Divine and Human Agency in the Poetry of George Herbert

Dialogue in one voice: God’s word to the believer

One of Herbert’s most striking theological innovations was to portray dialogue between God and a human partner without using two voices. In this section, I analyze three poems—“JESU,” “Heaven,” and “Coloss. 3.3”—to show how Herbert moves beyond conventional representations of dialogue. These poems, which “hinge on the discovery of truth within the typographic and sonic rather than the semantic spheres of language,” ⁹ all show God speaking not by an incursion from outside but by revealing, fulfilling, or transforming something that was already latent in the human words of the believer. One might call it a monovocal dialogue: a dialogue between two persons in one voice. In Herbert’s poems, God does not need to address humanity from a distance but is able to speak from within the materials of the believer’s life—yet it remains a word from beyond the believer, a word of God.

The monovocal technique that I am referring to can be observed in one of Herbert’s smallest poems, “JESU” ¹⁰ :

Although the poem is narrated by one speaker, a subtle interplay of two voices emerges from the speaker’s words. Without adding anything to what the human speaker says, the voice of Christ finds its way into the poem, transforming the speaker’s misreading, “I ease you,” into a divine address. This is not conventional dialogue as one finds it, say, in “Love” (III), a poem in which two distinct characters address each other. It’s not simply that the poet speaks and Christ replies. Rather when Christ’s words appear, they disclose something that was already latent in the materials of the poem—in the speaker’s own words. The word “Jesu” is already written on the heart. It is the speaker who brings this word, in his own voice, into the poem: “JESU is in my heart.” Only after his heart has been broken does he perceive something else written there, so that the speaker’s word, “Jesu,” seems now to speak with a voice of its own. This produces a unique kind of dialogue—a dialogue in which one person supplies all the words. Two voices speak, yet the second speaker adds nothing to what the first has said. Or rather, the second speaker adds new meaning but no additional words. We are to imagine the speaker sounding out the letters to himself—I ES U—and then hearing another voice speaking in and through the sound of his own voice. Christ’s reply emerges from within the speaker’s language and within the speaker’s heart. Although in this sense Christ adds nothing to the poem, what he says nevertheless creates a complete reversal of the situation. The words “I ease you” add nothing but change everything.

This curious technique—the introduction of a second voice without the introduction of any additional words—subtly represents the way union with Christ makes itself felt in the believer’s experience. Christ is so closely implicated in the workings of the believer’s heart that he breaks unexpectedly into the poem, speaking with a voice that is at once wholly the believer’s and wholly his own.

In the poem “Heaven,” Herbert takes the convention of the echo poem ¹¹ and exploits it to create, once again, a dialogue in which all the materials of the conversation are supplied by one voice. This poem, like “JESU,” depicts a divine voice that is both “in” and “beyond” the human speaker. The divine voice adds nothing to what the human speaker has said, yet changes everything.

By means of the echo device, God appropriates and speaks through the words of the questioning human interlocutor. Yet the echoed words do not simply reiterate what the first voice has said. Rather the echo-voice corrects the speaker (line 4), alters his meaning (line 6), answers his questions (line 10), and even provides entirely new information (line 14). The three climactic (trinitarian?) qualities of light, joy, and leisure are revealed to the speaker as hitherto unknown facts, things he could not have learned from any other source. We must remember, after all, that the speaker is asking what heaven will be like—hardly a question that any human interlocutor could be qualified to answer. God’s description of heaven as a domain of light, joy, and leisure comes as genuine news to the speaker. Yet God says nothing new but only echoes back the last word or syllable of each question.

In each case, the speaker is preoccupied with feelings and subjective states. What kind of delight will he experience? What kind of enjoyment? What quantity of pleasure? And in each case, the divine echo-voice replies not with a statement about feeling but with a statement of objective fact. Heaven is an environment of light, joy, and boundless leisure. In a sense, the divine voice has not answered the questions at all. The questioner wants to know what heaven will feel like, but God replies by telling him what kind of place heaven objectively is. The questioner’s highest hopes are both confirmed and surpassed.

In this way, the echo-voice corrects the questioner, leading him step by step toward an enlarged vision of what awaits him on the other side of the doorway between this world and the world to come. Yet the whole dialogue takes place using nothing but the questioner’s own words. It is a genuine dialogue between two speakers even though the divine speaker’s replies are already latent in the words of the human speaker. The divine echo-voice even has its own distinct personality—a certain sass, one might say, as well as a certain magnanimity that is manifest in the to-and-fro of the dialogue. Omniscient knowledge is tactfully parceled out in small pieces, as if God were taking pains to avoid overwhelming an inferior conversation partner. Omniscience is held in reserve so that the human partner will continue to respond with new curiosities and new questions.

