2.1 Charles Péguy

Before the First World War, some writers, especially in France, were already responding with both alarm and creativity to their country’s aggressive de-Christianization, which began in 1879 with the removal of priests from hospital committees and charity boards, in 1880 saw lay women replacing nuns in hospitals, and in the Jules Ferry laws of 1881–1882 resulted in the prohibition of all religious instruction in schools. The program of ‘secularity’ (laïcité) was to culminate in the December 1905 bill formally separating church and state, expropriating vast amounts of the Catholic Church’s property, restricting the exercise of worship by some state employees, banishing religious symbols in public spaces, and ending all state support for religious organizations. Reflecting on these developments in his memoir ‘Our Youth’ (Notre Jeunesse, 1910), Charles Péguy (1873–1914), rejected the official rationale for these sweeping reforms, insisting that the true fight

is between the whole of the old France, pagan France (the Renaissance, the humanities, culture, ancient and modern letters […]), Christian France, traditional and revolutionary, monarchist, royalist and republican – and on the other hand, […] in opposition, the dominion of a certain form of elementary, primary thought, which became established about 1881, which is not the Republic [but] […] the parasite on the Republic and is properly speaking the domination of the intellectual party. (Péguy 2001: 20)

As for most writers, intellectuals, and theologians of the Third Republic, the decisive event was the Dreyfus affair, which to Péguy revealed the betrayal of both republican and Christian ideals at the hands of modern power politics. Yet even as Péguy’s intellectual and religious development follows the standard progression from youthful atheism and left-socialist leanings to his Catholic conversion, his mystical outlook places him at odds with the clerical and corporative aspect of French bourgeois Catholicism. Péguy’s peasant roots and his view of Catholicism – not as a confession among others, let alone as an idea, but as an autochthonous and holistic outlook on life – led him to reject the intellectualized, sociological concept of religion advanced by Comte, Renan, and Durkheim. Instead, as he insists,

Everything begins with la mystique, in mysticism, with its own mystique, and everything ends in politics. […] The whole point […] is that in each order, in each system, THE MYSTIQUE SHOULD NOT BE DEVOURED BY THE POLITIQUE TO WHICH IT GAVE BIRTH. (Péguy 2001: 17, original emphases; see also Royal 2015: 442–467)

As in this passage, so throughout Péguy’s oeuvre, the emphasis on humanity’s essentially mystical vocation is conveyed in an incantatory style that relies heavily on repetition, usually with minute variations. Rather like the agrarian work of his forbears, that is, writing for Péguy involves repetition, a rhythmic conception of work and knowing-by-working. Formally, most of Péguy’s works can be categorized as prose poems that envelop their reader in a meditative, quasi-hypnotic experience. As his son was to comment later, Péguy’s approach to writing could be defined as ‘the absence of any style, [as] the instant notation of a meditation, of thought at its birth’ (Péguy 2019: iv). Echoing Bergson, Péguy sees consciousness originate in intuitions whose scope and power utterly transcends individual awareness: ‘Our forces of knowledge are nothing compared with our vital forces and our hidden resources. Our forces of knowledge moreover are really ourselves, whereas, contrarily, our vital forces are greater than we’ (Péguy 2019: 39–40).

One of Péguy’s most influential works is The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, first published in 1897 and republished in 1910 in substantially revised and more concentrated form. The work comprises a series of dramatic dialogues between three characters, the eponymous heroine, her spiritual confidante, Mme. Hauviette, and a nun. Set in 1425 against the backdrop of the Hundred Years War, the work’s protagonist is consumed by three questions: (1) Why did Jesus’ disciples abandon and deny him following his arrest? (2) Why did Jesus not save the damned in Hell? (3) Why does God permit suffering, particularly when caused by war? Péguy’s aim is to reaffirm solidarity, sacrifice, and martyrdom, supreme spiritual realities that the Catholic-socialist means to restore to the mundane bourgeois world of the Third Republic. If, as he puts it, ‘the world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years’, France at the turn of the century has become ‘the world of those who believe in nothing, not even in atheism, who show neither devotion nor sacrifice for anything’ (Péguy 2019: 19, 31). It is ‘the world of those who have no mysticism’, defined by ‘economic strangulation’, which in turn has atrophied the timeless rhythms of a Christian life where ‘everything was a rhythm and a rite and a ceremony, […] a most saintly habit […] an inner elevation and a prayer’ (Péguy 2019: 20, 23–24). Péguy’s final works, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope (1911) and Holy Innocents (1912) unfold as book-length theological meditations, in the case of The Portal on the second and most tenuous of theological virtues: ‘Hope sees what will be / In time and for eternity / In the future, so to speak, of eternity itself’ (L’Espérance voit ce qui sera. / Dans le temps et pour l’éternité. / Pour ainsi dire dans le future de l’éternité même – Péguy 1996: 11). Though his life and work were cut short by his death in combat in September 1914, Péguy would exercise considerable influence on writers such as George Bernanos, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Geoffrey Hill, such as in the latter’s 1983 tribute to Péguy, ‘brooding on conscience and embattled hope / Truth’s pedagogue, braving an entrenched class / of fools and scoundrels’ (Hill 2013: 143).

