Kay Smith was a Canadian and Christian poet from New Brunswick. She was born in St. John and continued to live there for almost her entire life, working as a teacher. Though her life was centred locally in St. John, she was intensely interested in the broader, worldwide movement of modernism in poetry, and obviously read and was influenced by the works of her American and British contemporaries, including especially Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Stevens and Bishop, as well as the contemporaneously published Hopkins.

Following Hopkins, many of her early poems explore those moments where the beauty and terror of nature reveal the grandeur of God. Though her poems in this mode are often beautiful and accomplished, one often feels like one is going over well-trodden ground and Smith does not always remake it sufficiently anew. A good example is “Night Sky”:

Stars burn in the midnight sky;
They seem so near a hand outstretched
From an upper window could pick them like fruit.
In the ancient orchard the hard green apples
Are hidden in leaves and the windless dark.
The grass is zebra-striped by bold shadows of tree trunks.
The familiar has become strange.
As I float behind my eyes,
The stars fall blazing through space,
Down, down, down and are quenched in that nameless place
Where I am faceless as the darkness, and all my limbs
Dissolve in rhythms of that mystery
On which the ark of my little life sails all night
Toward dawn and resurrection.

However, Smith moves beyond that in her best work. As with many of her poems, “When a Girl Looks Down” takes something from both Hopkins and Yeats, but goes beyond them to explore a distinctly female subject, something they would never have done:

When a girl looks down out of her cloud of hair
And gives her breast to the child she has borne,
All the suns and the stars that the heavens have worn
Since the first magical morning
Rain through her milk in each fibre and cell of her darling.

Smith herself never married or had children, so the poem is not based on personal experience, but Smith had a sympathy for the lives of women that extended well beyond anything that had merely happened to her. Smith’s literalizing of Yeats’ “waiting to be born” is perhaps a bit too on-the-nose, but there is gain as well as loss in bringing the metaphor back round again to an actual birth.

Though Smith is clearly a deeply spiritual, and specifically a Christian, poet, her poems rarely express faith or devotion directly. Rather, as she explores different subjects, a pattern of incarnation and resurrection will appear to her naturally in things and events around her, as in the awakening from a dream “The Eye of Humility”:

the seed of Adam enters, Man of Sorrows,
with the eternal stars of wounds in His thigh;
in the dream, in the charmed dream we were flying
out of mind, who now are grounded with the slow root
in the invaded womb of time.

Or in the mother nursing her child in “When a Girl Looks Down”:

And releases the flood of girl, of bud, of the horn
Whose music starts on a morning journey.
In mother, child and all, the One-in-the-many
Gathers me nearer to be born.

This pattern appears to her everywhere, and this includes in sexual relationship, even those, as we shall see, which are outside the boundaries sanctioned by the church.

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As time went on Smith would continue to experiment and this would eventually led to things like the delightfully weird “The Clown,” which is Smith at her most Wallace Stevens-like. The clown here is not literal, but an everyman, much like the Stevens so enamoured of ice cream, comedians and cookies, (though one that also has common fears, like the fear of death):

In a conical hat of hope that points to the sky,
In a clown’s garden of colours, the man runs out
On the threshold of morning, coaxing the day 
He sings to the sun, sings he’s the sun’s darling,
A sun himself as he cartwheels over the hills
And through the valleys; the spokes of his limbs
Piebald praise of himself into the sun,
But none, not one pebble hears him,
Or, if hearing, answers. There’s not a chink
Of creation through which his gladness leaks.

The poem takes a more Audenesque turn, before ending with another vision of the resurrection.

In the cold sheet of his naked skin
Stripped forever of motley pride,
Touches what dark continent,
Goes through the hoops of death
And faces what anguished resurrection?

Though this is influenced by Yeats, whose “rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem” appropriates Christian imagery for pagan purposes, Smith takes it back for Christianity, though the “anguished” is a little ambivalent, perhaps reflecting the difficulties of making even the best transitions.

Though Smith was a sincere Christian, she was not always strictly follow traditional teachings on sexual relationships, and some of her poems deal with sexual desire, both in and out of her physical relationships with men. It has often been noted how she was one of the first Canadian women to make her desire a central subject. In some of her poems, like “Orchard Morning” there is conventional mingling of sexual and spiritual imagery.

In the first orchard morning
you wake to that divine visitor
in your bed

The situation resembles Donne’s “The Sun Rising.” There are some differences, however. Donne also writes of both the sexual and spiritual, and uses some of the same fervent language of both, but he is wary of too directly presenting his own sexual relationships, especially those outside of marriage, as images of relationship with God. Smith, perhaps recklessly, is not so reluctant. In a manner more like the early free love advocating William Blake than Donne, the sun, Christ and lover all mingle here until it is difficult to tell them apart.

You see him as deliverer
---
as a god I saw him
as lion lying down with lamb and
(most poignantly and mercifully)
ordinary-extraordinary
man

Though this relationship obviously affected Smith deeply, his spiritualization in the poem does come at a bit of a cost. In the poem, the lover remains archetypal and individual human personality is hidden behind a veil.

“Old Women and Love,” perhaps her major statement on desire, does not invoke the spiritual quite as directly. Though the explicit reference is to Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” the poem owes at least as much to his Crazy Jane sequence. Smith, however, is not really the wild old wicked woman, a female equivalent of the horny old man poets that have followed on from Yeats, like Derek Walcott or Anthony Hecht. Smith emphasizes the sheer uselessness of female desire in old age, both to the women themselves and to others:

yet they refuse to die 
they clutter up the earth

Though Walcott and Hecht may know that they inspire disgust, they press on, at least verbally, and never see themselves and their desires as marginal. Unlike Smith, they don’t see themselves as dry kindling, as “frail bones.” On the other hand, Smith refuses to invoke disgust at all. Unlike in Yeats, there are no “foul stys” or “foul rag and bone shops,” much less “raving sluts who keep the till.” Smith’s lament is not that anyone finds the desire of old women disgusting, but that they barely notice it at all, like the young man in “The Old in One Another’s Arms”:

why he smiled at me
with mild amusement
almost indulgently

Some have tried to present “Old Women and Love” and other similar poems as straightforward affirmations of life, and they can point to the “fierce joy” invoked at the end of “Old Women and Love.” But I don’t think that does justice to the complexity of the feelings here. The joy and affirmation, or at least the fierceness, is real, but so is the darkness and disappointment.

Towards the end of the “Old Women and Love,” Smith call in the spiritual, but only obliquely:

When my eyes opened from the mercy of my own darkness
the world came at me like a blow
It’s beauty burned gold in every resurrected leaf
burned with a still flame. Spring never relents

Mercy and resurrection are there, and the “spring that never relents” echoes Hopkins’ nature that reveals God in being “never spent.” As her friend P.K. Page wrote in the introduction to The Bright Particulars, “The flesh and the spirit are both strong in her. Sometimes at war, sometimes one.” In this poem, they are at least warily reconciled.