One finds here the marks of a genuine relationship with mutual attention, responsiveness, and courtesy. The replies are real replies, and the conversation changes direction as a result of what the two voices say to each other. It is not a soliloquy: the human speaker is not talking to himself. And it is not ventriloquism either: the divine speaker does not commandeer the human questioner, but rather takes up the questioner’s syllables with a “gentle omnipotence,” to borrow a term from Sarah Coakley. ¹²

I have been speaking as if the echo-voice were simply God; but that is not quite right. Herbert’s echo poem is about scripture. The Bible, personified as a speaking voice, answers the opening question: “Who will show me those delights on high?” The nature of life in heaven is revealed by the pages (“holy leaves”) of scripture. Since scripture is God’s word, it can convey information otherwise inaccessible to the human questioner. Yet scripture is not only God’s word; it is also human speech. The divine voice is not something added on to the human words written by ancient authors. Every word is human and emerges from the contingencies of time and place, yet these very words are also words of God that convey otherwise inaccessible truths of revelation. Herbert’s poem performs, in miniature, that union of the divine Word with the human words of scripture.

This is not, therefore, merely a dialogue in which two independent sources of agency address one another. There is something supple, respectful, and creative about the way the divine agency relates to the human. The two voices do not occupy different planes. There is room within the same identical words for both voices to be heard. There is room within the one space of human agency for another source of agency to come gently into view. The divine voice does not need a separate position of its own, as would be the case in any human dialogue. Saying nothing but what the human speaker has said, the divine voice says something wholly new. God’s word to the believer is both “in” and “beyond.”

Herbert’s technique in these poems is to allow the emergence of a divine voice and a divine point of view from within the (human and finite) materials of the poem. In “Coloss. 3.3,” one finds a variation of this technique. Here, the poet’s words are taken up and—unknowingly, as it were—commandeered by a scriptural text. Gary Kuchar has noted that “Herbert’s speakers often betray signs of inspiration by the Holy Spirit that are unbeknownst to them.” ¹³ That is how it is in “Coloss. 3.3.” The word of God unobtrusively discloses itself through the human words of the poem.

The poem describes the “double motion” of the sun as understood in early modern cosmology. The sun moves each day on a straight path from east to west, yet over the course of the year it also follows an oblique or elliptical path toward the east. ¹⁴ The first path is clear and visible, the second hidden but no less real. In a similar way, our daily life follows a straight line toward death, yet the same life has another imperceptible trajectory, bending elliptically upward toward Christ. These two different trajectories are both equally true of the same life. We journey toward death but end up at the source of life. The poem is, then, about hidden paths. And Herbert has created his own hidden path not just in what the poem says but on its textual surface too. The descending diagonal line, beginning with the poem’s first word and ending with its last, spells out the statement: “My life is hid in him, that is my treasure.” As the speaker says in the first line, both his “thoughts” (what the poem says) and his “words” (the textual surface) convey the notion of life’s hidden trajectory. The reader follows the usual course, reading from left to right in descending lines; but in the act of reading, one is also led on a second oblique path, the diagonal path that leads to Christ. Just as ordinary life and the spiritual journey are not at odds with each other—both occur at the same time and make use of the same materials—so our “straight” reading of the poem is not at odds with the “oblique” or diagonal reading. Both readings are correct, both are simultaneously necessary; one is the hidden truth of the other. ¹⁵

As the title has already intimated, the poem’s hidden diagonal truth turns out to be a biblical quotation. The whole poem is spoken in one voice. There is no divine interlocutor, no dialogue. Yet just as in “JESU” and “Heaven” the speaker’s human words become the vehicle of a divine word that is distinct from the speaker’s point of view, so here the words of the speaker are gently appropriated by revelation. It is as if the divine words have become present by a kind of consubstantiation, a presence that asserts itself secretly without altering the substance of the human text that it indwells. Once again, the divine and the human are not active on separate planes. God’s word does not need to intrude into the poem, interrupting the speaker’s (merely) human words. Rather the divine and human words are the same, secretly united in the text of the poem and in the life of the believer.

