Poesy v. Theology

My guess is that C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, might be among his least read works, viewed perhaps as a mere mole hill next to such vast mountains like The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. But reading that book recently, what with prayer on our minds around here, I was quite amazed by its content. Here, for instance, is a brief quote which quite startled me by its truth and originality. It concerns biblical interpretation:

I suggest two rules for exegetics: 1) Never take the images literally. 2) When the purport of the images—what they say to our fear and hope and will and affections—seems to conflict with the theological abstractions, trust the purport of the images every time. For our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modeling of spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of Scripture—the light and darkness, river and well, seed and harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens, father and child? The footprints of the Divine are more visible in that rich soil than across rocks or slag-heaps. Hence what they now call “demythologizing” Christianity can easily be “re-mythologising” it—and substituting a poorer mythology for a richer.

  [From Chapter X, p. 52, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., edition, 1964]

Ah! the hierarchies of experience, where the poetic rises above the intellectual. But at those heights the general fades and becomes personal—which is where real understanding germinates.

Precision and Pattern

The philosophical and the scientific ways of looking at the world seem closely related. Both aim at precision. The philosophical aims at precision in the management of concepts, the scientific at precision in measuring phenomena. There are problems in both encampments. Concepts are damnably fluid and heavily dependent on the cultural atmospherics present where they arise and, for a while, abide. Nature is very coy and hides herself from measurement at the extremes—yet it is at the extremes where the doubts are: quantum physics and astronomy.

By contrast the poetic way of perceiving reality seeks meaning in patterns. Its operant faculty is intuition and imagination. In all three of these categories, needless to say, intellect, imagination, and intuition are at work, and if one of these faculties is weak, the results are merely so-so. But there is what might be viewed as a temperamental difference or leaning involved; some people are comfortable with precision, others with a much fuzzier gnosis. The great merit of the poetic view is that it produces a sense of certainty—its chief drawback that the poet can’t turn his insights into dogma or into technology; no money in it, you might say. The reason is that the poet is denied precision. The philosopher cannot reach closure; he or she might stare at the inaccessible noumenon, as Kant did—but the poet is right at home with Noumy. The scientist is denied meaning, but in seeking the mechanics of reality, his horizons keep expanding just like the universe is supposed to do; back to the drawing board is a recurring theme.

Borrowing brings happiness to all. Borrow a little science to enlarge the patterns, a little poetry to admire the shifting phenomena of nature, a little science to bolster concepts, a few eternal ideas to give them radiance.

One Poet's View

The poet I have in mind today is the Bengali poet Ramprasad Sen (1718-1775), he who celebrated the Goddess Kali throughout his life in verse. In the West we’re so conditioned to think of the divine in a masculine form, it is almost odd to hear divinity framed in the feminine—but such a framing is most accessible when a poet does it. I found the first two quotes on Wikipedia (here), untitled, and sourced there to books by western authors.

You’ll find Mother in any house.
Do I dare say it in public?
She is Bhairavi with Shiva,
Druga with Her children,
Sita with Lakshmana.
She’s mother, daughter, wife, sister—
Every woman close to you.
What more can Ramprasad say?
You work the rest out from these hints.

Bhairavi, Druga, and Sita are all names of goddesses in the, for us, vast universe of divinities discoverable in the traditions of India. Where she is linked to Shiva and Lakshmana, these male deities are her consorts. Now if the above strikes the reader as a kind of exaltation simply of the feminine, the next quote shows that Ramprasad had more in minds and that his hints are not worked out by most. It presents a fascinating piece of negative theology applied to the Divine but in a female aspect.

You think you understand the Goddess?
Even philosophers cannot explain her.
The scriptures say that she, herself,
Is the essence of us all. It is she, herself,
Who brings life through her sweet will.
You think you understand her?
I can only smile. You think that you can
Truly know her? I can only laugh!
But what our minds accept, our hearts do not.
Ants try to grasp the moon, we the Goddess.

Finally a brief but sharply poetic take on Death by this genuine poet of the first rank. I found this quote in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. It also bears no title or sourcing:

How can you shrink from death,
Child of the Mother of All Living?
A snake, and you fear frogs?

