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• W2168052442 abstract "Light thy Darknes isGeorge Herbert and Negative Theology Hillary Kelleher Joseph Summers astutely called George Herbert a 'mystic' of the via positiva, a religious path devoted to naming and affirming God's positive presence in creation.1 While the via positiva indeed enhances our understanding of The Temple, the seemingly opposed via negativa also represents an important influence on Herbert's poetry. This path derives from what is loosely called negative theology, a non-Augustinian current of Neoplatonism that insists upon the darkness or unknowability of God.2 Its central author, Dionysius the Areopagite, has been overlooked by contemporary Herbert scholars who, like Summers, tend to emphasize his poetic evocation of divine presence.3 Yet as Herbert reminds us in The Pulley, The God of Nature is never wholly present within Nature, and The work, as he calls it in Mattens, never quite reveals the workman.4 Because some part of God remains concealed, no linguistic sign can hold him entirely in signification. Through close readings of several poems, including Mattens, The Pulley, Love unknown, The Quidditie, and The Search, this essay elucidates Herbert's engagement with the via negativa. I begin with a brief look at its basic premises. The Via Negativa: Dionysius, Aquinas, and The Cloud of Unknowing Near the end of the fifth century, Dionysius introduced the concept of God as the divine dark, the negation of word and image; in his writings for the first time in Christian mysticism we hear words such as ignorance and unknowing used to describe the path by which the soul approaches God.5 It was Dionysius who, as the aptly-named Denys Turner tells us, actually invented the genre of mystical theology for the Latin Church and without whose writings Western mysticism would be unintelligible?6 The Dionysian corpus, otherwise called the Areopagitica, permeated the thinking of Aquinas and other patristic writers until, in the 1400s, the anonymous author of The [End Page 47] Cloud of Unknowing became the first to translate his Mystical Theology into English. In spite of his somewhat controversial place in the Western Christian canon, Dionysius exerted an enormous impact on the flowering of European mysticism.7 As Karlfried Froelich points out, from the fourteenth through the sixteenth century, except for the Bible and perhaps the works of Boethius, no writing of the early Christian era received similar attention in terms of translations, excerpts, commentaries, and even cumulative corpora that combined these elements into veritable encyclopedias of Dionysian scholarship.8 Dionysian ideas were still very much in play during the heightened religious tension of early seventeenth-century England, and with his extensive reading in theology, Herbert almost certainly would have come across the via negativa. He was, as Chauncey Wood demonstrates, a student, a professed bibliophile, and a devoted reader of texts in both English and Latin who spent a large portion of his slender income collecting books on divinity.9 Yet while critics have sensed the influence of the Areopagitica in the work of John Donne and Henry Vaughan, Herbert's complex approach to negative theology has gone unremarked.10 On the surface, the lack of critical attention is understandable. Perhaps the most overtly language-oriented of the period's devotional poets, Herbert is hardly an obvious example of the silent, unmediated knowing that has often been considered the goal of the via negativa. Although certain poems advocate a plain style of verse, The Temple as a whole celebrates language if not for its own sake then as a tribute to God.11 Many lyrics, moreover, record the immanence of the logos in creation, and some even suggest a sacramental language that approaches the Word itself.12 Even more to the point, it seems at first glance simply counterintuitive to compare a poet who describes climbing to God by a sunbeam to a philosopher of the divine dark. On a deeper level, though, the omission of the via negativa speaks to a somewhat mistaken conception of this path, whose complex, dialectical relation to the via positiva has only recently become a major subject of scholarly concern.13 This relation is central to the poetics of The Temple, as I shall soon discuss. First, however..." @default.
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• W2168052442 date "2007-01-01" @default.
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• W2168052442 title ""Light thy Darknes is": George Herbert and Negative Theology" @default.
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• W2168052442 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/ghj.2007.0003" @default.
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