But it is more complicated than that. For the scriptural quotation embedded in the poem turns out not to be a direct quotation at all but a personalized paraphrase ¹⁶ of the verse: “For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). On the one hand, the reader is meant to recognize the hidden line as a scriptural quotation. But on the other hand, this quotation has fused so completely with the speaker’s individual perspective that St. Paul’s “your” has now become “my.” And, tellingly, St. Paul’s “in Christ” has become simply “in him”—as if Christ were so familiar that he need not even be mentioned by name (a sanctified familiarity that is characteristic of Herbert’s use of pronouns). The speaker tells how his life follows a hidden path toward Christ (it “winds towards him”); and hidden on the surface of the poem is a scriptural quotation, the words of God concealed in human words; and, furthermore, this scriptural word has become impossible to differentiate fully from the speaker’s individual point of view.

The poem’s form depicts the divine and the human operating simultaneously within a single field of agency. The speaker tells the story of his own life, in his own words, only to discover that a divine word has been speaking through it all along, and that his own autobiographical words have been an oblique retelling of the word of God.

Union with Christ: the identity of the believer

In other poems, Herbert more directly explores the theme of the believer’s union with Christ. In “Aaron,” he undertakes an intricate investigation of the way a person’s identity and self-perception are changed by their union with Christ.

Even by Herbert’s exacting standards, the form of “Aaron” is exceptionally constrained. The five lines of each stanza are restricted to the same basic elements: a first line about the head, a second about the heart or breast, a third about death and music, a fourth about rest, and a fifth concluding line about clothing. The lines of each stanza end with the same five words: head, breast, dead, rest, and drest. In this tightly restricted form, Herbert develops a profound theological interpretation of the nature of the priesthood and of the way human beings come to locate their lives inside the life of Christ.

The first stanza gives a picture of a “true” priest, conventionally modeled on Aaron, the prototypical Old Testament priest. In the second stanza, the speaker confesses that his own priesthood is at every point antithetical to the priesthood of a “true Aaron.” His head is not holy but profane. Instead of light in his heart, there is darkness; instead of perfection, he has defects. Instead of the harmonious bells of the first stanza—the bells that were meant to be heard as a symbol of life—his disordered passions are like a church bell tolling his own death. Instead of leading others to divine rest, his passions have set him on a path toward hell (“a place where is no rest”). His priesthood is a priesthood of death. He is a priest, but a “poor” one, not fit to be a priest at all.

In the third stanza, however, the speaker begins to remember something that had slipped his mind. Yes, his own head might be profane—but he has “another head” besides his own. Yes, his own heart might be darkness instead of light—but he has “another heart” as well. Yes, his own music might be a hideous death-knell—but he has another life-giving music that supplies him with the rest he would otherwise lack. The speaker has not yet named that other life that exists somehow alongside his own, but he concludes with the familiar pronoun: “In him I am well drest.”

The second and third stanzas, then, juxtapose what the priest is in himself—poor, shabby, and inadequate—and what he is in Christ. The third stanza’s most important word is “another,” which chimes three times like a bell in contrast to the threefold repetition of “my, my, me” in the second stanza. By the third stanza, we have a “two-headed” priest. ¹⁷ He is still his old inadequate self, but that self has now been supplemented with “another” who supplies what had been lacking.

This two-self picture, however, is immediately corrected in the next stanza. Now, all of a sudden, Christ—now named explicitly for the first time—turns out to be not merely “another” head but the speaker’s “only” head; not “another heart and breast” but his “only heart and breast”; not “another” music alongside his old death-knell, but his “only music.” The threefold chime of “my” in the second stanza and “another” in the third has given way to the threefold chime of “only, only, only.” Herbert even underscores the point with the lovely tautology of “my alone only”—as if there were degrees of onlyness!

The two-self picture then is done away with. We started out with just the speaker; then we had the speaker plus Christ; and now we have just Christ. One cannot help wondering if the human priest has vanished altogether, if perhaps his agency has been erased by that of Christ who now stands in his place and performs the role of priest on his behalf. The fourth stanza hints at this possibility. Whereas Christ’s music had been said to provide the speaker with rest, we learn now that Christ’s music strikes him dead and annihilates “the old man,” that is, the speaker’s human nature inherited from Adam. The speaker dies in this stanza. That is the flipside of making Christ “only, only, only” instead of merely “another” colleague or collaborator, as he had been in the previous stanza. This sounds quite a bit like some conventional accounts of Christian experience: obedience as an abnegation of the self; sanctification as the prostration of the human will before the divine will. Something like that is indeed what Herbert suggests in the fourth stanza. But the poem is not finished yet.