2.2 Paul Claudel

Like Péguy, Paul Claudel (1868–1955) revolts against Parisian intellectualism with its ‘infectious darkness of a university education’ (Claudel and Rivière 1984: 134) and against what he considers the nineteenth century’s engrained habit of framing all reality in naturalistic or relativizing (historicist) manner:

My great joy is to think that we help usher in the twilight of nineteenth-century science. All its abominable theories that have blighted our youth […] At last, we shall fully breathe the sacred night, blessed unknowing [bienheureuse ignorance]. What deliverance for the learned [savant] to give himself over in complete freedom to the contemplation of things without having to sustain the nightmare of an ‘explication’. (Claudel and Gide 1949: 48)

Yet, unlike Péguy, Claudel is fully committed to the Catholic Church, notwithstanding his having been deemed unsuitable for taking orders as a Benedictine. Strongly influenced by his reading of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in 1886 and transformed in that same year by his attendance of the Christmas ‘Magnificat’ at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Claudel embraces in earnest the Catholic religion to which his parents had been ‘indifferent’ or positively ‘strangers’ during his youth (‘Ma Conversion’ in Claudel 1965: 1008). Though privately dismayed by the ways in which state-imposed ‘secularity’ (laïcité) reshapes French culture, Claudel successfully navigates the political and bureaucratic shallows of a career in the French foreign service, which was to include postings in China, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, Japan, the United States, and Belgium (in the last three places as French ambassador). Still, in his notebook entries and private correspondence Claudel often comments on the agony of being a Catholic in the modern, secular world: ‘to believe all alone in a despised doctrine, to dare face, without shrinking one iota from argument, the blasphemy and mockery that fills the books, the streets, and the newspapers, to resist family and friends, […] to be faithful against all’ (Claudel and Rivière 1984: 54).

With the notable exception of Dostoevsky, ‘who I studied most intensively during the crisis period of my spiritual formation, and who especially sustained and consoled me’ (Claudel and Gide 1949: 85), Claudel remains largely indifferent to prose fiction. Likewise, the dominant motifs of nineteenth-century poetry, ‘despair and revolt’, furnish for him no ‘composing theme’ because they ‘will never create harmony’. Only Baudelaire stands out in his time, ‘because he is the poet of remorse’ (Claudel 2020b: 46–47). Particularly in his earlier, lyric oeuvre, Claudel comes across as quite possibly the most unhesitatingly devout and committed Christian among twentieth-century poets: ‘The Christian is the creature of joy [l’homme de Joie], and to be such requires being universal, a creature of total expansiveness [l’homme de l’expansion totale]’ (Claudel and Rivière 1984: 146). Like Dante, ‘the greatest of poets’ (1984: 145), Claudel understands art as an extended lectio divina that grasps visible things as conduits to the invisible; alongside the liturgy and reading scripture and commentary, art is quintessentially a participation in the divine and, as such, can legitimately exist only as a form of praise: ‘What is art if not an exclamation and an acclamation, an enumeration and action of the graces, like the Canticle about the young men in the furnace’ (Claudel and Gide 1949: 52; referencing Dan 3:22–25).

