Religious Perspectives

 

What has religion to say about poetry? Obliquely, a good deal. Poets need a vision of the world, and for long centuries the Christian church provided that, not only in doctrine but in revelation, experience and inspiration. A poet's religious affiliations were not merely reflected in the semantic core of his work, but conditioned the vocabulary, the structure of his arguments and patterning of his Christian outlook.

God for adherents is an experienced reality. The reality is personal and not repeatable for others' benefit. Nonetheless, despite recent attempts, it is not possible to prove traditional Christian beliefs are true or even probable. Nor, equally, is it possible to show them to be false or logically incoherent. Theism is rational within a given conceptual system, such systems being judged on a) their match with the evidence, b) their explanatory or transforming power, c) their consistency, coherence, simplicity, elegance and fertility, d) the rules which arise out of the system, not a priori. Men become committed to religions which involve their whole personalities, and they will not readily them give up. Differences are to be expected if we accept that God reveals himself through men of different cultural practices and intellectual casts of thought.

Religion is not reducible to social function, though many seek faith because ultimately men are failures. Without sin, suffering and evil there cannot be free will. Guilt is our response to evil. We do not deduce evil from standards, but as a violation of the taboos which make possible our cultural and social life. Religion becomes meaningful in acts: ritual, prayer, mystical encounters. Meaningful is not equivalent to the empirical, to universally accessible acts of perceiving. The Eucharist is understandable to believers within the framework of an entire system of ritual symbols. Moral content is given in the very act of perceiving and understanding. As Plotinus remarked, "God is only a name if spoken about without true virtue".

The language of myth is closed and self-supporting, not easily translated or transferred from one culture to another. Meaning is formed by acts of communication, and has to be recreated in those acts time and again. It is always possible to reduce religion to anthropology or social science, but such explanations give no abiding satisfaction.

Religion is the sacralization of identity. Whereas identity in animals is rank or territory, in humans it is more often symbolic: in terms of class, sex, attitudes to money, beauty, equality. Sacralization is an emotionally welding of an identity which, sudden or not, consolidates and stabilizes that identity: certain patterns of symbolic systems acquire a taken-for-granted, eternal quality. This identity is also crucial to societies: alienation and marginalization occur if changes in society stake out identities before the originals adapt sufficiently.

Depth psychology is therefore neither a religion, nor a humanism, but a non-agnostic psychology. In religion Gods are taken literally, and approached with ritual, prayer, sacrifice and worship. In Humanism man is the measure of all things and Gods do not exist. In depth psychology the Gods are real but exist only as myths. Recall that it was Mersenne who led the campaign against paganism (as against demonism, astrology, alchemy, allegorical painting and poetry) which the Enlightenment continued in Christianity's monotheism of consciousness. Multiple personalities were seen as possession, nowadays schizophrenia. Equally suspect today is eloquence, especially words whose power over us cannot be curtailed by philosophy and semantics. Yet in many ways the individual, the person who acts rationally and individually, is himself a mythical creation. The accompanying self-determination or free will, the central preoccupation of western theology, is likewise a product of the monotheist viewpoint. Though the later Greeks offered prayers to many gods (while imagining monotheistically the One), the moral codes of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are literalizations of the Hero image, the Ego, the subdivision into light and dark, producing a moralizing that infects psychology even now.

Poetry is made from words, but it also expresses an outlook or vision. The world through art appears sharper, fuller, more intense, real and significant. So it does to the religious believer. Poetry makes experiences out of events, and such experiences are also real to believers. Equally obvious are parallels of a less attractive kind: the single vision of current schools of literary theory, the zealotry of poetry movements, and intolerance, not to say, paranoia with which each group regards the literary productions of others. All human consciousness can be regarded as mythic, but myths vary widely in their compass and persuasiveness.

An extended article can be found on TextEtc.

 

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Religious Perspectives

 

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