The Beloved and Her Veils

One of the fascinating limitations of existing in this low dimension is that we see the higher through veils formed of concepts, symbols. There is that image of the finger pointing at the moon—and the ignorant observer staring at the finger. I’ve always liked that image. The high cannot be uttered—but does that stop us? No. It can be experienced, and somehow we shall express it. The problem is much worse than the finger and the moon. The moon is felt, not seen. The finger is a web of words and images that spring from the hidden inward parts of the person who has the feeling.

It occurs to me that the ineffable has been described in endless ways, but that traditional ways of uttering and picturing the transcendent are, superficially examined, radically unlike each other. There are, for instance, spiritual traditions identical at their core but one we describe as “religion” and the other as “poetry.” Music is another such tradition—radically different enough from the other two so that it appears embedded in each of them. Vast confusions also arise especially for those who will not (or sometimes sadly cannot) fuse the intellectual with the intuitive effectively—and this because no detectable, hard boundary can be mapped between so-called lower and higher feelings; they’re always interwoven or, put another way, are identical, and what we call the lower is just the high at a coarse or “lossy” sort of resolution.

All three are veils—and at our least developed level we attempt to appropriate, co-opt them for service of the bottom layer. We exploit religion for social conditioning and deform it in all manner of strange ways; we name poets-laureate to praise kings or to worship nations; and music must accompany even our boring elevator rides.

I find it interesting that some traditions ban the visual arts, e.g. in branches of Christianity and in Islam; Islam also frowns on music. These customs, of course, arise from a vague sense that it is the Beloved, and not her veils, that should be at the center of worship. What those who’d ban images or sounds don’t seem to realize is that their doctrines, too, are merely veils—and that veils are unavoidable. In this dimension we must attempt to discover the hidden mystery as best we can.

Religion and Doctrine

I would here contrast religion as a personal experience and religion as a structure of doctrines. The first I would define as an attitude or orientation to reality—but with a twist. It holds within it an awareness of something beyond the tangible experiences of our day to day life—also something beyond projections derived from observing the world, thus such concepts as “humanity,” “nation,” “cosmos,” “history,” and so on. Under my definition Marxism would not qualify as a religion despite its detection of a “dialectical process” in history—however appropriately airy-fairy that sounds. Nor would atheism or materialism qualify. The last two would deny anything “beyond” the experienced. Atheists with odd intimations of positive meanings hidden somewhere invisibly have already committed heresy, as it were, in their hearts.

Intimation here is a good word although, for me, the German Ahnung, is best. Its derivation is from Die Ahnen, or the ancestors—and they’re definitely no longer here. Wordsworth’s title, Intimations of Immortality, fits my purpose nicely. My personal experiences of the religious take this form, the form of intimations, and they arise from poetry, myth, literary, and other artistic forms, including music. A sneering realist would label all this mere emotionalism—but I view such criticism as arising from the absence of inner powers rather than their presence.

Religion as experienced is an intuition. The moment concepts arise, and we hear of God quite early in life, we enter another realm. We learn to associate certain intuitions with certain structures of concepts. Intimations are intimate, personal. When I was young the concept of God produced in me images of a person in the sky. It did not connect with my own experience of awe—indeed has never linked that way in the intimate sense except in moments of extreme anxiety or gratitude. Odd, that, isn’t it. In certain moments when feelings rise beyond the normal range, when they transcend the average, we reach for the nearest concept of transcendence. There are no atheists in the trenches.

Experience teaches transcendence—and not just in extreme moments. But one does not experience it in a concrete, tangible way as one experience a tree, for instance, when climbing it as a child. The transcendental is ineffable yet felt as real. And the more open the top of one’s head, the more real it is and becomes. But between this experience and the doctrines of religions there is an enormous gulf—one so deep that the Grand Canyon would seem, by contrast, to be a mere line in the sand drawn by a wooden match-stick.

For these reasons I treat all scriptures as poetry—and view poetry as humanity’s highest achievement. I resist doctrinal claims to be communicating tangible realities, to describe in detail, however vague, what God intends or once might have done. Regarding that concept I hew resolutely to a negative theology and assert, no matter what I hear, “Not that, not that.” In the poetic mode I hear of “God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” in Genesis 3:8—and that’s fine with me, not least what came before and comes after. Eventually, by a long process, this inspiration turns into something that has nothing to do with intimations of the high; poetry is turned into doctrine; and by that time it has sunk out of my sight.

