Divine Economies

Divine Economies: George Herbert and the Labour of Grace

Reading the devotional lyric poetry of George Herbert, one may be struck by the poet’s seeming obsession with structures. One of Herbert’s most famous poems, “The Altar,” actually takes the shape of an altar itself, another, “Easter Wings,” takes the form of wings. His only published full collection of poetry is called The Temple, and itself is organized as if literally guiding the reader through a structural temple, from the “Church Porch” and onwards. This is all without mentioning that Herbert’s actual poems are some of the most painstakingly constructed and rhetorically disciplined works of the period. Though sometimes deceptively simple, his work conceals a wealth of emotion and poetic density. Herbert’s focus on structure is not merely a stylistic choice, but reflective of a much more complicated belief in the importance of labour and productivity as a means of effective worship. Examining The Temple and The Country Parson, I will argue that Herbert articulates not only a mode or philosophy of praise, but that he articulates a divine oikonomia, a domestic economy that imbues labor, productivity, and the cultivation of material goods with a divine value. To illuminate my argument, I will attempt to interrogate and disentangle Herbert’s relationship with Nature, rhetoric, and poetic modes. Ultimately, I hope to show Herbert as a prevenient figure by illustrating how his divine economy prefigures and anticipates Locke’s theory of Property Right and Appropriation.

In the years of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the concept of “Nature” was beginning to become unsettled. Increasing economic uncertainty and new revelations of natural science begged new questions about man’s role in Nature and in the great cosmological chain of being, linking all things to God. Francis Bacon, a long time friend of Herbert’s, negotiates these tensions by couching his scientific and philosophical observations within a discourse of theology that assures man’s dominion over the natural world. As a former Cambridge University Reader and Public Orator, Herbert was a highly skilled, classically educated rhetorician. Herbert, saw rhetoric as a means to communicate a divine knowledge and to deliver the word of God. Coming from a wealthy upper class family, From Cambridge Hebert intended to use his connections to seek a seat on the Parliament Court, but after seven years and a series of political dust ups he instead became ordained and would serve as Parson in the rural parish of Bemerton, “After thirty-seven years of preparation the final three years of his like were spent in total devotion to employment. Herbert’s life at Bemerton was not at all an ‘escape’ from the world … the role of country parson, seriously undertaken, required that Herbert come to terms with the lives of ordinary Englishmen in a manner not required for University Orators…” (Summers 45). The heavy focus Herbert holds on labor and the occupational “calling” which refers to the doctrine of vocation. Cristina Malcolmson explains, “formulated first by Luther and developed by William Perkins … the doctrine taught that the highest form of spirituality in the world was not the monastic life but labor in a calling. Perkins organized vocation into two parts: the general calling, by which God called the soul to conversion and election, and the particular calling, or one’s social estate or profession” (58-9). The experience of joblessness and the threat of idleness weighs heavily on Herbert as the speaking in “Employment (I),” exclaims:

Let me not languish then, and spend

A life as barren to thy praise,

As is the dust, to which that life doth tend,

But with delaies.

All things are busie; onely I

Neither bring hony with the bees,

Nor flowres to make that, nor the husbandrie

To water these.

I am no link of thy great chain,

But all my companie is a weed.

Lord place me in thy consort; give one strain

To my poore reed. (9-24.76)

The lack of employment is here shown to have such a disorienting effect on the speaker that it he loses his place “of thy great chain,” loses sight of his place in society or even in the cosmological order. “All things are busie” claims our speaker, as even the animals out pace him in being productive, following their vocations in a system that is both ecologic and economic—all while he languishes among the unruly and ever spreading weeds. “Employment (I)” is just one example of Herbert articulating an economy of interactions in a nature. Through his own failure, Herbert’s speaker becomes aware of the intricacies and particular labors of the natural world. Obviously Herbert is making a case for employment here, but he is also identifying some labor, like the bees bringing their honey and the flowers making it, as more valuable than the weeds, which tend to grow and spread for the sake of growing and spreading.