Perhaps the most striking of Smith’s reoccurring images is the bone. When they first appear in “The Bird of Sorrow Would Sing” they are ready to move:

The blue sea would stand up and clash its cymbals
For me to dance in my worshipping bones

Smith is, at her core, a worshipper, whether of God, the natural world or desire. In “Summer Night, Grand Manan” the bones actually do sing:

And pleasant it is to wake in the night
To the multitudinous tongues of the rain,
Listening until one’s very bones issue the sweet sound

But though her painter friend Miller Brittain tells her in her elegy for him: “never feel afraid of growing old/you have such good bones” these bones do let her down. Appearing again in “Old Women and Love,” they are, though still capable of devotion, also “frail,” insubstantial, easily caught in the trap of desire. In “A Thighbone” or “The Skeleton in the Closet,” they end up “stripped clean” or “stripped bare.”

Smith’s bones echo the “old bones” of Yeats’ “rag and bone shop of the heart,” but, unlike Yeats, Smith does not take up the image of the flesh as a rag, an image that reoccurs, for example, in “Sailing to Byzantium,” where the “tattered coat” also, though it does not sit on a bone, sits on a stick, a related image. In fact, Smith does use the word “flesh” a few times, and she does mention hands, eyes and arms specifically a number of times, but, aside from the bones, the rest of the body does not much figure in her work. In “Orchard Morning” the body of her lover is mentioned, but nothing specific about it is noted, and the speakers breast, which is mentioned, is cold. This lack of bodiliness is a bit odd, as Smith does frequently mention resurrection. But resurrection of what exactly? The major exception, of course, is “When a Girl Looks Down” where Smith’s identification with the maternal body brings out a more directly incarnational stance.

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Bones in Smith also strongly recall the Hebrew prophets and psalm writers. One can easily imagine the worshipping, passionate Smith saying with Jeremiah that there is a burning fire is shut up in her bones. And, like Ezekiel, the older Smith too might ask of her own bones, stripped of their flesh, yet awaiting resurrection, “Can these dry bones live?” Psalm 35 too may be an inspiration: “All my bones shall say, LORD, who is like unto you?” For a Christian poet, Smith does not echo the text of the Bible as much as you might think, yet parts of it clearly have found their home in her soul.

Though Smith does not seem to have been as deeply affected by his ideas and images as those of Hopkins and Yeats, through most of her life her metrical practices largely followed those of T.S. Eliot, whether as filtered through W.H. Auden or on their own. Accordingly, her early to mid-career work is often based in some sort of traditional metre and rhyme, but, as in Eliot, often applied very irregularly or broken off. In Eliot, this is frequently used to achieve a kind of deflation or to evoke a sense of unease. Smith sometimes uses these techniques for the same ends, but, while there are always lingering influence, she is not really that kind of poet, and as she gets older, she starts to write in different ways.

Smith does mention Auden as and influence and her most obviously Audenesque poem is the ballad “Autobiography.” Unlike Auden, Smith was not a public poet, directly addressing issues of the day, whether political or otherwise. While its form derives from Auden, in one of his more formal modes, the poem’s scale is small and personal, the subject being the death of a sibling. Narratives of events in childhood, particularly deaths in the family, were not a large part of her output, but there are enough of them to be of note, and they tend to be the most directly personal of her works. “Dream Back the Child” is another example, though it is about the death of a more distant relative. There are some poems about people who died while Smith was an adult (her father, and her friend the painter Miller Brittain, for example), but, in those, events and personalities are kept at a distance.

Also unlike Auden, Smith would did not make even a fitful return to traditional form in her later work. Even the early “Autobiography,” perhaps the most regularly formal of her poems, bends and occasionally breaks its rhyme scheme. The similarly themed “Dream Back the Child,” like much of her later verse, adopts a more thoroughgoing, shorter-lined free verse.

Smith’s New and Selected from 1987, The Bright Particulars, was her last book of poems published in her lifetime. She would publish one more chapbook, White Paper Face in the Window, and continued to publish poems in journals throughout the 90s, before her illness and death in 2004. These have mostly not been collected in book form, though one poem from the chapbook and one later poem are included in The Essential Kay Smith, edited by Michael Oliver. This is unfortunate, but somewhat understandable. While Smith was a very good poet, her work is not of such overwhelming greatness as the figures she set herself up against: Yeats, Hopkins, Stevens, Eliot and Auden.

Still, she thoroughly deserves to find new readers, especially those interested in Canadian or Christian poetry. The Essential Kay Smith, though very slim, is still available from Porcupine’s Quill, and used copies of The Bright Particulars can still be found online or in shops across Canada. They don’t entirely overlap.

Learn more about Kay Smith at the New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia.

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Burl Horniachek is a Canadian teacher, poet and translator, and the editor of To Heaven’s Rim, a major anthology of world Christian poetry. He was born in Saskatoon and grew up south of Edmonton. He studied Ancient Near Eastern Studies (Hebrew/Ancient Israel) at the University of Toronto and creative writing at the University of Alberta with Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott. He currently lives near Winnipeg, with his wife, a surgeon, and their two kids.

On the eve of Pentecost Sunday this year, four years after a reconversion to Christianity that followed decades of self-exile from the faith, I had a dream that ended with a woman dressed in white speaking authoritatively. 

Her tongue was a bright orange flame. 

Today, I recall how much I've always loved the image of tongues of fire hovering over the disciples' heads as a sign of the Holy Spirit and of their mission to light up the world with the Word. That blazing dream image also makes me think of the startling way that my own poetry recently caught fire. And about how it almost burned down in the process.

As a poet, professor, and literary critic, I have devoted many decades to the art of free verse. In my poetry, until three years ago I’d aimed for an understated, prosaic, casually conversational style that avoided didacticism, evident in poems such as “April,” which begins “Everything happens / over again except the light / comes from a slightly different angle. / The forsythia that didn’t flower / last spring when I needed it most / is trying again through your window.”

Then one day soon after my return to the Catholic faith, when I sat down to write, something very different appeared on the page: a poetic call to conversion complete with elaborate metaphors and old-fashioned capitalization of nouns, composed not in free verse but in set stanzas. After that first piece, things just got weirder in my religious poetry. I found myself weaving contemporary cadences and idioms together with baroquely intertwined syntax, superabundant repetitions, and intensely visceral imagery; or using intricate metres and stanza types; or concocting outlandishly layered metaphors; and occasionally incongruously punctuating all this exuberance with straightforward theological statements. My poem “Reversion” employs several of these florid techniques, as in this description of God’s invitation to return to the Christian faith as   

…a series of the short sharp shocks
the fish must feel when finally having taken in the shiny lure,
the line’s reeled in, let slack, reeled in and out and in and out again

by the patient angler who, sensing the reluctant longing
of the bride-to-be, declaims the true lover’s divinely-worded lines
patiently, patiently, knowing the patient wants more than anything
 
the cold, dark, emptying pain to abate, but just can’t quite
swallow the bait…

Unconsciously at first, I was borrowing these techniques from the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poet George Herbert and the nineteenth-century neo-Metaphysical poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Because it took me a while to realize this, I was surprised and embarrassed when a colleague dubbed my new poems as “postmodern Metaphysical.” I knew he meant it as a compliment, but I didn’t want my poetry to be hijacked by nostalgia and caught in some unpublishable limbo. So I considered just shredding it all and recommitting myself to understatement and free verse. 

Eventually, however, I understood that I had been forging a fusion poetics that could retain my twenty-first-century sensibilities yet also contain my newly inspirited imagination. Simply put, Christian observances were remodelling my inner world, making me increasingly aware of the interconnection between the physical and metaphysical planes, which I came to think of as an interface. 

Centuries-old practices open many well-known entry points to this in-between plane. The seven sacraments bestow intangible graces from God, but they equally require that our concrete, earthly selves are fully involved via the ritual’s “form” and “matter.” So at the Holy Eucharist, many denominations believe we consume God along with the physical bread and wine as the Real Presence of Christ’s Body and Blood; in confession, we hear the priest speak the prescribed words and see him make the gestures that signal divine forgiveness.

In a parallel kind of physical/metaphysical interface, it is customary to pray the rosary with a concrete meditation method that lets awareness flow back and forth from the divine to the earthly spheres as if through a spiritual conduit: while contemplating the fifteen mysteries of Christ’s and Mary’s lives, we focus intensely not only on the timeless spiritual teachings associated with each of the stories but also on particularized day-to-day details of each gospel personage, while also keeping in mind down-to-earth prayer intentions for ourselves or others. 

These in-between moments condition us to be present to the great mystery of the Incarnation, which is of course the most vital example of this interface between our world and God’s eternal kingdom. 

When I spontaneously borrowed from Hopkins and Herbert, I sought techniques that could do justice to the gravity of my new subject matter and embody my exuberant joy. Of course, I could never match the achievements of the two geniuses I was imitating, but in a more humble way my writing has been inspirited by the Incarnational poetics of these two great poet-priests. 

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Hopkins’ Turbo Metaphysical Conceits and the “Scandalous” Paradox

Hopkins thought "The Windhover" was his best work, and world-renowned Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan believed it was the greatest short poem in English, maybe in any language. Considering Hopkins’ innovative methods for capturing its holy subject matter, that claim of distinction makes perfect sense for this remarkable sonnet:  

The Windhover
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

A simple scenario introduces the sonnet’s profound meditations. One morning, the persona (or poetic speaker) watches a falcon (windhover) hover, then drop to strike its prey. The windhover’s “beauty” and “valour” “stir” the persona’s heart, and at the precise moment that the bird folds its wings to descend, he addresses it directly, bursting into hyperbolic praise for its “mastery.” In the very instant that the falcon “buckles” its wings and falls from the sky, the speaker exclaims: “AND the fire that breaks from thee then” is “a billion times told lovelier.” The word “then” is both a temporal and a logical term here, so this is a causal claim that introduces the paradoxical mystery at the heart of this poem: when and because the bird falls from the sky, its descent reveals its astonishingly high worth. 

The rest of the sonnet elaborates on this theme and gradually reveals its religious implications as the folding falcon becomes an intricate metaphor for the mysteries of the Passion, Crucifixion, and the Incarnation. But the reader must wait almost until the end of the poem for the Christological clue when in line 11 of 14 lines, the speaker ecstatically addresses the bird, “O my chevalier” (in other words, my knight, or my champion). When the persona compares the falcon to his own servant knight, he also alludes to Jesus’ paradoxical humility, to that strange and wonderful Incarnational mystery of God humbling Himself by coming down to earth to become the loyal champion Who even allowed His body be broken to save us. 

The poem layers on two other metaphors for Christ’s astonishingly generous brokenness. When a farmer’s plough breaks open dirt, it shines. And when dark embers fall onto the hearth, they break into flame again and "gash gold vermilion." The colour is a reference to His blood,  the gash is a reference to His wounds. And the fire to His Love. 

It turns out that this work’s subtitle “to Christ our Lord” wasn’t merely the dedication of a simple nature poem to Christ; instead, it prepared us to witness the persona speaking to Him with grateful adoration in a mystical moment when admiring creation creates an interface with God. 

These metaphors are 19th-century examples of the Metaphysical Conceits that 17th-century poets such as George Herbert are famous for, those often elaborate, jarringly incongruent comparisons between ideas from incompatible categories that they used to describe an abstract quality by means of a mismatched physical object. The most well-known is John Donne’s image in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” of the steel legs of a compass as a metaphor for two romantic lovers who have to part: “If they be two, they are two so/ As stiff twin compasses are two;/ Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show/ To move, but doth, if the other do.”

These Metaphysical Poets were left to moulder in obscurity until a hundred years ago because, to use the disparaging words of Samuel Johnson, “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together” in their work. Ironically, this famous insult names the very quality that earns these poets their place in history and that makes this neo-Metaphysical poem by Hopkins so great. After all, what poetic technique could be more apt for the paradoxical mysteries at the heart of Christianity? The ideas of the almighty God stooping to take on human form and then undergoing so much humiliation are themselves so violently incongruent that St. Paul called the Crucifixion a “scandal” to non-believers. 

In “The Windhover,” Hopkins perhaps went further than anything seen in the 17th Century, layering multiple images and doctrines to create a kind of turbo-charged Metaphysical Conceit that likely would have Johnson spinning in his grave. Marshall McLuhan famously spent an entire essay on the poem’s word “buckle,” with its complex layering of avian, knightly, and religious implications. 

And we would need a whole essay, too, to spell out all implications of the term “fall” in the final line, “blue-bleak embers fall, gall themselves.” This word is an indirect allusion to Adam and Eve’s sin and expulsion from Eden. The poem explicitly uses the falling embers as a metaphor for the falcon’s descent; the descent, as discussed above, connects theologically to Christ humbling Himself in the Incarnation by means of the chevalier imagery. Since the falling embers gash themselves vermilion, this image includes salvation history via the vermilion blood from gashes suffered during the Passion and Crucifixion. All these mysteries at the heart of Christianity are held in awareness by a 19th-century man observing a falcon one morning and are now being read about in the 21st Century. In brief, this high-powered Metaphysical Conceit enfolds all Christian history from Genesis up to the present-day and beyond. 

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Incarnational Inscape 

Even if we ignore the less obvious Christological parallels and read “The Windhover” simply as a sonnet in which nature inspires religious awe, it deserves its reputation as a great poem and a prime example of Hopkins’ signature theory of inscape. This is the term he coined for the distinctively individual design of a scenario or a thing, which he sought to capture in his poetry. This nature poem teems with highly particularized imagery, creating remarkably precise details that let us see the falcon gliding and diving, as when the bird’s turns are compared to “a skate’s heel sweep[ing] smooth on a bow-bend.” Hopkins is famous for this kind of finely tuned naturalistic description. 

Inscape also serves deeper mystical meanings by opening an earthly/heavenly interface because the stunningly individualized imagery insists on physicality even when the poem shifts to the metaphysical plane and becomes an adoring expression of thanks to Christ for coming to earth to champion us. The sonnet never relaxes its attention to nitty-gritty images, of a plough breaking dirt or a piece of coal shattering on the hearth, for example, thereby demonstrating that by entering deeply into the particularity of objects, things themselves do more than inspire praise; attention to things might actually effect mystical union with their transcendent Creator. 

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The Controlled Burn and Interfacing Allegories of Herbert’s Poetry 

Hopkins is famous for yet another innovation that helped light his poetry on fire: what he called sprung rhythm. Inspired by long-lined Old English alliterative verse, he adapted strict metrical forms by adding extra unstressed syllables, sometimes a surprisingly large number of them. “The Windhover” is a sonnet in terms of its rhyme scheme, number of lines, and its pattern of five strong stresses in each line. But instead of the expected ten syllables, its lines often run to lengths of fifteen or sixteen syllables, forcing them in many editions to arc over two lines, mimicking the sweeping arcs of the gliding falcon. 

All the superabundant repetition of sounds of Old English alliterative verse, which Hopkins amplifies with his sprung rhythm, creates a strange tension: the gravitas inherent in long lines and in the holy subject matter seems about to implode with the nearly uncontrollable burning of ecstasy suggested by the outlandish repetition. I sought to mimic this tension when I was writing a poem about the mysteries of the rosary, and so I used the long lines and abundant alliteration I learned from Hopkins in a joyfully reverent poem about Mary and Joseph presenting Jesus in the temple.  

Hopkins displays the same exuberance in his many poems that teem with imagery, such as the popular "Pied Beauty," with its list of dappled things (cows, trout, birds’ eggs); this plenitude is catalogued to praise the generosity of the Creator. 

George Herbert’s poetry is filled with the same tension between reverence and a superabundance that signals ecstasy, but in his case the enthusiasm seems to be tamped down somewhat by a desire for simplicity. When I modelled my work on Herbert’s, I reached first for his verbal repetition and signature catalogues. In elaborate poems like “Prayer (I),” he stacks image upon image to denote God’s abundant blessings as well as the persona’s pressing need to praise. In the brief, three-stanza long  "The Call," Herbert uses extensive repetition of key nouns and verbs. In each four-line stanza, he uses three key words in the first line, and then repeats each of them once in the same order over the next three lines. The poem begins: “Come my Way, my Truth, my Life” and those three nouns therefore dominate the short lines of the brief stanza.

So much repetition in so short a space gives the illusion that not much has been said because the form severely limits the number of nouns, and the result is a kind of childlike sing-song. Herbert’s simple form, syntax, and earnestness can be off-putting, but it has also been praised as “complexity disguised as simplicity.” Plain, earnest praise was one of his goals, as he stated in “Jordan (I),” where after complaining about his contemporaries’ overly obscure conceits, he counselled poets to be humbly straightforward and didactic, to “plainly say My God, My King.” But his theology was anything but simple. “The Call” is a catalogue packed with Christological paradoxes, as in line four: “such a Life as killeth death.” 

I wanted to learn Herbert’s trick of combining serious theology, straightforward statements of praise or doctrine, and the exuberance that always smoulders just below the simple surface with occasional flare-ups, all of which make up the controlled burn that draws attention to the interface between the physical and metaphysical planes. His "Redemption" is a case in point:

Redemption

Having been tenant long to a rich lord,
Not thriving, I resolvèd to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old.

In heaven at his manor I him sought;
They told me there that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possessiòn.

I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts;
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

Of thieves and murderers; there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died.

Here the poet uses a strangely reticent method of allegory that emphasizes the narrative for so much of the poem that the symbolic higher meaning seems secondary. “Redemption” narrates at length the tale of a debtor imploring his feudal lord to forgive his debt. Only two words and an ampersand open up the spiritual plane to reveal that the story serves as an allegory for the Crucifixion. Religious allegories, such as Pilgrim’s Progress, are usually far less insistent on the human plane, foregrounding instead their religious meaning. 

In “Redemption,” as readers witness in realistic detail the debtor’s long search for his creditor, they are left wondering whether the poet will ever cash in on the theological possibility of the title as a reference to Salvation by Christ rather than merely use it as a mundane reference to a loan. “Heaven” peeks through in one word only in the fifth line. By being so aggressively and precisely a story of a transaction between men, this piece builds to the sudden and short shock at the very end: “Your suit is granted” the lender says, “& died.” In the final word, suddenly the joyous spiritual meaning flames out, engulfing the poem with an eternal level of meaning that fires up the sense of gratitude that the human story inspires.

Here the poet uses that same attention to an individualized earthly scenario that Hopkins would eventually name inscape. In other words, Herbert captures an inscape of allegory. In “The Windhover,” Hopkins’ laser-like focus on the particularity of a bird opens up a conduit to the Creator. Similarly, in “Redemption,” Herbert’s unusual level of attention to the realistic plane of his allegory causes us to dwell on the earthly story until the piece finally flashes to the spiritual plane, and the poem therefore emphasizes the union of the human and divine in Christ, this most vital example of the interface. 

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Traditional Forms in Contemporary Christian Arts 

Poems like “The Call,” “Redemption” and “The Windhover” burn with ecstasy. We might be witnessing in them evidence of these two poet-priests’ mystical union with God, which is one of the chief goals of the Ignatian spiritual exercises. St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit order, devised a meditative method to place oneself in the Gospel scenes by calling to mind particularized details. Hopkins being a Jesuit priest, this unitive prayer method has been cited as one main inspiration for his theory of inscape, along with the philosophy of Duns Scotus. This prayer technique might have influenced Herbert’s poetry, too, as Louis Martz argues in his study of how Catholic meditation guides from the Continent were smuggled into Protestant England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then adapted secretly for Anglican priests and ministers, such as Herbert.

I certainly can’t claim Herbert’s religious or poetic depth, but I am struck by the parallels between my own experience and the basic process Martz describes: a spiritual renewal that focuses on an interface between the everyday earthly and the heavenly realms leads a poet to find and forge a new style. 

Once my attention was drawn to my own spiritual need to fuse my contemporary style with techniques borrowed from past masters, I noticed the same combination in several Christian arts at a lofty level. The music of Sir James MacMillan includes traditional passages; the celebrated poetry of Sally Read sometimes joins free verse with intensely particularized imagery and exuberant syntax that echo Hopkins’ style; church architecture is undergoing a renaissance of classical features. My worry that just such a fusion of contemporary and traditional styles would sideline me has turned out to be unfounded. A Christian journal, Ekstasis, published the religious poem “After Surrendering Night” that first hijacked my free verse. More surprisingly, a formalist and overtly religious poem about the physical/metaphysical interface has been published by a completely secular Canadian journal of ideas. 

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. We celebrate Pentecost yearly, I imagine, partly to remind ourselves that miracles still occur, including the miracle of speaking about God and being understood by those we assume don’t even share the same language. 

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Dorothy Nielsen is a poet and literary scholar. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in many U.S. and Canadian journals and anthologies including The Literary Review of Canada, Ekstasis Magazine, Christianity and Literature, The Fiddlehead, The Dalhousie Review, Room Magazine, and Another London: poems from a city still searching for itself. She is the author of one collection of poetry. Her literary criticism has been featured in many American and Canadian journals such as Canadian Poetry, Contemporary Literature, Sagetrieb, and in several essay collections including New Definitions of Lyric: Theory, Technology and Culture and the forthcoming Transformative Reading: The Alchemy of Literature and Life. She lives in London, Ontario.

How we know depends on what we love. Love makes all the difference between knowing something and merely knowing about it. When we love someone, we want to be with them, and when we are with them, it’s enough simply to be in their presence. Love inaugurates a remarkable simplicity. We find ourselves freed from distractions or able to overcome them easily.