A lifelong, avid reader of scripture, Claudel starting in the 1930s embarks on a comprehensive body of exegetical writing, often original though never (at least not intentionally) heterodox. His approach to scripture – ‘the only edition I know is the one by Fillion, not famous but at least orthodox’ (Claudel and Rivière 1984: 72) – is framed by extensive readings in patristic and medieval theology, anchored by constant recourse to Aquinas, whose ‘lucidité admirable’ (Claudel and Rivière 1984: 145) he often extols to friends (see Millet-Gérard 1999). From Aquinas, Claudel takes on the concept of proportionality, fittingness, or ‘a secret rapport, unknown to logic and of prodigious fecundity, between things, people, and ideas – what we call analogy’ (‘La Poésie est un Art’ in Claudel 1965: 54–55, original emphasis). It is the ontological condition on which all metaphor rests, as indeed ‘the texture of language itself, and consequently of thought, too’ (1965: 54–55). If poetry is a way in which a cosmic order manifests itself, rather than a function of Romantic self-expression, ‘poetic inspiration’ must be understood as ‘a grace – an unearned grace, or, as theologians say, gratia gratis data’ (grace freely given). It further follows that ‘praise is the greatest mover of poetry’ and ‘the creative theme par excellence. Nobody sings alone. Even the stars of heaven, we read in the sacred books, sing together’ (Claudel 2020b: 50–51).

Flanked by a sizeable number of shorter, occasional poems are Claudel’s major lyric works, most notably Five Great Odes, written between 1900 and 1907, with all five first published as a separate volume in 1910. They are followed by The Way of the Cross (1911), Cantata in Three Voices (1912), The Mass Down There (La Messe Là Bas, 1917), works that, drawing heavily on the liturgy and the ecclesial calendar, amalgamate poetry with the rhythms and sensations of the Mass. Claudel’s is an eminently liturgical poetry. Starting with the Odes, Claudel thus seeks to grasp his poetic voice as a transcendent gift, as inspired, divinely infused utterance rather than self-expression. Understood as the medium of the ‘word’ (parole) rather than its origin, the poet testifies to God’s presence by naming all his creation. ‘But when you call me I must not answer / With only myself, but with all the beings that surround me.’ The fourth Ode (‘The Muse Who is Grace’) frames this dialectic between creativity as act and as gift in a series of Strophes and Antistrophes, culminating in this rejoinder:

You may call me Muse, but my other name is Grace,
the grace who comes to the condemned man
and who tramples law and justice underfoot.
If you seek out the reason, there is none
but the love that exists between you and me.
It is not you who have chosen me, but I you
from before you were born.
(Claudel 2020a: 86–87)

Conservative – though never reactionary – in his politics, and in many respects a classical Thomist in theological matters, Claudel’s literary work is strikingly modern. Characteristic of Claudel’s style are sudden shifts in tone or, in his plays, abrupt changes in setting and action. His verse with its sprawling, irregular rhythm (known as verset Claudélien) stands unique in modern French literature. Modelled on the irregular, incantatory idiom of the Psalms and, in modern literature, echoing Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (see Royal 2015: 474), Claudel’s lines employ subtle sound-patterning within a line (nor traditional end rhyme) whose overall effect is that of a form discerned rather than imposed by the poet. Lyric form shows all things to be connected, often in entirely unexpected ways, with each thing both fit to its own intrinsic end and fitted to all others, issuing in one vast harmonious whole whose theological import is to be absorbed in the act of reading and listening rather than being scrutinized as a set of distinct propositions. Thus, in this passage from his second Ode (‘Magnificat’), Claudel traces the deeper meaning and exemplarity of his conversion (‘when God delivered me from myself’ – mon Dieu, qui m’avez délivré de moi même) as he suddenly finds himself ‘In the forest at midsummer, / around the Feast of Saint John the Baptist’ amidst ‘a smaller chorus of birdsong in Damascus’. He appears transfixed by the abundant, multi-sensory world around him,

When the water descending from the high country in tumult
is united with the sighing breath of the desert, and the tall plane trees tremble in the evening air
[…]
I stood before you a wrestler – not believing
myself feeble, but that you were the stronger.
[Et je fut devant vous comme un lutteur quie plie,
Non qu’il se croie faible, mais parce que l’autre est plus fort.]
(Claudel 2020a: 56)

After 1914, Claudel shifts from lyric to dramatic forms. Thus, in a trilogy (The Hostage, The Hard Bread, and The Humbled Father, 1910–1920) he takes up the conflict between temporal and spiritual power, here framed in the context of Napoleon Bonaparte’s imprisonment of Pope Pius VII. His most ambitious play, The Satin Slipper (1924), running approximately nine hours in performance, unfolds its plot at multiple levels. It is, first and foremost, a story of adulterous passion resisted (and, as such, a reworking of Claudel’s earlier, autobiographical Partage à Midi [1905]), yet also an extended moral reflection on the Spanish-Catholic conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which Claudel notably does not repudiate (see Royal 2015: 475–479).

