The “Gentleman’s Psalm” and Herbert’s “Unkindnesse”

I love working with the devotional poetry of George Herbert because the more I learn about the Bible, “this book of starres,” as Herbert calls it in his poem “H. Scriptures II” (line 14), the more connections I see with Herbert’s poetry.

 

So, this blog entry will be partly about an insight gained about a Herbert poem during a recent sermon and partly a cautionary tale that we need to check our sources before attributing quotes to famous people.

Trinity College Dublin Old Library

 

I’ll begin with the latter. Recently a guest pastor spoke at my church. The sermon was essentially on kindness, with Psalm 15 as one of the texts referenced. This psalm is what brought me to Herbert’s poem “Unkindnesse,” but, first, the guest pastor said that Ben Franklin called Psalm 15 the “gentleman’s psalm.” This sounded interesting. I’ve studied and taught Franklin’s Autobiography, but didn’t specifically remember a reference to the psalms, so I made a note to look up where Franklin had said this and find out the context in order to see if he’d said anything further on Psalm 15.

 

A few days later I searched Google & then Google Books (which is often more reliable information, as you’re searching published books) & then the entire Ben Franklin corpus at Project Gutenberg (his memoirs, Autobiography, Poor Richard, letters). And the ONLY connection between Franklin and Psalm 15 comes in published works from long-time preacher Chuck Swindoll—and he doesn’t refer to a specific work from Franklin or cite a source.* Where Swindoll gets this from, I have no idea, but other pastors have been quoting Swindoll’s apparently erroneous statement about Ben Franklin for decades now. So the moral of this story is always make sure you know the exact source of a quote (the specific work or interview or whatever) before you say that someone famous said something. I find misattributed quotes in student writing (and on those user-supplied quotes sites, such as Brainy Quote or Good Reads) all the time.**

 

In fact, several web articles and even an entire book are devoted to quotes misattributed to or misquoted from C. S. Lewis. (They then correct those quotes or attribute them to the right person.)*** I highly recommend an older blog from Beth Allison Barr of Baylor University with advice to pastors for how to do good research before including that supposed historical fact or famous quote in a Sunday sermon.

But back to the “gentleman’s psalm”: a book about some architecture at Princeton University says vaguely that English public school tradition (Americans would call these elite private schools) refers to Psalm 15 as the “gentleman’s psalm.”**** Why? I presume Psalm 15 is traditionally called the “gentleman’s psalm” because of verses 2-5. These answer the question asked in verse 1 of who is worthy to dwell with God:

 

He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart.

He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to his neighbour, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour.

In whose eyes a vile person is contemned; but he honoureth them that fear the LORD. He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.

He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh reward against the innocent. He that doeth these things shall never be moved. (Psalm 15:3-5 KJV)

 

While verse 2 of Psalm 15 focuses on the person himself (walking uprightly, speaking the truth, etc.), verses 3-5 focus on one’s actions toward others: Don’t speak badly against your neighbor, honor followers of God, don’t go back on your promises, and don’t hurt others financially.

 

And this is the connection I find between Psalm 15 and Herbert’s “Unkindnesse,” a poem that focuses on how the speaker has treated his human friends much better than he has treated his ultimate Friend. The refrain to each of the five stanzas is a variation on this phrase: “I would not use a friend, as I use Thee” (line 5).

 

Herbert’s stanza 1 is a general statement about the speaker’s intention to treat his friends well. Herbert gets more specific after that, specifics that I think line up well with Psalm 15, leading me to think that Herbert may have had this psalm in mind while writing “Unkindnesse.”

 

Indeed, Herbert’s stanza 2 is about preserving a friend’s good name, just as is verse 3 of Psalm 15:

If any touch my friend, or his good name;

It is my honour and my love to free

His blasted fame

From the least spot or thought of blame. (lines 6-9)

 

Next, Herbert’s stanza 3 parallels verse 5 of Psalm 15 regarding lending to a friend without usury: “Would he have gold? I lend it instantly” (line 12). That the word “use” is repeated in this poem 10 times, and accompanied by other financial language, strongly suggests that the speaker is aware of the temptation to usury and keen to avoid it when lending money to his friend.  

