Review of Faith, Hope, and Poetry, Part I: Imagination, Old English Poetry, and Malcolm Guite

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C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Dream of the Rood, Evangelical, Faith, Hope, Imagination, Malcolm Guite, Old English literature, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Theology

In prior posts, I have raised the issue of what I termed “the scandal of the Evangelical imagination,” and have drawn attention to one of the figures who is helping to redress this, poet/priest/singer/songwriter/scholar etc Malcolm Guite. For Christmas, I received a copy of Guite’s book, Faith, Hope, and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination, and had all kinds of good intentions of finishing the book and then reviewing it on this blog. My current problem is that I am only a third or so through the book, and already have probably enough inspiration to fill a number of blog posts, so I have decided to post my review of the book in a few parts. Here begins part I:

There is a point where one just can’t take it anymore. By “it” I mean the vague, fuzzy, warm sentimental idealism that one often encounters in my profession, the study of English literature – although to be fair it is more often the rhetors rather than the scholars who play it up. Poetry is inspirational!!!; isn’t creativity wonderful?; imagination is the key to [insert goal here]! And when one encounters this one too many times, one finally snaps.  Isn’t imagination wonderful? No, but I’ll say yes if it makes people like you  go away. Isn’t freedom to be creative great? No, because what you mean by freedom has I think very little to do with being creative. Doesn’t poetry just open your eyes to the wonder of the world?  Yes, yes it does, and also the tragedy, horror and misery of it too. Before one knows it, one feels deep kinship with Swift, seeks solace in Ecclesiastes, and knows what Flannery O’Conner meant when, upon being asked if universities don’t stifle aspiring writers, replied that they rather don’t stifle enough of them.

I include this as prefatory material because it will help give some measure of what exactly I mean when I say that Malcolm Guite’s book is helping to revive in me some understanding of wonder – of terms such as creativity, imagination – that were long ago shattered by encounters with vapours disguised as these things. The main title of the book covers three topics – faith, hope, and poetry – and while I’m good with faith, and good with poetry, hope, as some of you will know, is for me one of the hardest sayings of the gospel. Of course, the hardness of a thing should never keep us from enacting it in faith, but I will say that Guite’s remarkable book is opening my eyes a little to the thing I am trying to faithfully enact. It takes something special to be hopeful without allowing hope to become the kind of optimism that papers over things, and it also takes daring because being hope means imagining a vision beyond the alleged data – a vision that the reality police often do not like. In any case, Guite models both, and if I am a poor student, I am at least a willing student.

So, what is so special about this book? First off, I must say that not everyone picking it up should expect the same experience I have had. It will, for instance, be particularly annoying to those who do not believe in an ongoing conversation of great ideas from the beginning of writing till now. It will be annoying to those who believe that scholars shouldn’t make overarching claims about literary history, and should stick to their own little fields and let others stick to theirs – scholars such as I am in my worse moments. In fact, in approaching the poems he considers from both an academic and creative writing perspective, Guite takes the risk of being charged by one side of sacrificing scholarly nicety for creativity, and on the other side of dredging up old boring poetry that has nothing to say to the modern creative writer.

What such critics might find most annoying, though, is what I find most attractive. In the hands of Guite, old poetry is revivified such that it can speak into the milieux of contemporary poetry, theology, theory, and politics. However, this is not an only alleged dialogue where old works simply become puppetry to say what modern people want them to say – Guite lets the alterity of the poetry push back. The results of this are messy; the book is neither a neat scholarly work in the traditional sense, nor simply a modern “how-to” book for creative writers. Rather, what I sense most behind the book is ongoing dialogue – Guite wrestling with the poems he encounters in an arena where the strictest rules apply and the judge is Christ – no easy outs or deceptive maneuvers here. In certain ways it reminds me of what might have happened had Boethius encountered not Philosophy but the best of the muses rather than the harlots he dismisses at the beginning of the Consolatio.

I will be saying more, but for the current post I will focus on one particular section that impressed me: Guite’s treatment of Old English poetry. As an Anglo-Saxonist, I will admit that one of the most attractive features of this book even before I bought it was its inclusion of a chapter on “The Dream of the Rood.” Very often even Christians talking about faith and imagination are under the impression that nothing much happened before the Romantic period of literature, which has as much as anything else to do with the fact that such Christians who want to engage imagination are often Evangelicals, and Evangelicalism is birthed from the same historical moment as Romanticism – how can they remember what happened before they were born? In any case, as a scholar of medieval and early modern literature, I am often frustrated by those who ignore these literatures when they look to define what creativity and imagination are, and part of the attraction of Guite’s book was the front and centre inclusion of “The Dream of the Rood” – an inclusion no doubt inspired in part by his friend, Seamus Heaney.