The last stanza of “Aaron” returns, surprisingly, to the second stanza’s threefold repetition of “my.” It is now the speaker’s own head—not another head next to his, and not someone else’s head instead of his, but his own—that is said to be holy. It is now his own heart that is said to be perfect and full of light. His own music is harmonious now, since Christ has tuned the instrument. We thought the poem had left behind any notion of a single source of agency. We thought Herbert wanted to say that the self, with its agency and individuality, needs to be supplemented and ultimately replaced by Christ. But at the end, the poem returns to the progression that had begun in the second stanza. Now, it is once more the priest himself—the priest alone, as it were—who stands in his vestments and observes himself in the mirror. But what he sees now has undergone a transformation. Now, he is not just looking at Christ; he is looking at his own head, and he sees that it is holy. He looks at his own breast and sees perfection. The rather disgusted self-assessment of the second stanza has yielded to a completely different vision. He speaks now, with genuine fondness and humility, of “my deare breast.” “My deare” is a characteristically Herbertian expression. Elsewhere in The Temple it is used always with reference to God or Christ. Herbert speaks of “my deare Father” (“The Crosse”), “my deare Lord” (“Conscience”), “my deare God” (“Affliction I,” “The Holdfast”), “my deare Redeemer” (“H. Baptism”), “my deare Saviour” (“The Thanksgiving”), “my deare angrie Lord” (“Bitter-sweet”), and “my deare, / My dearest Lord” (“Christmas”). Twice in “Love III,” the speaker addresses Love as “my deare.” Only in “Aaron” is this devout term of endearment used to describe the self—the same self that had been so roundly disparaged just a few stanzas before. In “Aaron,” the speaker has become dear to himself because he has discovered himself as one whose life (to quote Colossians again) is hidden in Christ.

The union between Christ and the self is so close that when the speaker refers to “my deare breast,” he is referring to Christ. When he speaks, with a sort of resigned matter-of-factness, of his own holiness and perfection, he is referring to Christ’s life that “lives in me.” He has rejected the prospect of an abnegation of the self, since it is precisely the self that is the domain of Christ’s presence and activity. The self is drawn into Christ’s own resource of holiness, light, and perfection. And because the speaker is so dear to Christ, he becomes dear to himself as well.

The account of human agency that is developed here leads from provisional notions of Christ as a supplement or replacement of the self to the theological depth and subtlety of the last stanza, in which the speaker has come to see himself in Christ and has begun to live out of the enabling resource of Christ’s life. Hence, the priest who speaks in this poem can conclude his self-assessment with the simple, unselfconscious acknowledgment: “Aarons drest.” He no longer feels the need to insist that it is only “in Christ” that he is well dressed. He has so accepted Christ as the source of his life that he is able to view himself—with a kind of humble satisfaction—as a true priest.

This representation of the union between Christ and the believer is developed further in “The Odour,” the poem that immediately follows “Aaron” in The Temple. “The Odour” is one of Herbert’s most exuberant poems. Image piles upon image with an almost reckless sensuousness. What starts out as a simple meditation on the speaker’s fondness for a pious phrase expands into a sweeping vision of the whole of life conceived as an economy of joy.

The monastic tradition of lectio divina speaks of “savouring” a particular word or phrase from scripture. ¹⁸ Herbert’s speaker goes around all day savoring the words “my Master.” This term of endearment was a particular favorite of Herbert’s. According to Nicholas Ferrar, Herbert “used in his ordinarie speech, when he made mention of the blessed name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, to adde, My Master.” ¹⁹ In this poem, the speaker “thrusts” his mind into those two words until the words have come to permeate his mind like perfume. In the third stanza, the speaker plaintively wishes that Christ would reciprocate some of this attention by taking pleasure—at least “a little”—in the words “my Servant.” The speaker hopes to “creep” unworthily toward Christ. He is trying to insinuate his way by small degrees into Christ’s favor. He assumes that Christ is not already predisposed toward human beings (or “flesh,” as the speaker disparagingly puts it in line 13). The speaker has, in fact, forgotten the title of his own poem. The title refers to 2 Corinthians 2.15: “For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ.”

When the speaker remembers this, he contemplates the mingling of sweetnesses in his relation to Christ. Paradoxically, he notes in the fifth stanza that the title “my Master” “alone is sweet.” Christ is the repository of all sweetness. He is the “pomander,” a fragrant ball in which all sweet things are compacted. His sweetness is so full and all-sufficient that the words “my Master” are good and pleasing even when spoken by an unworthy person. Thus when the speaker says “my Master,” he does not add anything to Christ’s sweetness but only participates in it, receives it, and enjoys it. Christ is pleased to be called My Master and so confers the affectionate appellation My servant. When Christ calls the human being in this way, he breathes out his own innate sweetness and the human partner breathes the sweetness in.