 

Likewise, Herbert’s stanza 4, albeit not quite as directly, puts into practice Psalm 15:4b and indeed the entire idea of verses 3-5 about looking out for a friend’s interest, even if that means hurting oneself financially or socially: “When that my friend pretendeth to a place, / I quit my interest, and leave it free” (lines 16-17). These lines are basically saying if both my friend and I are in line for the same job (or other position I really want), I take myself out of the running so my friend can have that position.

 

I wonder if Psalm 15 was called the “gentleman’s psalm” as far back as the early 17^th century and if that might be why Herbert in “Unkindnesse” recalls this psalm when comparing how he treats his friends with how he treats the Lord. Thus far, I have not been able to trace the origin of this idea of Psalm 15 as the “gentleman’s psalm” back before the 19^th century. If anyone can enlighten me on the history of this moniker for Psalm 15, please let me know!

 

There’s so much more to say about Herbert’s “Unkindnesse” (including the beautiful concluding stanza). I have written on “Unkindnesse” in two previous posts on my blog: here (this first entry includes the entire poem) and here.

 

But for now, I’d like to draw a simple connection between how we “use” our friends/neighbors and how we “use” famous people (especially long-dead ones). When the lawyer asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”, the answer as seen in the parable turned out to be anyone is my neighbor, even people I don’t know. So, let’s be kind to famous people we don’t know—even if they’re long dead or their reputation might not be harmed—by not misquoting them or misattributing quotes to them. Let’s make sure we are “speak[ing] the truth” (Psalm 15:2)!   

 

Notes

* “Benjamin Franklin once called David’s Psalm 15 the ‘Gentleman’s Psalm.’ To him, it represented the standard of life after which a gentleman should pattern his walk” (47). No citation backing up these supposed statements from Franklin. Charles R. Swindoll, Living the Psalms: Encouragement for the Daily Grind (Worthy, 2012).

 

** Interestingly, other Christian sources attribute this idea of Psalm 15 as the “gentleman’s psalm” to a different U.S. Founding Father: Thomas Jefferson. For decades (and multiple editions), Halley’s Bible Handbook has perpetuated this—again, with no source cited: “Thomas Jefferson called this psalm ‘the picture of a true gentleman.’” A Google Books search shows that editions of Halley’s Bible Handbook from 1948 all the way up to 2012 maintain this same assertion and cite no source for it. Henry H. Halley, Halley’s Bible Handbook (Zondervan, 2012).  

When I searched the entire corpus of Jefferson’s works at Project Gutenberg, I found that Jefferson, unlike Franklin, at least mentioned Psalm 15. In Jefferson’s letter “To Mr. Isaac Engelbrecht. Monticello, February 25, 1824,” Jefferson mentions “David's description of the good man, in his 15th Psalm.” Then he quotes Brady & Tate’s metrical paraphrase of Psalm 15. Jefferson also references Psalm 15 translations in a letter to John Adams. (These letters are included in Jefferson’s Writings volumes 7 and 6, respectively, on Project Gutenberg.) But nowhere does Jefferson use the word “gentleman” with Psalm 15 or discuss the psalm’s content further.

 

Pastors, please stop quoting other pastors (or even printed resources for pastors) without first checking sources!

 

*** See William O’Flaherty, The Misquotable C.S. Lewis: What He Didn’t Say, What He Actually Said, and Why It Matters (Wipf & Stock, 2018).

 

**** Richard Stillwell, The Chapel of Princeton University (Princeton UP, 2020), p. 28. Sources as diverse as a book on Jewish theology to a book on the church in Africa to 1920s Upper Room devotionals and a periodical from the University of Pennsylvania all refer in passing to Psalm 15 as the “gentleman’s psalm.”

What Christians Can Learn from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People about Biblical Womanhood, Part 2

What Christians Can Learn from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People about Biblical Womanhood, Part 2 

 

Ely Cathedral

 

Ely Cathedral is my second-favorite of the medieval cathedrals in England—and the monastery that originally existed on the site was founded by a woman. Her name was Etheldreda, a queen who became a religious leader and then a saint after her death.1 But I am getting ahead of myself. 