Beyond its inclusion, however, the real test for me was whether he in fact “got” the poem – not that I am of course the ultimate judge of this, but as an Old English scholar I am qualified to gauge this chapter in a way that I am probably not for any of the other chapters, with perhaps the exception of the one on John Donne, which I have not yet read. In any case, I was well aware that it would be very easy for a theologian to get his hands on a translation and use the poem as a superficial prop for a more broad theological claim. But this is not what Guite does. To his credit, he includes passages from the original Old English, and discusses minute nuances and shades of words. Of course, not every Old English scholar will agree with his interpretation (if they did, it would have to be a bland interpretation indeed), but I was personally intrigued by what he does with the poem, particularly with relation to the much vexed issue of Christianity and paganism in Old English literature. Though the best critics are careful to hedge their claims and carefully navigate the polyphony of the Old English texts, critics have in the past often found themselves divided into two camps: the exegetically oriented critics situating the literature with regard to the Christianity that informed the context in which the manuscripts were preserved; and oral-formulaic critics more interested in the poetry’s alleged sedimentary paganism preserved from the pre-Christian times when the poetry was passed down orally.

In any case, Guite reads the poem against the backdrop of C. S. Lewis’s idea that pagan myths, rather than mere falsehoods to be utterly destroyed, could gesture, powerfully yet also imperfectly, toward the truth of Christianity. Guite’s articulation of this set something off in my head, and I realized that this is the way I (likewise influenced by this idea in Lewis) tend implicitly to read Old English poetry – though an exegetically inclined critic, I knew, thanks to Lewis, that the inclusion of a pagan idea in a poem must not always be damnable syncretism or subversive revolt, but could in fact be the baptism of that idea, wherein that idea found its perfection in Christianity. Of course, in reality, this is neither Lewis’s nor Guite’s idea but a very longstanding one in Christian tradition. Guite’s relation of Lewis’s conversion, though, via the circuitous but probably also necessary avenue of Norse myth, is helpful in communicating the “The Dream of the Rood” to modern Christians, who can see that the “tree” of the cross is not only a simultaneous appeal to and displacement of Yggdrasil in Old Norse myth, but is also an appeal to and displacement of the enduring value conveyed in the myth and appreciated by (comparatively) modern people such as Lewis.

Of course, what Guite is saying here – that there is something in Old English alliterative verse that modern poets can learn from and use – is not an altogether new idea, given poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney, and Earle Birney, as well as the poetry of J. R. R. Tolkien’s deeply Anglo-Saxon imagination. Moreover, there are, I imagine and hope, more than a few lovers or scholars of Old English verse who have tried their hand at it and found the results not entirely unpleasing and anachronistic. Where Guite’s genius lies, though, is in explicitly articulating beyond modern aesthetics why not only poets, but in fact theologians, Christians, and other moderns lamenting the modern/postmodern crisis in fact need to be revivified by engagement with poems like “The Dream of the Rood.”

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Christians and Textual Politics: An Only Half Flippant Response Regarding Donne, Milton, and Blake.

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Blake, Catholic, Christian, Harold Bloom, Imagination, John Donne, john milton, Milton, Paradise Lost

The answer to this seems to me fairly simple, and has to do with reception history. Though I know less of Blake than the other two authors, it does seem clear that Blake’s Milton is much different from the Milton of the modern imagination. For Blake, I think, Milton was all about freedom and a very romantic looking freedom at that; he was the champion of censored books and the “one just man” who stood out from the oppressive crowd. I am not sure how seriously to take his claim that “Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it” – I would have to do more research about what Blake thought of Milton’s God – but even that claim associates Milton with a romantic appropriation of Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost.

Fast forward to the twenty first century. Milton is now a misogynist who made his daughters slavishly read him poetry. He’s kind of full of himself in a way that particularly irks the postmodern imagination. And other people we hate, such as C. S. Lewis, championed him, which means he must be old fashioned and outdated. I think probably many students now who first encounter Milton are put off by what strikes them as all the worst excesses of modernity – a seemingly brash confidence in reason and the human will, and an insistence on natural order and knowledge. Such students in some ways agree with Blake – the devil is the heroic figure – but they treat this as an accident and lump Milton in with his God, both of whom they hate. Oh, yeah, and just so we don’t forget Harold Bloom, we must remember that most of the Western canon is grounded in the subversion of the ominous Miltonic father figure.