3.1 Literary engagement with Protestant and Reformed traditions

Still, neither the resurgence of post-liberal Protestant theology, exemplified by Karl Barth’s Letter to the Romans (Römerbrief, 1918/1922), nor Rudolf Bultmann’s attempted fusion of Protestantism with Heideggerian existentialism, nor the young Paul Tillich’s attempted reconstruction of the faith along socialist lines impact contemporary literature to nearly the same degree as does post-First World War Catholicism. To a significant extent, this disparity is the result of Protestantism’s different outlook on both the internal constitution and ultimate aims of theological inquiry, as well as its far more restrictive view of the place of art within Christianity. Having rejected the metaphysical framework of analogia – famously termed ‘the invention of the anti-Christ’ by Karl Barth – Protestant theology had long conceived of religious life and faith in aniconic terms. Like the material world on whose malleable resources all creation of form must draw, art and literature belong thereby to the realm of ‘appearance’ and, as such, always run the risk of being charged with (and dismissed as) ‘mere semblance’. Unwilling to take that risk, Protestantism typically refuses to take the risk involved in mediating between God and humankind. While embracing art as a supplement for ‘edifying’ the faithful, aesthetic form from a Protestant perspective is limited by the same ‘ontological difference’ that, according to Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich precludes Being (Sein) from ever entering into an authentic relationship with contingent, visible beings (Seiendes). As the ‘ground of Being’ (Tillich), Protestantism’s God is incommensurable with the world of appearance; and no finite form, natural or aesthetic and man-made, can legitimately mediate God. While twentieth-century literature is often set in a Protestant milieu, few literary works are constitutively shaped by a distinctly Protestant or Reformed theological outlook or by sustained critical reflection on it.

3.2 Literary engagement with Catholic theology

4.1 Czesław Miłosz

Perhaps no twentieth-century writer better exemplifies the complex relationship between literature and theology than Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004). Born in Šeteniai, Lithuania, then a province of imperial Russia, Miłosz for the first five decades of his life had a front-row seat at Europe’s unfolding drama of regimes toppling, nations being founded and then violently destroyed, cities burning, and political terror ravaging the bodies and souls of countless friends in the Soviet Bloc. Defecting from his position as a diplomat in Poland’s Communist government (stationed in Paris), Miłosz eventually emigrates to the United States and teaches Slavic literatures at Berkeley (see Franaszek 2017) and, having returned to post-Communist Poland, dies in Krakow in 2004. Reflecting on his rigorous Catholic education, Miłosz characterized it as ‘a constant process of rapprochement and withdrawal. This process of fluctuation began with my altercations with my catechist, Chomski, in middle school. Polish Catholicism was so totally Polish that I was repelled’ (Miłosz 2006: 125–126). Still, despite his misgivings about 1930’s nationalism’s misappropriation of Catholicism (see Rzepa 2021) and the rigid catechesis imposed by his middle school teacher (see ‘To Fr. Chomsky, many years later’), religious motifs and theological perplexities posed by Catholicism inform much of Miłosz’s poetry, starting with a Blake-inspired grouping of poems ‘The World’ and a trilogy of short lyrics on the theological virtues (‘Faith’, ‘Hope’, ‘Love’) in his wartime collection Rescue (Ocalenie, 1943) and continuing through his last published gathering of poems, Second Space (2004).

Three strands of religious thought vie for dominance throughout Miłosz’s oeuvre. First, there is ‘a Manichaean tendency’ that Miłosz diagnoses within himself, that is, the ever pressing ‘question of evil’ compounded by what he considers his ‘extreme sensitivity to suffering’ and resulting, at times, in an ‘accusation directed against the Creator’ (Miłosz 2006: 109). Particularly the earlier poetry, until about 1960, exhibits such Manichaean traits and shows Miłosz struggling to reconcile Christian hope with the reality of an omnipresent evil that is only occasionally punctured by moments of startling beauty (‘Esse’, ‘An Appeal’). Second, and overshadowing Miłosz’s entire career, is a hyper-Augustinian, self-lacerating sense of affliction, inadequacy, and guilt – feelings that, however acute, are in turn subjected to constant second-guessing. As he writes to Thomas Merton in May 1961,

