The Doctrine of Prevenient Grace in George Herbert’s The Temple

Abstract

The Doctrine of Prevenient Grace in George Herbert’s The Temple Kensei Nishikawa Prevenient grace is a notion that divine grace comes before any human initiative towards his own salvation. According to The Oxford Dictionary of English, it is “the grace of God which precedes repentance and conversion, predisposing the heart to seek, previously to any desire or motion on part of the recipient.”1 Scriptural supports for the doctrine can be found in such texts as Psalm 59:10 (“The God of my mercy shall prevent me; God shall let me see my desire upon my enemies”) and 2 Timothy 1:9 (“God hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus, before the world began”). Herbert must have been acquainted with that doctrine, judging from the following instances of his use of the word prevent: “Oh King of wounds! how shall I grieve for thee, / Who in all grief preventest me?” the speaker exclaims in “The Thanksgiving” (ll. 3-4), awed at the immensity of Christ’s Passion that removes from a believer all future pains as well as all possibilities to rival him in sacrifice; or addressing the streams of blood and water from the crucified Christ believed to counter sins in advance, the speaker in “H. Baptisme” (I) wonders how they “do prevent / And stop our sinnes from growing thick and wide” (ll. 7-8) There are also examples in which, without using the word “prevent” or its derivatives, Herbert refers to the prevenient quality of God’s salvific actions: the speaker in “Affliction” (II) ponders how the cross “took up in one / By way of imprest, all my future moan” (ll. 14-15, italics mine), comparing to an advance payment the salvific cost born by the Redeemer, while in “Obedience” he muses on how the Son’s sacrifice “was in earnest” (l. 28; italics mine), a non-rejectable offer of pledge that “we might not take or be withstood” (l. 30). More significantly than those local instances, however, Herbert often builds an entire poem based on the doctrine, in [End Page 66] which Christ is shown throughout to be a figure acting before or beyond the speaker’s expectation. Such embodiment of the doctrine of prevenient grace in the designs of some poems in The Temple is what I would like to explore in this essay. Before discussing Herbert’s poems in detail, it may be useful to consider two likely sources which theologically informed the poet. The first is the Book of Common Prayer, together with the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion incorporated in the Book. The BCP contains the following three Collects which refer to divine “prevention”: “By thy special grace preventing us, thou dost put in our minds good desires” (for Easter Day); “That thy grace may always prevent and follow us” (for the seventeenth Sunday after Trinity) and, most famously, “Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings, by thy most gracious favor (for at the end of communion).2 Similarly, pointing to the need of God’s favor before any meritorious volition on man’s part (as well as to the need of the subsequent divine help), Article X of the Thirty-Nine Articles declares: “We have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.”3 As a priest of the Established Church Herbert was likely to be at home with the above Collects and the Article they liturgically embodied. The second source is St. Augustine. That great Church Father, whose works we know the poet had in his library and bequeathed to one of his curates at Bemerton, was the first theologian who formulated the notion of prevenient grace.4 “[God’s mercy] comes before us … that we may be healed. … It comes before us that we may lead pious lives; it will follow so that we may always live with him, for without him we can do nothing,” wrote Augustine...