But people still like Blake. And it would be a shame to associate someone as brilliantly rebellious as Blake with a crusty old blind Milton. So, if we are to pair him with another poet, it will have to be someone we consider subtle and subversive. Donne is the prime candidate. Where Lewis defended Milton and was not particularly fond of Donne, Donne had as his champion none other than T. S. Eliot. A poetry that can influence the author of “The Wasteland” must be more attuned to the subversion and lament of postmodernity, and therefore onboard with Blake, who was (we know) of the postmodern party without knowing it. And to be fair, there is a difference between the styles of Donne and Milton. Milton writes epic poetry, and if we think of his precedents, we will see that though they involved great things, they were external – not angsty and inward turning in the way we would like. There is a difference between the rage of Achilles and the Ethan Hawke Hamlet. Contra the Psychomachic tradition, battles nowadays are not the way to talk about psychological subtlety. Donne on the other hand is metaphysical, something of a Christian Neoplatonist reaching upward toward the Forms. If Milton is interested in the stuff of hard history in the tradition of Homer and Vergil, Donne, perhaps in the tradition of the Plato who turfed Homeric poetry out of the Republic, is in fact interested in the minute details and sophisticated nuances that will be trampled in a battlefield scene. Donne is our man. And so we must pair him with Blake.

But what, you might wonder, is this post doing on a Christian blog? What it is doing is suggesting that, if we are indeed to learn as modern Christians to have a Christian imagination, we will have to learn to pay attention to these debates, as well as the sources of these debates, amidst the Lewises and the Donnes and the Miltons and the Eliots. I was a while back reading a book on the Christian imagination that made a very sad statement. The statement was about the experience of Christians attending university, and as an example, it suggested that a Catholic student might gravitate to Christian literature such as Paradise Lost. Now I know what this person meant, and I am not in the least saying that Catholics shouldn’t and don’t enjoy Milton – I happen to know a number who do, and I personally still appreciate Milton even though I am increasingly attracted to medieval Catholicism, particularly the Ecclesiology that Milton lacks. But what made me sad about the statement is that it missed the details. Anyone who knows even the smallest bit about either Milton or the Catholic church knows that both are complicated and fierce and noble – we can expect metaphysical fireworks if we put them in the same room, some pleasant and some not so pleasant – I expect there might be concordance on free will, and frustration regarding things like the Miltonic hermits blown about between heaven and the moon, or the Catholic propensity to have fun while doing theology (e. g. Chesterton and St. Francis). All this we would get and more – but suddenly we have decided that terms like Catholic and Milton and Paradise Lost can all be tossed in the same basket – and we are liable to throw Thomas Kinkade in there for good measure. I guess what I am getting at is that, if we want a Christian imagination, we will not get it by campaigning churches to do more for artists or try to be more open to imagination etc. No, it will be when the art we talk about is not blandly and generically Christian, but something else – something flourishing and growing and being transformed in sometimes pleasant and sometimes painful ways. This will only happen when artists care more about their subject and their craft than the production of Christian art, and when this care comes directly out of the charity that is the heart of Christian life. We will know the Christian imagination is flourishing when we stop talking about Christian art in abstractio, and begin to go to aesthetic bat, so to speak, for things we love rather than things we think will make us aesthetically relevant.

He’s Got Wisdom in His Soul, He’s Got Whiskey in the Jar: Appreciating Malcolm Guite

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Arts, C.S. Lewis, Gawain, Green Knight, Green Man, Imagination, Literature, Malcolm Guite, Music, Poetry, Rich Mullins, spirituality

In my second last post, I talked about the problem of imagination in Evangelical circles; in this post I want to talk about someone who is doing something to redress it, a modern English poet, priest, and scholar by the name of Malcolm Guite. Guite was brought to my attention about a month ago at a concert by Canadian singer/songwriter Steve Bell. At some point after the concert, I looked him up, and was duly impressed with what I found. He dares to write sonnets in the 21st Century. He has written a book on theology and imagination (which I need to order), and includes a discussion of Old English poetry. His work that I have thus far become most familiar with is his CD, “The Green Man.”

This CD has a lot of good things going for it, both from a literary and theological point of view. The title track is – at least I would argue – an oblique reference to Gawain’s green night interpreted as a synthesis of Christ and the personified fertility of nature (a little like Chesterton’s Thursday). Like Gawain’s Green Knight, this “green man” cannot be beaten no matter how careless his human foes are; the chorus states “If you cut me down, I’ll spring back green again.”

Guite’s reference to the green knight is typical of the rest of the album. He inhabits Biblical and literary phrases but  puts his own slight enough twist on them to ensure they don’t become preachy or cliched. Though he lacks the cultural and politico-religious fabric from which poets such as Donne and Herbert wove their work, he nonetheless attempts to follow in their footsteps. “New TV” is a brilliant satire of modern society (no matter where you plug it in, you won’t get any love from your new TV), while “Our Lady of the Highway” takes Marian devotion to Highway 61 – and includes a good chunk of quotation from the Magnificat. “Open Door” is reminiscent of something Rich Mullins might have written, an infinite riff on the Biblical image of Christ as the door to heaven. “Angels Unawares” discovers grace in the midst of humble earthy romance, and “Texas Farewell” includes some treats for C. S. Lewis fans (I’ll let you discover those for yourself).

