{"id":3846,"date":"2009-08-05T09:23:15","date_gmt":"2009-08-05T14:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pbs-wnet-preprod.digi-producers.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/?p=3846"},"modified":"2013-05-10T14:43:14","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T18:43:14","slug":"august-5-2009-the-things-of-this-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pbs-wnet-preprod.digi-producers.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/2009\/08\/05\/august-5-2009-the-things-of-this-world\/3846\/","title":{"rendered":" The Things of This World"},"content":{"rendered":"

REVIEW ESSAY
\nThe Things of This World
\nby David E. Anderson<\/strong><\/p>\n

For many poets, believers and nonbelievers alike, it is possible to talk about the religious imagination they bring to apprehending reality and describing the world.<\/p>\n

Theologically, Christianity provides a language\u2014and some doctrinal and historical metaphors or benchmarks\u2014for two such imaginations: the sacramental and the dialectical. The first is broadly linked to Catholic ways of seeing and understanding God and the world, and the second, equally broadly and generally, to a Protestant sensibility.<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"
\n George Herbert<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

Drawing on the work of Catholic theologian David Tracy, University of Notre Dame theology professor Mary Catherine Hilkert, in her book NAMING GRACE, gives a useful and succinct definition of the two imaginations: \u201cThe dialectical imagination stresses the distance between God and humanity, the hiddeness and absence of God, the sinfulness of human beings, the paradox of the cross, the need for grace as redemption and reconciliation\u2026and the not-yet character of the promised reign of God. The sacramental imagination\u2026emphasizes the presence of the God who is self-communicating love, the creation of human beings in the image of God\u2026the mystery of the incarnation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both imaginations reach deep into the history of English poetry. One can feel and touch the sacramental in the metaphors of the great religious poets such as John Donne<\/a> and George Herbert. It perhaps most fully flowered in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins<\/a>, who characterized the incarnation in the lovely but surprising phrase \u201cGod\u2019s infinity \/ Dwindled to infancy.\u201d It is a poetry that closely observes and celebrates the material world as the arena or playground of the Lord.<\/p>\n

Paul Mariani, a fine poet of this generation but perhaps better known for his biographies of Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, John Berryman and, most recently, Hopkins, offers a good working definition of the sacramental imagination as language that \u201cpays homage to the splendid grittiness of the physical as well as to the splendor and consolation of the spiritual.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a similar vein, literary critic and Gettysburg College English professor Peter Stitt, in his book THE WORLD\u2019S HIEROGLYPHIC BEAUTY, a study of five mid-twentieth century American poets (Richard Wilbur, William Stafford, Louis Simpson, James Wright, and Robert Penn Warren), writes that all of them \u201clove the physical world to such a degree that they sense within it some transcendent meaning, some hovering aura of belief.\u201d Stitt notes that because Wilbur and Warren, for example, believe \u201cthat something sacred is to be found within reality, they do not feel required to abandon the physical in order to find the spiritual.\u201d The sacramental imagination can, indeed, be summed up in the title of Wilbur\u2019s great poem, \u201cLove Calls Us to the Things of This World.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sacramental imagination has always been strong, but it seems particularly ascendant in contemporary poetry and criticism. Perhaps it is because there is something of a religious revival going on among intellectuals and artists not unlike that of a half-century ago; certainly there seems to be an abundance of religious themes in current film, fiction and music.<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"
\nWilliam Cowper<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

Unfortunately, however, that dominance makes it more difficult to hear and understand\u2014or grant religious legitimacy to\u2014the dialectical imagination. But poetry where the dialectical imagination is dominant, stressing the distance between God and the human and experiencing the world as a place where God is silent or absent, also has a long and distinguished pedigree in English poetry and hymnody.<\/p>\n

Donald Davie suggests as much in his discussion of poet and hymnist William Cowper (1731-1800) in his introduction to THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF CHRISTIAN VERSE. Davie notes of the first line\u2014\u201cSometimes a light surprises\u201d\u2014of Cowper\u2019s poem\/hymn \u201cJoy and Peace is Believing\u201d: \u201cOne may have read this poem, or more probably sung it, many and many a time before realizing that the crucial word in it is the first: \u2018Sometimes\u2019\u2014only sometimes, not always, not even very often!\u201d The usual relationship between God and believer in Cowper\u2019s imagination is distance rather than presence.<\/p>\n

