Religion, Literature, and Reality

In 1936, the same year that Hitler began to reoccupy the Rhineland and that the nationalist coup shattered the fragile peace of Spain, T.S. Eliot wrote his essay “Religion and Literature.” In that essay, he argues for “a literature that is unconsciously, rather than deliberately and defiantly Christian.” His meaning seems to be that rather than desiring a world with a specifically Christian Literature, he desires a Christian world from which a literature might spring. For Eliot, while a work of art of which Christianity is discernible as a foundational element is a work of art which permits the faith to become a serious possibility for the reader, even if only in the world of imagination, by the same token, a work that more or less propagandizes its faith does so because it is made by an artist who feels that he lives in a society in which Christianity is an anachronism. The effect of this, especially in the hands of the unskilled, is to produce a literature that disenchants precisely because it seeks so obviously to enchant.

To recapitulate: Eliot was pleading for a natural and un-self-consciously religious literature as opposed to an unnatural (because self-consciously) religious literature. He wanted a literature that, rather than seeking to enchant or convert, sought simply to represent the truth; the truth as understood by persons for whom the religion was something more than anachronism, emotional therapy, or a political fad. But this approach was, of course, not a call for a new and super-subtle variation on a theme. Eliot was more or less describing the approach of Christian authors of the past. In other words, he was separating the art of literature to some degree from the content of literature, claiming that “what” a work attempts to say does not justify the work alone. “How” a work says what it says is important as well. This move on Eliot’s part maintained the need for artists formed fundamentally by the Christian faith, who consciously attempt to make first-rate literary art. Eliot puts it: “what I believe to be incumbent upon all Christians is the duty of maintaining consciously certain standards and criteria of criticism over and against those applied by the rest of the world.” Eliot hints at what such a standard of criticism might entail in a passage from Little Gidding:

The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.

In this brief ars poetica, Eliot seems to suggest that the ideal poem has several qualities.

First, in this ideal poem, each part is oriented toward the good of the whole, but that each part is “neither diffident nor ostentatious,” supportive of that common good, but sufficiently worth saying on its own.

Second, the poem itself stands as mediator between the past and the future; speaking for the tradition of which it is an important iteration, for the present in which it is made, and for the future, for which it will (hopefully) remain as a part of a living tradition. The present-ness of the “old” in the “new” is central. They must have “easy commerce” in the sense that the poem must belong neither wholly to one nor to the other, but must modulate its register between them. Here, Eliot calls for a traditional, not merely conservative poetic.

Third, the poem must unite both “formal” and “common” language in consort. But most importantly, the “exact” and “precise” word must prevail. The high and the low, as in Chaucer’s pilgrimage, meet in harmony; but both are carefully selected and weighed by the poet. There must be everything, and yet there must be nothing superfluous.

The chapel at Little Gidding

Finally, the beginning of the passage says “The end is where we start from.” By this point, it should be clear that Eliot means “end” as telos; he has described to us the purpose of literature as he sees it. But just as the telos provides us with the beginning, so it also provides us with a limit; every great poem is an epitaph in two ways: first, the poem becomes part of “the communication of the dead,” which “is tongued with fire beyond/ the language of the living. But it is also an exhaustion of a particular form, insofar as it has explored the limits of what is possible. Thus a great poem both enables and exhausts the tradition of which it forms a part. This passage from Little Gidding succinctly expresses what possible standards we might have of judging a poem, or any work of literature, no matter the degree of religious content or context therein.

Much earlier, in France, three years after Eliot was born, Joris Karl Huysman, made his own idiosyncratic plea for a synthesis between art and religion in his La Bas,

"We must," he thought, "retain the documentary veracity, the precision of detail, the compact and sinewy language of realism, but we must also dig down into the soul and cease trying to explain mystery in terms of our sick senses. If possible the novel ought to be compounded of two elements, that of the soul and that of the body, and these ought to be inextricably bound together as in life. Their interreactions, their conflicts, their reconciliation, ought to furnish the dramatic interest. In a word, we must follow the road laid out once and for all by Zola, but at the same time we must trace a parallel route in the air by which we may go above and beyond.... A spiritual naturalism! It must be complete, powerful, daring in a different way from anything that is being attempted at present.