As Julianne Sandberg’s observes in “The Georgic Mode and ‘Poor Labours’ of George Herbert,” there are elements in Herbert’s writing that correspond with georgic sensibility. In The Temple as well as The Country Parson, Herbert stresses the importance of labor as a “central component to his relationship to his God” (218). Vocational labor and the moral imperative of productivity emerge as crucial elements to understanding Herbert’s work. The concerns about joblessness shown in “Employment (I)” are echoed in the Country Parson as a condemnation of idleness. “The great and nationall sin of this Land he esteems to be Idlenesse; great in it selfe, and great in Consequence: For when men have nothing to do, then they fall to drink, to steal, to whore, to scoffe, to revile, to all sorts of gamings” (CP 348). However, simply laboring—even if you have found your “calling”—may not be enough for Herbert who condemns the laborer who loses sight of God.  

Those that he finds busie in the works of their calling, he commendeth them also: for it is a good and just thing for every one to do their own busines. But then he admonisheth them of two things; first, that they dive not too deep into worldly affairs, plunging themselves over head and eares into carking, and caring; but that they so labour, as neither to labour anxiously, nor distrustfully, nor profanely. Then they labour anxiously, when they overdo it, to the loss of their quiet, and health: then distrustfully, when they doubt Gods providence, thinking that their own labour is the cause of their thriving, as if it were in their own hands to thrive, or not to thrive. (CP 348-50)

Laboring, doing one’s “own busines,” emerges devotional act as long as it does not become “labor for labor’s sake.” Its devotional value is also contingent on belief in “Gods providence,” and therefore the laborer’s implicit allegiance to a system of belief in which God reigns as the complete, reality-defining Sovereign.  Further, by claiming that doing business is a “just and good thing for every one,” Herbert implies a community in which “every” “one” is laboring and producing value in a communal arrangement. This theocratic system is overlaid by another set monarchical social dictums and imperatives, which are economic, statistic, demographic, and data oriented.

The reason of this assertion is taken from the nature of man, wherein God hath placed two great Instruments, Reason in the soul, and a hand in the Body, as ingagements of working: So that even in Paradise man had a calling, and how much more out of Paradise, when the evills which he is now subject unto, may be prevented, or diverted by reasonable imployment. … Yet is it also a debt to our Countrey to have a Calling, and it concernes the Common-wealth, that none should be idle, but all busied. Lastly, riches are the blessing of God, and the great Instrument of doing admirable good; therfore all are to procure them honestly, and seasonably, when they are not better imployed.  (CP 348-50)

Herbert complicates his role as parson by introducing matters of state economic interest. As a piece of rhetoric, The Country Parson works to persuade readers of the vast national importance of rural parsons, Herbert in particular, in cultivating stable, productive, and pious Christian communities. In another passage, Herbert fan his flattery down the monarchical hierarchy.

No Common-wealth in the world hath a braver Institution then that of Justices of the Peace: For it is both a security to the King, who hath so many dispersed Officers at his beck throughout the Kingdome, accountable for the publick good; and also an honourable Imployment of a Gentle, or Noble-man in the Country he lives in, inabling him with power to do good, and to restrain all those, who else might both trouble him and the whole State.” (CP 350)

With these three passages Herbert has provided us with a setting and a structure within which to contextualize the material and economic dynamics of his poetry. He describes an apparatus in which the English King technically rules, but the daily “governing” is still locating in the hands of God. This leaves Herbert in the role of both parson and local political authority. As a part of the church rather than parliament, Herbert is able to argue for the common-wealth by aligning it with moral and spiritual imperatives. In the Country Parson and The Temple, there could hardly be less consistency of voice between the two. The “Country Parson” is shown often to be an arm of the state, doing his duty, promoting production, enforcing standards of the church, teaching the ways of God, and generally acting representative of the institution he serves. Meanwhile, in The Temple, the speakers are interior, emotionally earnest, raw, and passionate if sometimes unpredictable. The duality between the two literary representations of Herbert neatly corresponds with the dualistic separations between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of England, exposing the precarious stability of order hinges on divine apparatus. Giorgio Agamben, attempts to articulate exactly this instance of sovereign governance and the economies necessary form within them. Looking at post-eighteenth-century governments and economies

