The Holdfast.
I threatened to observe the strict decree
Of my deare God with all my power & might.
But I was told by one, it could not be;
Yet I might trust in God to be my light.
Then will I trust, said I, in him alone.
Nay, ev’n to trust in him, was also his:
We must confesse that nothing is our own.
Then I confesse that he my succour is:
But to have nought is ours, not to confesse
That we have nought. I stood amaz’d at this,
Much troubled, till I heard a friend expresse,
That all things were more ours by being his.
What Adam had, and forfeited for all,
Christ keepeth now, who cannot fail or fall.
One of the best interpreters of Herbert's poems helps us get at the heart of what this poem is about: "every grace is the gift of God, even the grace to acknowledge our gracelessness." (Joseph Summers, George Herbert, His Religion and Art, 194).
Herbert is on the familiar territory of comparing his own inadequacy with Christ's sufficiency, setting his own unworthiness against the value put on every human soul by the crucifixion. The final index of human worth and value to God is Calvary; he knows that in his head, but in the daily grind of an incomplete obedience finds it hard to feel and know it in his heart.
The delicate mechanism of Herbert's soul swung between self-condemnation and assurance of forgiveness. Many of his poems explore and describe what that feels like, and move by various paths to some form of resolution. What he sought was the settled assurance of the later hymn writer Thomas Kelly, "Inscribed upon the cross we see, / in shining letters, God is love!" What gives many of the poems in The Temple their enduring spiritual truthfulness is precisely those acknowledged oscillations of faith and hope and love that are part of the earth-bound condition of a humanity that trusts that, nevertheless, in Christ, it is heaven bound.
The first stanza is a blunt acknowledgement that he tries his utmost to keep the First Commandment with all his power and might. But he keeps being told to stop attempting the impossible. He cannot do that in his own strength. Instead he must trust the God of light, a clear pointer to Christ 'the true light that lightens every man who comes into the world."(John 1.9)
Trust, not self-confident achievement, that's what's needed. So with unabashed confidence the poet decides to decide to trust. Except. "By grace are we saved through faith, and that not of ourselves; it is the gift of God." (Ephesians 2.89) So even the capacity to trust is given by grace. Indeed the confession of faith is possible only by the movement of the Holy Spirit, convicting of sin and enabling the confession of Christ as Saviour. The poet is still determined to be the agent who makes all this happen – "Then I confess that he my succour is…"
"But to have nought is ours, not to confess that we have nought." Human decisiveness is yet another attempt to control the levers of God's saving purposes. But actually no. To have nothing to do, or give, or achieve, means precisely that. We have nothing to bargain with, nothing. And it is that surrender of initiative to God that is the way of salvation; just as the stealing of the initiative from God was the primal sin in eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
At which point we are back in Eden. If we want to have all things in Christ, they are ours only as we surrender our wilfulness and life goals of making the world, and God, to conform to our desires. The will to power is incompatible with love for God, because eventually the will to power is prepared to take on even God. Salvation is not our project, it is God's purpose, God's free gift, from beginning to end.
The entire argument about who does what in the struggle of the human heart to love God perfectly, resolves into the last few lines. The poet has been interrupted again in full flow, by a friend (Christ) who assures him that "all things are more permanently, fully and securely his by their belonging to Christ, who holds them fast.
The final couplet describes the tragedy of humanity, fallen in Adam, and the redemption of humanity held fast by "Christ, who cannot fail or fall." Adam forfeited innocence, freedom, assurance and the hope of life eternal. In Christ, the second Adam, innocence is restored through the cross, and freedom, assurance and hope are Christ's gifts purchased by the cross and guaranteed by his resurrection, ascension and Lordship. "As in Adam all have died, so in Christ shall all be made alive…"
O loving wisdom of our God,
When all was sin and shame,
He, the last Adam, to the fight
And to the rescue came.
(Photo by Graeme Clark, Iron cross at Paisley Abbey)
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