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1 the Two Herberts: Philosophy, Religion, and Poetry in the Works Of The Two Herberts: Philosophy, Religion, and Poetry in the works of George and Edward Herbert Paul W. Gleason Los Angeles, CA B.A., Yale University, 2006 M.A., University of Virginia, 2014 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Virginia June 2018 _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ 1 ABSTRACT The Two Herberts: Philosophy, Religion, and Poetry in the works of George and Edward Herbert In this dissertation, I compare the poetry, philosophy, and religious views of George and Edward Herbert. George Herbert’s posthumously published volume of poetry, The Temple (1633), met with rapturous approval, lauded by Church of England stalwarts and Puritans alike. On the other hand, few were as reviled as Edward Herbert. In his metaphysical treatise De Veritate (1624) and his encyclopedia of religion De Religione Gentilium (1663), he inveighed against the authority of priests and argued that all religions were based on the same “five common notions.” Both books received swift and bitter condemnations. At first glance, then, it might seem that the brothers are quite different. In the first two chapters of my dissertation, however, I argue that both men were heavily influenced by Renaissance Christian Platonism and were responding to questions raised by the 16th- century skeptical crisis, which threw old religious knowledge into doubt: what is the relationship between God and humanity? How will I be saved? In the second half of my dissertation (chapters 3-5), I show that while they faced the same questions, they came up with diametrically opposed answers. George tries to reestablish his lost connection with God by turning the acts of reading and writing into holy rituals. Edward, on the other hand, believes he can best pursue true knowledge of God (and with it salvation) by divesting himself of traditional knowledge and relying only on his own mind. The deepest difference between the brothers, I argue, was their estimation of human power: Edward believed that he could achieve eternal life through his own feats of intellect and 2 will, while George consistently looks for divine aid, not only for his salvation but also for everything from maintaining his fragile health to the very act of writing poetry. It would be the easiest thing in the world to oppose pious, backward-looking George with fearless, modern Edward. But this would do no justice to the complexity of either. Despite his claims to the contrary, for instance, Edward draws heavily on Renaissance Christian Platonism and claimed to be going back to a pure, original and ancient religion. And despite George’s claims to be writing a kind of anti-poetry, in which he silences his own voice to let God speak, he was one of the greatest poetic innovators of his day. Instead, I contend that both brothers are Janus-faced: looking into the past and future at the same time. In my conclusion I consider Edward’s place in the history of the study of religion, and what poetic works like The Temple can add to intellectual histories. 3 Acknowledgements Thank you first of all to my dissertation advisor, Kevin Hart, who read and offered helpful comments on several drafts of each chapter. Any remaining mistakes, of course, remain mine (especially in the formatting of my footnotes). Thank you, too, to my other readers: Larry Bouchard, Elizabeth Fowler, Charles Mathewes, and Margaret Mohrmann. Before they agreed to serve on my committee, each of them taught classes that inspired and shaped my scholarly interests and intellectual development. The Institute of the Humanities & Global Culture awarded me the Buckner W. Clay Award for Summer Research, allowing me to travel to England and study Edward’s manuscripts and letters. While in England I received invaluable help from librarians at the National Archives in Kew, Jesus College in Oxford, and the National Library in Wales. Dunstan Roberts of Cambridge also answered many questions about Edward Herbert and his libraries. Peter Moench kindly translated 20 lines of Edward’s Latin- language poem “Life” for me. Over the past three years, I have presented parts of this dissertation at the American Academy of Religion annual conference; the AAR’s western regional conference; the George Herbert Society’s fifth triennial conference in Paris; the Conference on Christianity and Literature; and the Patristic, Medieval and Renaissance Conference. Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond to my papers or ask me questions. Finally, I must thank my wife, Greta. I would not have been able to finish this without her support. I owe her more than I can say. 4 Table of Contents: Acknowledgements.