3 The gospel and the transformation of reality: George Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’
The gospel and the transformation of reality: George Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’
‘Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds’ (Romans 12.2). Throughout his writings, we find Paul reaffirming the transformative power of the gospel – its capacity to change human lives, including the way in which we understand the world and behave within it and towards it.
The New Testament uses a wide range of images to describe this transformation, many of which suggest a change in the way in which we see things: our eyes are opened, and a veil is removed (Acts 9.9–19; 2 Corinthians 3.13–16).1 We are unable to see things as they actually are, unless we are helped to see. This was an important point for the British moral philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who emphasized that ‘by opening our eyes we do not necessarily see what confronts us … Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world.’2 This veil must be removed; our eyes must be healed; and both these are works of divine grace, not human skill or achievement. To use a way of thinking characteristic of Augustine of Hippo, divine grace ‘heals the eye of the heart’,3 allowing us to see the world as it really is, rather than in a fragmented and distorted manner.
Theology is thus about discernment, seeing reality in a certain way and attempting to resolve its ambiguities through this interpretative framework.4 But how are we to visualize this changed way of seeing the world? How are we to grasp it with the power of the imagination, rather than simply comprehend it with our minds? In what way does the Christian gospel so enhance our capacity to behold things that we may discern the footprints of God in the sands, the tracks of his passing in the walkways of life, and his presence and power in our everyday experiences? While we should never neglect the importance of reason and understanding, we must also value the power of the human imagination as the gatekeeper of the human soul.
Theology is an activity of the imagination as much as of reason, in which we seek to transcend the boundaries of the given, pressing upwards, outwards and forwards. Theology frames the landscape of reality in such a way that our everyday existence is set in a wider perspective. The world, formerly an absolute end in itself, now becomes a gateway to something greater.
In recent years, theologians and scholars of literature have paid increasing attention to the theological richness of the poetry of George Herbert (1593–1633). There is a growing consensus that Herbert, though steeped in and informed by the tradition of the European Reformation, possessed a rare ability to transform this theology into rhetorical forms capable of captivating the imagination.5 Underlying Herbert’s poetry is an understanding of the role of words to bridge the gap between heaven and earth, between the believer and Christ.6 Herbert’s use of evocative figures of speech (‘tropes’) allowed him to establish significant links between the secular and profane world and the core themes of the Christian faith.7 His genius was to offer a way of expressing these themes that was powerful and imaginative compared to the learned biblical commentaries and dense tomes of systematic theology of his age.
This was an issue of no small importance to Herbert. His writings show an acute awareness of the importance of audience and the limitations placed upon words as a means of communication.8 The poem ‘Windows’ opens with a question addressed to God:
Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
Yet this quickly transposes into a discussion of the limits of purely verbal forms of preaching, which risk being ‘waterish, bleak, and thin’. To be faithful and effective, preaching must marry and merge ‘doctrine and life, colours and light’. Herbert’s poetry itself can be seen as an attempt to enact the preacher’s role to be a ‘window’ for divine truth, which affects real life, not simply the understanding.9
Herbert’s collection of poems The Temple is widely regarded as a literary and theological treasure, and has excited much interest and comment. For example, does the arrangement of its constituent poems reflect some deeper theological or liturgical structure?10 We shall not explore this important question here, but will focus instead on what is often described as the most beautiful and meaningful of Herbert’s works – ‘The Elixir’.
The poem was initially entitled ‘Perfection’ and opened with the following stanza, which identifies God as the point of reference for both rational and moral judgements.
Lord teach me to refer
All things I do to thee
That I not only may not err
But also pleasing be.
Herbert revised ‘The Elixir’ extensively,11 in response to both literary and theological concerns.12 The first draft of the poem seems to focus on how the believer appears to God; the final draft is concerned more with how the believer acts for God.13 Yet the most significant change concerns the choice of analogies for the transformation of vision and action that Herbert regards as an integral element of the Christian faith.
Initially, Herbert shows a clear preference for analogies drawn from the living world of nature. Yet from the third draft onwards, these are displaced by analogies drawn from the inorganic world of alchemy. A significant final verse is introduced, containing a controlling image which comes to dominate the poem – Christ as the fabled ‘philosopher’s stone’.14
This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold:
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.
