George Herbert and the Triumph of Grace

By Neil Earle

Few formal students of English Literature can escape the encounter with – most thankfully – two of the most accomplished religious poets in any language. These are the renowned Anglican Dean of St. Paul’s, John Donne (1571-1631), and the English country parson George Herbert (1593-1633). Both are foremost exponents of divine assurance, that triumph of grace whereby the believer achieves certainty in the matter of personal salvation. But most importantly, both Donne and Herbert are celebrated for connecting “the sublime with the commonplace.”

It is Herbert’s poem Love III, however, that is revealing of the most sensitive reflection on the doctrine of grace. This one poem epitomizes how Herbert, an English aristocrat, a respected leader at Oxford University, a dissenter from the war party in the English Parliament of 1624, here communicated as a country parson an overwhelmingly gentle sense of God’s forgiveness.

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack’d anything.

In compressed 1600’s English style, Herbert opens his exquisite fifteen-line meditation with an analogy most Christians conscious of personal sin can well understand. Note how the long line alternating with the short conveys the sense of caution, of hesitation.

Lord of the Banquet

Love here is obviously Jesus Christ in poetic guise as the Gracious Host or Lord of the Banquet (Luke 14:16; Revelation 3:20). The invited one is hesitant to approach his perfect Lord but alert and “quick-eyed Love” spots this discomfort and guilt immediately. Love will accept no excuses. Love draws near “sweetly questioning,” an aspect here of the feminine principle, as are the two “my dears” later in the poem, Scriptural echoes of what some have named Lady Bountiful in Proverbs 9:1-5,

“Wisdom has built her house; she has set up her seven pillars…she also has set her table (the dinner party theme again). She has sent out her servants, and she calls…’Let all who are simple come to my house…Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed.”

Herbert knew his Bible well. According to one source it was the poet/parson’s practice to read Psalm 31 and Psalm 32 daily and to often join in an ongoing communal group reading of the entire book of Psalms (George N. Wall, George Herbert: The Country Parson, The Temple). Yet Herbert was no stranger to “dusty sin,” an apt word picture to depict unworthiness to enter a divinely-prepared love feast. In a sophisticated and compressed piece of dialogue, Herbert has his unnworthy guest protest to the Host. Yet each argument is met with a superior, more elegant and gentle response. In reply to the question whether the guest lacked anything, Herbert picks up the exchange:

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Who made the eyes but I?” is a gentle rhyme yet one so powerful in its effects. For one thing it finally reveals who the Host really is. Some think Herbert, as an Anglican minister, is implying a double-edged reference here to the Communion wafer, or Host, as some churches call it. That may be so, an example of the elastic suggestiveness of poetry at its best.

Blessed Reassurance

A major point at this juncture, however, is that there seems to be no final answer to Love’s astonishingly gracious reply in the second stanza. The Host’s tone is unfailingly serene, gentle, courteous, reflecting a Reformed sense of strong assurance of God’s unfailing favor. Literary scholar Helen Gardner has written of this kind of devotional poetry: “The image…is an image of a soul working out its salvation in fear and trembling. The two poles between which it oscillates are faith in the mercy of God in Christ, and a sense of personal unworthiness that is very near to despair.”

Stanza two is suffused with the great Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. So why do we need another stanza? Ah, this shows Herbert’s deep understanding of the psychology of sinners – of his own struggles against sin. Just one answer from God may not be enough! As a country parson familiar with ordinary people confessing their stumblings, Herbert knew that even more assurance was needed. Thus his next four lines are vitally necessary to the argument:

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.

Eyes marred with sin? Yes. Which Christian repenter has not felt that sting and whiplash of conscience?

Communion at Last

An even greater theologian than Herbert, the German Reformer Martin Luther, summarized his pre-conversion depiction of the effects of sin upon the guilty mind:

“I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, I was angry with God, and said, ‘As if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law…without having God add pain to pain by the gospel threatening us with his righteousness and wrath.’ Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.”

Herbert’s two souls in communion in Love III is a much kinder, gentler reiteration of Luther’s more graphic description of the sinner’s plight. Yet both are ultimately on the side of the repentant sinner. Herbert’s last two lines end the argument with his conscience and with God:

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat;
So I did sit and eat.

Thus the final word picture depicts almost everything warm, kind and inviting to the wounded and the penitent – true Communion at last. Nothing could be more calculated to spell Assurance than sharing a meal with one’s Creator-Redeemer. In the guise of a patient, loving host, God invites communion with sinners. The banquet here referenced is in the Biblical mode of Jacob eating with Laban, the elders of Israel eating and drinking with the Lord God, Jesus breaking bread at the Lord’s Supper and the gracious Host knocking at the door in Revelation 3. It represents the triumph of grace hard-won after remorseful repentance.

Herbert’s message? Even dusty sinners can expect restitution at the hands of a God who has provided both the incentive and the mechanism for forgiveness of past wrongs. With such a Host sinners need have no fear.