This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
I don’t think I shall ever recover from the “prayer fist”. It came in a sermon a few years ago from a senior Church of England clergyman to a large congregation of hoary-haired church volunteers. “Now,” he said slowly, “I think everyone finds praying difficult, don’t we? But there’s a very good way to help. It’s called ‘the prayer fist’. Everyone now make a fist with their right hand. Has everyone done that? Now, I want you to wiggle your thumb. You give the ‘thumbs up’ with your thumb, so this reminds you to give thanks in prayer … Now wiggle your index finger … You point to things with your index finger … This reminds you to point to things you should be thankful for in prayer … Now, your middle finger … ”
This memory came back to me the other day when I was contemplating the recent Bible Society survey on the “Quiet Revival”. Church attendance amongst the young has grown markedly over the last few years, but the per centage of those who attend Anglican services in comparison to Catholic or Pentecostal services has noticeably declined. Many commentators have suggested that this is a result of the young desiring to re-engage with the authentic, the serious and the intellectually challenging in a culture that is awash with the ephemeral and the vapid.
In this regard, the Anglican Church does not always help itself. Certainly, there are many individual clergy who do justice to the “lively oracles of God”. Yet, all too often, the Church of England now smacks of a primary school. I’m sure many readers could share stories of sermons equally cringeworthy to that of the “prayer fist”. Beyond this, we have seen cathedral naves filled with helter-skelters, crazy golf and silent raves, and the main website of the Church of England itself overflows not only with modish screeds on DEI but peculiar tracts on the “spirituality of video games” and “theological reflections on light and warmth”.
The shame of it is that the Church has an extraordinary and rich tradition of intellectual and spiritual creativity. If it cared to make more of a thing of this tradition in its preaching, its resources for education on its website and the like, it might just start to claw back a reputation for seriousness and authenticity.
One person who should be writ large and quoted often in sermons is the 17th century Anglican clergyman and poet George Herbert. Although he lived four centuries ago, his brilliance, spiritual insight and relentless honesty in the face of intellectual struggle has much to offer those seeking faith in this current age of religious and cultural turmoil.
For his last four years (he died at the age of 39 in 1633), Herbert was Rector of the hamlet of Bemerton, a mile outside Salisbury. After a youth of great promise, including a stellar academic career at Cambridge and a time in Parliament, he withdrew from affairs of state to dedicate himself to the religious life.
A number of critics, thanks to the idea of him as a mere country parson, have portrayed Herbert as saccharine and redolent of “the village green”, as one scholar put it. Indeed, one of his best known poems, frequently sung as the hymn “Let all the world in every corner sing/ My God and King” hardly suggests anything of depth or spiritual struggle. Yet, a proper engagement with his work dispels such a judgement. One may take, as a starting point for getting to grips with his poetry, his own meditation on the nature of prayer in the form of a sonnet, “Prayer (I)”:
Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
Herbert’s friend, the philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, outlined in his Novum Organum (1620) a new method for scientific enquiry which demanded the collection of data by observation and the development of hypotheses based on that data in order to unearth the underlying cause of any phenomenon. Bacon’s work was crucial for the development of modern science, yet it also had its effect on Herbert’s poetry.
This sonnet investigates the nature of prayer in a Baconian and scientific spirit, meditatively listing his observations of prayer and making hypotheses on its essence. By the same token, prayer also for Herbert is scarcely submission or simple thanks but rather a scientific quest and a demand for answers: “The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth”.
The poem may be scientific in spirit, reflecting an age where, like today, “new philosophy calls all in doubt”, in the words of another friend of Herbert, his older contemporary, the poet John Donne. Nonetheless, it is hardly cool and detached but wracked with passionate desire, belying the idea of Herbert as a staid country parson. In the short round of the sonnet, Herbert cycles through the contemplative, the furious and finally an ecstatic and blissful revelation, but even then still tainted with doubt; it is only “something” understood.
Herbert’s striving for God takes on all the intimacy of a passionate plea from a lover to a beloved. “Whither, O, whither art thou fled,/ My Lord, my Love?” he begins “The Search”, a poem which grapples to embrace an infinite God who is of such grandeur that He cannot be bounded in any mortal or transitory thing.
The difficulty of the search for God drives him almost to lose his mind
Herbert, in a scientific spirit, demands proof, to lay his hands on concrete evidence of God’s presence: “Let rather brass,/ Or steel, or mountains be thy ring,/ And I will pass.” Yet, God’s infinity can only be manifested by absence, by refusing to appear in the bounds of the finite. Herbert does not shun the difficulty of the agonising paradox but rather confronts it with zeal. The whole of creation seems to bask in God’s presence, almost unconsciously and without effort: “Yet can I mark how herbs below/ Grow green and gay,/ As if to meet thee they did know … ”
Herbert himself, as if cut out from that unconscious knowledge of God’s presence, must suffer the “hateful siege of contraries”, as Milton put it, even to have a glimpse: “my grief must be as large,/ As is thy space … ” The search for God breaks all the certainties of human existence and the everyday order of life: “Thy will such a strange distance is,/ As that to it/ East and West touch, the poles do kiss,/ And parallels meet.” Yet, for all the pain of this paradox, there is a deep resolution and intimacy in the absence: “For as thy absence doth excel,/ All distance known:/ So doth thy nearness bear the bell,/ Making two one.”
Herbert does not hold himself from despair. The difficulty of the search for God drives him almost to lose his mind, wishing to merge back into nature which seems to possess the truth: “Oh that I were an Orange-tree,/ That busy plant! Then should I ever laden be,/ And never want/ Some fruit for him that dressed me,” he writes in “Employment (II)”. Yet again, Herbert manages to pass through the midst of the paradox to a form of anxious resolution: “But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wild/ At every word,/ Methought I heard one calling, Child:/ And I reply’d, My Lord.” The submissive acceptance of the agony and its transfiguration into a serene intimacy is redolent of the earlier generation of English medieval mystics.
One of the most perfect examples of this submission to paradox in Herbert, and of simplicity in the heart of complexity, is the little poem “Bitter-Sweet”, which was almost certainly inspired by Catullus’s famous epigram “Odi et amo”:
Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.
Herbert desires to comprehend the infinity and timelessness of God in a finite and temporal world. His poetry is a record of a striving after glimpses of the divine in the human sphere. No difficult question is avoided, no agony of mind is shirked, and his work documents every turn of thought and feeling, from exaltation and a sense of union, to anxiety, doubt, despair, revival and eventual resurrection. Despite the complexity of this pursuit, it is chronicled in language of startling clarity. Herbert is an outstanding example from the Anglican tradition of the fact that one can convey the authentic struggle of heart and mind for the presence of God in simple dress, without having to resort to the idiom of the primary school.