“Supernatural naturalism” as Huysman dubs it, is a step farther than Eliot’s desire for “unconscious” religious literature. But it is a step along the same path. Eliot’s essay directs us toward a literature that is so religious that it simply assumes the truth of religion at a fundamental, and perhaps even hidden level. But Huysman here directs us towards a literature that not merely assumes, but fully embodies the metaphysical underpinnings of the religious world. The architecture of faith should, by these standards, work to inform and support the poem as a whole, as, inversely, the ideas and visual vocabulary of an age ought to inform and support the architecture of that age. The desideratum is a poetic that proclaims the possibility of faith in this way, not merely in a dogmatic or direct statement, but in its nature and bones; the way an old house proclaims and shapes its builders and inhabitants. This does not mean per se that such a poetic will demand the use of this or that traditional form, meter, or rhyme. Rather, the work must acknowledge in the artist and audience the presence of a knowing mind, capable of discerning truth, a will to seek the truth in art (because we seek it everywhere, even in a diseased and jumbled form,) and, perhaps most basically, a set of emotional habits that cannot help but know truth to some degree or another. To return to Eliot’s criterion, a truly “unconscious” religious literature must, at a minimum, show in its form, a sense of the cosmos as an ordered reality, and of the knowing self as a being ordered towards that reality. Such a work shows reality, and shows metaphysics and theology to be an integral part of that reality.

I should note here that a “supernatural realism” of the kind I am discussing would not be a kind of life-like fantasia, much less a reduction of a world to what the 19th century knew as “realism,” which, at its worst, merely documents, ad nauseam, “monotonous studies of mediocre persons and to interminable inventories of the objects in a drawing-room or a landscape.” In a sense, our pattern must be, and in very important ways must not be James Joyce. He gave his documentary muse a house to live in, but it was a house oppressed by the presences of the dead. He transubstantiated nominalism into aesthetics, and turned the sacramental poetic of some parts of Portrait into the Black Mass of Ulysses. Joyce’s attempt to represent the “quiddity” of things individually, but unrelated to the rest of the cosmos, gives us in literature what nominalism gives us in philosophy: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. According to Dick Davis, the poet and critic Yvor Winters considered that “Literature that lists specifics, or that dwells on their particularity rather than on those features held in common, seems to tacitly endorse nominalism, the theory that reality is merely discrete particulars, each existing only in terms of itself.1” Significant form exists, of course, in Joyce; but it is an order imposed from without by Joyce’s own post-Nietzschean value-creating subjectivity. There is little if any order inherent in his subject matter, apart from that demanded by his self-imposed task, as in the famous lines of Portrait: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

Of course, by this point, the reader will have realized that I am arguing for a philosophy, rather than a literature. Or rather, I am arguing for a literature by way of arguing for a philosophy. But what, we might ask, is that philosophy? It is, more or less, the philosophy of the De Anima, the Poetics, and the Summa. This is far from being an original stance, but in this case I view this dependency as an advantage, rather than a handicap.

To elaborate: we must admit, first, that the human mind experiences the real in more than one way. Sense knowledge becomes emotional knowledge, which is more or less associative. I feel a certain mood come upon me when I see a certain place, or when certain words are spoken in a certain cadence and order, because each word refers to a thing that has an interior order and system of its own, one that interacts with the order and matrix of my own mind. The order of the outer world informs, and represents itself, within the world of emotional (sensible) knowledge. The mood or emotional impact of that exterior order produces within me what Eliot called the “objective correlative.” Essentially, the order within these hypothetical words, their rhythm, arrangement, tone and music create, in my imagination, a virtual2 reality. As above, so below. As without, so within. Every aesthetic work must work along these broad outlines. But the words and the things they signify, it must be noted, do not simply exist as phenomena with a certain emotional value for me. Rather, the same form and substance that makes them be what they are also acts upon my intellect, which knows them, potentially, in their essences. Rational knowledge, contra certain moments in Plato’s dialogues, derives at the basic level from sense knowledge. But contra Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, and company, it it nonetheless rational for all that.

To return to Joyce for a moment: in translating the well known Thomistic aesthetic trinity of “integrity or perfection. . . due proportion or harmony, and lastly, brightness or clarity,” Stephen Dedalus translates the crucial “claritas,” not as “clarity,” which “would lead you to believe that he had in mind. . . the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. . .” but as “quiddity,” which merely reveals “that it is that thing which it is and no other thing.” Joyce’s realism is not patient, ultimately, of God. However, in truth, once we have apprehended the “claritas” of a given object, we have moved beyond mere Joycean quiddity into the realm of true knowledge, since to know a thing as beautiful is to know it formally and essentially. Thus known, it becomes a species of a genera, and becomes related as part to a whole. But, to give Dedalus his due, it would be a mistake to suggest that Joyce’s “quiddity” does not exist. But rather than being the “radiance” of a thing, I would argue that the particular “whatness,” as Joyce means it, has less to do with the formal properties of the observed thing than the way in which that thing, by virtue of being particular is a more or less deformed version of its own nature. Joyce baits and switches; if the radiance of a thing’s quiddity tells us that “that it is that thing which it is and no other thing,” this emphasis on the individuality of the thing might lead us to suppose that Joyce might have with better justification referred to haecceitas; which refers not to a thing’s formal universal qualities, but it’s individuation amongst other things that share it’s form. What Joyce, despite himself, seems actually to refer to is the degree to which the imperfections of a thing’s integrity and proportion obscure its essence. In a sense, this is a feature of all individuals within a species, who differ from each other insofar as they are more or less defective iterations of the same universal form.