“…the origins of governmental techniques in the Christian pastorate, that “government of souls” (regimen animarum) that, as a “technique of techniques,” defines the activity of the Church until the eighteenth century…One of the essential characters of the pastorate is that it refers to both individuals and the entirety of mankind; it looks after men omnes et singulatim; it is […] an individualizing and a totalizing activity. Another essential trait shared by the pastorate … [is] the idea of an “economy,” that is, an administration of individuals, things, and wealth ordered according the model of the family. If the pastorate presents itself as an oikonomia psychōn, an “economy of the souls,” “the essential issue of government will be the introduction of economy into political practice”

(Agamben 110)

Labor is imbued with a value that is at once material and divine. As Sandberg notes, in The Temple, the georgic is expressed through the desire to perform fruitful labor, the lack of otium, and the promotion of a work ethic, “Canst be idle? canst thou play,/ Foolish soul who sinn’d to day?/ Rivers run, and springs each one/ Know their home, and get them gone:/ Hast thou tears, or hast thou none? (1-5.125). So far, we see how Herbert is implicated into the divine economy as a parson—promoting politics, managing his parish, promoting productive labor, but how does this translate at a poet? And by what mechanism can we think of labor as a non-material object.

In Locke’s Political Theory of Appropriation, he describes labor as a kind of object in itself, one that can be owned by the body or the individual who performs it or appropriated by another owner. He explains, “every man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of this Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatever a man removes out of its natural state he has mixed his labor with. By mixing his labor with it, he makes it his property’” (Macpherson 200). This idea of “property” Andrea Finkelstein explains, “included all sorts of things one had a ‘right’ in; for Locke, as for his compatriots, this could (and often did) include life, estate (status), liberty of conscience, faculties, and, for those who had it, the right to vote.”

Like Herbert, “Labor was, in Locke’s usage, a term from a moral dictionary rather than from an economic one, since it was a fulfillment of God’s purpose for humankind.” Herbert and Locke share the same view that labor is an act of transformation, intimately linked with nature and the divine. “As God had a maker’s ultimate right over our lives, we had an ultimate right over that which we made (through our labor). For the most notable thing about labor for Locke was the change it made in anything to which it was applied: fallow land into a farm or wheat into bread, labor brought into being something that did not previously exist” (Finkelstein 162). As Herbert shows in the Country Parson, the labor that he encourages from his congregation is not meant to produce a property that is necessarily their own. As subjects of the common-wealth and of God’s divine kingdom, the property produced they ultimately appropriated to the Divine Monarchy. Moreover, this relationship imbues labor and property with a simultaneously divine and material value. Herbert, like Locke, views labor as a mutable concept that can include the transformation of language from and unruly text into a well-constructed one, or the labor of rhetorical constraint, on the labor of choosing the proper words to transmit God’s grace.

It is in this setting, in which “labor” is understood to be the process of mixing human labor with “natural” material transformation into property with divine and social economic value. As an orator and a poet, language serves as Herbert’s raw material and his labor is characterized in his application of Christian rhetoric. The “product” he hopes to achieve is the impartation of “truth” by suffusing his writing with the clarity and gravity of the word of God—in opposition to the florid style of other modes and styles of poetry and rhetoric. Herbert’s rhetorical training seems to have had a deep effect on not only his style and aesthetic preferences, but also his spiritual sensibility and world view. Michael P. Gallagher offers a convincing argument about the influence of St. Augustine and his Christian work De Doctrina Christiana on Herbert. Augustine proposes a rhetoric that is not concerned with the classical rhetorician’s goal of harnessing the natural forces of eloquence, rather he describes a rhetorical understanding in which all eloquence—indeed, all “Truth”—is derived from God. As Gallagher notes, “In short, if there was a significant classical revival in rhetoric during Herbert’s lifetime, St. Augustine was a major authority for these classicists insofar as they extended their horizon to Christian rhetoric… Augustine’s work, at its simplest, involved a baptizing of classical rhetoric but the implications of this move were complex and far-reaching … It is clear both from his poetry and his prose that Herbert’s preference for plainness or simplicity was simply an aesthetic matter but reached out to form a kind of life-value: ‘Give me simplicitie, that I may live...’” (501-3).  In a georgic sense, Herbert turns language into his own garden to be pruned, farmed, and refined into a property worth of divine value.