My last post was a reminder of why it is helpful for Christians to read works from the distant past. Among other benefits, reading works from the past helps us to transcend our contemporary mindset and to see that Christians from other times did not necessarily think as we do. This is the main point of C. S. Lewis’s essay “On the Reading of Old Books” (which inspired my blog title), in which he advises us to avoid “the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet.” Reading widely throughout time, advises Lewis, “puts the controversies of the moment” into perspective.2 

My friend Beth Allison Barr’s popular book The Making of Biblical Womanhood (Brazos Press, 2021) does a wonderful job of showing how important it is to read about Christians from the past. In particular I like to emphasize reading what those past Christians themselves wrote. This is the best way to see through their eyes and enter into their time (another piece of advice from C. S. Lewis). 

This is why I like to read past Christians such as the Venerable Bede, who wrote the first church history book for English-speaking people. Although written in Latin, the language of medieval learning, the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People was THE church history text of England from the 8th century through the Middle Ages.3 

Bede was a monk living in northeastern England from A.D. 673-735. In Books 3-4 of his Ecclesiastical History, which cover about a century of church history in England, from the couple of generations preceding Bede through his own lifetime, Bede highlights many women instrumental in the flourishing of the English church. 

In my last post I focused on Bede’s account of Abbess Hilda, who founded and ruled over the double monastery, which separately housed monks and nuns, at what is now called Whitby in Yorkshire. 

In this post, I will highlight the woman who seems to be Bede’s favorite: Abbess Etheldreda. He devotes two chapters to Etheldreda and even writes a poem in honor of her. 

Etheldreda’s is a rather sensational story. 

Like Abbess Hilda, who has a lengthy secular life followed by a monastic one (Bede 4.23), Etheldreda has a two-part career (4.19).4 Etheldreda begins her first career as a queen, after initially being married to a prince who dies and then marrying a king. However, her example of biblical womanhood is one which eschews conjugal bliss and chooses “perpetual virginity,” with Etheldreda eventually urging her husband to let her go from her secular responsibilities so that she could join a convent “and serve Christ the only true king” (4.19). The implication here is that it’s not her earthly king-and-husband she feels she should be serving, but the true king: Christ! 

Etheldreda, who, according to Bede, is married to King Egfrid for 12 years, refuses to consummate her marriage, so King Egfrid enlists the respected Bishop Wilfrid to plead with Etheldreda to have sex with her husband, even offering the bishop land and money to use his influence with the queen, but to no avail. Instead, Wilfrid supports Queen Etheldreda entering the religious life, and Egfrid gives his “reluctant consent” (4.19). 

Ely Cathedral

Etheldreda eventually founds the convent at Ely (which becomes a double monastery like Whitby’s), where she “display[s] the pattern of a heavenly life in word and deed” and may have “possessed the spirit of prophecy” (4.19).
 

Bede is so taken with the example of Queen-turned-Abbess Etheldreda that he composes a hymn after her death “in honor of this same queen and bride of Christ—all the more a queen because a bride of Christ.” His hymn praises women martyrs of church history, such as Thecla and Euphemia, concluding with the English example of Etheldreda, who does not die by martyrdom, but is praised for “Scorning the marriage bed,” choosing virginity, and seeking the veil and thereby, it seems, dying to the roles of wife and biological mother (4.20). 

Etheldreda’s body, according to Bede, remained undecayed in the grave for several years, as discovered years later by her sister Sexburg, who succeeded Etheldreda as abbess of Ely, when the nuns attempted to move Etheldreda’s body to a new sarcophagus (4.19). Bede gives Etheldreda’s chosen life of virginity as a reason that her body remains incorrupt after death: “For the miraculous preservation of her body from corruption in the tomb is evidence that she had remained untainted by bodily intercourse” (4.19). Forsaking biological motherhood, Etheldreda became, as Bede puts it, “the virgin mother of many virgins vowed to God” (4.19).  

As Barr reminds us in her Making of Biblical Womanhood, Christians in the past did not always exalt being a wife and mother as a woman’s highest calling and did not always refuse women a place of authority over men in the church. The faithful church of the distant past also offered the choice of religious careers for women outside the home. 

