Moving away: the loss of religious language
The first two lectures in this series on literature and spirituality both discussed poetry. Erica Longfellow talked about devotional poetry from the seventeenth century, and Sean Heslop discussed the religious dimension of some twentieth century poems by Betjeman and Larkin. If we look back over this material, we can see a development. In the seventeenth century, it was natural to write a poetry of explicit Christian reference. Donne was able to talk about his personal experience in terms of Good Friday and the Crucifixion. By the time of Betjeman, and even more of Larkin, this natural inhabiting of Christian language was no longer available. So Betjeman’s account of visiting a church has to be cast in an ironic tone, out of which his desired seriousness can only partly emerge. Larkin’s account of a church visit expresses itself as deliberate flippancy: “I take off/My cycle clips in awkward reverence.” This movement goes further in the poems that I shall be discussing with you today, where even religious references such as those in the titles of Betjeman’s “A Lincolnshire Church” and Larkin’s “Church Going” have almost entirely disappeared.
The evidence of all these poems taken together suggests that something is being left behind; religion is no longer the centre from which poets, and people generally, give an account of their lives. Increasingly there is no common language that links those within the church to those outside; and generally the poets are outside. The language of faith has become increasingly an ‘in-house’ language, current within the walls of the churches, but without any leverage beyond them. Consequently it becomes harder and harder for people of faith ever to make use of that language outside the church. Though Christianity still talks of the need to ‘share’ or ‘proclaim’ the faith, Christians find it increasingly difficult to know where to begin, because such a proclamation would involve a shift into a language that the world no longer speaks or even understands.
This development is often broadly summarised as ‘loss of faith’, with science as the cause: science has shown us a world that has no place for the things that religion talks about. There is an obvious truth in this. Modern accounts of the universe don’t readily offer a place for a creator God. But I’d like in this lecture to suggest that the real centre of the problem is language, and that some contemporary poetry can give us a clearer sense of just what the problem is, and even of how it might be addressed.
A technological language
There is nothing new in suggesting that contemporary language does not readily support religious meanings. The many arguments about modern translations of the Bible and modern versions of liturgy have centred on this perceived deficiency. The language of the present is seen as somehow less capable of the ‘spiritual’ than that of 1611 or 1662 or even of the hymn-writers of the nineteenth century.
Some people feel that modernity itself is the problem: religious things require expression in an old language, a language marked by permanence and continuity rather than by what is currently and perhaps briefly to hand. But much (though certainly not all) religious language has been the current language of its age. The gospels themselves were written, not in classical Greek, but in a very workaday contemporary idiom, the language of their time. Modernity or otherwise is not the real problem with language.
To say that we live in a technological age is of course a cliché. But its implications go beyond the obvious—that we are surrounded by the products of technology, mobile phones, DVDs, etc. It also means that we speak a technological language. Again, this means more than to say that we talk a lot about technology, though that is also true. It means that our language is infused with a technological view of the world; that when we speak, even of non-technological things, it is the technological world view that limits what we can say.
Technology sees the world in a very particular way. Essentially, it sees the world as something to be changed through the identification of ends and the discovery of means. From the hand-held tool to complex mechanisms of social organisation, it looks for ways in which new states of affairs can be brought about: an easier way of skinning a deer, a more effective health service. The technological mind sees the world in terms of potential, and of the means by which that potential can be actualised. In a sense, it always lives in the future; it is not interested in staying with what is present, in simply dwelling in the world as it is. The world as it is stands as resource for the world that is to be made.
This comes to be true not just of objects and states of affairs, but also of people. To the eye of technology people are also a resource: we speak of ‘departments of human resources’, as though we were doing people a favour by noticing them. But they are being noticed in a very particular way—as means to an end; living means no doubt, but still understood in terms of the ends that they can be brought to serve. ‘Management’, as we know it, is increasingly this technological deployment of the human resource.
The language of religion
Against the overwhelming tendency of the age, the language of religion is profoundly non-technological. It does not see the world in terms of ends and means (not even religious ends and religious means). [1] Instead, it discloses being and establishes relationships. It declares who God is and who we are and how one relates to the other. “Hear, O
It is very hard for many of our contemporaries to understand this, or even to understand what they are not understanding. From within a technological language, they assume instrumentality: God must be for something. God is there as an explanatory device: his purpose is to explain the existence of the world or the meaning of my life. Or he is there as another, supreme, resource: to provide me with strength, consolation, the power to overcome my troubles.
Now God may well do some of these things. But that is not to say that doing these things is the point of God, why we should believe in him. There is no point to God. He does not exist in any frame of ends and means. In that he is unlike everything else of which we might have knowledge. He is certainly not tied into the ends and means of my own life. God is God completely and fully within himself, not as a means for bringing things about.