In my poetry, in my readings […] I am preoccupied with religious problems and I strive hard. Sometimes I think I would be an agnostic if not for my weakness. Certainly, I have a tendency to a delectatio morosa, but I know a lot about myself. What is repentance? There are nights when I am oppressed by a feeling of guilt because two or three lines of mine which seem to me artistically bad: my wounded self-love. Other nights, a remembrance of all my deeds which prove that I am inferior by nature to the vast majority of human beings: is it repentance? Or just a wounded ambition? […] I realize that nothing is more important than to find a common language with those who ‘search in despair’, through poetry, prose, any means. Being one of them: the blind leading the lame. Yes, what is needed is a new attempt of a Pascal. (Miłosz and Merton 1997: 117–119)

Time and again, Miłosz meditates on the poet’s paradoxical situation in a fallen world in which poetic utterance appears but a ‘scream’ (perhaps echoing Rilke’s First Duino Elegy) that is morally necessary yet futile: ‘And what about my poetry? I wanted to scream, but at the same time I knew that a scream is futile. While feeling guilty that I was not screaming’ (Miłosz 1994: 99). Yet by the same token, Miłosz recognizes that ‘all my intellectual impulses are religious and in that sense my poetry is religious’ (1994: 21). In his Norton Lectures at Harvard, Miłosz openly wonders whether poetry can be written at all except from a theologically informed perspective:

Is non-eschatological poetry possible? That would be a poetry indifferent to the existence of the Past-Future axis and to the ‘last things’ – Salvation and Damnation, Judgment, the Kingdom of God, the Goal of History – in other words, to everything that connects the time assigned to one human life with the time of all humanity. (Miłosz 1983: 37)

At the same time, theology itself needs to be saved from its hermetic tendencies, which Miłosz believes have gravely diminished its reach and resonance in the twentieth century:

The situation in theology is very peculiar. Over a period of centuries, theology developed a special language, and today this language somehow doesn’t penetrate minds outside the theological guild. This is precisely the argument of that priest: that poetry should be for a theologian a source of inspiration and new language. (Miłosz 2006: 175)

In this, theology mirrors a similar predicament of modern poetry which, having ‘entered into territory where questions about the meaning of life find no answer’ has incorporated that unintelligibility into itself, either as symbolism’s esoteric ideal of ‘pure poetry’ or high-modernism’s perplexed insistence on a total ‘absence of meaning’ (‘Against Incomprehensible Poetry’ in Miłosz 2001b: 374). As is the case for the handful of writers whom Miłosz repeatedly identifies as having had the most influence on him (Pascal, Blake, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Weil), poetry is a legitimate pursuit only insofar as it seeks to restore clarity to a world whose fallen nature is a direct consequence of its continuous abuse of the word: ‘What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people? / A connivance with official lies. / A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment’ (Miłosz 2001a: 77, lines 14–17). Time and again, Miłosz ponders the disfigurement of language under conditions of totalitarianism, as in these bitterly ironic lines from ‘Child of Europe’ (1953) inspired by Luca Signorelli’s ‘Preaching of the Antichrist’ (1504) in Orvieto (Franaszek 2017: 276).

Let your words speak not through their meanings,
But through them against whom they are used.
Fashion your weapon from ambiguous words.
Consign clear words to lexical limbo.
[…]
The laughter born of the love of truth
Is now the laughter of the enemies of the people.
(Miłosz 2001a: 85–87, lines 60–63 and 85–86)

Miłosz’s formal response to this dilemma is a deceptively straightforward poetic style, plain, compact, at times brutally direct and, particularly in his early and middle period, often laced with grim irony (e.g. ‘Child of Europe’, ‘Incantation’). Overarching Miłosz’s oeuvre is the attempted repristination of the word as a bearer of truth, an undertaking that demands constant vigilance against ideologically motivated distortions and Orwellian ‘newspeak’, as well as resisting the modernist temptation of an obscurantist or esoteric style. Even before Miłosz begins to translate several books of the Bible into Polish in the 1970s, he turns to scripture as the embodiment of the condition to which all poetic speech ought to aspire, as in these opening lines from ‘Readings’ (1969):

You asked me what is the good of reading the Gospels in Greek.
I answer that it is proper that we move our finger
Along letters more enduring than those carved in stone,
And that, slowly pronouncing each syllable,
We discover the true dignity of speech.
Compelled to be attentive we shall think of that epoch
No more distant than yesterday, though the heads of caesars
On coins are different today. Yet it is still the same eon.
Fear and desire are the same, oil and wine
And bread mean the same.
(Miłosz 2001a: 262, lines 1–10)