While Herbert wields his Christian rhetoric with systematic skill as an orator, the Augustinian mode emerges as locus of deep anxiety and persistent tension for him as a poet. He frequently finds himself struggling for the appropriate language and rhetorical style with which to honor a “Christian subject-matter” that is “paradoxically both humble and sublime” and many of his poems “involve debates with himself about the propriety of using ‘enchanting language’ in religious verse” (502). Such a struggle is illustrated in “Jordan (2),” where Herbert’s speaker reprimands himself for embellishing his devotional poetry with “curling metaphors” and skewing with artistry what is ultimately a “plain intention” to imitate God’s love in plain words.

When first my lines of heav'nly joyes made mention,
Such was their lustre, they did so excell,
That I sought out quaint words, and trim invention ;
My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell,
Curling with metaphors a plain intention,
Decking the sense, as if it were to sell.

Thousands of notions in my brain did runne,
Off'ring their service, if I were not sped :
I often blotted what I had begunne ;
This was not quick enough, and that was dead.
Nothing could seem too rich to clothe the sunne,
Much lesse those joyes which trample on his head.

In these first two stanzas of the poem we find our speaker struggling to describe God’s grace.  Despite his verbosity and artistry, he finds his writing inadequate, sullying the “lustre” of his intentions. The speaker’s “heav’nly joyes” get lost in the mix of language as he begins to focus on the artfulness of his verse, as if attempting to portray his own talent, “decking the sense” of his original devotional intention.

As flames do work and winde, when they ascend,
So did I weave my self into the sense.
But while I bustled, I might heare a friend
Whisper, How wide is all this long pretence !
There is in love a sweetnesse readie penn'd :
Copie out only that, and save expense.

(117)

Here the speaker more explicitly acknowledges his self-centered artistry as it ultimately burns up his devotional intention. He then hears “a friend” remind him that God’s word, “the sweetnesse readie penn’d,” was all he needed to show his devotion. With the last line, “copie out only that, and save expense,” Herbert argues that true devotional writing must mimic the word of God in plainness as well as intention. If Quintillian viewed rhetoric as an attempt to mimic a natural eloquence, Herbert sees it as an attempt to mimic the word of God, if not copy it word for word. As Joseph Summers puts it: “The individual does not have to invent arguments for such joys, God has already ‘invented’ them in the manifestations of His love” (Summers 111). In line 4 we can tease out Herbert’s relationship with Nature as his thoughts “burnish, sprout, and swell,” unrestrained, unconfined, and ultimately unsuitable for use in the praise of God. We get the sense that in order to fit into Herbert’s concept of divine, nature must be, like language, be made plain, modified, or aesthetically beautiful.

Herbert ties God’s love to an economic imperative to “save expense,” again linking God to thrift, the economy of the State, and the economic of divine value imparted on production. By copying out the prescribed language of God, the speaker can save his “self” from being expended into his failed devotional writing and instead saved for the “consumption of that self by divine love” (Summer 111). Ironically, the word “expense” here literally creates a curling metaphor by pointing the reader back to the end of the first stanza, “Decking the sense, as if it were to sell.” By connecting “expense” and “sell,” both words couching “service” and “too rich” in the second stanza, Herbert is inviting the reader to think economically about the whole argument—to think about the “self” as a good to save for God and to provide the “service” of mimicking his word. This metaphor works doubly as a value statement by rendering the over written, overly clever, swollen work described in lines 1-5 “senseless,” and therefore worthless. We could potentially read the line “as if it were to sell” as “impossible to sell,” as it is all but undisciplined “pretence” and of no worth. In any case, Herbert is inviting the reader to think about divine value in an economic context.

While “Jordan (2)” concerns itself with condemning the search for “quaint words” and the lack of artistic and rhetorical restraint, “Jordan (1)” provides an even more scathing and pointed critique aimed specifically at the “romantic” pastoral tradition.

Who says that fictions only and false hair

Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?

Is all good structure in a winding stair?

May no lines pass, except they do their duty

Not to a true, but painted chair?

Is it no verse, except enchanted groves

And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?

Must purling streams refresh a lover's loves?

Must all be veil'd, while he that reads, divines,

Catching the sense at two removes?

