The Incarnation of the Poetic Word: Theological Essays on Poetry & Philosophy, Philosophical Essays on Poetry & Theology by Michael Martin (review)

In his 1952 essay “Learning How to See Again,” Josef Pieper worried that his contemporaries were losing their ability to perceive deeply. Their lives were too harried. They were constantly surrounded by the “visual noise” of television and advertising. It is understatement to say that these trends have since deepened. Screens increasingly dominate our lives, and attention itself has become a ruthlessly pursued commodity. Visual noise and the resultant attenuation of perception disconcerted Pieper. He feared that it impoverished our experience of the world and flattened the spiritual dimension of the human being. Pieper’s proposed solution? Consciously avoid visual noise and become an artist since that would foster “a deeper and more receptive vision, a more intense awareness, a sharper and more discerning understanding, a more patient openness for all things quiet and inconspicuous, an eye for things previously overlooked.” The true artist, according to Pieper, is a contemplative.

A similar insight is at the heart of Michael Martin’s rich essay collection. Martin helps us discern some of what we lose when our perception is weakened. We lose a sense of the mysterious “thereness” of being as well as the overdetermination of the given world, its “too-muchness.” We lose track of how being is not inert but “hyperbolic,” to borrow a term from the philosopher William Desmond (who provides the foreword to this collection). Since we are a part of the world, we can easily become inured to this, which can in turn lead to an instrumental stance where being becomes a mere resource. But experiences of wonder as varied as a starry sky, a child’s face, or a close call with death can all reawaken us to the mystery of being. So can the encounter with a poem or painting, and such artistic encounters are Martin’s main focus in The Incarnation of the Poetic Word.

Martin agrees with Pieper that we can consciously cultivate an openness to this overdetermination. He points to the philosophical practices of phenomenology developed by Edmund Husserl and his students. For Martin sees phenomenology as a revival of contemplation in the midst of the twentieth century’s pervasive reductionism. In “the [phenomenological] epoché,” he writes, “we stand before the phenomenon in attentive patience, awaiting its self-disclosure” (23). It is “when intentionality is relinquished or forgotten,” he elaborates, “that the phenomenological reduction then metamorphoses into contemplation (theoria)” (33). Phenomenology in Martin’s account is not a new science (Husserl was wrong to present it as such) so much as a renewal of ancient practices.

One of the major goals of this volume is to illustrate that such “attentive patience” is necessary for literary criticism. Martin outlines an “agapeic” or contemplative criticism where “we approach the text in an attitude of respect and reverence, avoiding the temptation to colonize it with premediated assumptions” (98). In such a criticism, “The poem, the text, enters into me as I enter into it: a chiastic movement of sublimation. I am sublimated: sublimated is the poem” (30). Of course this agapeic approach ultimately issues in criticism, including critical judgments, but the initial stance is openness, and this openness ideally underpins the whole critical endeavor. Martin’s essays in this collection on George Herbert and Robert Herrick are impressive cases studies—they are attentive to form, historical and biographical context, and theological implication, but these concerns grow out of an openness to the poems themselves, a willingness to experience the poems and to think with them.

Martin notes that attentive openness is in short supply in contemporary literary criticism, where too often “what the work has to say is of very little consequence in the presence of what the critic wishes to say” (22). He points out that literary “theory” is often far removed from contemplative theoria. We might think of how the hermeneutics of suspicion and...