Some examples of these Anglo-Saxon women in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, like Etheldreda, show women forgoing wifehood or traditional motherhood to devote themselves to the religious life, and, again, Bede and other religious leaders he writes about, such as Bishop Wilfrid, praise them for this.5 

Saint Etheldreda statue, Ely Cathedral

We can also see with Bede’s examples of these 7th-century abbesses such as Hilda, Etheldreda, Sexburg, and Ebba of the Coldingham monastery that the early church in England saw women’s leadership over these double monasteries (housing monks and nuns) as both fitting and praiseworthy. 

In fact, instead of the controversy being about who should be appointed to ministry or allowed to teach whom, the controversy that everyone is genuinely concerned about in Bede’s English church is when they should celebrate Easter—as well as how monks should shave their heads.6 

As I’ve sought to demonstrate through the examples of Hilda and Etheldreda, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History highlights women’s roles in the church (as patronesses, nuns, and religious leaders) as noteworthy. Queen Eanfled, for instance, acts as a patroness to Wilfrid, eventually launching him in his religious career, seeing that he makes the right connections so he can study in Rome (5.19). Later, Eanfled and her daughter Aelffled, who grows up as a nun, each become abbesses over the Whitby double monastery (4.26).7 

Bede mentions at least 15 female religious leaders by name (mostly abbesses, with one prioress), devoting whole chapters to a few of these. In addition, Bede names and gives partial stories of several nuns, such as the nun Earcongota, whom Bede says “deserves especial mention” for her “wonderful deeds and miracles” (3.8). 

Beth Allison Barr devotes part of a chapter to exploring the insufficient references to women in the most popular church history texts, such as the one that I’m most familiar with, Church History in Plain Language, which references only 8 women, none of them medieval (Barr 96-98). 

Yet if Bede, who hardly traveled outside his medieval monastery, can see so many women as significant to the growth and life of the English-speaking church over a hundred-year period, surely, as Barr points out (98), over two thousand years of church history should yield itself to highlighting many more significant women in the church history textbooks of today? 

 

NOTES 

1 You can read a brief history of Ely Cathedral and its founder, Etheldreda, from their website.

My favorite of the medieval cathedrals in Britain is Salisbury Cathedral, but since they have stained glass windows dedicated to the poet George Herbert and a statue on the front of the cathedral representing him, I am probably biased. 

2 C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books.” In God in the Dock, edited by Walter Hooper. Eerdmans, 1970. (Originally Lewis wrote the essay in 1944.) 

3 Bede’s sizeable Ecclesiastical History of the English People was translated from Latin into Old English a couple of centuries later. (Old English is the purely-Germanic English of the Anglo-Saxon period.) Bede’s history covers the Romano-British period before the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain (which Bede syncretizes from a few sources he’s read) through the 7th century, during which Bede is born, up until he completes the Ecclesiastical History in 731. You can read the British Library’s brief overview of Bede here and easily find English translations of Bede’s History online, such as this one from Project Gutenberg. 

4 Bede’s History is divided into five books, each with twenty to thirty chapters. In my parenthetical notation, the first number is the book and the second is the chapter (e.g., 4.26 = book 4, chapter 26). I quote from the Penguin edition. 

5 Sometimes we’re told that a woman joins the convent after her husband has died, but often that is not clarified. Whether or not she is or has been a wife, Bede is more interested in highlighting the part a woman plays in the development of the English church. Beth Allison Barr develops throughout her book how leaving distinctive feminine roles behind was a path toward holiness and spiritual authority for medieval women. 

6 Believe it or not, these issues are directly related. The controversy was over whether to follow the Roman tradition for the church calendar and monastic life or the Irish one. 

Interestingly, Bede presents us with another example that doesn’t fit with modern biblical womanhood when Queen Eanfled and her husband King Oswy, differing on which tradition to follow, each, along with their attendants, celebrate Easter on a different date: “so that when the King had ended Lent and was keeping Easter, the Queen and her attendants were still fasting and keeping Palm Sunday” (3.25). 

