Poetic Revelations: Word Made Flesh Made Word (The Power of the Word III) ed. by Mark Burrows, Jean Ward, and Malgorzata Gregorgzewska (review)

Scholars of Christian spirituality are always speaking into what Charles Taylor has termed a “Secular Age,” in both the Academy and the wider culture. How then to identify and claim a discourse for exploring the central Christian mystery of the “Word made flesh”? This volume, the third in a series of conferences on the “Power of the Word,” proposes poetic language as a way of exploring the revelation of the divine in history and everyday life, probing the relationship between language and the “flesh” or bodily experience. Its subtitle, “Word made flesh made word,” suggests the play of ideas among poetics, theology, and philosophy that this feast of conversations offers.

This volume’s three sections are each introduced by one of the conference’s keynote speakers, with succeeding essays responding to issues raised in the opening essays. Sir Michael Edwards begins by framing an experiential theology of Revelation based on the “bodied” nature of poetry, its ability “to make us aware of the flesh-ness or corporeality of language: by its concentration and its unconcern simply to convey a message, a poem invites us into the life of words” (21). The revela-tory experience of reading and writing poetry guides the rest of this section. Kevin Grove explores Augustine’s approach to the the Psalms as a way of “participating in Christ,” while Krystyna Wierzbicka-Trwoga constructs a dialogue between George Herbert and Stanislaw Herakliusz Lubormirski, two poets who understood poetry as in some way mediating the mystical experience of God. Edwards’s theme of the corporeality of language is taken up again in Sonia Jaworska’s essay on the “flesh” as a key focus of Richard Crashaw’s poetry, stressing both the erotic imagery in his work and his kenotic Christology. The affinity between poetry, mysticism, and sacrament is further explored in Anna Walcuk’s essay on Elizabeth Jennings, whose priestly understanding of the poet-artist leads her to view poetry as “opening the gates to an all-embracing reality” (72).

The second section moves into more explicitly philosophical and theological territory. Richard Viladeseau begins by summarizing two directions in traditional Christology: theology “from above” encompasses the Chalcedonian understanding of the “Word made flesh” as the descent of the divine into the human, while a theology more radically “from below” offers a sometimes heterodox focus on “flesh made word” in which the Incarnation is completed only in the resurrection. For the Word to become flesh, the flesh must become Word” (90). Threaded with insights from Aquinas, Rilke, Teilhard de Chardin, and Karl Rahner, the essay emphasizes the “poetic” character of religion itself, its awareness that like poetic words it can “intend and evoke but never contain the divine reality” (90).

The remaining essays in this section explore aspects of the relationship between the “flesh” and the Word, focusing largely on the experiential dimension of the texts discussed. Marta Gibinska, drawing on the philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion, offers a reading of Act 2, scene 2 of Macbeth, emphasizing how the voice and body of the performer give us access to the “flesh” – the real being—of the character Macbeth. Mark Burrows draws on Bachelard’s account of reading as “dreaming” or “reverie” to suggest that engaged reading is a kind of contemplative practice: not a process of analysis but an opening of the self to transformation. Bradford William Manderfield also pushes against purely analytic approaches to reading in his essay on the Irish philosopher William Desmond. Starting from T.S. Eliot’s use of the phrase “hints and guesses” to describe the mystery of the Incarnation, Manderfield elaborates Desmond’s promotion of what he calls “equivocity” or the “guess,” an open attitude toward the mysteries of theology and philosophy which contrasts with the “univocity” of traditional scholarly discourse. This equivocity also informs Malgorzata Grzegorzewska...