To download the pre-circulated papers in advance, please click here.
Anne M. Carpenter (Theology, University of St. Louis)
“Time and Tapestry: Charles Péguy and Place Beyond Memory” – This essay makes a study of the French writer Charles Péguy’s “tapestries,” poems dedicated to the saints Genevieve and Joan of Arc. These poems are ineluctably temporal, set to successive days, and ineluctably geographical, woven into the tapestry of places with which the saints are associated. But, the essay argues, it is at the crossway of “place” and “saint” that the tapestries fragment. This is a deliberate choice on Péguy’s part. What it means is, in a sense, the central question at hand: in what ways do Péguy’s artistic decisions suggest the limits of the poetic voice, and what about these limits is meaningful for theology, and for doing a theology that adapts poetic insights and strategies? So the essay spends its time reflecting on the deliberated “failure” of Péguy’s tapestries, and it argues that this failure burdens theology with the necessity of adaptation at all, or in the first place, giving to the theologian the responsibility of transposing poetry rather than borrowing it directly or simply. This failure is Péguy’s “wound” of grace.
Ian Cooper (School of Cultures and Languages, University of Kent, U.K.)
“Poetry, Sacrament, and the Rhythm of Modernity” – Taking its cue from David Jones’s essay ‘Art and Sacrament’, this paper will explore Jones’s attempt, notably in The Anathemata, to fulfil in form something which Jacques Maritain had regarded as a need of modern existence: the need to inhabit a subjective ordering of experience without succumbing to the subject’s demand for abstract closure. Maritain’s identification of this possibility with recognition of a ‘primary rhythm’ underlying the unity of the subject will be linked to Heidegger’s preoccupations in The Origin of the Work of Art, and Jones will be seen implicitly to criticize Heidegger’s own response to the same set of questions. Jones’s theological reflections on sign and memory, and his poetic practice, have a clear predecessor in Hölderlin: ‘Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos’.
Anthony Domestico (SUNY – Purchase)
“T. S. Eliot’s Grammar of Unknowing” – Throughout his career, T. S. Eliot was interested in apophaticism: the notion that, in Denys Turner’s words, “all talk about God is tainted with ultimate failure.” This essay considers the different means by which Eliot explored these ultimate failures. More specifically, it considers how Eliot’s shifting grammar and syntax—clipped in The Waste Land; stuttering in “Ash-Wednesday”; endlessly qualifying in Four Quartets—offer different models for how unsaying might lead to a deeper, mystical kind of unknowing.
Luke Fischer (Philosophy, University of Sydney)
“Hölderlin’s Mythopoetry of History: The Eschatological Reconciliation of Nature and Spirit” – Hölderlin is a poet-philosopher of the highest caliber. He has not only come to be rightly appreciated as one of the great German poets, following the research of Dieter Henrich, Christoph Jamme, Frederick Beiser, Violetta Waibel and others we have also come to learn that the development of German idealism after Fichte could not have been the same without Hölderlin, especially his influence on Hegel, Schelling and the emergence of Absolute Idealism. However, his importance extends beyond that of influence. While the philosophical and theological positions of Hölderlin, Schelling and Hegel emerged through mutual dialogue, Hölderlin’s philosophical outlook is unique. Moreover, what is most significant is the manner in which Hölderlin’s philosophical ideas are sublated and transfigured within his poetry. In the present essay I especially want to illustrate how Hölderlin’s mature elegies and hymns (from the early 1800s) embody a mythopoetry of history or Geschichtsmythopoesie, which occupies the same place as a philosophy of history or Geschichtsphilosophie in Schelling and Hegel.
While there are close connections between the evolving philosophical and theological positions of Hölderlin, Hegel and Schelling, from their time together at the Tübingen Seminary to the early 1800s, there are great differences between Hölderlin’s Geschichtsmythopoesie and the later philosophy of Hegel. Although the mature Hegel – like Hölderlin and Schelling – regards art as a form in which the oppositions between spirit and nature, subject and object, are resolved, art is an inferior form of Absolute Spirit that has been twice superseded. The art-religion or art-mythology of ancient Greece is superseded by the pictorial thinking of the Christian religion, which is in turn superseded by the conceptual grasp of Absolute Spirit in Hegelian philosophy.