Although this disagreement does lead to some household confusion, Bede does not reprimand Eanfled (or Oswy) for this lack of marital unity (nor hint that Eanfled should yield to her husband’s spiritual leadership), but instead highlights the importance of toleration with religious customs among believers. Bede lifts up the example of Bishop Aidan, during whose “lifetime these differences of Easter observance were patiently tolerated by everyone; for . . . [Aidan] labored diligently to cultivate the faith, piety, and, love that marks out God’s saints.” Bishop Aidan “was therefore,” says Bede, “rightly loved by all, even by those who differed from his opinion on Easter, and was held in high respect” (3.25). 

7 It seems that Queen Eanfled is not the only wife-turned-abbess (presumably after being widowed) whose daughter is also a nun. Another is Abbess Heriburg, whose daughter Coenburg is a nun in her convent at Watton (Bede 5.3).

What Christians Can Learn from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People about Biblical Womanhood, Part 1

  

What Christians Can Learn from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People about Biblical Womanhood, Part 1

 

As readers of my long-term blog know, I rarely reference current events. I usually want my blog to feel more timeless, but there’s a hot debate in evangelical conversations right now, and that is over “biblical womanhood,” especially regarding women’s authoritative roles in the church.*

 

Saxon church at Cambridge

I’d like to consider this hot topic by looking at our primary source for the history both of Britain and of the English church in the early Middle Ages: the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written by Bede, a monk in the northeast of Britain, in AD 731. Bede’s text is not obscure. Portions are included in every survey of British literature textbook, such as the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Every fall since 2004, I have begun my British Literature Survey class with the account Bede gives of the first extant English poem by the first English Christian poet, Caedmon.

 

I love the story of Caedmon, the shy cowherd who is visited by an angel and receives a miraculous gift to sing about God and biblical truths in his native Old English language and poetic style. But my focus here isn’t on the historical account of Caedmon, it’s on the religious leader he is told to report to, who leads the council in determining whether or not Caedmon’s gift is a miracle.**

 

This leader’s name was Hilda, abbess over the double monastery of the place now called Whitby.

 

There were several of these double monasteries in the Anglo-Saxon period of England (after the gradual conversion of the island to Christianity, so from the early 600s).*** These double monasteries housed both nuns and monks (separately), and at least some (all?) were ruled over by abbesses, such as Abbess Hilda.

 

After the council determines that Caedmon indeed has been given a miraculous gift, Hilda advises him to give up his secular occupation (cowherding) and become a monk, with apparently the specific vocation of writing songs (the monastery’s own Chris Tomlin). It is Hilda who “admitted him into the Community as a brother” (that is, a monk) and “ordered him to be instructed in the events of sacred history” (Bede 4.24).

 

For all of these years, my British Literature Survey students have been subtly learning, through this story of Caedmon, about a woman who does not fit our contemporary notion of “biblical womanhood” as conceived by the Council for Biblical Manhood & Womanhood.

 

This short account included at the beginning of the Norton Anthology of English Literature (NAEL), which is probably the most widely-used English literature survey text in the U.S., briefly allows students at my Baptist university to see a different attitude toward Christian women’s roles.

This brings me back to the origin of my blog and its title: why it’s so important to read the old books. In his essay “On the Reading of Old Books”, C.S. Lewis writes,

 

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.

 

Similarly, Lewis advises his readers in “Learning in War-Time” that we need to know the past

 

because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.****

 

In both of these quotes (and in a few more I could pull up), Lewis reminds us that reading only within our own time, keeps us from seeing how attitudes and assumptions have differed in different eras and places. We in our arrogance think that we are right in all our assumptions, but we can learn much from what was taken as true in the past. Past periods of time had their own mistakes, but they also understood truths that perhaps we’ve neglected, suggests Lewis.

 

 

I wish that the NAEL would include a lot more of Bede. Indeed, Bede devotes an entire chapter to the life of abbess Hilda (the chapter prior to the story of Caedmon). We are told that she was not just abbess over the whole monastery at what is now Whitby, but she had “founded or organized” that monastery (3.23), where “she taught the observance of righteousness, mercy, purity, and other virtues” (my italics).

 

Kings and princes (male leaders, in other words) “used to come and ask her advice in their difficulties and take it,” says Bede. “Those under her direction were required to make a thorough study of the Scriptures and occupy themselves in good works” (3.23; my italics).