Shepherds are honest people; let them sing;

Riddle who list, for me, and pull for prime;

I envy no man's nightingale or spring;

Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,

Who plainly say, my God, my King. (72)

Here, the speaker is essentially lambasting pastoral poetry’s inability to express “truth,” instead projecting a fantasy of nature, sensuousness, and love that is ultimately blasphemous. It apes the conventions of the pastoral mode, proposing them as rhetorical questions in a listing style reminiscent of the Petrarchan blazon. “The poem is addressed to the partisans of the pastoral love poems, and they are expected to recognize the meanings (as well as the absurdities) of their own conventions. ‘Jordan (I)’ is a defence of ‘true beauty’ (i.e. religion) as the subject of poetry and a rejection of the language and conventions of ‘false beauty’ for the sacred subject” (Summers 108). Margaret Turnbull cleverly deems “Jordan (I)” as “Herbert’s pastoral anti-pastoral,” as Herbert simultaneously evokes pastoral tropes while roundly rejecting them (Turnbull 85). In this “anti-pastoral” the characteristic sense of otium, or contentment, is replaced by resolute discontent and discordance. The use of rhyme, which finally breaks in the last line, suggests that words written plainly, words put into the service of worship, transcend not only pastoral conventions, but poetic conventions in general. God is shown to be the “true” nature, rather than the imagined nature of pastoral poet.

Herbert’s interpretation of pastoral nature is decidedly less than idyllic: seductive and unrestrained, it’s a space that invites chaos, sexual promiscuity, deceit, and blasphemy. “Is it no verse, except enchanted groves/ And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?/ Must purling streams refresh a lover's loves?” (72.6-8). The pastoral depicts a nature devoid of labour, devoid of divinity, and devoid—for Herbert—of value. “Herbert’s poetry does not purport to create a parallel, unrestrained Nature, but to glorify the recreator of Nature, the Word incarnate, revealed in the word written” (Turnbull 85). Where the goal of the pastoral is to achieve otium and peace within an imagined redemptive, Edenic natural space, the goal of Herbert’s poetry is to invoke a sense of duty, to labor in the service of worship and divine transformation. Herbert “sees the beautiful world of the pastoral as, if not quite blasphemous, at least dangerous, for it supposes a creation of a positive good apart from God’s…” (83). The artist does not create worlds, God does.

Herbert is more interested in illustrating an Oikonomia—an articulation of husbandry, order, stewardship over God’s creation and an exploration of the relationship between sacrifice and and divinity. “Praise (I)” follows our speaker’s struggle to praise God, pledging to do more and even encouraging his neighbors to join along.

O raise me then! Poore bees, that work all day,

                                         Sting my delay,

           Who have a work, as well as they,

                                         And much, much more. (17-20.79-80)

In this final stanza, of the poem Herbert’s speaker identifies with the “bees, that work all day,” a classic trope of the georgic mode, but also a concession to the ceaseless labor and a pledge to overcome its challenges. Herbert’s speaker is making a typically georgic please to improve the world and improve his praise, to Divine restore order. The urge to restore an edenic quality or repair a fractured landscape in deeply georgic, “this link to Eden characterizes the georgic mode more broadly, where labour is the means by which humans participate with God in restoring the fallen world” (Sandberg 234). The speaker’s angst arises from his own sense of disorder and social disruption. As he pleads for God to “mend my estate” in any ways “though shalt have more,” the speaker acknowledges his own failure to produce divine or material value (3-4.79). Later, “man is all weaknesse; there is no such thing/ As Prince or King:/ His arm is short; yet with a sling/ He may do more,” the social order of monarchical rule seems to be being threatened and the body politic falling is apart. Herbert is describing the Oikonomia of divine economy by displaying its dissolution. Without labor, without the drive to “do more” to sacrifice for God and contribute to this divine economy, the social order of the Kingdom is shown to be unstable. Hence, Herbert is here outlining the theological imperative to administrating productive communities. The stability of the church and state upon a labor merged with belief. Sandberg observes that “like the labourers of his parish who depended on the land, Herbert finds himself dependent on the natural world as he seeks to communicate the reality of a human world defined by productivity and a spiritual world that redefines but still perpetuates a georgic paradigm” (Sandberg 235). While Herbert generally expresses a relationship with Nature in which Man is the dominant player, he also displays throughout his poetry moments of identification.  

In ‘Man,’ Herbert illustrates how the hierarchical distance between Nature and Man on the Great Chain can flatten in the context of God.

