Avarice By George Herbert-GCE-A/L

MONEY, thou bane of bliss, and source of woe,
Whence com'st thou, that thou art so fresh and fine?
I know thy parentage is base and low:
Man found thee poor and dirty in a mine.

Surely thou didst so little contribute
To this great kingdom, which thou now hast got,
That he was fain, when thou wert destitute,
To dig thee out of thy dark cave and grot.

Then forcing thee, by fire he made thee bright :
Nay, thou hast got the face of man; for we
Have with our stamp and seal transferr'd our right :
Thou art the man, and man but dross to thee.

Man calleth thee his wealth, who made thee rich ;
And while he digs out thee, falls in the ditch.

Avarice is a poem composed by George Herbert, who is a metaphysical poet. It is about money. Here, money means gold.The process whereby metal is transferred from its 'cave or grot' and hammered into coins and then there is a process by which money is hammered with man's face. According to George Herbert money is given a face, a stamp, a right to command the labor of men and the produce of the earth. We make money both physically and through our consent- we turn it into something that has value. When we possess money, we think that we are wealthy, but as Herbert points out in his ironic last line, the value of money is perpetual and our possession of it is ephemeral.
Herbert draws our attention to it because he wants us to see that the consent and contract upheld by the state can become a competitor to his own view that humanity is a God driven and purposed entity. If our priorities are only heavenly- and if you strictly believe the words of the Bible how else can they be- then money and the whole apparatus that protects earthly happiness (the state itself) is a disguise- a disguise that may lead to doom. Christ of course turned down the kingdoms of the world and Herbert is suggesting that we too should turn down money that cannot accompany us when we drop into our ditch and that is a 'bane of bliss and source of woe'. Money and government are the insignia of sin: not merely in the sense for Herbert that they perpetuate sin (the Rousseauian and Marxist point) but that merely by existing they are the definition of sin, they create a goal, a God to worship over God.
Money in Herbert's vision is only valued as an expression of man's intentions- his earthly desires. Herbert of course believes that fallen man can never achieve any happiness- money is thus a source of woe and bane of bliss because it is created by man and not by God. Herbert's title is crucial to interpreting the poem- by calling this Avarice he wants us to analyze the poem in the Augustinian way that I have done. What Herbert offers us as a definition of Avarice is a poetic definition of money and that poetic definition of money ties money right into the political acts of consent that create it. You don't have to endorse Herbert's view of the world- Augustinian and profoundly Christian- to understand the power of his point. His argument is that Caesar and Christ can never be followed together: render unto Caesar what is Caesar's- the coin of the empire (and remember at this point England is an 'empire entire to itself') and render unto God what is God's (the soul). Too much preoccupation with the former leads to a neglect of the latter and consequently what Herbert argues for here is both quietist and revolutionary: he does not argue for a new kind of politics or economics, he argues against politics and economics as ways of thinking about human kind.
It is worth considering this, even if you disagree with Herbert's line of thinking, because what it reminds us is how secular modern politics actually is. Everyone today is a secularist in Herbert's view. Herbert did not see a political system as evil- he saw political systems in themselves as a perversion of the higher aims that we all should have. Money for him is a part of the political world- it is created by consent after all- raised to become a King. But his argument is that as soon as we care about money, we lose the ability to care about God. I do not agree with this position- but it is worth understanding that it exists. Herbert's world view is more foreign from that of Newt Gingrich than Karl Marx's world view is, because it denies the very legitimacy of any argument about political systems or political entities save as a pathway to heaven. This radical Christian impulse- and it is shared in other religions- is an important strand in the theology of politics: in a sense it goes back to Augustine for whom the civitate mundi was filled with conflict and destruction, the civitate dei was the only refuge. Herbert would have endorsed that.
Sources
gracchii.blogspot.com/2009/03/avarice-21.11.2010