Kevin Hart (Religious Studies and Romance Studies, University of Virginia)
Spiritual and Spiritualizing Exercises: T.S. Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday” — “Ash-Wednesday” is a poem that performs a genetic phenomenology, especially by way of realizing different sedimentations. On the one hand, it generates a complicated literary sphere of past meaning (Andrews, Cavalcanti, Dante, even — if we study its drafts — the Two Black Crows); while, on the other hand, it proposes a familiar spiritual journey from alienation through purgation by way of metanoia which leads to partial healing in and through the mediation of Our Lady and, more, a mysterious woman who, at times, becomes indistinguishable from the Virgin and embodies the possibility of redeeming misdirected sexual desire. The literary sphere orients the spiritual sphere and vice versa: and this yields the peculiar, unsettling dynamic of the poem. If the poem is illuminated by genetic phenomenology, it is also illuminated by generative phenomenology; for it is about the recognition and overcoming of an alien world (“our exile”) and the first steps towards what will be hoped to be a home world. The speaker inherits from both worlds, from death as well as life, but the “home world” that is prized is given in and through the mysterious woman, then the Church, and remains ahead of the speaker. Only when one grasps the phenomenological structure of the poem can one be in a position to evaluate what has troubled many of its readers, namely its appropriation of liturgical language.
Thomas Pfau (English Literature and Duke Divinity School, Duke University)
“Paul Claudel’s ‘sensibilization’ of Thomism in Connaissance de l’Est” – Paul Claudel’s early prose poems, Connaissance de l’Est, offer an intriguing glimpse at his understanding of how poetry and theology are entwined in his oeuvre. Written between 1896 and 1903, these short texts exemplify a Thomist theo-poetics of Creation that approaches the theological dimensions of being by an exacting phenomenological description of how the sensible world gives itself to us in experience, with the latter conceived not in terms of abstract (Lockean or Kantian) “sensation” but as concrete and transformative “delight” (dilectio). What prevents the systolic-diastolic shuttling back and forth between sensible and intellective modes from incoherence is a poetics of analogia that undergirds each of Claudel’s prose poems as a whole. It is by such a metaphysics of analogy that Claudel’s writing is able to balance the formal multiplicity and sensible richness of nature’s effects on the perceiving subject and the joint participation of all natural beings in a single and transcendent First Cause.
Łukasz Tischner (Polish Literature, Jagiellonian University, Krakow)
“Religion and Compassion. The Poetry of Józef Wittlin and Czesław Miłosz” – The essay considers the poetry of Józef Wittlin and Czesław Miłosz, noting the religious potential of compassion as a response to the scandal of evil. Józef Wittlin, a soldier in World War I and later a victim of anti-Semitic attacks, was particularly sensitive to manifestations of cruelty in the world. Likewise, fifteen years younger than Wittlin, Miłosz, who experienced first-hand the oppression of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. Although their poetry is very different they both can be named “sick souls”, as William James defined religious people who confront their faith with evidences of pain, loss, evil and suffering in the world. The concept of compassion (in case of Wittlin and Miłosz originally borrowed from Schopenhauer) seems to be rather secular, but their poetry suggest that it gets theological overtones and becomes similar to agape, as understood by Charles Taylor in his reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan (A Secular Age). The paper would mainly refer to the two poems by Wittlin (Pain of a Tree, The Lament of the Sacrificial Ram,) and the two poems of Miłosz (Father Severinus, The Second Space).
Bernadette Waterman Ward (English Literature, University of Dallas)
“Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Theology of Grace” – The poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins enact, and his spiritual writings describe, a startlingly original theology of divine grace. Hopkins draws upon Scotist theories of the nature of the inmost self, the haecceitas, which Hopkins called “Pitch.” Hopkins offers his readers a “new and higher pitch,” as the poet describes when he explains the action of God upon the soul when infusing salvific grace.
Judith Wolfe (School of Divinity, University of St. Andrews)
“R.M. Rilke and the permanency of impermanence” – In the second Duino Elegy, Rilke laments that ‘our own heart always exceeds us, as theirs did. / And we can no longer follow it, / gazing into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies where, / measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.’ This is a philosophical claim: a rejection of projections of human existence onto a supernatural or divine ‘projection screen’. Instead, he suggests, it is our task to discover ‘a pure, contained, human place, / our own strip of fruit-bearing soil between river and rock’. Rilke’s elegies are themselves peopled with supernatural beings: with angels, whose radiance of celestial light, ever returning to themselves, contrasts with humans’ continuous evaporation. These angels are not (as in earlier literature) harbingers of human self-transcendence, but markers of its impossibility. And yet Rilke describes the artworks of the sculptor Rodin in strikingly similar terms as the elegies’ angels. This article examines the complexity of Rilke’s Augustinianism-without-God, the task of poetry within this vision of existence, and the questions it raises for a constructive theological engagement with his work.
