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Divine and Mortal Absence in George Herbert's English

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Divine and Mortal Absence in George Herbert's English THE “MOURNING CHILD”: DIVINE AND MORTAL ABSENCE IN GEORGE HERBERT’S ENGLISH AND CLASSICAL VERSE by ERICA MORTON-STARNER A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2015 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Erica Morton-Starner Title: The “Mourning Child”: Divine and Mortal Absence in George Herbert’s English and Classical Verse This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Benjamin Saunders Chair Lara Bovilsky Core Member George Rowe Core Member Cecelia Enjuto-Rangel Institutional Representative and Scott L. Pratt Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded in September 2015 ii © 2015 Erica Morton-Starner iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Erica Morton-Starner Doctor of Philosophy Department of English September 2015 Title: The “Mourning Child”: Divine and Mortal Absence in George Herbert’s English and Classical Verse The period of tumultuous religious reformation during which George Herbert lived demanded of people a strict adherence to the paradigmatic structures that prescribed the ways in which public displays of religious conviction were to be manifested. The freedom, indeed the necessity, to doubt is taken for granted by the modern reader, but for Herbert it was a matter of spiritual life and death. As country parson, he diligently labored to guide his parishioners, administer the sacraments, and exemplify the “right path.” This persona—reinforced by necessarily performative, faith-demonstrating actions—is continually destabilized by the experience of doubt, which leads Herbert to address his own persistent despair at the absence of God through poetry. His masterful use of the structural and thematic patterns of the Psalms in many of the poems of The Temple draws on the rich tradition of lament in contrast to the prescriptive, ideological agendas of the Book of Common Prayer and the Common Lectionary which privilege faith. The poems demonstrate an extensive knowledge of the epistemological foundations and history of both official Church doctrine and of medieval mystical thought and become a tool for exploring the paradoxes of human existence. His philosophical and rhetorical engagement with the Christological and ecclesiastical iv theology specific to Dionysian mysticism demonstrates the intensity of Herbert’s preoccupation with Divine absence and his near obsessive search for the ideal apophatic presence, that silent, knowing-unknowing that defines oneness with God. Nowhere are Herbert’s existential dilemmas more evident than in Memoriae Matris Sacrum, a sequence of poems written immediately following the death of his beloved mother, which reveals an inner life of the poet that his more controlled poetic voice of The Temple often conceals. These elegiac poems, written in Latin and Greek, show the poet as a “mourning child” and lay bare his most intimate fears about the constancy of his own faith and the uncertain terms of Christian death and resurrection embodied in the sacred ritual of the Eucharist. The poetic closure often ascribed to Herbert’s poems in fact disguises the nature of spiritual and psychological dilemmas which remain for Herbert persistent and unresolved. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Erica Morton-Starner GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene, OR Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, University of Oregon, 2015 Master of Arts, English, Western Washington University, 2006 Bachelor of Arts, Northern Arizona University, 2002 AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Renaissance Studies PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellow, Department of English, University of Oregon, Eugene, 2007 to present (composition, Shakespeare) Assistant Editor and Reader, More Than Thought: A Scholarly Literary Journal Devoted to Consciousness, 2010-1011 . Instructor, Coconino Community College, 2006-7, 2012. Instructor, University of Western Washington, 2004-2006 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Graduate Teaching Fellowship, English, 2007 to present Sarah Harkness Kirby Award for best essay written for a graduate seminar, 2009: “Visuality and Phantasmagoria in John Thompson’s Victorian London Street Life in Historic Photographs.” Mavetee Scholarship, University of Oregon, 2007-2009 Graduate Research Scholarship, University of Oregon, 2007. vi Magna cum Laude , Western Washington University (2006) & Northern Arizona University (2002) PUBLICATIONS Morton-Starner, Erica. “Negotiations of ‘Right Dependence’: Rhetoric and Fleshly Embodiment in the Writings of John Donne.” More Than Thought: A Scholarly Literary Journal Devoted to Consciousness, Fall 2010 . vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................1 II. BEARING THE LONGEST PART: GEORGE HERBERT AND THE DISORIENTATION OF DOUBT ................................................................................24 Appropriating the Psalmic Model: Framing and Legitimizing Darkness ..................................................................................................................36 Doubt in Praise: A Speech Too Low ...........................................................................50 Psalms of Confession: Lamenting “Thy Bitter Wrath” ..............................................58 Third Party Hostility: “Let Not Their Plot/Kill Them and Me” ..................................65 Resisting Resolution ....................................................................................................72 III. GEORGE HERBERT AND DIONYSIAN THEOLOGY ..........................................78 The Self-Subverting Utterance: Disordering Language through Paradox ..................................................................................................................86 Exstasis : Only “Thou Dost Know the Way”............................................................100 Christ’s Absent-Presence: Seeking Exstasis in Eucharistic Feasting .......................113 IV. MEMORIAE MATRIS SACRUM ..............................................................................123 Speaking in Classical Tongues ...............................................................................126 Sacer and Profanus .................................................................................................130 The Good Death ......................................................................................................141 The Counterfeit and the Garden ..............................................................................153 Displacing Mourning, Becoming Sacerdos ............................................................172 APPENDIX: ADDITIONAL SOURCES ........................................................................176 REFERENCES CITED ....................................................................................................188 viii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION I’ll begin with a passage from St Augustine: … the most peaceful and most profitable procedure was for me to question and answer myself, and so, with God’s help, search for what is true. So, if you have committed yourself too quickly anywhere, there is no reason for you to be afraid of retreating and setting yourself free; there’s no way out otherwise. Augustine, Soliloquies 2.7.14. 1 This passage from Soliloquies illustrates a particularly fascinating aspect of Augustine’s legacy that is especially relevant to my interest in George Herbert—the notion that in searching for transcendental truth, it is acceptable and even necessary to change one’s mind, to retreat from one point of view in order to be free to radically modify a way of thinking, a pattern of logic, or a vision of oneself at a particular stage in an evolving search. Indeed, George Herbert, in his vernacular and religious verse reveals 1 Augustine. Soliloquies and Immortality of the Soul. Trans. Gerard Watson. Warminister: Aris & Phillips, 1990. 1 a vision of individual subjectivity that is at once self-declaring and self-consuming. 2 Most importantly, this vision is dynamic and represents the poet’s capacity both to commit and to retreat. 3 For Herbert, even knowledge of one’s own self is sometimes unavailable; instead, the self vanishes beyond the ever-receding horizon of an impossible standard of sincerity, or disappears before the searching gaze of an imagined all-knowing Other forced by implacable theological logic into an existential and epistemological crisis. Herbert’s poetry is therefore a reasoned dialogue with the self—a theology of evolving perspectives that represents the poet’s capacity to advance towards and then retreat from mistaken ideas or perspectives on experience. In this dissertation I will trace how Herbert worked to establish a notion of the self in relation to Christian narratives that are fraught through and through with anxiety about our separation from divine presence. I will also show how both his religious and secular verse can and should be viewed not as soliloquies or dramatic monologues but rather as inner dialogues within which the perspective of any given “speaker” is always subject to qualification and change
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