Silence, the Word and the Sacred

Fullness and Silence: Poetry and the Sacred Word

Chapter 11 FULLNESS AND SILENCE: Poetry and the SacredWord David W. Atkinson A consideration of poetry as sacred expression gives rise to several issues. Perhaps the most obvious of these focuses on divine nature and on whether there is any appreciable difference between how the divine is presented in an identifiable religious document and how the divine is presented in poetry that may or may not be explicitly religious. Beyond this there is the question of whether the religious experience evoked by religious language bears any relationship to how one responds to a poem which moves in the realm of aesthetic experience. And, finally, there is the issue of whether the poem as religious expression is conditioned by the particular religious tradition withinwhichthe poet isworking. These issues concerning poetry as religious expression are, however, underpinned by the basic question of what comprises religious experience itself and how this experience is communicated in language generally. Here Gerardus van der Leeuw expresses the generally accepted view that the religious significanceof things... is that on which no wider nor deeper meaning whatever can follow. It implies an advance to the farthest boundary, where only one sole fact is understood:—that all comprehension is beyond. This "beyond" van der Leeuw talks about as the "wholly other," whereby he echoes Rudolf Otto, who defines the "wholly other" as "beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible,and the familiar;"2 it is that which is totally other from the conventional reality we experience as limited human beings. Otto was, of course, one of the first to address whether religious experience is expressible in language, and in this regard argued that the experience of the "wholly other" is expressible in an "ideogram" that suggests and points to, but never exhaustively renders, the absolute nature of the divine.3 Thus Otto distinguishes between the sublime and the numinous, insisting that the sublime is "but a pale reflection" of the numinous and at best "an indirect means of representing the numinous."4 189 190 Silence, The Word and the Sacred Simply put, the "ideogram," while capable of producing a powerful response in the individual, is still not a direct expression of the divine. Persuasive as Otto's argument is, it falls apart outside the western religious traditions, for in eastern traditions, and particularly Hinduism, the religious and the aesthetic merge into one; and, even in the case of western traditions, one wonders whether the experience evoked through literature can be qualitatively distinguished from what is identifiably religious. Certainly there are any number of writers who identify the aesthetic experience and, more specifically, the poetic experience with the religious experience. The Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore, for example, describes his poet's religion as revealing "endless spheres of light because it has no walls around itself."5 And his contemporary Sri Aurobindo draws on traditional Indian poetics in describing how poetry "has not really done its work. . . until it has raised the pleasure of the instrument and transported it into the deeper delight of the soul."6 Among western writers, Coleridge is notable for affirming the congruence of the poetic and religious in writing "how the poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity."7 And his fellow Romantic, Shelley, is even more forceful in his observation that "poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge. . . . the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of things."8 For Tagore and Aurobindo, as well as Coleridge and Shelley, then, all poetry is religious poetry in introducing a dimension of reality the reader hitherto has never experienced. Humankind lives in an arena of partiality and incompleteness—this, after all, is what the Fall from Innocence suggests. It is such partiality and incompleteness that, in turn, generates the anxiety and suffering we commonly call the human condition. Religion aspires to overcome this partiality and incompleteness. In that poetry also takes one beyond one's individual vision of the world to what Otto calls the "totally other," it is reasonable to conclude that this is a religious function and that what evolves as an aesthetic experience from the poem is also a religious experience. Put another way, religion gives anticipation of something more and aspires to provide realization of this something more. Given the case, then, that poetry gives rise to religious experience, one is left to...