Modernity Blunts Our Soul’s Eye. Poetry Heals It.
By growing up in the modern world we inherit a secular and scientific worldview. We interpret our experiences through a biased lens. Our focus gravitates towards what we can touch and measure, rather than on metaphysical truths behind what we touch and measure. We must strive for poetry and art, because these retrain our focus, and make us more sensitive to spiritual matters.
I hope the following reflections guide your meditation on this subject.
“The scientific mindset of our day, with its requirements of clarity and analysis, makes it difficult for many people to repose in the obscure certitude of faith. A man habituated to a poetic gaze is more easily at home in a simple and confident acceptance of the dazzling truths of our faith” (Fr. Francis Bethel, John Senior and the Restoration of Realism, 187).
Science verses Poetry
Science provides us valuable tools, but its scope is limited. It is useful for controlling and manipulating. It is incapable of addressing the more significant parts of human existence: issues of ethics, meaning, and love. Poetry is a tool for encountering the latter.
“Music, or poetry, thus leads us to wonder about the depths of reality. It teaches us to be silent so that we may listen to reality’s deeper voice and receive its message” (Bethel 166).
Science is an attempt to place the world into man’s mind. Poetry is an attempt to place one’s mind into the world, to let go, and wonder.
“Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea, reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite…The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head” (G. K. Chesterton).
Poetry Opens Our Heart to Being
“Being should touch us…Existence is taken for granted, without our paying much attention to it until some aspect of being, such as beauty, awakens us to wonder anew at it…The world is a poem wherein not only being but He-Who-Is beckons to us” (Bethel 186).
“Behind the beautiful, it is indeed being that is beckoning to us. Beauty, the splendor of the form, strikes us because it is a manifestation of a deeper reality: the riches of being. The function of gymnastic, and particularly music, building on it is to cultivate delight in things and a wonder at their beauty, and thus awaken us to the mystery of being, refreshing our gaze. Poems, songs and stories…stimulate and nourish our amazement at existence itself ” (Bethel 187).
Art Launches the Soul towards God
“The arts — sculpture, painting, poetry, music — nurture our faith through all the aspects of the poetic mode…They operate on the level of the intuitive, experiential, loving and connatural, communicating the true, good and beautiful, and thus launching us toward God. Frequenting them habituates us to peacefully gaze at mysteries without pretentions of clarity” (Bethel 187).
“Poetry disposes to faith not by persuasions but participation…having to do with the beginning of religious life in the consciousness of sin and helplessness and the end in bliss” (Senior, Letter to David Whalen).
The Music of Words
“The most important kind of music in the wide sense…is, of course, the music of the words — that is, poetry and literature. Music in the strict sense of song and instruments plays an enormous part in shaping the sensibilities, so does art; but what you read enters directly into the intelligence and has therefore an even stronger effect. We must put our greatest effort into restoring reading in the home, first and foremost reading aloud around the fireplace of a winter’s evening or on the porch of a summer’s afternoon; and for the older…
…children and adults, silent reading, each by himself as they all sit together in the living room, reading…from Mother Goose to Willie Shakespeare…the thousand good books for children in the nursery to the youth at college, which we read and reread all the rest of our lives” (Senior Restoration of Christian Culture 23).
The Aim of Art is Worship
Art is not meant to entertain, inform, or evoke emotions. Art is meant to kindle hunger for God.
“Art should resemble seasoning that brings forth the food’s natural flavor. Good aft emphasizes beautiful features with the purpose of teaching us to perceive and savor more intensely the riches of reality. It cultivates the proper love of beauty as manifesting real values” (Bethel, 165).
What Kind of Literature is Conducive to Contemplation?
“We want…something simple, direct, enjoyable, unreflective, uncritical, spontaneous, free, romantic…Such experience is not sufficient for salvation…nor sufficient for science and philosophy, but indispensable as the cultural soil of moral, intellectual, and spiritual growth” (Senior, RCC 26).
A Man Without Poetry becomes Trousered Ape
“Oh, poetry, is pretty stuff, they say, but in this desperate war, idle pleasure must be sacrificed for the survival of civilization and the Church. Well, soldiers without poetry are gangsters, hired guns, blind means with neither love nor knowledge of the end, who never will achieve the end because the End is Truth, not a concept but three Persons only known in beauty both on earth and as it is in Heaven” (Senior, The Restoration of Innocence).