The spirit in the church: instituting the holy in George Herbert's poetry and prose

George Herbert's poetic edifice, called The Temple, has been read according to various schematic forms, usually under the idea that the collection's central unit, The Church, creates an architectural church that in turn models the interior space of the Protestant believer. Turning away from these earlier models of reading, my work puts forward the idea that the "church" of Herbert's poems refers not to a static edifice or interior space but toward the site of communion among the readers of his poetry. Herbert's collection is a "church" in the universalist sense of a church extending backward and forward in time to encompass all communicants of Christ's grace. In Chapter 2, I argue that Herbert's conception of the Holy Spirit works to constitute the audience of his poetry. The problem of understanding how the Spirit creates the momentum behind many of his poems. Most often, this problem becomes expressed through pondering some miracle, such as communion, or an inscrutable biblical passage. In the end, the speaker's anxious desire overcomes this ratiocination and, paradoxically, creates the speaker's own assurance of grace. In Chapter 3, the argument expands to Herbert's pastoral manual, The Country Parson. As a twin to his work in The Church, The Country Parson again worries over the question of creating a unified spiritual community through the Holy Spirit. While in The Temple, his speaker turned inward, the priest of The Country Parson must turn outward, using the iconographic and rhetorical traditions of Counter-Reformation theory to answer the Puritan problem of displaying the Spirit's inward effects. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries