Paul KeenanJohn Donne’s poems move towards a genuine contact with Christ
John F. Deane
While trying to understand my faith, while trying to find a way past and around the cultural cell in which I had been locked for decades, while trying to redeem, if you will, the language and approach of the Catholic Church to our God, that contradictory God whose cosmic threat and apophatic nature militated against the urge and command of love, I have always sought in poetry some answers to my queries. John Donne and George Herbert have helped.
A modern theologian, the German Cardinal Walter Kasper, writes: “Jesus Christ is not only the final self-definition of God, but the final definition of the world and man.”
If we had this person of Jesus Christ, the man of history, the man of love and service and self-sacrifice, if we had this person close to our hearts instead of the abstract God so close to our minds and wills, perhaps our country would not have come to the sorry state it now finds itself in. Perhaps we would not have cast off all notion of God. For contact with the person of Jesus, not the vague concept of the Son of God, or the Messiah, or the Anointed One, but with the actual living Jesus, is a life-altering event.
Donne’s poems (which I write about above) move with wit and humour towards a genuine contact with the Christ, particularly in his Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward.
Theistic theory
The God I was introduced to was an apophatic God, a God whose attributes were all classified as negative. It was a God remote, unreal, impersonal, depending on the rules and regulations of the Church to which I was attached. It was Greek metaphysics that influenced the west to speak of God in negative terms: what God was not, according to pure reason; God was ineffable, he was unbegotten, he was without origin.
We did not have a God of a living, and therefore evolving tradition. We had a theistic theory. A book like the one under consideration goes to show how Donne worked conscientiously all his life to encounter the true God. Adelia Prado, a contemporary Brazilian poet, wrote: “I found God more deeply in poetry than in doctrine.”
Donne (pictured) deeply believed that the preacher, in his pulpit, was conduit between God and the ordinary man. Izaak Walton reports of Donne’s final sermon, when he got out of his sick bed to come to London to preach: “Many that saw his tears, and heard his faint and hollow voice professing they thought the Text prophetically chosen, and that Dr Donne had preach’t his own Funeral Sermon”.
I have always had a difficulty with the term ‘religious poetry’. The word ëreligiousí instantly sets a clamp on the thinking of so many people in our time; there are many reasons for that, some of them quite legitimate, but too many of them simply a misreading of the term.
Poetry of faith
In a recent interview I did with Dr Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Anglican Communion, and now theologian and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge: I asked him about this.
We spoke about poetry as a form of prophecy, as a listening to God or to God’s creation, and by passing on what is heard to the world, writers like Donne being exemplary. I asked: would ‘faith poetry’ work better: and he replied: “Faith, yes, that would work better for me than ‘religious’; because ‘religious’ poetry always strikes me as poetry written to subserve religious purposes. That can’t be it.”
Yes, a poetry of faith, just as a poetry of eros, a poetry of vision, you want to talk about a poetry that is rooted in one of the central aspects of our being human. Having faith is a central aspect of being human just like erotic attachment, just like a vision of the world around us, just like having a hope in the future, all of that. And, to me, a poetry that is, let’s say, religiously significant, is a poetry that works as poetry out of that sort of human depth. Donne succeeds, as the book under review shows, in preaching to Everyman, and yet writing a poetry of intense personal integrity.
Poet and novelist John F. Deane is currently editor of Poetry Ireland which he founded.