It is encouraging to me that people such as Malcolm Guite manage to exist somehow in the modern world; it is encouraging to see someone daring to imagine things outside of both secular narrowness and its cloned Evangelical narrowness so often found in Christian singer/songwriters.  It is encouraging to find someone who measures time by liturgical seasons and sings about nature, whiskey, and God like some kind of Johnny Cash turned celtic. And it is in the hope of encouraging others that I  share his website.

The Scandal of the Evangelical Imagination

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Bible, Christ, Christian, Evangelical, God, Holy Spirit, Imagination, John Donne, Milton, Scandal, Tradition

One of the things that has most annoyed me about Evangelical culture is the lack of imagination. I think part of this has to do with the fact that we don’t know how to read the Bible in an imaginative way. Please don’t think that in making this criticism I am in any way suggesting that we read the Bible as merely an inspiring piece of art over against the church’s claim that it is deadly serious in speaking the truth about matters of eternal life and death.  It is certainly the latter.  But when I think of the Christian authors who have most inspired me, their imaginative treatment of the Bible, though often appreciated by Evangelicals, is something I would argue the latter do not have the capacity to replicate.

What I mean by this is that poets like Donne and Herbert, or the Old English poets, or Milton, seem to tap into what I would call a Biblical/Christian atmosphere. If you try to pin down by Biblical chapter and verse the metaphysical conceits of Donne or the extrapolation of the Genesis story by Milton, you can’t; much as most Christians believe in something like Milton’s conception of the fall, the devil, etc., there is no scripture they can point to to back it up in the strictest literal sense.  The serpent of Eden is only identified as the devil by later Christian (and possibly Jewish) tradition. And if we pared Donne’s poems down to only things that could be found in the Biblical text as understood by a modern Evangelical, they would be impoverished indeed. Though we recognize these texts as deeply Christian, they are not “biblical” in the modern Evangelical sense, but rather their roots are in a whole imaginative superstructure built via tradition atop the basis of Scripture. Like the best of Cathedrals, it took centuries of medieval trial and error (and councils) to build, and though we can’t always see immediately how the lines trace back to God’s word, our loss of vision does not make the superstructure less scriptural.  If you put yeast in grape juice and let it brew, it will become something different and better, even though it is no less the original grape juice with which you started.  I suggest that Christian tradition, in its best instances, is exactly this – scripture left to ferment in the wineskin of the church inspired by the active agent of the Holy Spirit. Yes, if a fly gets in the wine it can become vinegar, and even so can heterodoxy and sin produce sour batches of tradition – Christ on the cross is made to taste vinegar. But when it goes right, it goes very right, and produces exactly the sort of the thing that Miltons and Donnes and Herberts of the past could draw on, and exactly the sort of thing Evangelical churches have tossed out as “superfluous additions” to Scripture understood in the narrowest sense possible.

Lest my critique here should sound like a typical romantic idolatry of imagination, I do want to clarify that the imagination and imaginative works are not pretty toys we can bring out at parties, and then put away when we are done with them. No, if we dare imagine, we will be captured – whether by something good, or by something bad, for the imagination can engage in and promote both, as can tradition. But I feel like Evangelicals, seeing the negative side of tradition (that is, the imagination of the church), have gotten rid of it entirely.  It is a little like reading Proverbs and presuming that because there are some figures of temptresses, we should eschew women altogether – thereby missing the central figure of the text, Woman Wisdom.

But what can be done, and who can do it? I will post more concerning this in some following posts, but one thing I do think necessary is for Evangelicals to quit pretending that faith is a respectable and reasonable (by 21st C standards) business. I have seen many Christians attempting to defend Christianity by betraying their sisters and brothers in Christ from the past – and betrayal of Christ’s body is the betrayal of Christ. Yes, they will say, those awkward, ignorant, backward Christians in the past were entirely stupid, but we Evangelicals are eminently reasonable and easy to get along with – we will make good neighbors in your middle class suburbs (but don’t expect us to cross the street for you if you get beat up). Please notice I am not here saying that modern Christians should not own up to the sins and errors committed by Christians in the past – the place to do this is on our knees weeping before God in repentance.  What I am saying is that more often than not, our apologetics become a means of dissociating ourselves from those “weirdos over there, a couple of centuries back.” Christ bears the sins of the church on the cross, and as part of his body these sins are ours to bear as well. One of the best places to learn to love our enemies is the church, for on more than many occasions we will find ourselves called to love those we pray with and hate.

I suppose what I am getting at here is that addressing the scandal of the Evangelical imagination will be more than a mere shift in “worldview” or an attempt to be sensitive and emergent. What it will require is the ability to stand beside the historical church and say that we are one with them, for better or for worse, in poverty or plenty, in sickness or in health. To do this is to be the bride of Christ, and it makes sense that in neglecting this commitment we have lost the rich and fruitful imagination – the imagination of the Song of Songs – that was once part of our marriage.