After such a statement, a question naturally arises: is the knowledge and representation of particular objects, in their particularity, of no aesthetic value? Of course not. Rather, when we represent, say in a poem, the obscuration of a things claritas, (for example, if we read almost any of Poe’s stories) we are drawn, in a sense, beyond the thing itself, towards something that stands behind it: Time, Death, God, Being, et alia. Such a Something is beyond the immediate object of our attention; yet the immediate object of our attention exists only through, with, and in that Something.

To use the example of time, which Plato so beautifully called a “moving image of eternity;” sometimes, as in W.H. Auden’s As I Walked Out One Evening, or Eliot’s Four Quartets, such a statement is made explicit, and made, also, explicitly Christian. In the same poem, Auden declares that “you cannot conquer Time,” and that, yet in spite of this, “you must love your crooked neighbor / with your crooked heart.” By the same token, for Eliot, “only through time time is conquered.” To make a distinction: those works that emphasize either the compensatory and substantive presence of the divine in particular things, or those works that emphasize the passing of things in time as an object of aesthetic interest are what most people mean by “romantic,” while those works that emphasize the integritas and proportion of a thing despite the passing of time we usually denominate “classical.” I suppose that Dante chose Virgil as his guide, that Wordsworth wrote over the ruins of Tintern Abbey, and that T.S. Eliot chose the French Symbolists and Dante as models for reasons not too distant from these.

Having said this, we can now see how much valence there is in perception, and therefore in the philosophical-aesthetic scale that runs from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton to Hopkins, Joyce, Pound et al. This valence exists in literature because it genuinely exists in and runs through, in some way, perception, imagination, and thought. While the artist ought to strive to cultivate an understanding and a taste for all valid aesthetic phenomena, they ought to set themselves the highest possible goal; to decline neither to the right nor to the left. Realism, in the sense that I am using the term, is the middle term between two aesthetics; in excess, that of a loose, billowy Platonism and in defect, a crabbed, crumbled Scotism. It is, in my opinion, this mean that the greatest artists approach, without, perhaps ever reaching it. Some poets move fluidly and gracefully between the two worlds, and yet appear to make their habitation in neither; the late Richard Wilbur being the prime example.

By way of example, let us consider three passages of the work of three different poets: Denis Devlin, Mario Luzi, and Roy Campbell. Each of these poets has some aspect of the craft of poetry which we may justly admire.

Denis Devlin’s Est Prodest begins with the following passage:

Tablelands of ice
Bastions of blocks of light
Are his identity
Or light as flutenotes
At a flick he is round me flowing
Denying, promising,
Boulders of ice, gentian,
Daring, dominant,
As a tower drags up the eyes.
Whose eyes will not flare
Jerked out of sloth by sudden
Bugles and flags blaring?
In gentleness, who not answer
The shy friendly nudging
Of that insistent stallion?
He stamps there, desperate, sweet,
The air aches with our breath.
He is me otherwise.

This poetry has a density that defies abstract understanding until particular terms are parsed and fileted. It is in what we might call a “crabbed-modernist” style; the poem surrounds the reader with a wealth of images, all of them concrete. The only abstract descriptions (“Daring, dominant . . . “) are those that tend towards a more or less sense-based description of the subject. Even the abstraction of “gentleness” is anchored to a physical referent in the “shy friendly nudging” of the “insistent stallion''. Yet, ironically, the effect of such a technique is, to some degree, intentionally alienating, rather than immersive. Rather than being drawn into a stream of virtual sensory data, the individual images, though concrete, are abstracted from the poem and from each other, since the poem provokes the reader’s mind to separate the individual images from each other, in order to make sense of them. Devlin, of course, has a referent towards which the entire catalogue of descriptors applies; Christ, and the experience of dwelling with Christ. I would suggest that the concretions of the sensible material world are at the forefront of this poem, though here they are drawn upwards into the world of forms, and placed side by side like pieces of a mosaic arranged within the interior of the dome. He is a follower of his countryman Joyce3 in this regard, but more clearly, in most literal sense possible, on the side of the angels.