For man is ev’ry thing,

And more; he is a tree, yet bears more fruit;

A beast, yet is, or should be more:

Reason and speech we only bring.

Parrots may thank us, if they are not mute:

They go upon the score.

                                                           (7-12.106)

The speaker here is arguing that Man should be more than nature. Man is inherently more productive, capable of bearing “more fruit” than trees and giving speech to parrots. However, ‘Man’ reveals itself to be—perhaps intentionally—to be a deeply paradoxical poem. The speaker begins by asking God the rhetorical question, “What house more stately hath there been,/ Or can be, then is Man? to whose creation/ All things are in decay.” After the first stanza Herbert uses the next four to contrast man’s shortcomings in comparison to an inexplicably productive and anthropocentric nature. While the speaker of the piece remains largely inactive or sleeping, the poetic landscape that Herbert lays out is one in which “Parrats may thank us,” “Herbs gladly cure our flesh,” “The stares have us to bed,” and still, “More servants wait on Man” (107).  The focus on nature is ironically reminiscent of the pastoral, yet still open to a georgic interpretation. Despite its focus on ‘Man,’ the poem is one of Herbert’s most ecologically minded pieces—it sets up its own economy of labor and notes how each element of the environement within it plays its own role. Though I believe that this point is meant to be facetious, the most remarkable moment occurs when the speaker declares, “Each thing is full of dutie.”

This is an incredible moment in the poem, one in which Herbert implies agency upon non-human objects. By exclaiming that “each thing is full of dutie,” Herbert seems to be conceding to a view of Man living in a world of distributed agency. Herbert then takes this democratization of agency, or “dutie,” a step further by place man and his servants on the same level beneath God, “and both servants they will be.”  Herbert seems to be suggest that, under God humanity and nature are undifferentiated, in as far as they must act as servants to God. Jane Bennett describes a similar circumstance in her book Vibrant Matter, in which she theorizes a distributed agency composed of human and non-human materials to form “a vitality distributed along a continuum of ontological types … indentify[ing] the human non-human assemblage as a locus of agency…” (Bennett 37). In short, Bennett argues that by realigning the individual notion of the self to incorporate the “tools, microbes, minerals, sounds, and other ‘foreign’ materialities” that also work to define every day experience, forces humans to recognize the ways in which they are intimately linked with their material circumstances and hence responsible for the well-being of the surrounding environment (Bennett 36). For Herbert, divinity is distributed much in the same way that “vitality” is for Bennett. Like Bennett, Herbert’s divinity is distributed unto a variety of human and non-human objects, including language, natural material, metal, herbs, water, meat, “all things unto our flesh”—all of these objects can be divine or receive God’s grace—as long as they are put into the labor of worship; the labor of producing something that is good; or the labor of perfecting an object into the best version of itself. By expanding or extending his labor, one can likewise expand or extend their divinity. For the Country Parson, for example, his church acts as an expansion of his holy being as he labors to make it “befitting of his [God’s] NAME.”

The Countrey Parson hath a speciall care of his Church, that all things there be decent, and befitting his Name by which it is called. Therefore first he takes order, that all things be in good repair; as walls plaistered, windows glazed, floore paved, seats whole, firm, and uniform, especially that the Pulpit, and Desk, and Communion Table, and Font be as they ought, ... And all this he doth, not as out of necessity, or as putting a holiness in the things, but as desiring to keep the middle way between superstition, and slovenlinesse, … Let all things be done decently, and in order: [I Cor. 14:40]The second, Let all things be done to edification, I Cor. 14 [:26]. For these two rules comprize and include the double object of our duty, God… (CP 313-314)

The Parson is quite vocal that his labor is in this case, not “putting a holiness in things,” but rather keeping them in order, mimicking in his own way the divine order that comprises God’s creation and rule. Ordering, governing, administering—these become acts of labor marked by edification.

For Locke, the individual landowner had the right to claim any of the labor or property that workers produced on his land as his own. In Locke’s view of appropriation and ownership, a landowner could then extend is estate, to claim any of the material wealth that it produces, which in turn becomes a representation of the landowner himself, extending his influence and power. The “self” of the laborers is ultimately subsumed into the “self” of the landowner. In Herbert, we can identify these economic relationships occurring in terms of divinity rather than capital and God as the ultimate individual owner. Herbert articulates this extension of ownership or absorption of the self relationship in “Church-musick,” but in this case he interprets the it as function of a relationship with God.

