Recent scholarship has linked George Herbert to medieval French theologian Jean Gerson, an early theorist of individual natural rights and conciliarism. This essay proposes that Herbert knew Gerson’s ideas on divine and natural law in De Vita Spirituali Animae (1402) well enough to employ them in “Providence.” In this didactic poem, Herbert explains (through his sole use of italics) how divine and natural law work providentially. Pivotal for Herbert is Gerson’s redefinition of the concept of subjective right as a power or faculty intrinsic to an individual, whether human or non-human, since that redefinition underpins Gerson’s conciliarism. Herbert not only uses Gerson’s concept of subjective right at the outset of “Providence,” where the speaker relishes the “right” (4) to “write” (2) as God’s “Secretarie” (8), but Herbert also relies on Gerson’s notion of subjective right throughout the poem. Because Herbert thinks that non-humans have Gersonian subjective rights, he places these creatures within the scope of God’s “permission” (33), a jurisdiction traditionally reserved for rational beings free to act morally (or immorally). Herbert’s choice has immense philosophical and theological consequences, for, according to his Gersonian logic, non-humans serve God, humanity, and each other when they use their powers and faculties to obey God’s objective right, His “command” (33). Their behavior allows them to offer what amounts to moral witness indirectly. Significantly for Herbert, Gerson suggests that when creation exercises their subjective rights in obedience to God’s objective right, their obedience creates a cosmic concord, a mystical music. That concord bolsters Gerson’s conviction that a council of priests may hold a pope accountable. Herbert provocatively metaphorizes Gerson’s logic in “Providence” by depicting a council of creatures headed by “Man” (6) as the “worlds high Priest” (13), who learns to attune himself to the universal harmony in loving obedience to a self-sacrificing God.
Angela Balla (Mon,) studied this question.