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Abstract
This volume, the third in a series of conferences on the “Power of the Word,” proposes poetic language as a way of exploring the revelation of the divine in history and everyday life, probing the relationship between language and the “flesh” or bodily experience. Its subtitle, “Word made flesh made word,” suggests the play of ideas among poetics, theology, and philosophy that this feast of conversations offers.
Full text
Scholars of Christian spirituality are always speaking into what Charles Taylor has termed a “Secular Age,” in both the Academy and the wider culture. How then to identify and claim a discourse for exploring the central Christian mystery of the “Word made flesh”? This volume, the third in a series of conferences on the “Power of the Word,” proposes poetic language as a way of exploring the revelation of the divine in history and everyday life, probing the relationship between language and the “flesh” or bodily experience. Its subtitle, “Word made flesh made word,” suggests the play of ideas among poetics, theology, and philosophy that this feast of conversations offers.
This volume’s three sections are each introduced by one of the conference’s keynote speakers, with succeeding essays responding to issues raised in the opening essays. Sir Michael Edwards begins by framing an experiential theology of Revelation based on the “bodied” nature of poetry, its ability “to make us aware of the flesh-ness or corporeality of language: by its concentration and its unconcern simply to convey a message, a poem invites us into the life of words” (21). The revela-tory experience of reading and writing poetry guides the rest of this section. Kevin Grove explores Augustine’s approach to the the Psalms as a way of “participating in Christ,” while Krystyna Wierzbicka-Trwoga constructs a dialogue between George Herbert and Stanislaw Herakliusz Lubormirski, two poets who understood poetry as in some way mediating the mystical experience of God. Edwards’s theme of the corporeality of language is taken up again in Sonia Jaworska’s essay on the “flesh” as a key focus of Richard Crashaw’s poetry, stressing both the erotic imagery in his work and his kenotic Christology. The affinity between poetry, mysticism, and sacrament is further explored in Anna Walcuk’s essay on Elizabeth Jennings, whose priestly understanding of the poet-artist leads her to view poetry as “opening the gates to an all-embracing reality” (72).
The second section moves into more explicitly philosophical and theological territory. Richard Viladeseau begins by summarizing two directions in traditional Christology: theology “from above” encompasses the Chalcedonian understanding of the “Word made flesh” as the descent of the divine into the human, while a theology more radically “from below” offers a sometimes heterodox focus on “flesh made word” in which the Incarnation is completed only in the resurrection. For the Word to become flesh, the flesh must become Word” (90). Threaded with insights from Aquinas, Rilke, Teilhard de Chardin, and Karl Rahner, the essay emphasizes the “poetic” character of religion itself, its awareness that like poetic words it can “intend and evoke but never contain the divine reality” (90).
The remaining essays in this section explore aspects of the relationship between the “flesh” and the Word, focusing largely on the experiential dimension of the texts discussed. Marta Gibinska, drawing on the philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion, offers a reading of Act 2, scene 2 of Macbeth, emphasizing how the voice and body of the performer give us access to the “flesh” - the real being-of the character Macbeth. Mark Burrows draws on Bachelard’s account of reading as “dreaming” or “reverie” to suggest that engaged reading is a kind of contemplative practice: not a process of analysis but an opening of the self to transformation. Bradford William Manderfield also pushes against purely analytic approaches to reading in his essay on the Irish philosopher William Desmond. Starting from T.S. Eliot’s use of the phrase “hints and guesses” to describe the mystery of the Incarnation, Manderfield elaborates Desmond’s promotion of what he calls “equivocity” or the “guess,” an open attitude toward the mysteries of theology and philosophy which contrasts with the “univocity” of traditional scholarly discourse. This equivocity also informs Malgorzata Grzegorzewska’s reading of Eliot’s late poetry- from Gerontion through Four Quartets-an insightful exploration drawing on Eliot’s Clark Lectures as well as the early Fathers and Hans Urs von Balthasar, to show how Eliot’s poetry finds meaning, not outside of language in the world, but in words themselves, citing the poet’s “uneasy negotiations between word-made-flesh and flesh-made word” (132).
The final section explores how poetry invites and generates experiences of “presence.” “By its very nature,” writes Angela Leighton in her opening piece, poetry challenges the Word/flesh, word/thought dichotomy.” Alluding to poet Les Murray, who famously wrote that “Religions are poems,” she presents poetry as a mode of theological discourse, “a thinking at the heart of words” (159), again suggesting that an engagement with poetry is more experiential than analytical. Francesca Bugliana Knox finds in T.S. Eliot’s Clark Lectures a definition of “metaphysical poetry” whose function is “an enlargement of immediate experience” (167). The remaining essays in this section look closely at the “flesh” side of the “word made flesh made word” theme. Monica Szuba introduces us to the embodied, sensuous poetry of the contemporary British poet David Constantine, while Joanna Socko invites us into a stimulating and unlikely dialogue between Jacques Derrida and R.S. Thomas. I would take issue with her implicit association between Derrida’s deconstruction of the logos and R.S. Thomas’s experience of God as absent, but I agree that they have in common an appreciation for the materiality of language itself, the words of a poem as “flesh.” This section culminates in Jean Ward’s elegant and persuasive reading of David Jones’s war poem In Parenthesis. Here she shows how feminine presence-especially the presence of Marian elements-is woven through the text and voices of Jones’s war-poem so that Mary as mediatrix of God’s incarnate presence becomes a crucial part of the poem’s celebration of presence even in the waste land of the Western Front.
A recurring theme in this volume is that of understanding reading itself as a kind of informed contemplative practice, a way of prayer in the sense that it opens onto the divine mystery in a spirit of receptivity. These essays together suggest that poetic language by its nature invites this kind of reading, which becomes a mode of revelation. In its breadth of theological exploration and its emphasis on the experiential dimension of engagement with the poetic word, this collection should be an important resource for students of Christian spirituality.
Kathleen Henderson Staudt
Virginia Theological Seminary and Wesley Theological Seminary
Kathleen Henderson Staudt
Kathleen Henderson Staudt teaches at Virginia Theological Seminary and Wesley Theological Seminary. Her writing has appeared in Weavings, Christianity and Literature, and The Anglican Theological Review. She is the author of of At the Turn of a Civilization: David Jones and Modern Poetics, as well as three volumes of poetry, most recently Good Places.
Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press Fall 2017