At the same time, paradoxically, love sharpens our acuity. We notice more, we take in more, we have time for more. Our patience increases, as well as our capacity for endurance. We have a strong sense of direction and everything intervening only reveals another way to the goal. Nothing is superfluous, nothing wasted.

Without love, we may know about something, but we fail to know it intimately. We register and collect facts, but we fail to make connections. We find it difficult to build bridges from the known to the unknown. We ask questions like “What’s the point?” We can’t see a point because we have no sense of the reality of the thing, its being in the world.

Of course, this state is worst where people are concerned. They sense our indifference to their reality, they distrust that we have entered into their lived experience, and they perceive an absence of empathy and imagination where their life is concerned.

We manipulate people, we reduce everything to the status of tools for our purposes. Perhaps worst of all, we come to believe that everyone lives this way and that there’s no way of escaping self-interest. We place a canopy over our understanding of what love can be. Knowledge becomes the only game in town.

Distinguishing between knowing and knowing-about, sage though the contrast may be, involves a temptation. Am I secretly asking, Okay, how do I know things properly? Have I still put the emphasis on knowing? Love overcomes our suspicions and our second-guessing. Love has brought us and all of reality into being, and love is the final destiny of all things. Love makes the world go round:

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end, as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.1

Love intimates completeness: “when the complete comes ….” Love allows us to see things and to experience things whole. In the language of another time, it is simple: everything all at once, defying parsing and discursivity. We have connected with what matters. We have become immersed in it. We have come home.

Love encourages our affirmation of its own reality as well as the assent to its claim upon us, individually and collectively. It encourages a response on our part. Knowledge will come to an end; love has no end. One might say it also has no beginning, except that love seems always to be beginning things. It seems to be the very definition of beginning. Love calls the tune. Love is personality, love is reality. Love never fails. Reason is a gift of love.

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Lived Reality

For the followers of Perfect Man, the supremacy of love means that love is first about proclamation and only secondarily about explanation. The story of Perfect Man furnishes those who first know him with a set of lived realities around which they take their identity. Soon these shared points of reference are recreated in practices; eventually, they come to engulf Western culture; they lend the terms for a definition of culture. 

An improbable society gathers around the revelation that God is Love. The definition of this claim is inseparable from the events in the life of Perfect Man. These include miracles and teachings leading to transformed lives; they culminate in Perfect Man’s death, his Undeadness, and his going to a Better Place figured as a community of love. The improbable society invests its identity in those events, seeking to organize everything it sees and touches around the Man himself and the events of his life, death, and undeadness. It takes charge of existing narratives, recentring them on Perfect Man as the fulfilment of tropes.

This reorganization represents a kind of pragmatism. If one really thinks something to be the case, then one will act a certain way as a consequence. As a school of thought, pragmatism typically begins and ends in self-interest, and so seems far removed from the injunctions of Perfect Man, whose binding instructions include loving your neighbour as yourself and sacrificing yourself for another. Yet the pragmatist is committed to acting in accordance with reality.

Modern pragmatists typically take science as the arbiter of the real, but if one came to accept an alternative understanding of reality, pragmatism would insist on acting in accordance with the accepted picture. The first followers of Perfect Man were pragmatists in this sense. Their devotion did not indicate credulity. Rather, the fact that these weathered realists formed a new and enduring community supplies one indication that they did so for a reason. From the effect of a community taking shape around Perfect Man one can infer a compelling cause.

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Love’s Work

The Perfect Society that takes shape around this event expresses its experience of mystery in the notion of a bond between knowing and loving. The trope is present in the sacred writings it inherits, from their primitive language of sexual union and genealogy to the allegorical epithalamium at their heart. In the community’s additions after the appearance of Perfect Man, it describes the spiritual goal in terms that fuse knowing and loving: “having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know ….”2 The heart has “eyes” for seeing and desiring. They can be “enlightened” to produce a knowing, but it is the heart, not the head, that must respond and must know. 

In the centuries that follow, Perfect Society defends its knowing in the midst of pagan philosophies. Its representatives insist, with increasing influence, that its knowing is not only  philosophically sound but  an advance over the other schools of thought. Canada’s first political philosopher, Charles Cochrane, refers to Roman efforts collectively as “creative politics,” by which he means the maintenance of power in the absence of rational closure both to thought’s subject matter and to its methods, impossible for reason alone to attain.3 In a vision of what a Canada worthy of the epithet “Canada’s century”4 could look like, Cochrane turns to these much earlier commentators on community, who recognize its integral role in any construction of knowledge, which depends on what the community loves. Early writings by members of Perfect Society make the relationship between reason and the heart characteristic of its philosophizing, politics, and morals.

It does so in correction and completion rather than contradiction of these other systems of thought. Love reigns supreme. On the one hand, humanity longs for God with an unquenchable desire, seeking its rest like the cosmos itself in Aristotle’s understanding; on the other, divine love is active and seeking, making and sustaining the universe, itself God’s meaning, as a medieval mystic will put it. Even the Latin word for learning, studium, literally means desire.5 An early thinker and shepherd of souls in Perfect Society offers the formulation that we err when we give up on our desire: we fall into ourselves as into a kind of centre, when we should follow its centripetal and ecstatic movement.6

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Ways of Talking

In its God-talk, Perfect Society refuses to disentangle celebration, proclamation, and the insistence on accuracy.7 As it becomes ascendant, this matrix of modalities is transposed into culture. The relationship between reason and emotion, head and heart, comes to serve as a cultural proxy for an evolving discussion in these three modes.

In its practices, Perfect Society celebrates what it holds to be true in such a way as to give “the fullest possible range of significance in the language used” and “to evoke a fullness of vision.”8 In the communicative mode, it turns increasingly outward to bear witness and to put its message into the terms favoured by those whom it engages. It takes “a long and exotic detour through strange idioms and structures of thought.”9 Working in this more “exotic” mode, at some point the question of limits arises. God-talk then relies on its critical mode: it insists on accuracy, especially the apophatic insight that all our language is inadequate. In the formulation of Rowan Williams, 

This nagging at fundamental meanings is what constitutes a critical theology, alert to its own inner tensions or irresolutions…. Negative theology remains one of the most basic forms of critical theology, sometimes doing no more than sounding a warning note against the idea that we could secure a firm grip upon definitions of the divine.10 

In its insistence on affirming the incomprehensibility of the divine, God-talk in its critical mode returns to the celebratory, and embraces the “gratuitous mysteriousness” of that with which Perfect Society has to do.11 What Williams calls the “mobility” characteristic of God-talk indicates an “essential restlessness in the enterprise” that has to do with a promise of final vision and harvest given by Perfect Man himself.12

In a modern perspective, this set of modalities has been thought to map like a matrix almost perfectly onto “western culture” in a time known as Christendom (a projection both of lovers and haters of the idea). This has happened despite the inherent “mobility” and “restlessness” within Perfect Society. The notion of such a transposition has yielded a definition of culture, which is for Raymond Williams one of the “keywords” in the English language most difficult to define. “Christendom,” especially as applied retrospectively, connotes a comprehensive, monolithic, and static culture. As time progresses, and the seemingly unified culture of Perfect Society fractures and diversifies, the word “culture” (again retrospectively) becomes increasingly associated with one or more of the modalities otherwise held together by Perfect Society, but not all of them together. Perfect Society’s fate is to be trapped in its own matrix. “Culture” pulls the plug on it. 