Echoing Aquinas’ contention that splendour or radiance is the true criterion of beauty (claritas est de ratione pulchritudinis), Miłosz sees human flourishing inextricably entwined with achieving claritas in word and thought. Not only does it undergird much of Miłosz’s poetry, especially when taking up theological matters (e.g. ‘Readings’, ‘Paradise’, ‘On Prayer’, ‘Realism’, ‘Treatise on Morality’, ‘Second Space’, ‘Father Severinus’) but it pervades his lifelong quest for responsible poetic ‘form’, which for Miłosz consists in

a constant struggle against chaos and nothingness. Had I had wisdom I wouldn’t need to constantly create form in order to combat chaos and nothingness. […] We are in the power of forces which escape our words and our records. […] As far as form is concerned everything in human life is form or giving form; we enter into a relationship with the world primarily through language composed of words, or signs, or lines, or colours, or shapes; we do not enter the world through a direct relationship. Our human nature consists of everything being mediated. (Miłosz 2006: 79)

Yet this quest for clear, articulate, and luminous form, Miłosz concedes, is itself born of a spiritual crisis whose insidious logic the poet must first illuminate. A recurrent theological motif in his poetry, ‘despair’ (acedia) often seizes Miłosz, such as in the poem entitled ‘Temptation’, which recalls how ‘Under a starry sky I was taking a walk, / On a ridge overlooking neon cities, / With my companion, the spirit of desolation, / Who was running around and sermonizing, / Saying that I was not necessary’ (Miłosz 2001a: 342, lines 1–5). Such lines explain the strong appeal to Miłosz of the work of Simone Weil (e.g. ‘The Importance of Simone Weil’ in Miłosz 2001b) and, even more so, Pascal. He writes that the latter

personifies a man in crisis. So for a man in crisis as I am, Pascal is a spiritual brother in a way. Pascal said that ‘to believe and to doubt, and to gain this belief is for man what running is for a horse’. Every hour, I believe this one-hundred times. And in this way, belief can be nimble. (Miłosz 2006: 179)

It is this quest for leading both poetry and theology out of their hermetic and often obscurantist situation which defines the third and final strand of his Catholicism, namely, his gradual return after 1970 to a Thomist realism. A programmatic expression of it can be found at the start of his ‘Treatise on Theology’ in Second Space:

Why theology? Because the first must be first.
And first is a notion of truth. It is poetry, precisely,
With its behavior of a bird thrashing against the transparency
Of a windowpane that testifies to the fact
That we don’t know how to live in a phantasmagoria.
Let reality return to our speech.
That is, meaning. Impossible without an absolute point of reference.
(Miłosz 2004: 47, lines 6–12)

Arguably the most prominent among Miłosz’s poetic heirs is Adam Zagajewski (1945–2021), even as his lyric oeuvre shows theological motifs and scriptural references to be far less frequent and greatly attenuated, with his Mysticism for Beginners (1997) being a notable exception.

4.2 Seamus Heaney

Like Miłosz a generation before him, Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) received a rigorous Catholic education. To the young student on a scholarship at St. Culumb’s College, this meant

living the liturgical year in a very intense way: a Latin Mass every morning; aware, from the missal, of the feast day and the order of the feast; going to confession and communion; alert to the economy of indulgences; offering up little penitential operations for the release of the suffering souls in purgatory; adjudicating the moment when sexual fantasy passed from being a ‘temptation’ to being the deliberate ‘entertainment of impure thoughts’ and concluding every year with an ‘annual religious knowledge exam’. (Heaney quoted in O’Driscoll 2008: 38)

Yet the firmly Thomist theological grammar that was to provide the young student with orientation in the world did not survive its collision with the civil rights movement in 1960s Northern Ireland and the brutal sectarian conflict of The Troubles that were to follow (cf. Quinlan 2021; Duffy 2020). While Heaney’s earlier collections Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975) mostly draw their imagery from archaeological details and Celtic myths of a pre-Christian Ireland, later volumes once again focus on the tension between Catholicism’s moral teachings and the Church’s problematic involvement in The Troubles that had defined Irish history for the past three centuries. Starting in the 1980s, however, poems such as Sweeney Astray (1983) stage the conflict ‘between unregenerate pagan man and the stern and constraining demands of Christianity’ (Duffy 2020: 173). The twelve poems comprising Station Island (1984) find Heaney ‘doing the stations’ – the annual forty-eight-hour pilgrimage and fasting on Lough Dergh Island.

