I would like to begin by thanking the four esteemed gentlemen for the time and attention they’ve given. I would prefer to take my lashings and treasure them as trophies, but alas I am contractually obligated to respond. But rest assured that the following remarks will be fully recanted in my retractions.
Any attempt to undertake the herculean task of defining poetry will inevitably be met with the offer of an overlooked property, as with Professor Esolen, story, and Mr. Wilkins, atemporality. Such is the difficulty of definition or, more broadly, the wildness of the world. Identifying the necessary and sufficient properties of nature is itself a fine gloss of the history of philosophy and theology.
While I will not enter into a Thomistic discussion, I will offer some general comments on the nature of these attributes in relation to poetry.
In Defense of Stories
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts…they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Huntsman, What Quarry?
If I may crassly gloss Professor Esolen’s response as “you have forgotten the story, my boy,” I will of course accept. What I am not as quick to accept is that “narrative” is an essential feature of poetry per se rather than, as I am inclined to think, a transcendental property of being.[1] This is therefore not a disagreement but a relocation of the property to a more fundamental stratum of reality. Nothing can exist unless it is an object (character), progresses through time with a purpose (plot), in a certain place (setting).
And it is not an unreasonable account to say that the loss of story in modernity or postmodernity (or whatever category the thinkers have carved out for us) is the root cause of the rot. If we have lost truth, goodness, and beauty, perhaps it is because we have lost the Story.
Jean-François Lyotard famously argued that the distinguishing feature of postmodernity is the “incredulity towards metanarratives.” And he spoke better than he knew, because typically in philosophical discussions the “narrative” in “metanarrative” is used analogically to mean something like a unifying account but not a story in the common sense of the term.
Much has been made in the last few years of the loss of meaning, which I believe, even in the construction of that clause, participates in the problem: “meaning” is simply “story” in scientific/philosophical idiom, a reduction. It feels adolescent and beneath the scholarly robe to write seriously about the loss of story when “meaning” is there for the milking.“‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory).
Not only are the first poems narratival, but the first philosophical reflections, Plato’s Dialogues, were stories; the first philosophical and theological discussion of the problem of evil, the Book of Job, was a story, and the first theological reflections were stories. That is, it seems that stories are not only a necessary feature of poems but of everything. And modernity and the crisis of meaning is coincident with the de-storifying of philosophical discourse. Open any philosophical journal or text and you are offered a feast of saltines and sawdust. Much of modern literature replaces the traditional narrative architecture of character, action, dialogue and plot with thinly-veiled philosophies hidden under a Halloween bedsheet of interior monologue.[2]
Bible, Poetry and Stories
To Professor Esolen’s point, the first poem arrives with the introduction of the dramatis personae: man and woman. And the connection between stories and poetry in the Bible is a consistent pattern. John Sailhamer, in The Meaning of the Pentateuch: Revelation, Composition and Interpretation, notes that poems occupy critical seams of the Pentateuch. And the pattern is that the poems follow, summarize, and theologically reflect on the previous story. There is something peculiar about poetry that makes it the correct capstone of and participation in the story. In the idiom of this series, poetry is a story compressed.[3]
Sage, Leave Your Contemplation
Mr. Brians worries I have fallen headlong into a hole, or at least am peeking over the edge. I do not take offense. While I believe and will forthwith defend the steadiness of my step, I have indeed witnessed many men tumble into Mr. Brians’ hole. And before I tender my defense I would like to describe some of the furnishings of this hollow I have observed in my peeking.
Discussions of meaning, the meaning of x, presuppose that beneath or through the surface of a thing is its meaning. That is, the surface of a stone or snow or life itself does not immediately disclose its meaning or purpose. And most men intuit that some additional action or contemplation is required for the stone to reveal itself. This structure, then, assumes that there is some degree of difference between the surface and the depth, the showing and the nature, the form and the content.
Mr. Brians warns against one of the two extremes that these discussions can take. That is, the distance between surface and depth, particular and meaning, can be stretched to a breaking point. And this has been a perennial trap. Plato’s Forms produce a conception of the body as a prison house of the soul. Descartes’ system is predicated upon an interior conscious ego that avoids all the vicissitudes of the particular. Kant’s formless noumena (depth/reality/substance) are rendered intelligible not by their nature but by the categories through which the human mind stuffs the substance.
The reaction then swings the pendulum to the opposite extreme with the phenomenologists. They rightly recognize that the phenomena, the surface of stuff, not only provide intelligible structures but are indeed a central explanatory feature of existence. But their extremity is in the systematic ignoring of ontology, the belief that meaning can survive on the surface and requires no depth.