The arts contribute to all three modes of God-talk and take shape through them. Many forms of celebration involve the arts: prayer; liturgical drama; chanting and polyphony; iconophilia; architecture. They also contribute to the mode of communication, adept carriers of those “strange idioms and structures.” This process accelerates with the iconoclasm controversy of the 8^th and 9^th centuries as Perfect Society confronts from yet another angle the strangeness of what the status of Perfect Man seems to imply.

For those working with the modes of God-talk “through the arts,” no less than for others, at some point the question of limits arises. In this area, a sharp difference develops between the mode as practiced by Perfect Society for the first 1000-plus years of its history and the way it is understood in the modern world. Or perhaps one ought rather to distinguish between the ongoing practice of artists and the modern theory of the artist’s role. In either case, the critical mode of Perfect Society’s God-talk never abandons its confidence in the knowability of the reality concerning which it must be acknowledged there are limits to what can be meaningfully said. It does the opposite, holding most fiercely to the reality that is there, in the light of which, or rather, in the darkness of which, it acknowledges the poverty of its categories and its language. 

Art theory becomes a secularized God-talk that rejects its properly critical and apophatic mode. In “Learning in War-Time,” C.S. Lewis suggests Matthew Arnold is the first to use geistlich (spiritual) in a sense cut off from religion. At this point, Arnold and his followers divorce themselves from Perfect Society’s critical mode. Arnold expresses sadness at the retreat of the Sea of Faith, but he remains content to communicate something outside any strictures of Perfect Society. He writes, in “Dover Beach,” of that sea

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 

And naked shingles of the world.13

The great Victorian intellectual is willing to shed any association with faith; he sees Culture rushing in to fill the void. Sadly, there is in Arnold a dreary refusal to admit a certainty informing Culture’s negations. The cycle of Perfect Society’s circulating God-talk, at least in theory, has been broken. 

 In their practice, artists persist in evoking a sense of the unsayable. The artist wishing to bear witness to the deposit of faith recognizes a fidelity to Perfect Society that embraces its genuine negations. Ironically, negation gives scope for the true mystic to be recklessly accepted as the profane poet, and vice-versa. In the language of negation, the construct of love-and-reason-and-the-bond-between-them persists, and in the language of head and heart, art continues to hold out the possibility of a critical God-talk alive to its own limitations. A careful discernment is required here. Traces traces the traces of where both sorts of artists might have been and might be tending, and of the movement of this most basic of bonds.

This essay appears in two parts.

Click here to continue reading part two of “The Supremacy of Love” by Norm Klassen.

Norm Klassen teaches in the English Department at St Jerome’s University and in the rhetoric program at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario.

Click here to read part one of “The Supremacy of Love” by Norm Klassen.

Three Faces of Courtly Love

In the Middle Ages, courtly love provides a new idiom for the transposition of love and reason and the bond between them. It does so in two ways: firstly, it makes explicit to a broader audience what is often implicit in Perfect Society’s modes of discourse; and secondly, in retrospect, it gives love-and-reason-and-the-bond-between-them status as a cultural artifact that can take on a quite different meaning within a simulacrum of that community and its modes. The supremacy of love is particularly vulnerable.

Lawless love

In the Middle Ages, the literary phenomenon of courtly love plays a prominent role relative to the three modes of God-talk fostered by Perfect Society. It is allegorical in one fundamental sense: it represents the supremacy of love in relation to reason. As a cultural system, courtly love consists in humility, courtesy, and usually, adultery. Above all, it is a religion of love. It does not necessarily offer an isomorphic allegory of, say, the relationship between God and the soul, but it codes the seemingly universal, spontaneous, bodily experience of falling in love. The allegory lies here, in the paradoxical bond between rational and emotional components, and the ultimate triumph of an unspeakable love as the analogical source of everything that is important in the lovers’ world.

Courtly love begins (from the male lover’s perspective) with love at first sight, a transformative event. Falling in love happens through a process –  seeing – that is strongly associated with logical deliberation and rational insight, co-opted by the God of Love to effect the conquest of the heart. The lover is smitten, now devoted to the beloved and unable to think of anything else. Chaucer articulates the established principle of love and reason being in tension: “‘Do you not well know the old clerks’ saw, / That “who shall give a lover any law?”’” (This is self-reflexively funny because the speaker is a smitten knight who is arguing his case.) Love at first sight deliberately juxtaposes head and heart. Dante famously portrays Francesca and Paulo as stimulated to love through reading a certain book, a detail Rodin is careful to capture in The Kiss. “‘Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante,’” Francesca confesses. “‘That day we read in it no farther.’” As a convention, courtly love generates set pieces like the demande d’amour or “question of love,” in which two forlorn lovers debate which of them suffers more from their unrequited or lost love; visual tropes like that of a courtier and a maid playing chess, a scene which fuses dalliance and stringent concentration; a medical lexicon that identifies lovesickness as a disease (hereos) and recommends various treatments; the seedy paradox of poetic voyeurism, including the invention of the pander who conveys information while getting far too into his role.

Cosmic love

Courtly love is also cosmic. “Quando l’amor divino mosse di prima quelle cose belle,” Dante writes at the start of his own comic creation The Divine Comedy. Divine love moved all those beautiful things, themselves impelled by desire for the love that moves the universe but is itself unmoved.1 In Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, after the knight who has asserted the lawlessness of love dies in a tragic accident, Duke Theseus of Athens seeks the meaning of all things and is told only that 

This world is nothing but a thoroughfare full of woe,

And we are pilgrims passing to and fro.2

The duke acknowledges the First Mover, the fair chain of love, and that

with that fair chain of love he bound

The fire, the air, the water, and the land.3

Rhyming couplets attest to this ancient belief in the bond between all things, as does modern science with its tacit belief in comprehensibility. The duke can get no farther, but pilgrimage takes on its fully revealed dimensions immediately following the tale to which he is bound, in the pilgrimage to Canterbury, symbolic of heavenly Jerusalem (which they never reach). It doesn’t matter that the religious allusions on this level are uniformly blasphemous in the mouth of a miller. He’s not responsible for talking or living in a particular way. The fellowship will stay together just the same, evincing bonds greater than those that hold fire, air, water, and land together, greater even than the collective will or happenstance reasons of the pilgrims. 

Of love

Beyond all the reasons for going on pilgrimage is the love that draws the pilgrims; behind all the explanations for falling in love is the inexplicable reality of it. Love is bound up with reasons, but lies beyond reason’s ability to walk its way to its destination in love. The great premodern doctrine of supernatural finality survives in courtly love as a cultural expression of something that becomes unsayable in the early modern period. Humans were made for divine completion. God has so planted his grace in us that we cannot fully be ourselves without returning home to him. Reasoning causes us to yearn for this finality, yet we cannot attain it out of reason’s own resources. Perfect Man reveals a paradoxical relationship between nature and the supernatural in the strangeness of his own human and divine natures: humans have a destiny incommensurate with their nature; they cannot fulfil their supernatural destiny simply by following their nature. A transformation is required. This is not the overlaying of one reality on top of the other. On the one hand, nature can boast its own order, with which the supernatural is not confused; on the other, the two are joined in union, so that the natural yearns for its own transformation. We must say the same for courtly love as a cultural system. Courtly love as a teasing, self-aware, and sensuous construct participates in a love that escapes enclosure and beckons for self-transcendence. The art form does not capture the relationship between the natural and the supernatural; nothing can. “Of” love is the love that is a belonging-to and points to the love that is the beginning and end of all things. 