 

Bede cannot seem to praise Abbess Hilda enough. She is praised as a shepherd, “instruct[ing] the flock committed to her.” Bede compares Hilda to the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 12, writing that “it pleased [God] to try her holy soul by a long sickness, in order that, as with the Apostle, her strength might be made perfect in weakness” (translator’s italics). Her life, says Bede, “afforded a shining example . . . to all who wished to live a good life” (4.23; my italics)—in other words, not just to other women. Bede does not use gendered statements about Hilda’s godly example.*****

 

There’s more in Bede’s account of the Abbess Hilda (d. 680), but how can/should/do modern conservative Christians respond to Hilda, this godly religious leader who happens to be a woman?

 

 

In Part 2 of my blog post, I will explore more of the exemplary women in religious leadership roles that Bede writes about in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People and compare Bede’s church history book with today’s most popular church history books in regards to their discussion of influential women in the church (based on the section “Writing Medieval Women out of Church History” from Beth Barr’s Making of Biblical Womanhood, pp. 96-99).

 

 

* cf. the “hot” books right now: Aimee Byrd’s Recovering from Biblical Manhood & Womanhood (Zondervan, 2020) and especially Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood (Brazos, 2021). My journey into Bede here is especially inspired by Barr’s accounts of medieval women in her book. In looking at Bede’s “biblical women” I am adding to her examples.

 

** You can find this account of the poet Caedmon in Book 4, chapter 24, of Bede.

 

*** D.H. Farmer’s notes to my Penguin edition of Bede list “Whitby, Ely, Wimborne Minster and others” (p. 369).

 

**** These essays from C. S. Lewis are found in God in the Dock and The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, respectively.

 

***** I have been working from the Penguin editions translation by Leo Sherley-Price and revised by R.E. Latham.

Of Trees and the Tree (and George Herbert)

Of Trees and the Tree (and George Herbert)

Our neighborhood HOA is chopping down trees today. These are decades-old, very-tall, healthy pine trees that, from what we’ve been told, pre-date the housing development they’re now a part of. Earlier this spring, my family was rudely surprised and shaken to find that a tree removal crew had arrived to cut down all four of the evergreen trees that flanked our home (an end-unit condo). (Tree “removal” is such a euphemism for what actually happens in the hacking off of healthy limbs and then slicing down of tall tree trunks until nothing is left but a stump. “Butchery” is a more accurate term.) These pine trees had shaded our house from the hot Southern California sun and provided greenery in our window views that added layers and color to views of pavement, stucco housing, and harsh sunshine.

 

Why the HOA decided (without letting residents know) that they were going to cut down the trees is another matter (pine cones dropping on cars was the answer I received). I knew I loved and was thankful for these trees. But I didn’t know how much I truly valued those trees until they were gone and we were left with nothing but stumps. No shade, no green boughs to see out of second-story windows. Stumps. When the crews showed up today to chop down more healthy, verdant pine trees in our sun-drenched area (see photo of the trees prior to execution), I knew I had to leave my neighborhood for the day.

And I thought of George Herbert.

 

I think Herbert loved trees. I’m speculating, of course, but several of his English poems use a metaphor or analogy of humans as trees. My favorite can be found in his poem “Affliction (1),” which I’ve written about on my blog before: http://readingtheoldbooks.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-limits-of-book-learning-gh-day-17.html. It’s actually a moment of frustration where the speaker wishes he were a tree, because at least that would give him a useful purpose and occupation:

 

I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree,—

          For sure then I should grow

To fruit or shade; at least some bird would trust

Her household to me, and I should be just. (“Affliction (1)” lines 57-60)

 

Then there’s “Employment (2)” where Herbert’s speaker proclaims,

 

Oh that I were an Orange-tree, 

                             That busie plant!

Then should I ever laden be,

                             And never want

Some fruit for him that dressed me. (lines 21-25)*

 

Herbert once again refers to the trees as a home for birds in “Miserie”:

 

The bird that sees a daintie bowre

Made in the tree, where she was wont to sit,

        Wonders and sings, but not his power

Who made the arbour: this exceeds her wit. (lines 55-58)**

 

I wonder if in dwelling on the trees’ purpose as homes for birds, Herbert is remembering Jesus’s words in the Gospels. In Luke 13:18-19 (or parallel passage in Matthew 13:32), Jesus says, “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches” (ESV).