This extremity was completed in the postmodern philosophers who retained the focus on particularly but rendered the surface of reality not as a harmonious latticework but various, violent, and often contradictory showings—a cacophony of powers.
Substanciness
I both see and share Mr. Brians’ concern. It is a fault in Protestant evangelical preaching. Every sermon is about the same thing (“Jesus is your personal Savior”) whose application is the same thing (“Read your Bible” or “Pray”). The Bible is wildly particular, and the meaning of every text is found in and through the particularity, not in spite of it.
This is also the central problem in Jordan Peterson’s hermeneutics. On the positive side, he understands that there’s more to the text than the surface. On the negative, he misunderstands that the depth is through the surface, in the surface. Borrowing heavily from Carl Jung, Peterson has one symbolic story into which every narrative must fit; x always means y. This hermeneutic then becomes technically unfalsifiable as any additional particular has a pre-rendered meaning.[4]
The Trinitarian Balance
But we must keep in mind that the sword cuts both ways. The opposite of disregarding the surface for depth is disregarding the depth for the surface, a postmodern play of the epiphenomenon. And, as always, the answer is in Trinitarian theology.
God as Father, Son, and Spirit is at once both surface and depth. The “showing” of God on the surfaces of revelation and creation is both a true showing/revelation and at the same time an icon of the surfeit, the depth, the permutations of the divine life in God.
The Father is Father but, as a referential term always, even at the origin, refers to the Son. The Trinitarian error on one side would be the separation of the divine persons such that their relations are external and non-essential. On the other side it would be to collapse the persons into modes of one fundamental substance.
The perichoretic life of God is always already surface and depth. The depth of God is always accessed in and through the surface because the depth is further fractals and permutations of the surface. God’s Trinitarian surface is also its Trinitarian depth, interpenetrated but not identical. The Father is not the Son, but he abides in the Son. The Spirit is not the Father but he is internally shared by the Father and the Son.
Many of these themes were the preoccupations of David Bentley Hart in his great work The Beauty of the Infinite. And I could easily duplicate half the book. But I will restrain myself to a few sentences:
Being is not simply a bare category indifferently embracing an endless plurality of arbitrary instances; it is the fullness and unity of all determinacy in the Trinity, unfolding its light in the unity and diversity of beings, composing endless and endlessly coinherent variations on an infinite theme (not, that is, a theme to which the whole is somehow reducible, an “essential” meaning, but a theme in the musical sense, which is itself in its display of supplementation, variation, and difference).[5]
Practical Poetic Justice
Let us leave our contemplation and close with some practical tips on how to discern if we have indeed fallen headlong into Mr. Brians’ hole. There are two considerations that I find most practical as a guide to metaphysical mishap:
- How well does the meaning account for the particulars? In this case poetry, but it could easily be applied to a text of Scripture or a person. Are the particulars able to be more fully what they are by the purported meaning or do they have to shave down their edges? Does the meaning provide a home, an effervescence to the particulars, or are they squished and unseemly?
- For arts of making (poiesis), if the consumption and attending is largely intellectual and not practical (i.e., in the recitation, performance, and participation), you are probably nearing the edge: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good,” as Aristotle says. And the poetic art is not finally or only found in internal and private contemplation. This also means that intellection is atrophied because when the end of a good is not exercised, the full nature of the object is not disclosed. A song must be sung to be understood, no matter the music-theoretical depth.
Whether I have properly attended to these matters, I will let the fine gentlemen be the judge.
John Higgins is the producer of The Bible is Art website and YouTube channel.
NOTES
[1] A “transcendental” property of being is a property of a being that is necessary insofar as it exists. Traditionally, there are three: truth, beauty, and goodness.
[2] Perhaps the narrative of the Fall of man can be read as the desire to avoid the narrative, to hop on the wings of the great eagles and fly straight to Mount Doom. Jesus’s three temptations would be early returns. Interestingly, the three early temptations occur again at the end, after his ministry, or, perhaps, we could say after his narrative. Or more precisely, the loss of meaning/narrative is an icon of the Fall.
[3] This pattern also seems to be the pattern of history. Grand poems arise in the seams of culture: Iliad/Odyssey, Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost. They gather up the wisdom of an age for preservation and contemplation.
[4] As a sidenote, I think the vast majority of scholarship would benefit from being shoved in Peterson’s direction; I just wouldn’t shove them off the cliff.
[5] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 144.