A Chastened Communion: Modern Irish Poetry and Catholicism

4. Transcending Sacrifice: How Heaney Makes Room for the Marvelous

108 4 Transcending Sacrifice How Heaney Makes Room for the Marvelous No Irish writer since James Joyce has more openly acknowledged the influence of Catholicism upon his work than Seamus Heaney. Raised in a devout Catholic family in rural County Derry, Heaney grew up in an atmosphere thoroughly steeped in religion. He has frequently commented on the imaginative potency of this Catholic upbringing, which he says anchored his nascent consciousness within a “light-filled, Dantesque, shimmering order of being.”1 His poetic retrievals from this childhood reservoir range from familiar Catholic rituals to exotic accoutrements of the faith, such as the chasuble and ciborium, respectively, the outer vestment adorning the priest during Mass and the vessel that holds the consecrated eucharistic wafers.2 What remains uncertain, as with Joyce, is Heaney’s governing attitude toward Catholicism. Spurred on by the poet’s own comments such as the one quoted above, some recent critics have cast Heaney as a Catholic fellow traveler, who no longer officially adheres to the faith but remains profoundly sympathetic to its beliefs. Thus John Desmond, while acknowledging Heaney’s struggle to overcome the “narrow cultural Catholicism” of his upbringing, stresses his ongoing commitment to the metaphysical principle of “a vertical, transcendent dimension of reality [that] he learned in his early Catholic training.”3 A more nuanced version of this position comes from Peggy O’Brien, who emphasizes the impossibility and irrelevancy of determining the precise nature of Heaney’s actual religious beliefs. What matters, she suggests, is his willingness, under the influence of the “intellectual Catholicism” exemplified by the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, “to imbue poetry Heaney Makes Room for the Marvelous | 109 with a questioned but also felt religious impulse quite at odds with the metaphysics of modernism and postmodernism, ranging from agnosticism to atheism.”4 Against this position, there is the abiding view, articulated most forcefully by Henry Hart and Helen Vendler, that Heaney’s poetry demythologizes and secularizes the essential elements of his inherited faith. According to Hart, “Heaney recollects Catholic spiritual exercises . . . to better focus on their hallowed assumptions, which now seem hollow, and attacks their methods even as he employs them.”5 This stance of demythologizing critique towards Irish Catholicism is, indeed, foundational in Heaney’s poetics. As much as any twentieth-century Irish poet, with the possible exception of Austin Clarke, Heaney has committed his poetry to the task of dismantling the debilitating components of this cultural system. Foremost among these from his perspective is a sacrificial imperative sanctioned by a theology of atonement. But Heaney’s undoing of this Catholic cult of sacrifice eventuates in something more than just divestiture. It opens space for the appearance of what Heaney refers to as the “marvelous”—the unforeseeable and seemingly impossible . In Heaney’s poetry, this revelation is always tinged with the numinous . But the grace that accrues to it is elusive in nature, neither clearly supernal nor purely immanent, neither theistic in provenance nor fully desacralized. Heaney releases this epiphanic event from its theological bondage without handing it over to the forces of secular materialism. He sets it loose in the open territory between the zones of belief and unbelief, where it threatens the secure premises of each of these domains. While sacrifice has long been recognized as a central component of Heaney’s work, the commentary on this issue has mostly focused on his appropriation of Iron Age sacrificial devotions to a Mother Goddess in the bog body poems of Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975). The controversy triggered by Heaney’s interfusing of these archaic ritualized sacrifices with the contemporary sectarian violence of Northern Ireland has been so strident that it has preempted critics from addressing the Catholic dimension of Heaney’s obsession with sacrifice. Heaney himself has not been as reluctant to make such a connection. He has stressed how compelling he found the Catholic principle “that your own travails could earn grace for others, for the souls in purgatory” and how his mother epitomized 110 | A Chastened Communion for him “the whole theology of suffering, the centrality of sacrifice, of the cross, of losing your life to save it.”6 Elsewhere, Heaney cited this impetus toward self-sacrifice as the salient feature of Irish Catholicism. In a blurb describing Station Island, his poetic account of the Lough Derg pilgrimage, he identified this ritual as manifesting “those self-afflicting compulsions and obedient pieties which...