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Leaf or Chaff: On Poetry in Religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Abstract
Poetry, understood the way Icons are, teaches its readers and writers how words make relationships, put people, places, things in one another's presence. In the relationship called religious, poetry takes on a very crucial task, that of mediating an experience, the human of the divine, the divine of the human, in the various traditions, like the Icon in Orthodoxy. Poetry creates nonreligious relationships too, but uses the same manner of making someone present to something or someone. Poetry becomes anti-presence in religious traditions that deny experience of God. In Christianity of a sacramental kind, poetry is the Icon of language, beauty/truth inseparably set out, the loss of one jeopardizing the existence of the other, language refusing to be idolatrous, and equally, refusing to be inane. Religious understanding in sacramental Christianity requires the poetic Icon.
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References
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19 I am referring to Ted Hughes' volume Crow. My review of it may be found in The New Orleans Review 3, 2, p. 202.
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38 Interior Castle, tr. Peers, E. Allison (New York: Doubleday Image Book, 1961)Google Scholar, Sixth Mansions, Chap. VII, pp. 169–178. Esp. p. 174. “It is true that anyone whom Our Lord brings to the seventh Mansion very rarely, or never, needs to engage in this activity [self aid], for the reason that I shall set down, if I remember to do so, when I come to deal with that Mansion, where in a wonderful way the soul never ceases to walk with Christ our Lord but is ever in the company of both His Divine and His human nature.”
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41 (Boston: David R. Godine, 1974), p. 27.
42 Ibid., p. 8.
43 Ibid., p. 5.
44 Cf. Sölle, Dorothee, Imagination et Obéissance, tr. Jarczyk, G. (Paris: Casterman, 1970), p. 13Google Scholar. “En aucun domaine les scléroses de la tradition n'ont eu de conséquence aussi grave que dans ce-lui de la formation de la conscience. Sous la dictature de normes et de schèmes de conduite bien établis, la sensibilité de la conscience dépérit comme une plante sans eau; même les cactus les plus sobres ne pourraient résister à des siécles de pareil traitement. Or le point qui a rendu possible pareille fossilisation, et auquel tout s'est réferé dans la formation de la conscience—dans l'une et l'autre des deux confessions, d'ailleurs, parmi les catholiques et les protestants, réunis ici en une belle unanimité pratique—c'est l'obéissance.”
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46 Ibid., pp. 130–133.
47 Cf., “Faith and Poetry Issue,” New Catholic World 219, 1309 (January/February, 1976), p. 16Google Scholar. The poem is to accompany a gouache of the Jesuit Church on the University of San Francisco campus.