This alchemical image is deeply significant, from both a literary and theological perspective. The classic image of the ‘philosopher’s stone’ makes a powerful appeal to the human longing to be able to transcend the limits of the ordinary world. Base metals could be transmuted into gold; mortality into immortality.15 English writers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were clearly familiar with alchemical literature and terminology, and though its leading themes were widely ridiculed in literary circles16 – Francis Bacon, for example, expressed concern about its ‘credulous and superstitious traditions’17 – the potency of the imagery made its eventual deployment in sermons and poems inevitable. The great Puritan preacher Richard Sibbes (1577– 1635) spoke of the grace of God as ‘a blessed Alchemist’, in that ‘where it toucheth it maketh good and religious’.18 John Donne and George Herbert were thus not alone in believing that this intoxicating imagery could be put to literary, even theological, use to yield a ‘true religious alchemy’.19 Donne uses several alchemical images in his poems addressed to the Countess of Bedford. Perhaps more importantly, we find the alchemical ‘tincture’ playing a significant iconic role in his ‘Resurrection, Imperfect’. Christ is here portrayed as the one who transmutes the base metals of fallen, mortal human nature to his immortal and imperishable nature.
For these three days become a mineral.
He was all gold when He lay down, but rose
All tincture, and doth not alone dispose
Leaden and iron wills to good, but is
Of power to make e’en sinful flesh like his.
Herbert’s alchemical imagery offered an imaginative framework by which the transformative impact of Christ upon believers’ perceptions of the world, and their place within it, could be expressed poetically. Where theologians and preachers of his age generally used abstract concepts to express the new attitudes that faith in Christ engendered – such as a theology of work or vocation20 – Herbert chose to deploy words and images with the capacity to linger in the minds of the faithful, and thus permanently to affect how they saw the world. Christ, the ‘philosopher’s stone’, transforms, transmutes and transvalues the humble, mean life of the believer into something that is significant and valued. This theme is found at several points in Herbert’s The Temple, as in the important poem ‘Easter’:
Rise, heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delays,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.
The poem envisages Christ as the agent of transformation from dust to gold, from ashes to precious metal.
Yet it is arguably in the later versions of Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’ that we find the most sophisticated theological application of the imagery of alchemy, focusing on three core concepts: the ‘philosopher’s stone’ itself, a substance that was believed to have the power of transmuting base metal into gold; the ‘elixir’, a powder derived from this stone; and a ‘tincture’, produced by mixing this powder with a liquid such as water or alcohol. The alchemical literature points to a wide variety of interpretations of these notions, and they are probably best regarded as essentially fluid concepts.21 For Herbert’s purposes, each is to be regarded as an agent of transmutation and transvaluation; when brought into touch with base metals, each has the power to transform metal into gold.
So how does this bear upon theology? How does Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’ illuminate the ability of theology to transform our perceptions of the world, and hence our actions within it? The first stanza of the poem sets the scene for the discussion that follows. Often criticized for their banality,22 these lines emphasize the importance of ‘seeing’ the world correctly.
Teach me, my God and King,
In all things thee to see,
And what I do in any thing,
To do it as for thee.
These opening lines contain the core themes that pervade this poem. For Herbert, the disciplined skills required to see things as they really are must be thought of as an initial gift of divine grace, which are subsequently honed through the preaching and sacraments of the Church. The habits of thinking underlying the mature Christian engagement with reality are thus acquired from God, rather than from innate human intelligence or experience. These habits of thought then lead from reflection on the world to action within the world. All of these themes, of course, are widely recognized to be commonplace within the Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican theological traditions known to Herbert, directly or indirectly. Herbert’s genius lies not in their origination, but in how they are expressed and explored poetically.
So how does this help us reflect on the traditions and tasks of Christian theology? Herbert’s conception of the role of theology in the Christian life is to be found in the third stanza of ‘The Elixir’:23
A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.
Herbert here contrasts two quite different possible modes of engagement with a piece of glass – a ‘looking on’ and a ‘passing through’. There is a clear parallel with the poem ‘Windows’, noted earlier, which explores how a human preacher, though little more than ‘brittle crazy glass’, may act as a window through which God may be more fully known.24 The observer may look at the window, seeing it as an object of interest in itself. Yet there is a deeper mode of engagement, in which the observer uses the window as a gateway, a means of gaining access to a greater reality. Indeed, the window itself may become a distraction, in that the viewer focuses on the sign, rather than what is being signified.25
Herbert’s analogy illuminates two possible ways of doing theology. The first is to look at the window itself, allowing our eye to ‘stay’ on its physical structures and appearance. Likewise, we may study theology by considering its core ideas and their mutual relationships; by gaining a deeper understanding of the historical contexts within which they emerged; or by reflecting on how best these may be expressed or explained.
