The Givenness of Being and Language in the Poetry of George Herbert

Abstract

In March 2017, the Polish Academy of Sciences hosted Professor Jean-Luc Marion, who has long been engaged in a dialogue with Jacques Derrida over the aporias of the gift and the relationship between the Judeo-Christian God and the multiple gods of postmodern thought. In the title of his Warsaw lecture Marion posed a question: “Qu’attend la théologie de la phénoménologie?” [What does theology expect from phenomenology?]. The audience did not have to wait long for an answer; nor, when it came, was it elaborately long. The lecture opened like a gun-shot with one simple and most straightforward monosyllabe: “Rien.” But given Marion’s propensity for apophasis and negative theology, the audience knew that what was to follow would be as potent and pregnant with consequence as Cordelia’s “nothing” in Shakespeare’s great tragedy, King Lear. In this paper I wish to echo Marion’s question in a slightly modified form and reflect briefly on the ways in which literary studies can profit from intercourse with contemporary phenomenology (and also theology). I shall try to take advantage of contemporary phenomenology in order to redefine, perhaps also recover the concept of the lyrical “I” who responds to the call of being and language, and in this way may become a “gifted subject” of George Herbert’s poetry.