Supernatural finality marks the history of Perfect Society in two ways related to the development of culture. Its members do not turn away from human culture. Rather, they perceive that its accomplishments need purifying and completing. They also do not seek a specific principle of grace, already fingerprinted and photographed, at work in the complexity of concrete realities in nature or in culture. The permeation and spiritualization of nature is too pervasive for that. Rather, faith is everywhere operative in the pursuit of cultural understanding worthy of their calling.

Love-and-reason-and-the-bond-between-them is the translation and intuitive acculturation of supernatural finality. Reason in its more prosaic form (ratio in the Middle Ages, empiricism in the modern one) represents nature and the expectation to arrive at its telos out of its own resources. Love is the grace planted within nature; that which effects the necessary transformation; it is also nature’s (and reason’s) telos.

Yet one can also recognize a transcendent source in reason itself. Blaise Pascal has written,

From all material objects taken together no one can ever extract the tiniest thought. That is impossible; it is something belonging to a different order. Out of all material objects and all spirit no one can ever draw a movement of true charity; that too is impossible; it belongs to a different order, the supernatural order.4

Pascal affirms the supernatural source of both the human capacity to reason and its ability to be drawn by “true charity.” If he seems to put them on equal footing, he nonetheless affirms that they are so in an “order” beyond that to which we can attain out of our natural resources. Dante seems to say something very similar at the end of The Divine Comedy. As has been observed, “At that decisive instant ‘the Christian soul begs love to bring it beyond intelligence’; but then, in the transfiguration of all being which is consummated in God, love and intelligence are one.”5 Henri de Lubac here first accepts the formulation of Etienne Gilson, then deepens it.6

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A Sensibility

This is not the place for sketching a history of the motif of love and reason and the bond between them in the development of modern culture, although another obvious highlight after courtly love is the one to which T.S. Eliot draws attention in his lectures on “the dissociation of sensibility.” That The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has dismissed Eliot’s terminology as “simple-minded”7 only confirms that contemporary cultural poetics is confronted by something very large in this trope with which it has difficulty coming to grips. Eliot gave those lectures not long before deciding that he too needed to find his place in Perfect Society. His early poetry confronts the Western tradition by insisting on the impossibility of reconciling what any modern person knows with desires by turns seedy and profound and, at any rate, inescapable. The opening lines of “Burnt Norton” turn to courtly love to affirm the possibility, at least, of their rapprochement, and to effect the further transposition of that medieval genre in terms of modern psychology and burgeoning discoveries in phenomenology and physics.

If something about the handling of the relationship between reason and love in the metaphysical poets is dissociated in modernity, the construct persists, with implicit recourse to the narrative and coherence of Perfect Society. Formulations range from the crass (“He’s thinking with his dick”) to the wry (“Schooled by love”), to the pithy (“the heart has its reasons”). They populate high and low culture alike. Shakespeare appeals to it (“Love talks with better knowledge …”), and modern mystics still do as well. Terry Eagleton has dragged it into literary theory to make a new case for objectivity, disinterestedness, and a revaluation of liberalism’s hallowed separation of facts and values. Confronting death in her forties, the brilliant Jewish sociologist Gillian Rose calls her memoir Love’s Work. She acknowledges the strangeness of what love accomplishes. The book is wrought out of her desperation that philosophy is abandoning rationality, which she perceives it can only do out of the resources of language, reason, and love. In it, she meditates on Camelot, like others invoking that medieval world of paradoxical courtly love, and in her dying days brave friends honour her by still suggesting to her further possibilities latent in that invocation.

The ubiquity of references to love-and-reason is a problem. Can there be anything to analyze when a trope is virtually omnipresent? Is it so clichéd as to be unilluminating, or so obvious that it offers very little to gnaw on? Then there is the problem of terms. Is love and reason the same as faith and reason? Perhaps not, since Simone Weil’s apothegm resonates: “Faith is the experience that intelligence is enlightened by love.”8 And what do we do with asseverations like the one in Bloodline, that “Baking is a science, cooking is intuition”?9 Science is metonymic for rationality: does intuition mean feeling and feeling, in turn, mean love? The construct gets at something similar to the ad for an exhibition at the Balloon Museum in London: “Emotion Air – Art You Can Feel.” The accompanying graphic depicts a man in a suit holding a balloon where his head should be, with a smiley face and the letters n and ē where his eyes should be.10 Love-and-reason-and-the-bond-between-them is easily dismissed in the call for exactness of terminology or appeals to historical particularity. Yet the allusions keep happening. They keep doing some sort of work.

Jean-Paul Sartre once expressed skepticism about moral codes on the grounds that they are difficult to apply uniformly in individual cases. To this, C.S. Lewis replied,

Obviously it is moral codes that create questions of casuistry, just as the rules of chess create chess problems. The man without a moral code, like the animal, is free from moral problems. The man who has not learned to count is free from mathematical problems. A man asleep is free from all problems.11

 The idea of reason-and-love-and-the-bond-between-them as a trope is a generalization, just as the category of ethics is. As difficult as allusions to love and reason together can be to read in a way that allows one to describe a taxonomy, the work continues to be done with the expectation – obviously met on some level – that it will reach the audience and tell it something recognizable about art. We need a taxonomy. We need a hermeneutical consciousness. We need a lot of things.

Meanwhile, the examples of this trope keep coming, and they continue to do cultural work. The following excerpt from a murder mystery by Louise Penny, one of Canada’s leading writers in the genre, offers a pithy insight:

Not for the first time the retired psychologist wondered who’d decided to name that part of the body the temple. No doubt some man who worshipped information. Thinking that the brain was the temple where knowledge was housed.

But she knew, as did her companion, as did the dogs, and Gracie, trotting beside them, that anything worth knowing was kept in the heart.12 

This meditation contrasts information with a different kind of knowing and in-forming. The first is housed in the brain, the latter in the heart. The first can be worshipped, and this is quite clearly misplaced worship, because “anything worth knowing” is kept not there but in the heart. The latter does not depend on expertise, as information often does. It can be gained by people of any age or professional status, women as well as men, and by animals too.

The passage offers an oblique critique of scientific modernity and of persistent patriarchal mores. It does something else, too. It contributes to the establishing of the writer’s (or the narrator’s, if you insist) credentials as a wise observer of human conduct and of history. The tone is gently ironic. In this way, the author makes a bid for her writing to be taken that little bit more seriously in that it offers not merely clever distraction but something more. The fiction aspires to the status of art. It is not surprising to learn, as we eventually do (spoiler alert), that the plot – the solving of an intellectual puzzle, the métier of the mystery novel – turns on the interpretation of a work of art. 