 

I think God loves trees. They are after all His creation (and He called them “good” [Genesis 1:12]).

 

We no doubt recall that the analogy of humans compared to growing trees is found several places in Scripture. Psalm 1 comes to mind.*** Believers are to be growing and flourishing like a healthy tree, producing fruit. In fact, Herbert’s entire poem “Paradise” is based around this metaphor: “I bless thee, Lord, because I GROW / Among thy trees, which in a ROW / To thee both fruit and order OW” (lines 1-3).

 

But another association we have with trees—or, in particular, a tree--is Herbert’s second most-common reference in his English poems, and that is to THE tree, the one on which Jesus died.

 

In “Unkindness” Herbert writes, “My God upon a tree / His bloud did spill” (lines 22-23), while in “Longing” he pictures how, “Lord Jesu, thou didst bow / Thy dying head upon the tree” (lines 31-32).

 

Then, in “Sacrifice,” Herbert writes from the perspective of Christ on the cross:

O all ye who passe by, behold and see;

Man stole the fruit, but I must climbe the tree;

The tree of life to all, but onely me:

                                              Was ever grief like mine? (lines 201-4)

This specific tree, the cross, has an exalted place in Christian history and English literature, from the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood (which means “dream of the cross”) to these Renaissance-era poems of George Herbert and beyond.****

  

Perhaps we Christians need a slightly higher view of trees. I am certainly not arguing for a complete upending the Great Chain of Being, that of animal being higher than vegetable which is higher than mineral. But at least we need to recognize and appreciate trees’ beauty, their shade, and the homes they provide for birds and other animals—and especially to be thankful to God for creating them. It’s purely coincidence that Arbor Day is this month (April). My husband and I have been trying to nurture the little seedlings that are the “children” of the beautiful pine tree that was chopped down in front of our home.

 

Herbert’s poem “Providence” celebrates how God’s providence is at work in the natural world and especially under the stewardship of humans. In “Providence” Herbert imagines how trees could be “tuning on their native lute” to praise God (lines 10-11), but they have not been given the gifts (of reason and speech) that humans have to praise God. Humans are to praise God on behalf of all creation, says Herbert (lines 13-20).

 

No offense to Herbert (or to humans), but I wouldn’t mind hearing the trees make their own music to praise God (“tuning on their native lute(s)”). Indeed, in his poem “Easter,” Herbert writes that the cross, that one special tree, “taught all wood to resound his name” (line 9). Because of that one tree, says Herbert, all trees, all wood in fact, resounds the name of our Savior.

 

Scripture abounds with images of Creation, including trees, praising God. Even as I mourn the loss of my own trees, I look forward to enjoying praise to God from His Creation in His perfect kingdom, as anticipated in Isaiah 44:23b (ESV):

  

break forth into singing, O mountains,
O forest, and every tree in it!
For the LORD has redeemed Jacob,
and will be glorified in Israel.

 

California Redwoods (thankfully protected!)

 

Notes

 

* Another example is the poem “Man,” where Herbert declares that “Man is ev’ry thing

And more: He is a tree, yet bears no fruit” (lines 7-8).

 

** The idea here that birds (or beasts or other parts of Creation) don’t have the knowledge or ability to praise God in the way that humans do is one that Herbert develops more fully in his poem “Providence.”

 

*** Herbert may have written a poetic paraphrase of Psalm 1. F.E. Hutchinson includes a paraphrase of Psalm 1 in his Works of George Herbert under the heading “Doubtful Poems.”

 

**** In The Dream of the Rood, the tree tells its story of having been “felled from the forest’s edge,” made into the cross that a heroic Christ mounts, buried and raised like Christ, and ultimately exalted, “honored [by God] over all the trees of the forest.” Throughout the poem, the tree is given such monikers as the “victory-tree” and the “tree of glory.” (Translation from R.M. Liuzza, Old English Poetry: An Anthology)