Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Herbert Discussing the Word 128
infinite and divine. It is his Christological and incarnational emphases that allow him to
create a means by which he can speak to and with God, and in this we find one of the
richest and most nuanced poetic representations of a believer’s relationship with God.
The topic of George Herbert’s The Temple and its relationship with the Incarnation
has been studied several times before. The first significant work was by Richard Hughes
in his article ‘George Herbert and the Incarnation’. While this article makes the important
claim that Herbert’s ‘sense of the Incarnation pervades nearly every poem he wrote, and
each poem is a further celebration of the Incarnation’, 5 it ultimately tries to align Herbert’s
understanding of the Incarnation with Gnosticism. This rather unfortunate assertion is
made despite the fact that Gnosticism is anti-Incarnation, as can be evidenced by the fact
that ‘A central Gnostic notion was that matter was evil and sinful’; 6 therefore, Herbert can
be an Incarnationalist or a Gnostic, but not both. However, Hughes’s essay did
importantly call for a closer look at the importance of the Incarnation in The Temple. This
call was taken up in Jeannie Sargent Judge’s Two Natures Met: George Herbert and the
Incarnation. 7 Judge’s work primarily looks at the doctrine of the Incarnation and how the
various theological aspects of the doctrine can be found to play out in the poems of The
Temple. Most recently, Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise has published the book Le Verbe Fait
Image which builds upon her article, ‘Herbert’s Theology of Beauty’, 8 and looks at the
Incarnational properties of the imagery used by the metaphysical poets, with Herbert and
Richard Crashaw as primary studies, in a manner akin to the creation of verbal icons.
These critical works are correct in their assertions of the importance of the Incarnation in
The Temple; however, as critics begin to explore the Incarnation in relation to The Temple
it is clear that there are many more avenues for discussion, and so, while keeping the work
5 Richard E. Hughes, ‘George Herbert and the Incarnation’, Cithara 4 (1964), 28.
6 Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology, 4 th edn., (Oxford, 2007), p. 295.
7 Jeannie Sargent Judge, Two Natures Met (Oxford, 2004).
8 Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, ‘“Sweetnesse readie penn’d”: Herbert’s Theology of Beauty’, George Herbert
Journal 27.1&2 (2003/4), 1-21; Le Verbe Fait Image (Paris, 2010).