To his own surprise, the speaker who is there to take ‘the last look’ at a faith he had gradually lost finds himself drawn into ‘an examination of conscience’ that bears considerable resemblance to Dante’s Divine Comedy, especially Purgatory (Heaney quoted in O’Driscoll 2008: 234). Among the various figures from Ireland’s violent history that abruptly intrude on Heaney the pilgrim with their apparitional and often accusatory presence is Father Murphy, the stern headmaster at Heaney’s primary school in Anahorish. Another is Terry Keenan, from Heaney’s home parish, who fades into view ‘glossy as a blackbird […] his polished shoes / unexpectedly secular beneath a pleated, lace-hemmed alb of linen cloth’ (Heaney 1984: 69). Like Bernanos’ priests, he appears defeated by the disparity between the clarity of his faith and the empirical realities of his missionary work in Brazil’s interior: ‘I lasted / only a couple of years. Bare-breasted / women and rat-ribbed men. Everything wasted. / I rotted like a pear. I sweated masses […].’ As his virtual presence grows in the consciousness of Heaney on his pilgrimage, fragments of liturgical language (‘In hoc signo […]’ [In this sign]) ironically cause him to ‘break off from the renunciation’ and recall the young Terry Keenan ‘on a bicycle, / a clerical student home for the summer / doomed to the decent thing. Visiting neighbours. / Drinking tea and praising home-made bread’. While acknowledging that as a young postulant he had indeed been ‘unaware / that what I thought was chosen was convention’, Keenan’s ghostly presence also enjoins the poet to examine his own motives for returning to this bedrock of Irish Catholicism: ‘what are you doing, going through these motions. / Unless … […] / Unless you are here taking the last look’ (Heaney 1984: 69–71). As Heaney notes, even as ‘intellectually speaking, the loss of faith occurred offstage […] the potency of those words remained for me, they retain an undying tremor and draw’ (2008: 234). Two later collections, Seeing Things (1991) and The Spirit Level (1996) further probe the fluid boundaries between the visible and the invisible, with Heaney still striking an irritable, at times defiant note vis-à-vis the Catholic faith, as in ‘Weighing in’ (1996). Against accepting ‘the intolerable in others’ and ‘against our better judgment’ ‘embracing ‘passive suffering’, the speaker counsels that, faced with aggression and pain, we ought ‘to refuse the other cheek’. Even so, if Jesus’ precept (Matt 5:39) left the soldiers who mocked and abused him ‘neither shamed nor edified’, an ineffable change was wrought: ‘something was made manifest – the power / Of power not exercised, of hope inferred / By the powerless forever’. Heaney’s poem leaves it open whether human failure ultimately lies with ‘the obedient one’ or with the speaker’s closing, defiant exhortation: ‘Still, for Jesus’ sake, / Do me a favour, would you, just this once? / Prophesy, give scandal, cast the stone’. Such lines aptly capture the later Heaney’s attempt to negotiate between ‘the lyric darkness of Philip Larkin; the sceptically assertive Catholicism of Czesław Miłosz; the eclectic mythological borrowings […] of Yeats; and the nagging non serviam of Joyce’ (Quinlan 2021: 218).

4.3 Geoffrey Hill

A deeply ambivalent Anglican, Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) at times echoes Miłosz’s dark view of nature while also sharing the latter’s life-long fascination with Blake, as in Hill’s ‘Holy Thursday’ (from For the Unfallen [1959]), where ‘Child and nurse walk hand in glove / As unaware of Time’s betrayal, / Weaving their innocence with guile’ (Hill 2013: 6). With its thick layers of allusion and its terse, often hermetic diction, Hill’s poetry not only recalls Eliot but, going further back, also the alternately obscure and pugnacious style of his (and Blake’s) seventeenth-century dissenting forebears, such as the Ranters, Levelers, Diggers, Fifth-Monarchy Men. Throughout his career, Hill probes theological questions, as in ‘Funeral Music’ (no. 4) in King Log (1968) meditating on the relation between mind and soul: ‘Let mind be more precious than soul; it will not / Endure’ (Hill 2013: 50) or in two poems in Canaan (1996) whose titles (‘Whether the Virtues are Emotions’ and ‘Whether Moral Virtue Comes by Habituation’) allude to Aquinas’ treatise on habits and the virtues (Summa Theologiae I–II, 49–70). Yet on balance, Hill remains doubtful whether surrender or expurgation of the self (‘self / expression – you could argue the first to go – immolated / selfhood the last’) ensures virtuous conduct. Echoing seventeenth-century critiques of the virtues as ‘splendid vices’ (see Herdt 2008: 173–280), Hill resists scholasticism’s ‘ethereal conjecture / taking on / humankind’s heaviness of purchase / the moral nebulae / common as lichen / the entire corpus of ruinous sagesse’ (Hill 2013: 177).

