'God being pleased to delight in those little images of Himself': Jeremy Taylor, bees, and quietness
I read through the sermons over the space of year, beginning in Advent 2024 and ending in early 2026. There is an abundance of riches in the Golden Grove sermons. Many passages are delightful examples of 'the Shakespeare of divines'. I was also struck by the consistent invocations of classical wisdom, demonstrating how Taylor understood this to cohere with Christian teaching. The allusions to the circumstances of the Interregnum were also noticeable.
Amongst all this, however, one particular small, playful detail joyfully amused me as I read through the sermons: Taylor's references to bees. Where did these rather homely references to bees come from? As he grew up and studied in Cambridge, it is perhaps unlikely that Taylor there encountered beekeeping. As a parson in Rutland, after 1638, he would probably have encountered beekeeping, than a staple of the rural economy. After the interruption of the civil wars, rural beekeeping would again have been evident in Carmarthenshire. And it is the sermons delivered at Golden Grove, that the references to bees appear.
In Part 1 of 'The Flesh and the Spirit', bees are to be found alongside other animals as possessing greater physical gifts, bestowed "by his preventing grace", than humanity:
for God fitted horses and mules with strength, bees and pismires [i.e. ants] with sagacity, harts and hares with swiftness, birds with feathers and a light airy body; and they all know their times, and are fitted for their work, and regularly acquire the proper end of their creation ...
The way in which bees can be superior to humans again is found in Part 2 of 'The Good and Evil Tongue', with bees demonstrating the Creator's wisdom:
For so the little birds and laborious bees, who having no art and power of contrivance, no distinction of time or foresight of new necessities, yet being guided by the hand and counselled by the wisdom of the supreme Power, their Lord and ours, do things with greater niceness and exactness of art, and regularity of time, and certainty of effect, than the wise counsellor, who, standing at the back of the prince's chair, guesses imperfectly, and counsels timorously, and thinks by interest, and determines extrinsical events by inward and unconcerning principles.
Bees then become a metaphor for grace in Part 2 of 'The Return of Prayers', in a manner which might suggest to us that the activity of bees has caught Taylor's eye in a moment of meditation, perhaps when thinking upon Royalist and Episcopalian defeat:
the good man sighs for his infirmity, but must be content to lose the prayer, and he must recover it when his anger is removed, and his spirit is becalmed, made even as the brow of Jesus, and smooth like the heart of God; and then it ascends to heaven upon the wings of the holy Dove, and dwells with God, till it returns, like the useful bee, loaden with a blessing and the dew of heaven.
In noting how the clergy of the reformed Church of England often "cheerfully celebrated their family lives" in their writings, Diarmaid MacCulloch particularly points to the example of Jeremy Taylor:
[he] spoke from enjoyable experience of marriage when he spoke of children in one of his many marriage sermons ... In what was surely a conscious refutation of Cardinal Bellarmine's catechism ..., Bishop Taylor commented in another of his sermons that 'Single life makes men in one instance to be like angels, but marriage in very many things make the chaste pair to be like Christ' ... One cannot imagine a bishop of the Counter-Reformation entertaining his flock with such rhapsodies.
Taylor's joy in marriage makes it notable, therefore, that in this latter sermon quoted by MacCulloch - Part One of 'The Marriage Ring' - bees provide an illustration of marriage:
marriage, like the useful bee, builds a house and gathers sweetness from every flower, and labours and unites into societies and republics, and sends out colonies, and feeds the world with delicacies, and obeys their king, and keeps order, and exercises many virtues, and promotes the interest of mankind, and is that state of good things to which God hath designed the present constitution of the world.
Marriage, like bees, is a useful and joyful part of the goodness of the created order.
Finally, in Part One of 'The Invalidity of a Late, or Deathbed Repentance', bees and their honeycombs are a cause of divine delight and also icons:
For if God is glorified in the sun and moon, in the rare fabric of the honeycombs, in the discipline of bees, in the economy of pismires, in the little houses of birds, in the curiosity of an eye, God being pleased to delight in those little images and reflexes of Himself from those pretty mirrors, which, like a crevice in a wall, through a narrow perspective transmit the species of a vast excellence.
Bees, then, are both exemplars of God glorified in creation and "little images ... pretty mirrors" of the divine. It is a glorious passage, speaking of a Traherne-like joy in creation. Indeed, Traherne's poem 'Walking' - composed at least a decade after the publication of the Golden Grove sermons - has a very similar delight in bees:
To note the beauty of the day,
And golden fields of corn survey;
Admire each pretty flow’r
With its sweet smell;
To praise their Maker, and to tell
The marks of his great pow’r.
To fly abroad like active bees,
Among the hedges and the trees,
To cull the dew that lies
On ev’ry blade,
From ev’ry blossom; till we lade
Our minds, as they their thighs.
Taylor's bees, therefore, point us to that rich, joyful theology and piety of the created order which was to become a feature of Anglicanism in the 'long 18th century'; and this, surely, is something to celebrate at Rogationtide.
Was there, however, something in particular that may have led to Taylor's delight in bees appearing his sermons of of the late 1640s and early 1650s? We might tentatively draw a parallel with a work by Taylor's fellow Royalist and Episcopalian Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler. In his masterly Providence Lost: The rise and fall of Cromwell's Protectorate (2020), Paul Lay points to Walton's work as the premier example of an Episcopalian piety which, amidst defeat, a world turned upside down, and (until the very close of the 1650s) the apparently permanent loss of an ecclesiastical and constitutional order, turned to meditation upon the peaceableness and quiet of the natural world. In concluding words from The Compleat Angler:
I will walk the meadows, by some gliding stream, and there contemplate the lilies that take no care, and those very many other various little living creatures that are not only created, but fed, man knows not how, by the goodness of the God of Nature, and therefore trust in him.
We can similarly imagine Taylor - a former chaplain in the defeated Royalist army, who had been a prisoner of Parliamentarian forces - meditating upon the bees in the garden of Golden Grove or as he passed hives kept by local farmers. Something of such a context is suggested in the dedication of his 1647 The Liberty of Prophesying:
In that place of rest and quietness, in an unsettled time, perhaps Taylor's eyes fell upon the bees, there beholding "little images" of divine goodness, wisdom, and providence, even as these could not be seen in affairs of church and state. Here was a reason for Taylor's delight in the bees, for, even as the causes to which he had rallied were consumed by defeat on the battlefield, the bees were "like a crevice in a wall, through a narrow perspective [they] transmit the species of a vast excellence". And here, therefore, looking upon the bees, Taylor could know "rest and quietness".
(The first illustration is a 1658 English woodcut of a beehive. The second is a stained glass depiction of Izaak Walton and his famous words.)
Comments
Post a Comment