An interview Yo-Yo Ma gave to Terry Gross achieves a similar feat of drawing the listening audience further into culture and promoting an understanding of it that trades on the relationship between reason and emotion.13 Ma expresses admiration for the role of rationality, but also recognizes its limits. He talks about reason in relation to emotion: the tension between them is again present in a discourse intended to educate non-specialists in the significance of art. Nonetheless, Ma instructively distinguishes between appealing to head and heart to “get it right” and the deeper reality of art in the infinite and in community, that is to say, in love.

Both Gross and Ma reach for the low-hanging fruit of reason and emotion to talk about art. Ma is famous partly as an interpreter of Bach’s Cello Suites. Bach has a reputation as a very mathematical musician, a technical genius. His Cello Suites, Gross presses, serve as technical pieces, and she wants to know how Ma draws musicality out of them, “making them beautiful” (4:16”). Beauty stands at a distance from technical know-how. Gross has established a binary, one which Ma both acknowledges and deepens. 

The cellist leans into the role of rationality, emphasizing the importance of finding patterns and comparing making music to writing code: “Everything we have in life is about patterns: the same or different. We are constantly oscillating between the same and different” (7:10”)…. “Now, why is this beautiful?” (7:23), he continues. … “You actually get to code infinite variety” (9:15”). Ma is sharing very quickly and intuitively here. On the one hand, the expression “get to code” privileges the role of rational discipline. The notion of coding “infinite variety,” however, embeds the intellect in something other, and the combination can produce beauty: “why is this beautiful?”

The cellist seems to be pointing beyond pattern-making itself to a conception of art in which rationality is harnessed to the infinite. A rationalist might wish to claim that the coder masters variety, and some people are apparently tempted to restrict Bach’s achievement to such mastery, but Ma does not make this claim. Rather, he sees Bach as getting beyond mere rationality: “In a world where we can measure everything, or we think we can measure everything, how wonderful it is that you could have the poetry of music, or poetry, or music that actually makes you think you are touching infinity” (9:38”). Art unmasks the deception that measuring, a form of intellectual circumscription, accounts for everything. We need something more to encounter reality properly, which for Ma involves acknowledging and gesturing to the infinite. Art uncovers the reality of the latter: it makes it seem touchable.

Art creates the sense of “touching infinity.” Yet it would be hasty to equate this act with emotion. One can sense the exhilaration, the emotion, in the words Ma uses. He includes the emotions, but he is looking beyond a simple binary of reason and emotion. That binary becomes explicit when Gross encourages autobiographical reflection in her subject. Ma talks about his “tiger parents” (14:25”). He refers to “head and heart” explicitly as the contributions of his father and mother respectively. The two parents both contribute to “trying to get things right” (15:25”) in the education of their prodigy. Both parents contribute to something conceived as a closed system. 

Significantly, Ma leaves an escape from this system in which he is implicitly boxed in by his parents. He asks: “But did I know why I was doing something, or what it was about?” (15:35). He is pointing towards something other. In retrospect, he discovers an escape from any system whatsoever. He comes to recognize an elsewhere beyond the effort “to get things right” in the exposure to a community of young people similarly gifted, each in their own area. They opened up worlds to one another through their geekish talent, focus, and discipline.

This interview illustrates a twofold movement in the love-and-reason construct. On the one hand, it is meant to explain everything. On the other, it makes apparent something else that transcends it. “Touching infinity” means more than achieving a perfect balance between reason and emotion; rather, it implies self-transcendence and the infinity of other people and the worlds they open up to one another in community. This is love, running on both a vertical and a horizontal axis. 

Fascinatingly, love does not vanquish reason: we still get to code infinity, and the community (of artists) draws on the geekish focus and discipline of its members. Love goes beyond reason, but it does not move against it. Yet by saying that, in his case, head and heart combined in an attempt to “get it right,” Ma points to the danger of resting on head and heart as a system. Something lies beyond, something like encounter. Ma puts his finger on a perennial danger in the practice of art and in the explanation of its ways: reason always lurks to fold the other, to fold infinity, to fold love back into itself. Even if we call the otherness community, action, or encounter, our labels and our efforts at description indicate a ravenous rationality. 

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Who We are Now

Two very large issues press upon the construct of love-and-reason-and-the-bond-between-them to do work that it cannot do. This work jeopardizes the supremacy of love as inculcated in culture by Perfect Society. One is the paltry claim that art is subjective, where subjectivity is reduced to relativism and stripped of infinitely resonant personhood. One must distinguish between recognition of the deep subjectivity that recalls the relationship between nature and grace and the thin idea that the subject makes its own choices in untrammelled freedom. Pushed forward as the subversion of rational norms, this latter subjectivism is read into the construct of love and reason as the simplistic triumph of “Do what you want.” Feeling, embodiment, intuition, and imagination all serve as synonyms for a very narrow commitment to voluntarism in the face of the imposition of norms, the presence of authority, or the spectre of limits. The binary of love and reason, when treated without sensitivity and without reference to its history, obscures the potential richness of subjectivity, while subjectivism restricts the relationship between love and reason to the immanent domain and reduces both terms, but especially love, to a cartoon. 

The other pressing issue, closely related to the first but displaying a different aspect, is the invocation of love as the objective point of reference without reference to the habits nurtured by apophasis. This tendency marks liberalism. It is to be accepted avant la lettre that love is roughly to be equated with the transcendence of revelation and authority, the unwillingness to acknowledge binding personal and corporate moral responsibility and brokenness, and above all the stubborn belief that reason, not love, is humanity’s greatest feature and source of achievement. Paradoxically, liberals invoke love to suppress rational debate. The decision has already been taken. Love is invoked as a universal, but rationality has already settled the issue. Love belongs in a quarantined realm to which liberalism has given the name “values.” Here love reigns supreme, and the presenting of reasons is frowned upon in aesthetic terms: as being in bad form, tone deaf, vulgar, insensitive, kitsch. In this way, liberalism mimics the apophatic God-talk of Perfect Society. But love isn’t supreme, decisions have been taken, and what’s left is a candy salad simulacrum of a civilizational order that pays homage to the arts. In a further irony, those who accept a fact/value split (the terms themselves must go) tacitly undermine art’s power. The construct of reason and emotion has been co-opted by liberalism to the end of opposing them and making love supreme, but at the expense of building up facts and values.

The critical mode of God-talk through the arts challenges the hegemony of love (and of art) in the recognition of love’s persistently deeper unsayability.

Love is not a victory march,

Leonard Cohen avers. The line echoes across the song. The one that follows, 

It’s a cold and it’s a broken “Hallelujah!”

is easily misunderstood as a variation, however wry, on the theme of praise, an Arnoldian reduction of geistlich. In that misunderstanding, love survives intact, conceptualized, knowable: here is a song in praise of it. The enduring power of Cohen’s warning stems from its admission that it doesn’t comprehend love and can only trace where it’s been.

Except that it is a victory march after all, from the harrowing of hell to final glory. Negation from one end to the other, though much else besides. And not Dante especially to invoke as a guide, but many, many other poets too, and another medieval one as well, Langland, for a practical love worked out in the shadow of the tower of Truth.

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Norm Klassen teaches in the English Department at St Jerome’s University and in the rhetoric program at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario.