28 - ‘Part heathen, part Christian’: Recording Transitions and Amalgamations of Belief Systems in Constantine Cavafy’s Poetry

Summary

CONSTANTINE CAVAFY WAS neither a religious nor a mythological poet in the traditional sense of these terms. A Greek Orthodox Christian, Egyptiote Cavafy attended liturgies (albeit not regularly), keenly read ecclesiastical history and hagiographies of saints, sages and miracle-workers of all faiths, and, as a young writer, mounted a spirited attack on Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) for its critique of monotheistic religions and misinterpretation of Byzantine history. Yet, he was mostly silent on any religious feelings he might have had, and his mature depictions of religion are often underwritten by irony and anxiety about the abuse of religion for political causes. A few valuable studies have attempted to read Cavafy’s poetry and prose through the lens of the ‘religious attitudes’ discernible in his opus, notably, his interest in modern mysticism and esotericism, revived Gnosticism, and the lives of Early Christian Fathers. However, most scholars have conceded that the weight of ‘Cavafy persona’ – that multi-layered, observing-ironic-emotive voice that dominates his poetry – is such that it renders any ‘genuine’ religious affect hard to discern, and that the scrutiny of the poet’s theological viewpoints leads only to a ‘well-informed but rather inconsistent set of conclusions’. When Cavafy engages religion, it is less as a religious poet than as a poetic record-keeper of religious expression and its effects on the believing and the non-believing. Noting the deification of the poet-seer and of the labour of creative (re)production in his opus, some scholars have identified Cavafy’s ‘true religion’ precisely in his commitment to aesthetic record-keeping. ‘Although religion, morality […] are treated ironically and are often repudiated in Cavafy’s poetry,’ Gregory Jusdanis writes, ‘aesthetics is never questioned and is venerated with religious conviction.’ At least one commentator and fellow writer labelled this belief position an ‘ascetic Epicureanism’. As it happens, the tension between askesis (of intellectual work/creative production, of religious piety; and, metonymically, the figure of the hermit) and the erotic pulls of the body (of inherent human licentiousness, of morphology of Beauty, of creative production again; metonymically, the figure of the mystic) is also the most mercilessly scrutinised theme in Cavafy’s poetry.