All this produces a spiritual snowball effect. Christ delights in the fact that the believer delights in him, which increases the believer’s delight, which increases Christ’s delight—and so on ad infinitum. The mutual delight between Christ and the self “traffics” together, establishing a “commerce” in sweetness. Before long, there is an entire economy of sweetness. It is, the speaker says, a full-time job keeping up with it all. The mutual exchange of sweetness and delight will demand all the resources of human agency and activity. The whole life of the speaker must henceforth be busy with the industry of sweetness.

It may seem paradoxical for a poem to assert the sole sweetness of Christ—“My Master, which alone is sweet”—while also claiming that Christ finds sweetness in the human partner. But the point of the poem is to show that Christ does not have a monopoly on his own attributes. Christ’s uniqueness never excludes or silences the human partner, but always welcomes, invites, and calls forth a mutual response. As George Keizer has said of this poem, God “can allow efficacy to the creature while remaining the sole source of efficacy.” ²⁰ The union between Christ and the believer is such that one could hardly say where the (generative) sweetness of Christ ends and the (conferred, elicited) sweetness of the human partner begins—just as, by the end of “Aaron,” one can no longer draw a line between the holiness of Christ and the holiness of the priest. It is all one sweetness, all one holiness: the sweetness and holiness of Christ, who has become internal to the believer’s own experience and identity. Christ is “in” the believer precisely because he is also “beyond.” He is the transcendent Master who calls, sanctifies, and delights the human partner—not by external action, not by approaching the self from outside, but by indwelling the self, permeating it like a pleasing aroma, and renewing its springs of action.

Conclusion: “all I can call me”

Coleridge once remarked, with characteristic perceptiveness, that Herbert’s poetry does not address the sin of pride—the sin of valuing ourselves too highly—but the opposite sin of shame. Coleridge himself struggled to accept not the “threats” of scripture but its “promises”: it all seemed too good for somebody like him. What he found in Herbert’s poetry, he said, was a response to this “tendency to self-contempt, a sense of the utter disproportionateness of all I can call me, to the promises of the Gospel.” ²¹ The promises of the gospel are more challenging than its threats. In “Love” (III), it is not pride or guilt but shame that is the final barrier between God and the self. The ability to accept oneself as loved is, for Herbert, close to the heart of what it means to live in Christ. And as Herbert shows in “Aaron,” the reality of Christ is ultimately constitutive of “all I can call me.”

The poetry of Herbert represents Christ not as an external agent but as a welcoming, renewing presence that becomes internal to the believer’s identity. My interpretation of Herbert has followed the broad lines of Erich Przywara’s formulation of Augustinian theology, according to which God is both “in and beyond” (in und über) the human being. This Augustinian pattern is embedded in Herbert’s account of the theology and the experience of union with Christ. In Herbert’s poetry, God acts “in, through, as, and beyond creaturely agency,” all without ceasing to be God. ²²

It is for this reason that, in Herbert, the arduous struggle to make an adequate response to God is never resolved by an abnegation of the self. As Rosemond Tuve has observed, Herbert never envisages obedience as “a prostration of the will.” ²³ Human nature does not need to diminish to make room for God. Obedience, for Herbert, involves the discovery that the human will finds its highest delight when it moves freely in concert with the divine will. The believer’s will is guided, corrected, and enabled not by an external influence but by an indwelling resource of divine life.

Much more could be said about the negative side of Christian experience in Herbert, the experience of correction and the painful realignment of the human will with the will of God, for example in “The Collar” and the “Affliction” poems. For my present purpose, it is enough to observe that even in poems such as these, where the human will is radically problematised, the solution lies not in an intervention from outside the self—something like Donne’s “Batter my heart” ²⁴ —but in a renewed awareness of the interior union between Christ and the believer. That union is capacious enough, it is human enough, to accommodate the pain and perplexity that arise from a disordered, enfeebled, or even immobilized human will. ²⁵ God is “in and beyond” the believer in affliction no less than in delight.

In Herbert’s view, God might truly be said to intervene in the lives of human beings. Such intervention comes not vertically from above but concentrically from within. It is a patient, welcoming, renewing, and ultimately transformative unfolding of the life of Christ within the believer.