The Tragic and the Comic

As a youngster I thought it odd that the most famous Italian poetic work would be called The Divine Comedy. How could the divine be comic? I thought of it as serious. Later I came to understand that “comedy” is one of those words that had one meaning in ancient Greek and Roman times, another in the medieval centuries, and then regained its old classical meaning once more in modern times. You might say that one of the two parts of the word came to dominate the meaning in succession. The two roots are komos, which meant a revel or a carousal and oidos, which meant a singer or a poet. The two were still visible in Greek, komoidia. A revel, an amusing spectacle, carries the “funny” connotation, poetry and song carry the “serious.” In the Middle Ages the word had the latter meaning and was used for poems and stories. The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests that its earliest meaning in English was “narrative poem.” Dante’s intention was to signal a serious story but with a happy ending.

Amusingly the word tragedy also contains the root oidos, but the front part of it comes from tragos, meaning a goat. A tragedy is a “goatsong.” The root of this seems to be dramas that depicted satyrs, thus creatures who are half-goat half man. These meanings, again taken from my trusty online source, are in debate—but they please me; they suggest a deeper truth. The unhappy ending associated with this form of drama seems to suggest that the goat-half had its way. To unpack this line of thought a little more, let me return to my youthful wonder. How, indeed, could the divine be comic?

It might help to ponder another word in this context, the thing that we call fate. Its meaning is the course of a person’s life; the word is derived from “decreed” or “spoken” or “ordained,” as by a higher power—thus that which is determined. The word fatal does not come from some ancient tag for death; rather it comes from the fact that death is our unavoidable destination, our destiny. But is it? It is certainly the destination of the body, of the goat. Its meaning includes the idea of “unavoidable necessity.” That we have to live a life in bodies—that is fate. But we also have another part; and that part is free. How we live that necessary life—that’s up to us. If we identify with the immortal spirit, it suggests that, at death, we escape this realm of necessity and…well, enter the divine. The tragic results when we identify with the limited but necessary; the comic when we identify with the free and limitless. People have a fate; I’ve never encountered any reference to the “fate of angels.” Why? They don’t follow a necessary course.

The very core of our nature belongs to the high, the superior, the ultimately free. That nature, caught in this lower dimension, looking around, but still aware of itself, beholding the shenanigans, will simply have to laugh at what it sees. But its ability to rise above, to laugh at all this in light moments, testifies to a high gift which, in more serious moments expresses itself in poetry.

Concerning Rigor

I’ve never explored the source of irritation philosophy sometimes produces. A knee-jerk response is that it lacks integration—not in the sense of rigorous internal consistency, which is present in it in spades, but in that it relies exclusively on conceptual operations and leaves out everything mysterious and intuitive; those latter aspects need a poetic expression and a different kind of cognition. Philosophy tends to the purely intellectual. This flaw is least present in Platonic dialogues, although these too can be reduced (good word that, reduced) to conceptual tokens. In that process, however, something is lost, whereas, by contrast, in cooking for instance, reduction can often concentrate essences and something then appears to have been added. The very virtue of philosophy, precision, is also its limitation. It cannot render the whole. π is not a round number, you might say. But the poetic, the mystical also has its limitations. It produces a total knowledge, an absolute certainty that matters, unlike logical compulsion, which may not really persuade. But it lacks precision. Ah, total integration… Maybe in heaven.

More Magical Verse

She is the ease of whoever
   burns for her,
      transferring him from the levels
         of mortal man
out of jealousy, lest her sparkle
   be stained
      by the turbidity
         in the pools.
[Ibn el-Arabi, The Interpreter of Desires, 38-39]

A woman slender, lissome, of fresh beauty,
   for whom the heart of the sad lover is longing.
The assembly is filled with fragrance at the mention of her,
   and every tongue utters her name.
[Ibid, 117]

Translations from by Arabic by William C. Chittick. I’ll say more in another post.