Poets and Theologians
By CANON ROGER LLOYD
DURING the discussions about the Revised Prayer Book, Bishop Hensley Henson interjected the remark, " Some limit must be set to this inordinate lust for intelligibility." My own mind, wayward member that it is, promptly connected this remark with another made some years ago by the Editor of the Spectator, who, speaking of the difficulty of bringing Bible language tip to date, asked how one would put into intelligible modern speech St. Paul's great and crucial phrase, " God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself."
These are the sorts of remarks which have the power to quicken the imagination and set the mind racing. It seems clear, first of all, that this kind of paraphrasing and interpretation is really a matter for poetry, and that this is a point where the theologian like St. Paul, who formulates a doctrine in theological shorthand, needs the poet to translate his shorthand into intelligible and persuasive speech. theology, in fact, has need of poetry, and cannot complete her work without the help of her sister muse ; while she, in her turn, !mist naturally be left free to choose which Christian doctrines she will illuminate. Her choice among them has been and is very capricious ; and this capriciousness is significant for those who are grappling with the problem of problems today, which is how to keep religion in touch with life.
A new kind of anthology which uses the clauses of the Creed and their plain implications for life and devotion as the chapter headings, and collects under each the poems which have been inspired by them, would certainly produce odd, unexpected and rather discon- certing results. The rough outline of such an anthology emerges quite clearly. There are three main groups of headings. The first is concerned with the great plot of human history as a Christian sees it—the creation of the world, the entry of sin, the fall of man, the nature of man and the fact of Divine judgement. The second group covers the action of God which the fact of sin calls for—incarnation, redemption, Easter, Ascension, Whitson. The third group is con- cerned with the Church and its life, and includes such things as the Bible as the word of God, the kingdom of God, the Eucharist and the idea of eucharistic community and the new life of the new race in the Church. Thereafter an epilogue devoted to the last things and life in heaven completes the anthology.
In the first group the anthologist will find that he is embarrassed by too many riches. There is a great mass of poetry which theorises about the why and the wherefore of creation. The themes of " war in heaven," the fall of man and the personality of the devil have by their obvious drama attracted more still ; while poems on the mingled depravity and virtue of human nature are beyond counting. The two interesting facts which emerge from studying the poetry which belongs to this group are how often it happens that the secular-minded Byron says the right and Christian things better than anyone else ; while over and over 'again, Shelley, going out of his way so often to repudiate Christ, speaks on these matters with Christ's own accent. The other fact is-the vital importance of Blake, to whom, more than to any other poet, it is given to embrace in a single Whole the majestic procession of the plot's chapters and to link the unity he makes of them to the redemptive love of Christ.
Of the second group of headings—those concerned with the nature, the mission and the life of Christ—there is little to say, in that the results of such a study are much what anyone would expect them to be before he had undertaken it. It is true, of course, that the doctrine of the Incarnation is generally the point where inspired poetry begins to slip away from orthodoxy ; and it is not in the least surprising that poetry as a whole appears to be able to make very little of the Ascension and the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is with the third group of headings that the really interesting results begin to come to light. Poetryciis like music in this, that it rises most easily to drama, and therefore where there is an evidently dramatic theme like the birth or the crucifixion of Christ it calls forth much of the best poetry and music. Of religious music a great trainer of choirs recently said that one way of testing the
quality of So-and-so's Mass in D is to look first at what he makes of clauses in the Creed which have no obvious drama in them. " Anybody," he said, " can set the Sanctus or the Crucifixits, for the drama of the words carries him along ; but it takes a great composer to make Confiteor Union Baptimnainteresting."
Now there is drama enough in the flowing life of the Church through history, but the drama in the mere fact of its existence is withheld from those who do not see it as the body of ,Christ. In the same way there is drama in the Eucharist, but it is only as a memorial that the poets see its drama, and they seldom see even that. if there is the drama which the painters have often seen in the spectacle of the Lord God giving the Ten Commandments to Moses engraven on stone tablets, there is plainly more in thinking of the Bible as the final word of the God who eternally speaks, but apart from a quaint hailing of Holy Scriptures by George Herbert and occasional references in T. S. Eliot, the part of the anthology devoted to " The Word of God Who has Spoken " is likely to be very nearly as short as the celebrated chapter about the snakes in Ireland.
The situation is, in fact, worse than the previous paragraph suggests. Of the Church as an institution only the orthodox Christian poets have spoken at all politely, and even their speech is rather chilly ; a phrase like Charles Williams's "The mind of God's Church is the only final subject of song " stands almost completely alone. The less orthodox-minded but still deeply Christian poets like Blake have detested the Church at length and on all possible occasions. Of the church as a building to which people go to worship God, there is Browning's most memorable " Christmas Eve "—perhaps the best sermon on the spirit of church-going which has ever been preached—but very little else. The Eucharist hat fared only a little better at the hands of the poets. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was a matter of constant public con- troversy, and yet in the two very full Oxford anthologies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse there are few, if indeed there are any, sacramental poems before 1650 ; and, although as the centuries proceed there are eucharistic poems to be found when one starts to look for them, they are rare.
Here then is yet another instance of theology and art parting company when it is the condition of the health of both that they should travel hand in hand. Today they are far apart, for the primary interests of most modern theologians, which filter down from them by teaching and sermon to the mass of church-people, are centred in precisely those departments of Christian faith and life about which the poets seem always to have found almost nothing to say. These interests are in the Bible as the word of the living God to the people of God, in the nature of the Church both as the body of Christ and in its relationship to the Gospel, and in the idea of the eucharistic community as the framework of what has been called "eucharistic Man," and his relationship to God and his fellow men. Even modern poetry, which on the whole has a strong religious bias, has virtually nothing to say about such themes as these, and an anthology of the poetry of all the ages devoted to theni would be short indeed. Are we to conclude that such themes as these cannot furnish suitable raw material for poetry ? It is to be hoped not, for the theologian always has need of the poet, and he needs him today as much as he has ever done, and perhaps more.
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