George Herbert and the Phenomenology of Grace

Thus grace constitutes the most proper depth of the will – interior intimo meo – as well as its most intimate stranger.

—Jean-Luc Marion¹

In both its architecture and in what can be called its metaphysical substance, George Herbert’s The Temple is a profound and extended contemplation of the ways in which God works in (and into) the life of the Christian. In a manner perhaps unique in devotional poetry, in this carefully structured collection of poems Herbert attempts to transcend theological debate and, instead, strives to disclose the immanental qualities and experiences of a life in God, particularly in his poetic illustrations of the movements and permutations of grace. Herbert’s spirituality is thoroughly enstatic, a term used by the Victorine theologian Thomas Gallus (c. 1200-46) to describe a spiritual state in which “Still contained within itself and sober, the soul yet desires that which exceeds its capacities and, indeed, even its nature.”² As opposed to ecstatic varieties of spirituality which take the believer out of himself or herself, Herbert’s modest method of approaching God requires that he abide in himself, attending to and awaiting on the movements of grace when and as they come. The Temple, then, functions as a kind of spiritual picture book providing illustrations – and not explanations – of God’s gentle theophantic entrances into the life of the Christian, tracing a simultaneously languaged and existential event that could be called “a chiastic point where two extremes cross paths.”³

Taking a phenomenological reading of Herbert as my starting point, in this article I explore Herbert’s The Temple as a space for a variety of encounters with God, encounters figured by a double intentionality: from Herbert’s (the speaker’s) side showing the struggles, anxieties, and uncertainties attendant to religious belief; and from “God’s side” disclosing a “phenomenology of grace.” By calling what I find in Herbert a “phenomenology of grace,” however, I do not mean to suggest that the poet was working in a Husserlian idiom avant le lettre, that he was in any way anticipating developments in early twentieth century philosophy. Rather, my claim is that Herbert was exploring the ways in which grace actually unfolds in the lives of believers, that he was interested in grace as phenomenon. In his attention to the phenomenology of grace in The Temple, Herbert opens for his reader an opportunity for thinking about the possibility of religious experience and, as we shall see in at least one documented case, access to religious experience itself. Like prayer, Herbert’s poetry is nothing if not a dialogue with the absolutely Other.

Surprised by Grace

One of the ways that Herbert figures grace in the poems of The Temple is in the “element of surprise” that inhabits the verse. As readers of Herbert are familiar, nearly every poem in the collection somewhere holds a surprise, an “aha!” moment, so much so that the reader anticipates it. This phenomenon is most apparent, even prior to reading them, in the visual poems, such as “The Altar” and “Easter-wings,” whose clever construction and obvious charm awaken delight in the reader, a strategy also present in less anthologized poems such as “The Water-course,” “Anagram of the Virgin Marie,” and “Jesu.” “Coloss. 3.3” performs a similar trick, showing how grace lies within the larger forum of what is ostensibly a rather straightforward stanza block. Indeed, the very “blockiness” of “Colossians 3:3” — visually a block of text – and the grace-full message contained within it work together to unfold this religious sensibility: that grace can be found, not only in the extraordinary (as in the more charmingly shaped poems) but also in the seeming ordinary. This is also the case in “Paradise,” with its incremental pruning of letters from the final word of each stanza’s first line in order reveal an insight hidden within the word. This religious aesthetic is most explicitly illustrated in the poem’s fourth stanza, which moves from a contemplation of reduction and sacrifice (“spare,” “pare”) to a discovery of being (“are”):

When thou dost greater judgements spare,And...