Put in that way, it is perhaps a little easier to see why it is hard for people to move from a technological language to the language of faith, and why it is hard for people of faith to address those who live within a technological language. It is not just that one starts to talk about different things, some of which some people believe in and others don’t; it is that the whole assumption as to what things are like—purposive, instrumental, resources toward some end—is such as to disable the understanding of religious meaning. Why pray? What is it supposed to do? Does it work? These questions arise within the instrumental, technological frame. They are unanswerable, not because we are unable to point to the outcomes of prayer, but because prayer—knowing our being in the presence of the being of God—isn’t that kind of thing at all, inhabits an area that is not constructed around means and ends.
The language of poetry
So: our age and religion speak different languages, not in the sense that one language is old and the other modern, but in that they don’t agree on what there is to talk about. One sees the world instrumentally, the other in terms of our being and the being of God. They are, of course, looking at the same world, because we only have one world; but what they see in that world is not the same.
So far, so depressing, at least from the religious perspective. If our language survives at all, it will survive only as an inbred dialect that no one from outside the group can understand, a little like the Siberian languages that are down to their last dozen speakers. This is the desert of my title: a linguistic and cultural world in which the being of God and of our relation to him can neither be heard nor declared, where nothing at all speaks of God even to those who wish to hear. This, I would suggest, is pretty much where we find ourselves at the start of the twenty-first century. As believers we feel odd, we have a bad conscience about speaking a language that those around us regard as nonsense. And not surprisingly, it sounds like nonsense to us too for much of the time, because we too are creatures of the technological language that encompasses us.
What has any of this to do with poetry? Simply that the language of poetry is also non-technological, non-instrumental, not directed to the calculation of means and ends, but rather declarative of the being of things. Given that it, too, stands aside from the dominant language of the age, poetry also finds the going rather difficult, and is often tempted to re-invent itself in the forms of instrumentality—as entertainment, as protest. But at its heart poetry is a naming of the world, a naming that seeks to be truthful to the being of the world. In that sense it stands in an unbreakable relation to the language of religion. Matthew Arnold was not just seeking an easy escape from dogmatic uncertainty when he said that the best of religion was poetry, and that the best of poetry would come to serve us as religion.
But poetry, too, lives within its age and suffers the pressures of the age. Eliot was aware of the peculiar threat to poetry that a technological contemporaneity offers as long ago as 1929, when he wrote (in Ash Wednesday): “Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.” Eliot’s ‘word’, here, is both the Christian Word, the Logos, and the word of poetry; both depend on something beyond themselves, beyond language itself, on the silence from which all naming arises. This silence, whether of the poet’s listening to language or of attention to God, is beyond the reach of a technological idiom that generates the noise of a world dedicated to endless self-transformation.
Listening
For Eliot, poetry, like the language of religion, is engaged in a struggle with the dominant speech of the age. This speech is grounded in the view that since meaning is essentially to do with our purposes and the means by which we bring those purposes about, all meaning is our own; that we are the sole originators of meaning. But in the silence of poetry, as in the silence of faith, there is a listening for a meaning that is not our own, that comes to us from outside.
It is in this shared commitment to a non-technological language that poetry draws very close to religion, even when it makes no religious reference and has no explicit religious commitment. What is at issue here is the common task of religious language and poetry to disclose, declare, name being and our relation to being. A good example is a poem by the American poet Wallace Stevens, from 1954: “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself.” In the poem a man half-hears something upon waking: “At the earliest ending of winter,/ In March, a scrawny cry from outside /Seemed like a sound in his mind.” He is unclear as to whether what he has heard comes from “the vast ventriloquism/ Of sleep’s faded papier-maché . . .”, or whether it is something external and new, “A new knowledge of reality.”
This poem has as its basic task to disclose what there is, what makes up the world; which, as Stevens’ hesitancy shows, is not an open-and-shut matter, as it generally is in contemporary discourse. Commonly we know (already) what things make up our world, where ‘I’ ends and ‘the world’ begins. But Stevens is not sure of that. His man, in this poem, finds himself on a boundary, between what is incontestably ‘his’ (the ‘faded papier-maché’ of dreams), and something that he cannot at first locate, but which he recognizes as ‘outside’, coming to him, shown to him. There is meaning outside of himself; distant but approaching, like a great sun.
This is not a religious poem in any obvious sense. Stevens was not a religious man in any obvious sense. But it might be described (from within the enclave of religious language) as a poem about revelation, about meaning shown to us rather than generated by us. It conveys the surprise of such a moment; the difficulty of incorporating it into the familiar, known, self-dominated world. The title (a key to much of Stevens’ work) stresses that such a moment of boundary-crossing comes when we cease to operate conceptually, when we escape from the immanent definitions and exclusions of accepted language, and allow the being of the world to speak directly.
The presence of the world
But for that to happen, we have to believe that the world is real apart from ourselves. This might seem to be a ‘given’ of modern materialism, which constantly accuses religion of spreading a falsely humanizing veil over an alien and meaningless world, of painting our own meanings—love, trust, grace—on to the brutality of nature. But in reality creatures of a technological language have great difficulty in grasping the reality of the world apart from their means and purposes. The world comes to be what it is for us: resource, a realm of pure potentiality out of which we form the only true reality, that of our achieved ends. That this world has being and presence apart from what we do with it, becomes almost beyond our imagination. [2]
Here a recent poem by the English poet Geoffrey Hill may be helpful. The title, “Offertorium:
Like Stevens, Hill’s primary engagement is with what there is in the world; how it is to be named. Again, as for Stevens, there is nothing self-evident about this. What emerges is Hill’s sense of the substantiality of being not his own, of the world as presence marked by an illimitable radiance. Despite the title, which may well be an afterthought, the poem itself makes no conscious effort to wheel the apparatus of faith into some kind of engagement with the world; instead it looks, listens, names what it finds. Again, what it finds goes well beyond the bounds of the dominant technological language: this is a poem about the ‘real presence’; obliquely in the Eucharist, but primarily in the being of the world.
Expectation
But the language of faith is, traditionally, not just a registration of presence; it has been (at least in the Jewish and Christian traditions) a narrative language. Easy enough, one might say, for poetry to enter a ‘mystical’ mode that approximates to the mystical within religion; but the narrative of faith, of God’s entry into time and space, is so peculiarly tied to a specific corpus of belief as to be surely untransferable.
In an obvious sense this must be true: the Christian story is just that, the Christian story. But it may still be the case that, without appealing explicitly to that story, a poet might—from simple engagement with the world—actualise it in a non-specific, non-religious fashion. The poem by the American John Ashbery, “At North Farm”, achieves something of this sort. He announces an arrival: “Somewhere someone is travelling furiously toward you.” But we do not know who or what is on the way, only that in anticipation a barren landscape appears to have been blessed with fullness, rather in the manner of Hill’s Suffolk: “Hardly anything grows here, /Yet the granaries are bursting with meal.” But unlike Hill’s poem, the mood of the poem is less contemplative than eschatological: we are looking toward some end, some fulfilment, which will be personal. Someone is about to arrive. But who this someone is, we do not know; the ‘dish of milk’ left out at night even suggests an animal. And in any case we do not know if we really want him to arrive. In one sense everything seems to depend on it (the unexplained richness of the place seems a kind of anticipatory blessing); but at the same time we look to this culmination with a sense of inadequacy and ‘with mixed feelings’; and the birds still ‘darken the sky.’
Again the primary question of the poem is ‘what is there?’; but now that question is cast into movement, into expectation. The story is not complete; with whatever conflicting feelings, we live toward its conclusion. There is no explicit religious reference (students’ suggestions as to what is on the way ranged from Jesus Christ to a hedgehog). Yet the poem discloses an eschatological tension in human living, a leaning toward an end which is not a technological end, which the means of a technological culture can never bring about. Ashbery couldn’t give us mechanisms even if he cared to do so. Again the speech of the age has been transcended.
The word in the desert
The point of this discussion has not been to show that there are analogies between modern poetry and traditional religious language or belief. The issue goes far beyond reinforcing analogies to the very possibility of expression. My point is that poetry can be, for our age, the word in the desert, in that it has the power to cross the limits of an essentially technological idiom, and so to talk of the world in terms of being, presence, endings, and of meanings that are not our own.
There may be, here, some common linguistic territory between those who continue to move within religious language and the wider society. It may be at this point that the validity of religious understandings can at least be suggested. Probably the chances are better than down the roads of theology or the philosophy of religion, which are themselves subject to the incomprehensions of the prevailing culture. What will certainly not work is the blunt repetition of Christianity as a positive system to a world that has ceased to see the force of its central terms, such as ‘sin’, ‘salvation’, ‘grace.’ The issue is not one of the explanation of unfamiliar or misunderstood terms; it is centrally one of language, and of what different languages debar or make possible. Without recognising that and working from that recognition, no convergence can be expected. Nor is this a matter (as is often said) of ‘restating’ the faith ‘in modern terms,’ if those terms themselves—deriving as they do from an essentially technological idiom—immediately suppress what we are trying to say.
What options are available, given (and no one would wish this) that church life cannot become a sequence of poetry readings? First, we should be aware of our position, linguistically speaking, vis-à-vis the prevailing culture. Then we should take care to avoid, as far as we can, falling into the trap of that culture, that is, the trap of using religious language ourselves in a technological fashion. There should be less talk of ‘finding the words to communicate our message,’ because that is immediately to yoke ourselves to the dominant economy of ends and means. The
[1] Unsurprisingly, some religious language has been technologised. The language of much evangelical Christianity treats Christ as a resource toward an end—salvation, the changed life—as though Christ were a means to be deployed in a divine economy.
[2] It is noticeable that even those contemporary movements, such as environmentalism, that appear to take account of the world in itself often use an instrumental language: the world is to be preserved so that we too may be preserved.
[3] It is in this sense that the
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