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  • The Spiritual Within Limits
  • Harold L. Weatherby (bio)
A More Beautiful Question: The Spiritual in Poetry and Art by Glenn Hughes (University of Missouri Press, 2011. xiv + 168 pages. $60)

This apologia for “the spiritual in poetry and art” is a distinctly oldfashioned book. It could have been written a half century ago. Until the penultimate chapter the reader might conclude that Glenn Hughes is innocent of the New Historicism, deconstructionism, ethnic studies, queer studies, and comparable ideological and secularizing literary developments of recent decades. In fact he is not, and in that penultimate [End Page iv] chapter he makes an altogether elegant statement of his position. Any approach to art that does not allow its “greatness of vision, clarity, or comprehensiveness” to “move one to existential humility” radically misrepresents the work. This defect of criticism “particularly obtains in the regions of academic life . . . where certain progressivist dogmas have merged with tenets of radical historicism to encourage the notion that the meaning of any great work of artwork can be reduced to—for example—the determining economic circumstances of the society in which it was composed” or to any of the other ideologies that “reduce the work to a fascinatingly brilliant artifact of mainly historical interest, especially useful for showing up the prejudices and benightedness of the author and his or her times.”

Given this firm rejection of immanentizing, it is not surprising that the book is deeply indebted to Eric Voegelin—perhaps too deeply, for Hughes tends to set everything in a Voegelinian frame. The burden of the introduction is the ideas of Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan, but in the chapters that follow Lonergan receives much less attention than Voegelin. Hughes’s concern is Voegelin’s “image of human consciousness as an ‘in-between’ of worldly and transcendent realities—as the ‘site’ where temporal and eternal being intersect or interpenetrate”—what Voegelin calls the metaxy, “a mode of creaturely existence co-constituted by immanent . . . and transcendent” modes of being. Great art and poetry are the fruits of that intersection, and any criticism that reduces it to the merely immanent deforms the work.

Within this Voegelinian construct Hughes deals quite ably with Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot. Only the chapter on Hopkins relies in major part on Lonergan, specifically on his concept of “elemental meaning”—meaning grasped within, not abstracted from, the “absorbed apprehending” that discovers it. One can see immediately how such an epistemology applies to Hopkins’s apprehensions—of a windhover, a spring, a caged skylark, Binsey poplars. The grasping of elemental meaning is precisely the “instressing” of “inscapes.” Of course this mode of knowing also places Hopkins firmly in the metaxy: “the guiding vision is of nature and human existence as simultaneous participation in the world and transcendence, perishable and eternal reality.”

Emily Dickinson is also a “poet of the In-Between.” She scorns the institutionalized Christianity “of her place and time” precisely in order to enter “the metaxy . . . which is neither time nor eternity.” She writes in the “disturbing movement in the In-Between of ignorance and knowledge . . . ultimately of life and death.” Hughes limits himself, on principle, to discussion of the less familiar nonanthologized poems with interesting results. He convinces me that Dickinson fits the Voegelinian frame (better, I think, than do Hopkins and Eliot) and that coming to her work from that perspective illuminates it. What would be closer to the metaxy than “Of Paradise’ existence / All we know / Is the uncertain certainty”?

Hughes’s Eliot is the Eliot of the Four Quartets, and obviously “the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless” is dead [End Page v] center in “the In-Between.” Hughes comments not only intelligently but movingly on Eliot’s various instances of “the unattended / Moment, the moment in and out of time.” Here he demonstrates the loving engagement with the poetry that his thesis demands. And he concerns himself as well with a dimension of the Quartets that distinguishes them from the work of Hopkins and Dickinson: Eliot’s concern with history—moving constantly—in its paradoxical relationship to the “still point” that gives it meaning. The result is a comprehensive and convincing...

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