George Herbert's approach to God: The faith and spirituality of a country priest

Hark how they cry aloud still, Crucify:

It is not fit he live a day, they cry,

Who cannot live less than eternally:

Was ever grief like mine?

In healing not my self, there doth consist

All that salvation, which ye now resist;

Your safety in my sickness doth subsist.

Was ever grief like mine?

Herbert's views on sin focus on the heart of the biblical drama. The depth of sin and evil as well as the height of God's love can both be seen only in the agony of the crucifixion at Golgotha. Because human sinfulness is offset by divine love, Herbert can recognize the full extent of human depravity without giving up on humanity ("The Agony," 11. 7-18):

Who would know Sin, let him repair

Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see

A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,

His skin, his garments bloody be.

Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain

To hunt his cruel food through ev'ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay

And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike

Did set again abroach, then let him say

If ever he did taste the like.

Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,

Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

The tale does not end there, of course. Jesus has risen from the dead and we have risen with him. If the deity of Christ is central to Herbert's understanding of the incarnation, the catholicity of his theology is shown further in that Christ's crucified and risen humanity is just as central to his understanding of the atonement. Herbert understands salvation to be a participation of our fallen humanity in Christ's crucified and risen humanity (as expressed earlier in his realist doctrine of the eucharist). In his poem (almost a hymn) "Easter," Herbert proclaims that we are risen with Christ: "Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise / Without delays, / Who takes thee by the hand, that mou likewise / With him mayest rise" (11. 1-4). In Christ's resurrection, God has given us the means to cure sorrow ("The Dawning," 11. 9-16):

Arise sad heart; if thou dost not withstand,

Christ's resurrection thine may be:

Do not by hanging down break from the hand,

Which as it riseth, raiseth thee:

Arise, arise;

And with his burial-linen dry thine eyes:

Christ left his grave-clothes, that we might, when grief

Draws tears, or blood, not want an handkerchief.

Additionally, Herbert's theology embraces the language of legal judgment to describe the atonement. In "The Redemption," Herbert tells the story of a tenant who is dissatisfied with his lease and seeks out his landlord to obtain new terms. The landlord is identified as divine ("[i]n heaven at his manor I him sought"), but he is missing, having gone to earth to take possession of some land (1. 5). The tenant follows, seeking the landlord in cities, theaters, gardens, and courts, only to find him amidst a group of thieves and murderers. "At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth / Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied / Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died" (11. 12-4). In using metaphorical imagery, Herbert strikes the imagination in ways that atonement theories that interpret the legal language literally cannot.