Poesis

"She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up."

—Zora Neale Hurston

Stone by stone it rises, this little house by the sea. Soft, damp sand for mortar, moss for the garden, driftwood for the roof. A tiny stone wall encircles the yard, a path winds toward the front door. I am on my belly working to bring this little dwelling into being. My wife and young daughter work beside me. A breeze from the ocean cools us. We have begun building this miniature house on a whim, but now we are going at it in earnest. We want to make it strong and beautiful. Pausing from time to time to consider our creation, we talk and laugh and exchange stories. We imagine the lives of the inhabitants of this place, how they live, what they care about. A whole cosmos gradually comes into being.

This desire to make things, beautiful things—where does it come from? I do not know. I only know that there is a pleasure, deep and pure, that comes from making something beautiful, from fitting stones into a pattern, laying a floor, creating a garden, making a life. Even if the making is all there is, even if the thing made is ephemeral and not destined to last, there is pleasure and joy in the making. Sometimes, though, our creations do endure. We are able to behold the work and feel it work its magic on us, kindling the imagination, taking us out of ourselves if only for a moment, into another world.

This making and beholding, so central to the experience of art, is also essential to the spiritual life. The Christian community has long known this. The outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost—nothing less than God's creative life coursing anew through the world and through the hearts of believers—not only gave birth to a community but also to a habit of inquiry into the meaning of faith that can best be described as "theopoetic." It was Clement of Alexandria who introduced the term theopoesis into the Christian vocabulary. For Clement, theopoesis meant at its most profound level nothing less than divinization, the experience of being taken up into the life of God—in and through the life or Logos of everything that exists. An entire tradition of Christian mystical theology and spirituality emerged from this insight; so did a range of artistic practices. If we consider, for example, the hymns of Prudentius, the mosaics at Ravenna, the architecture of the early Christian basilicas, the rhetorical beauty of Augustine's sermons, the tradition of Gregorian chant, it becomes clear how much of the earliest Christian reflection on the mystery of faith was rooted in an aesthetic, imaginative experience. It is true that there is also a strong aniconic tradition within Christianity that questions whether faith can be mediated through art. But this dissenting voice, so necessary to the tradition, must be seen as part of a larger chorus of voices that finds art essential to the expression of the spiritual life.

Still, Christian theology and spirituality have not always taken seriously their own aesthetic possibilities. It was just this sense that lead New Testament critic Amos Wilder, in his little book Theopoetic, to call for Christian theology and spirituality to overcome their "long addiction to the discursive, the rationalistic, and the prosaic . . . [and do more] justice to the role of the symbolic and . . . mythopoetic dimension[s] of faith." This issue of Spiritus includes essays, poems and works of art that do just that.

To consider what this might mean in practice inevitably leads to a blurring, even a confounding of boundaries and categories which so often guide our thinking about these matters. For example, the clear distinctions so often made between so-called "high art" and "low art" become problematic as we consider...