The Poetry of Christianity

By R. A. SCOTT-JAMES PROFESSOR KNIGHT has written a bold and original book*

which, however difficult it may be, ought not to be allowed to be tucked away in libraries and forgotten. It ought to

be read not only or mainly by persons of special literary interests, but also by all ministers of religion of all denomina- tions, who should first labour to understand it, and then preach sermons about it. For Professor Knight is a student of literature, who is also among the prophets ; he bases his right to interpret Shakespeare not so much upon his scholar-

ship as upon a gift of vision which he has some claim to have attained by dint of sympathetic reading and understanding.

Thus equipped he becomes a missionary, whose mission it is not to preach the gospel among the heathen but to preach

poetry to those who are benighted in the dark ways of Christian theology.

His purpose is to effect a new marriage between Christianity and poetry ; to bring -together, within Christianity, two life forces, each by itself sterile, which were divorced and took separate courses, as he suggests, at the Renaissance —though quite clearly he ought to put the separation at a far earlier date, before even the time of Boethius, who denounced the muses of poetry, and at least as early as St. Augustine. The trouble began in the Dark Ages ; and the Renaissance was, in fact, a partially successful attempt to escape from the repressive asceticism of the mediaeval Church. It so far succeeded that it managed to make poetry respectable. Professor Knight proposes to complete the process of liberation. He would convert religion to poetry by taking it back to the fountains of poetry and poetic life which spring up in the New Testament itself and in the parables of Jesus. The other half of the process of reconciliation—that of converting poetry to religion— is unnecessary, since in his view Christianity is already latent in the works of all the great poets.

Professor Knight begins with Shakespeare, and with Shakespeare in preference to any other because he, especially, is " the great poet of incarnate life," in whose work we have the perfect blending of matter and spirit, the natural and the supernatural. He would approach Shakespeare with the same faculty of the mind with which the poet himself handled experience, with the " synthetic imagination "—a term which he uses in much the same sense as Coleridge used it, implying that creative faculty of the mind by which spirit informs matter and becomes one with it. The need for the art of poetry is, in the author's view, an essentially human need, for it arises from the consciousness of a dis- harmony between the inward world and the outward, between an ideal life and repressed life, between joy and desire—a disharmony which it is the function of the artist to resolve. Shakespeare suits his purpose better than any other poet, because he deals always directly with human experience, and makes us aware of its ceaseless miracle, showing us, on the plane of actual life, the conflict of warring elements and the music of their union.

It is poetry, then, which deals with life in its most significant form, and in its utmost conceivable intensity. It is essentially human and essentially spiritual, and its awareness of life is that of intuitive knowledge which transcends the laborious logical process of reason. But in turning from Shakespeare to the New Testament, Professor Knight finds something even more important than creative art—namely, a cre- ative life.

" Its subject is the Incarnation of the mysterious Logos in human life. . . . The book announces a marriage of heaven and earth. . . . A maximum of valuable historic truth— because Jesus was so great a man—is married to a maximum of poetic splendour."

It is not quite clear to me to what extent Professor Knight advances the claim that the New Testament (conceived as a whole, and not merely the Gospels) is to be regarded as

• The Christian Renaissance : With Interpretations of Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, and a Note on T. S. Eliot. By G. Wilson Knight. (Macmillan. 12s. 6d.)

a work of art ; but his main contention appears to be that the subject-matter belongs to the order of poetry, consisting of a poetic life lived, rather than life exposed poetically.

The life of Jesus, who talked in poetry, thought in poetics images, and experienced the very processes which the poet endeavours to reveal to us, is all the richer for us for being

based partly on the fact which is history and partly on the sublime fiction which contains the truth of poetry. " We

see the very process of incarnation, the crossing of the lines " —the lines which stand for the paths of the spiritual and the natural, the divine and the earthly, which meet only in the most vital human experience. The whole purpose of the book and the life which it enshrines is " to blend the worlds of poetry and history."

• It is impossible here to trace the mystical argument which

Professor Knight unfolds. What is probably of most practical importance in it is his emphasis on the essentially

poetical character of the teaching of Jesus. " He does not so much lay down a code of ethics, or a rigid theological belief, but rather himself aims at enriching human life with poetry. His ethic is paradoxical, and his theology vague : but his imagery and symbolism are consistent, and on that he bases his teaching."

" We must see Jesus, then, as preaching not merely a poetical doctrine, but rather a doctrine of poetry, tolling man to live the poetic world, to contemplate the birds, the vine, the harvest, the luxuriant growth of the seed, the quiet but gigantic powers of natural law."

The Gospels are like pastoral poetry, " homely and magical." They " breathe warmth' and truth, their words and incidents are flowers budding as we read." " The Gospels are like

their own loveliest incident. Through them we are washed by the tears that mortal things let fall : these are the tears fallen on Jesus' feet from the penitent, weeping for past blindness." They arc a radiant affirmation, not a denial, of experience and the intensity of life. Here, poetry and religion, drama and divine worship, are not " cruelly divorced" as they are divorced in the art. and religion of today, so that poetry, which should be an intensification of experience, is deprived of its significance, and religion is deprived of its life.

" Poetry and religion . . . have been as two splendid coupled horses curveting and prancing aside from their direction, fighting the one against the other : one fiery and of sparkling eye, impatient of restraint ; the other noble in dignity but darkly suspicious of its companion, angry that its natural and tmhurrying pace be disturbed. . . . We need today, as Christians, to face our Renaissance, our poetic heritage, accepting and ratifying this marriage union with all its implications and all its splendour of life."

Professor Knight insists on the value of life on the plane of human existence, his humanism being spiritualized by significant poetry and the example of Jesus. lie would unite Hellenism with Hebraism, joy in life with other-worldliness.

To some it may seem that he is offering us a Jesus who would invite us to make the best of both worlds, to eat our cake and have it, to experience redemption without the pangs of any but artistic sorrow. But is he necessarily wrong because he puts off the hair-shirt of mediaeval Christianity, and would give us a new, joyous, Hellenized Christianity ? It is true, it is difficult to sec what place, if any, he allows to dogmatic theology. His account of St. Paul seems to me completely misleading, for was it not St. Paul who first organized the Church on the basis of a teaching which was doctrinal and scholastic rather than, as in the Gospels, humanistic and poetical ? Our feeling is that unless St. Paul was in part at least wrong in his interpretation of the teachings of the Gospels, Professor Knight cannot be altogether right. But what matters is that the author begs us to turn not to St. Paul, and still less to the Fathers of the Church, but to the Gospels themselves, and to read their poetry as poetry, and to study the message of Jesus as it was delivered. l'ursuing that method, would not the churches find themselves going out into the highways and hedges, to the theatres, the cinemas and the dog- races, apd compelling men to come in to the feasts of Christianity ?