By contrast, the Italian Mario Luzi’s treatment of language reveals him, as it were, as an aesthetic Platonist. Consider the following passage from In the Dark Body of Metamorphosis:

Something imminent dominates her,
makes her weep and offer me tears in silence
while I not circumscribed by any limit
of the past and present look at her
and do not disturb the silent session
with demands or anything else. I study
her eyes lowered to and lost in the arabesque design.
And I receive the power of love and sorrow
of the world. And still more, still more than this,

The language is general, philosophic, and ultimately refers back to those universals for which the words and the poem itself is, in a way, a symbol. Here, the lady of the poem is the Church, the most universal and mystical of bodies. But the language is the language of abstraction, even, perhaps, of vagueness. “Something imminent dominates her.” What that “something” is, we are left to guess, although the word itself is effective as a way of expressing the otherworldliness and looming, surrounding nature of the “something.” Here, in contrast to the passage from Devlin, the things discussed in the poem are abstract enough to be discussed in terms of circumscription and limit; the language of geometry. The most particularized image in the passage is that of the (still rather unparticular) “arabesque design” of theology, history, and the whole Catholic system. But in this passage, at least, the abstraction serves to actually discuss the subject matter of the poem in a direct, even simple fashion. It is a mistake to suggest, as people so often do, that particularity and concretion are the essence of clear or even (God save us) “efficient and effective” writing.

Finally, let us consider one poem of Roy Campbell’s: The Seven Swords:

Of seven hues in white elision
the radii of your silver gyre,
are the seven swords of vision
that spoked the prophet’s flaming tyre;
their sistered stridences ignite
the spectrum of the poet’s lyre
whose unison becomes a white
revolving disc of stainless fire,
and sights the eye of that sole star
that, in the heavy clods we are,
the kindred seeds of fire can spy,
or, in the cold shell of the rock,
the red yolk of the phoenix cock
whose feathers in the meteor fly.

This tetrameter nonce sonnet is obviously dealing with abstract subject matter; the Seven Sorrows of Mary, typically depicted in Catholic iconography as a set of seven sword blades meeting like radii in the centre of her heart, is here a kind of oblique metaphor for the color wheel. What could be more abstract than religious devotion and color abstracted from any particular scene or object? And yet, I would argue, Campbell’s treatment of that matter is distinct from either the treatment of Devlin or Luzi. To give a brief exegesis of the poem; the colors of the world, as represented in the color wheel, are at once the swords in the heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the spokes on the chariot of the prophet Elijah, as well as, indirectly, the strings of an Orphean lyre. Color combines in the poem, at the center of the wheel, to form white, the “stainless fire” of mystical experience, which reminds us, via the stars, of the “seeds of fire” within us, or, in the final image, the nascent phoenix of resurrection and eternal life.

The sonnet form, in part, helps account for the step-by-step movement of the poem from abstraction to concretion, from the “seven swords of vision” to “the red yolk of the phoenix cock.” But we should also realize that Campbell is doing no more than what Shakespeare’s Theseus suggested the poet do: “the poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance / from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; / and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things / unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes, / and gives to airy nothing a local habitation / and a name. . .” This is especially true of the sextet of Campbell’s sonnet. But while the message of the poet might seem to align more with Book VI of the Aeneid than, say, the book of Genesis; we should note also that the poem, effectively translates the material of the world, “the seven hues” of color into the “stainless fire” that evokes the inner life of the Holy Trinity, or the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. The material and immaterial have met in this poem, (as they do in the world) which is also written in a traditional form that lends it an integrity that also matches its subject matter, since the seven colors are matched by the sonnet form (fourteen being double seven). All in all, this is a poem that shows a balance between density and fluidity, between concretion and abstraction, that while perhaps imperfect, is nonetheless a potent reminder of what poetry can be in the right hands.

If this examination has accomplished anything, it has, I hope, shown that poetry is, or ought to be, governed not by a concern for expression, or mere recapitulation of experience, but of all the notes on the scale of being. As Richard Wilbur once said, “I like to play the whole instrument.” Perhaps that is sufficient.

1 Davis, Dick, Wisdom and Wilderness: The Achievement of Ivor Winters, University of Georgia Press, 1983

2 I mean “virtual” in the old sense of “having the same power or virtue,” not in the sense of “false.” Thus, while my knowledge of sense-objects is not the object itself in the material sense, it is formally; since my sensation and knowledge of that object must bear an analogous relationship to that object, at the very least.

3 Devlin even attended the same seminary as Joyce: Belvedere College, Dublin.