Sweetest of sweets, I thank you: when displeasure

Did through my bodie wound my minde,

You took me thence, and in your house of pleasure

A daintie lodging me assign’d.

Now I in you without a bodie move,

Rising and falling with your wings:

We both together sweetly live and love,

Yet say sometimes, God help poore Kings

(1-8.83)

The georgic economy of divine value that Herbert describes prefigures this relationship of owner/laborer. But in the case of Herbert, the ultimate owner, is God, who disseminates value and divinity that extends and expands throughout an economy of laborers and worshipers and ultimately reinforces the authority of monarchical government. By articulating a system of distributed value pulsing through a productive labor force, Herbert illustrates a divine economy and makes an ultimately a proto-capitalist assertion of the dynamics of individual ownership that prefigures Locke, whose theories were published in his Second Treatise of Civil Government, over thirty years after Herbert’s death. Herbert’s articulation of “language” as an analogue of nature, a kind of material with which to mix with the labor of rhetorical discipline to convert into an object of divine word and devotion is an important reinterpretation of the role of representation and rhetorical communication. Herbert’s writing reflects a change in thinking about Nature in the late Renaissance, recognizing it not only its economic potential, but as a means for establishing and maintaining government and ecclesiastic authority over a laboring class. However, to say that Herbert can be defined or identified as a capitalist in the same breath as Locke would be incorrect. While Herbert maintains a relationship with the natural world in which his self is most definitely separate and superior, he also opens the door for a more nuanced identification with Nature as a co-equal with Man in his ultimate duty to serve God. While Herbert implores us, yes, to farm nature for material production, he also urges us to tend and learn from it. He implores us to appreciate the ecological system that God has set before us and urges us to improve it. Laurence Coupe agues that, “in georgic, human beings can ‘learn from’ nature in the very act of ‘imposing on’ it—indeed that is one way of getting to understand nature’s demands: discovering which arts will succeed” (Fairer 208). Herbert’s relationship with the world of the Nature was not strictly binary, but one in which he is willing to explore the tropes and meanings behind difference and, through critique, attempt to Catechize his readers toward the greater good—to engage in the labor of honoring God’s creation, a divine economy. 

[1] It is heavily implied by many historians that Herbert’s latent Calvinist tendencies may have played a role in denying him a seat at court. He also lost many allies in the court after the deaths of Bacon and Andrewes in 1626. As the Elizabethan influence on the court waned, there were also changes in the culture of the court that may have made Herbert incompatible, “..an abandonment of his hope that … a ‘life based on divinity’ and ‘great place’ in civil affairs..” (Summers 44).

[2] Francis Bacon echoes this sentiment in several of his works, specifically criticizing the otium—which we will discuss further on—as “useless and unproductive.” “Historians of science do not seem to have realized that the widespread distrust of otium, and the negative association of idleness and inertia as being contrary to God’s commandment for fallen men—‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’ (Gen. 3.19) – created a dilemma for natural philosophers in the Renaissance” (Vickers 145)