Yet Herbert’s preference is clearly for a second mode of engagement: using theology as a means of envisaging a transformed reality. Theology makes possible a new way of seeing things, throwing open the shutters on a world that cannot be known, experienced or encountered through human wisdom and strength alone. Christian doctrine offers us a subject worth studying in its own right; yet its supreme importance lies in its capacity to allow us to pass through its prism and behold our world in a new way.
Having established this point, Herbert then makes a series of moves that consolidate this critical role for theology in discerning the true nature of things, and the manner of habitation and action that is appropriate for believers in the world. Theology articulates and frames the transvaluation of reality which takes place on account of Christ, turning the mundane into the epiphanic, base metals into gold. The gospel changes the realities of life, through the death and resurrection of Christ.26 Theology is not the agent of this transformation; it is, however, the agent of its disclosure.
All may of Thee partake;
Nothing can be so mean
Which with his tincture (for Thy sake)
Will not grow bright and clean.
Herbert invites us to see the world in a new light – a world that has been brightened and cleansed through Christ’s suffering and death. Nothing that comes into contact with Christ can be ‘mean’ – lowly, humble, commonplace or worthless. His theological vision discloses and describes the grand inversion of values within the new ordering of reality resulting from the gospel, in which the first become the last, the humble noble.27
A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
Makes that and th’ action fine.
Christ sprinkles every aspect of the believer’s actions with grace, forcing us to see both the agent and action in a new light. Herbert thus links the transformation of vision with that of agency, holding that the Christian gospel enables and authorizes a specific manner of beholding both the moral agent and the moral task.
It is interesting to compare Herbert’s understanding of the evangelical transformation of reality with that of C. S. Lewis. Herbert’s poetry is dominated by the notion of the gospel coming into contact with humanity. ‘The Elixir’ is unusual, in that this contact is described in somewhat impersonal and physical terms, using the controlling images of the philosopher’s stone, a tincture and the elixir. All these are agents of transmutation that need to be applied to what is to be transformed. Unless the tincture is applied to the wound, it will not be healed. Elsewhere in The Temple, Herbert uses images of personal contact – for example, the image of Christ taking the believer ‘by the hand’.28 Herbert’s imagery here is drawn from the Gospel narratives, which portray Christ as reaching out to touch individuals, or taking them by the hand (Mark 1.31, 41; 5.41; 7.32; 8.23; 9.27). The gospel is an alchemy of grace, which transforms by application, as a medicine is applied to a wound by a physician.
Lewis similarly affirms the transforming capacity of the gospel. Yet the dominant imagery which Lewis deploys is that of illumination. God is like the sun, whose rays lighten the world, altering human perceptions. It would be no criticism of Lewis to suggest that he seems to be incorrigibly Platonic at this point,29 tending to think of God as the intelligible Sun who gives light to the mind and therefore intelligibility to all that is now seen.30
Lewis’s emphasis on the importance of ‘seeing’ as a metaphor for human engagement with a greater reality may reflect the priority assigned to this mode of perception by many German Romantic writers:31 his interest in the Romantic notion of Sehnsucht is evident at many points in his writings. A particularly striking instance of this imagery may be found in Lewis’s early sonnet ‘Noon’s Intensity’. Here, God is portrayed as a sun whose ‘alchemic beams turn all to gold’.32 The sonnet appears to leave open the question as to whether this illumination transmutes nature itself or merely human perceptions of nature, but it is possible to argue that Lewis’s dominant idea is that of the divine metamorphosis of human vision.33 This stands at some considerable distance from Herbert’s approach, which sees the transformation of reality and of human perception as interlinked, both being dependent upon the gospel as a ‘tincture’ which heals and amends.
Much more could be said about Herbert’s approach to transvaluation in ‘The Elixir’, not least the manner in which he reworked the poem to make alchemy central to the development of its argument and imagery. The important point is that Herbert offers us a vision of theology as a lens or window, through which we look to discern the transcendent in the everyday, heaven in the ordinary. There are few better starting points for the appreciation of the role of theology in the Christian life than this.