Similarly, in what is perhaps Cowper\u2019s most famous poem, the first line (\u201cOh, for a closer walk with God\u201d) stresses absence, an absence the second stanza only underscores: \u201cWhere is the blessedness I knew \/ When first I saw the Lord? \/ Where is the soul-refreshing view \/ Of Jesus and his word?\u201d<\/p>\n

In the twentieth century, one of the greatest poets of the dialectical imagination was the Welsh Anglican priest R.S. Thomas (1913-2000). Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams called him \u201cas influential as T.S. Eliot in religious circles,\u201d and one critic designated Thomas \u201ca poet of the Cross, the unanswered prayer, the bleak trek through darkness.\u201d His powerful poem \u201cThe Porch\u201d needs little explication:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Do you want to know his name?
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It is forgotten. Would you learn
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0what he was like? He was like
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0anyone else, a man with ears
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0and eyes. Be it sufficient
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0that in a church porch on an evening
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0in winter, the moon rising, the frost
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0sharp, he was driven to his knees and for no reason
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0he knew. The cold came at him;
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0his breath was carved angularly
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0as the tombstones; an owl screamed.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0He had no power to pray.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0His back turned on the interior
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0he looked out on a universe
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0that was without knowledge
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0of him and kept his place
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0there for an hour on that lean
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0threshold, neither outside nor in.<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"
\nR.S. Thomas<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

God\u2019s absence, wrote Thomas, was for him like a presence \u201cthat compels me to address it without hope of a reply.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the most difficult cases to critically deal with in trying to use religious categories is the poet who is an avowed nonbeliever but whose poetry is rich with religious resonances, themes, and iconography. Such a poet was Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), who was not a practicing Christian herself and was sometimes scathing in her dismissal of Christians as dogmatic and judgmental. But as Scripps College modern languages professor Cheryl Walker suggests in her fine and challenging, though sometimes uneven, study GOD AND ELIZABETH BISHOP, \u201cShe lived poetically, and in a sense religiously.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without using the language of the sacramental and dialectical, Walker\u2019s study suggests that Bishop was a first-rate poet of the dialectical imagination who longed to perceive the world in sacramental terms, but was generally unable to. God\u2019s presence was just not there. Like sacramental poets, such as her rough contemporary Richard Wilbur, Bishop was a close and careful observer of the material world, the local and the ordinary. Her observations revealed the absence of transcendence rather than the presence of God, but the poetry was no less religious for that perception.<\/p>\n

Walker divides her study of Bishop into chapters exploring different Christian concepts and theological themes\u2014time and eternity, the fall, love and longing, justice and charity, suffering, and \u201cassent.\u201d She draws out of Bishop\u2019s poetry and prose the religious possibilities that are either on or just below the surface.<\/p>\n

Walker is especially concerned to look at Bishop in light of the poet\u2019s reading of Catholic mystics, especially St. John of the Cross. She is careful not to overwhelm the poems with interpretation or create for them a theological Procrustean bed, but she also candidly admits the poet\u2019s dialectical imagination. In the poem \u201cSquatter\u2019s Children,\u201d for example, about the lives of poor Brazilian people on the hills surrounding Rio de Janeiro, Walker sees that \u201cwe are once again confronted by the deus absconditus, the absent God who looks down on the children of the poor seemingly without much interest.\u201d She identifies one of Bishop\u2019s most moving poems, \u201cOne Art,\u201d as \u201ca religious poem without a God to offer grace.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"
\nElizabeth Bishop<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

Even when one quibbles with some of the fine points of Walker\u2019s reading, it is a rewarding and\u2014for those who equate the dialectical imagination with a secular antagonism to things religious\u2014surprising tour through the work of one of the premier poets of the middle of the last century. Bishop loved old hymns and the poetry of George Herbert, knew the Bible well, and read theology all her life. Still, the spiritual did not present itself to her \u201cas a tenable substance,\u201d observes Walker, quoting the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, \u201cbut, rather, through its absence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be of two minds was characteristic of Elizabeth Bishop,\u201d Walker writes. \u201cShe could never quite relinquish the desire to believe, though a settled faith eluded her.\u201d Precisely.\u00a0 And therein lies the tension between the sacramental imagination of presence and the dialectical imagination of absence. Both offer rich possibilities for a poetry that speaks powerfully of and to the modern world.<\/p>\n

David E. Anderson is senior editor at Religion News Service. He wrote most recently for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Charles Taylor\u2019s <\/strong>A SECULAR AGE<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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