…………………………………………………………………..4 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………...6 Herbert’s Crowded Temple (a literature review)………………………………........26 Edward Herbert (a literature review)………………………………………………..56 Chapter 1: Edward, George, and Renaissance Neoplatonism……………………….73 Chapter 2: Epistemology and Soteriology………………………………………….139 Chapter 3: The Sense of Scripture in The Temple……………………………………...199 Chapter 4: Edward Herbert and the Study of Religion……………………………..252 Chapter 5: Copying the Word: George Herbert and Creative Copia……………….299 Conclusion.…………………………………………………………………………339 Works Cited.………………………………………………………………………..350 5 The Two Herberts: Philosophy, Religion, and Poetry in the works of George and Edward Herbert During the middle decades of the 17th century, the English public held diametrically opposed opinions of the brothers George (1593-1633) and Edward Herbert (1583-1648). After his death in 1633, George Herbert’s book The Temple (1633) met with rapturous approval. He had created what many churchmen of his day deemed a contradiction in terms: poetry that celebrated divine rather than earthly love.1 Perhaps even more than his contemporary John Donne, he inspired a whole line of poets. Henry Vaughan called him a “blessed man, whose holy life and verse gained many pious Converts (of whom I am the least).”2 Even in an England bitterly divided by denominational disagreement, everyone from radical Puritans to staunch supporters of the established church praised and emulated his poetry. Two editions of The Temple appeared in its first year of publication, and ten editions over the next forty, totaling around 20,000 copies of the book.3 In an introductory note to The Temple, Herbert’s old friend Nicholas Ferrar proclaimed him “a pattern or more for the age he lived in.”4 On the other hand, few were as reviled as Edward Herbert. His books on truth and religion, in which he inveighed against the authority of priests and argued that all religions were based on five common notions, received swift and bitter condemnations. Apologists for 1 In her Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry: ‘Divinitie, and Poesie, Met’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), Elizabeth Clarke has a good rundown of prominent divines who objected to poetry on the grounds that it might distract readers from sacred truths (see page 1). 2 For a good summary of George Herbert’s immediate reception, see Joseph Summers’ George Herbert: His Religion and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 12-13. See also Clarke, 12. 3 Clarke, 7. 4 “The Printers to the Reader,” line 27. The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007). Wilcox’s book is the current and authoritative edition of Herbert’s poems. I have drawn all my quotations from George Herbert’s poetry from it. 6 Christianity like Richard Baxter noted that Christ had no role to play in Herbert’s economy of salvation.5 Edward Herbert’s infamy spread well beyond England, too. The Catholic Church placed his treatise Of Truth (1624), in which he exhorted readers to trust no judgment other than their own, on the index of forbidden books in 1634. In Germany, a Lutheran divine called him one of the “great deceivers,” along with Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes.6 Frame: It would be easy to present the conflict between the two Herberts as a window into a moment of great historical change: the moment the world became modern.7 Here stands pious George, looking back over the Reformation and medieval world, the ages of faith and ritual, sighing over all that had passed. And beside him, fearlessly facing the future, is Edward, foe of all ecclesial authority and received opinion, the first modernly religious man—in the sense of obeying only the dictates of his own conscience. Such a frame, I submit, would do justice to neither of them. It was George, after all, who translated Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning into Latin and congratulated Bacon on killing off the philosophy of the “schoolmen,” those great inheritors of medieval 5 Richard Baxter, More Reasons for the Christian Religion (London, 1672), 558. 6 John Butler cites the Lutheran Christian Kortholt’s objection to Edward Herbert in his [Butler’s] Lord Herbert of Chirbury (1582 - 1648): An Intellectual Biography (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 201. Another German professor, Johann Muses, coined the term “Cherburianism,” which meant a natural theology completely eclipsing revelation. For more continental denunciations of Edward Herbert, see Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 629 and 633. 7 Of course, this would not be the first time the world became modern, starting with the neoteroi Greek poets who self-consciously rejected the conventions of epic poetry. The Latin modernus was coined in the 6th century, during the supposedly “dark ages,” and the via moderna opened up in the high middle ages, the 14th century. So Edward and George lived during the transition to a relatively recent modern period. 7 scholasticism. It was Edward who assured his readers that nobody would ever unravel the secrets of blood circulation.
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