[3] In a classical sense, rhetoric was considered to be something somewhere between a science and an art. Quintillian, author of the “most comprehensive classical treatise ‘On the Teaching of Oratory’ Institutio Oratoria describes it as coming from nature. “It was, then, nature that created speech, and observation that originated the art of speaking. Just as men discovered the art of medicine by observing that some things were healthy and some the reverse, so they observed that some were useful and some useless in speaking, and noted them for imitation or avoidance, while they added certain other precepts according as their nature suggested” (Vickers 3). Rhetoric represented a codification of natural ability and persuasive topics and approaches. “’Everything,” notes Quntillian, “which art has brought to perfection originated in nature,’ be it medicine, architecture, music, or oratory” (3). In a classical sense, to master rhetoric was to tame and cultivate a perfected eloquence, to not only mimic the elusive natural gift of speech, but to wield it in it’s most persuasive form. As Brian Vickers describes, “the rhetorician seeks to align his power with the great forces of nature, rivers in flood, thunder and lightning, or snowstorms (as with Homer’s Ulysses) (82). If we are to take Vickers’ assessment seriously then we have to accept that rhetoric was understood to be mimetic of Nature in that eloquence was thought to be a natural ability particular to some. For the classical rhetoricians, the use of rhetoric was ideally meant as means of communicating a natural sense of truth. For Herbert, that understanding is skewed and refocused through a Christian lens.  [4]“In classical rhetoric,” as Michael P. Gallagher explains, “the genus tenue was not a style devoid of artistry; rather it was characterized by hidden craftsmanship, by a subdued degree of ornament compatible with its emphasis on clarity and its conversational manner” (Gallagher 496). However, by the sixteenth-century, the classical imperative of “clarity” in rhetoric began to lose out with Renaissance scholars who favored the emotional appeals and linguistic ornamentation of what would be called the “middle” and “high” styles of rhetoric. For early renaissance scholars, rhetoric had become “almost exclusively the art [1] “In classical rhetoric,” as Michael P. Gallagher explains, “the genus tenue was not a style devoid of artistry; rather it was characterized by hidden craftsmanship, by a subdued degree of ornament compatible with its emphasis on clarity and its conversational manner” (Gallagher 496). However, by the sixteenth-century, the classical imperative of “clarity” in rhetoric began to lose out with Renaissance scholars who favored the emotional appeals and linguistic ornamentation of what would be called the “middle” and “high” styles of rhetoric. For early renaissance scholars, rhetoric had become “almost exclusively the art of ornamentation” where “most handbooks of rhetoric offered only an impoverished notion of the classical plain style” (497). By the latter half of the renaissance, the rhetorical pendulum had begun to swing in the other direction and scholars, “came to see that far from involving an absence of art, plain style meant an area of discourse where the stress fell on dialectical qualities rather than on emotional power” (499).

[i] The influence of the Augustinian principles of plainness in meaning and flexibility in rhetorical style is clear in Herbert’s method as preacher. He explains in The Country Parson:

When he preacheth, he procures attention by all possible art, both by earnestnesse of speech, it being naturall to men to think, that where is much earnestness, there is somewhat worth hearing … Sometimes he tells them stories, and sayings of others, according as his text invites him; for them also men heed, and remember better then exhortations; which though earnest, yet often dy with the Sermon, especially with Countrey people; which are thick, and heavy, and hard to raise to a poynt of Zeal, and fervency, and need a mountaine of fire to kindle them; but stories and sayings they will well remember. (CP 297) In the chapter titled “The Parson Preaching,” Herbert lays out the parson’s duty to interpret the rhetorical needs of his audience in order to speak in terms that they will understand. Further, he elaborates a specific methodology of making plain the meaning of his sermons and his approach to delivering scripture. The passage is interesting not only because it sheds light on how Herbert negotiated his training and skill as an orator with his position as a preacher, but it also gives us an idea of just how much importance Herbert placed upon the labour of his occupation. 

By these and other means the Parson procures attention; but the character of his Sermon is Holiness; he is not witty, or learned, or eloquent, but Holy. … The Parsons Method in handling of a text consists of two parts; first, a plain and evident declaration of the meaning of the text; and secondly, some choyce Observations drawn out of the whole text, as it lyes entire, and unbroken in the Scripture it self. This he thinks naturall, and sweet, and grave. Whereas the other way of crumbling a text into small parts, as, the Person speaking, or spoken to, the subject, and object, and the like, hath neither in it sweetnesse, nor gravity, nor variety, since the words apart are not Scripture, but a dictionary, and may be considered alike in all the Scripture. (CP 297-99)

Echoing Augustine, any alterations or embellishments outside of the original scripture are in Herbert’s view, rhetorically ineffectual and lacking the “sweetnesse,” and “gravity” of God’s text and ultimately falling on ears as a “dictionary” rather than a scripture. Herbert’s verbal catering to his audience, his “particularizing of his speech” reflects an inherent literacy of English class differences and the economic particularities of his congregation. “With the particularizing of his speech now to the younger sort, then to the elder, now to the poor, and now to the rich. This is for you, and This is for you; for particulars ever touch, and wake more then generalls” (CP  297). Yet, despite the “particular” elements of persuasion that may be employed in each case, the “earnestness” of the speaker and the purity of the scripture must remain intact, it’s meaning made plain and self-evident.

 

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