At once inescapable and all but impossible, testing the scope and depth of the Christian faith is, for Hill, the essential warrant for all poetic utterance and a task vis-à-vis which human speech and religious practice are destined to fall short. Indeed, ‘the castaway of drowned remorse’ who in all his ‘nakedness [has been] consigned by proxy to the judas-kiss / of our devotion’, Christ asks of human beings a level of witness at which aesthetic, ecclesial, and theological practices have consistently failed for two millennia (Hill 2013: 121, 134). Thus, patterns of worship risk being no more than ‘an enclave of perpetual vows / broken in time,’ just as ‘theology makes good bedside reading’ for those ‘who are lost [and] covet scholastic proof’ (2013: 130, 131). Yet another sonnet in Tenebrae (1978), perhaps Hill’s most sustained engagement with theology, foregrounds the Augustinian motif of God being at once wholly unfathomable and wholly interior to the self:

Crucified Lord, however much I burn
to be enamoured of your paradise,
knowing what ceases and what will not cease,
frightened of hell, not knowing where to turn,
I fall between harsh grace and hurtful scorn.
You are the crucified who crucifies,
self-withdrawn even from your own device,
your trim-plugged body, wreath of rakish thorn.
What grips me then, or what does my soul grasp?
If I grasp nothing what is there to break?
You are beyond me, innermost true light.
uttermost exile for no exile’s sake,
king of our earth not caring to unclasp
its void embrace, the semblance of your quiet.
(Hill 2013: 123; emphasis added)

Some of Hill’s most probing and wary explorations of the Christian faith can be found in his long meditative poem, The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983), and also in Canaan (1996). To probe the recesses of Christian stance in the modern world means for Hill to cultivate the stance of the outsider, not just vis-à-vis the saeculum but often the Church, too. Identifying with its eponymous hero, Charles Péguy, Hill’s 1983 poem lauds the defiance of the fallen protagonist’s ‘radical soul’ and ‘skirmisher with grace’: ‘This world is different, belongs to them – / the lords of limit and of contumely. / It matters little whether you go tamely / or with rage and defiance to your doom’ (Hill 2013: 144, 146–147).

Still, for all his ambivalence regarding Anglo-Protestantism, whose ‘strange church smelled a bit “high”, of censers and polish’ (Hill 2013: 91), the ‘resentful communicant’ Hill stands squarely in a tradition for which poetry is conceivable only in relation to scripture (allusions to which abound throughout Hill’s work) and theological reflection (see Hart 2017: 63–123). Crucially, Hill insists that the struggle with faith is not something to be merely ‘represented’ in poetry. Rather, it must be lived, by both author and reader, as an embodied experience. Hill thus envisions ‘a modern literature of penitence […] which is at times, and not inappropriately, a penance in itself’ and which ought to be approached ‘as a medium through which we convey our awareness, or indeed our conviction, of an inveterate human condition of guilt or anxiety’ (Hill 2008: 7–9). Echoing Simone Weil, whose work had influenced Hill’s oeuvre as much as that of Iris Murdoch a generation earlier, he aims to move beyond a merely ‘generalized awareness of sin’ such as had defined Eliot’s and Auden’s ‘disciplines of conscience’ (Hill 2008: 9–10, 12). Recalling Karl Barth’s understanding of sin as ‘the specific gravity of human nature as such’, he considers it poetry’s principal task of poetry to incorporate this ‘heaviness’ in order to ‘do its atoning work’ in the very ‘density of language’ itself (Hill 2008: 17).

I would seriously propose a theology of language; and a primary exercise to be undertaken towards its establishment. This would comprise a critical examination of the grounds for claiming (a) that the shock of semantic recognition must also be a shock of ethical recognition; and that this is the action of grace in one of its minor, but far from trivial, types; (b) that the art and literature of the late twentieth century require a memorializing, a memorizing, of the dead as much as, or even more than, expressions of ‘solidarity with the poor and oppressed’. (Hill 2008: 405)

Like Eliot, with whose long shadow he continues to wrestle in many of his essays, Hill regards his theological forbears (Tyndale, Hooker, Laud, Bramhall, Taylor, Coleridge) and his literary ancestry (especially Donne, Herbert, Vaughn, Blake, Hopkins, and Péguy) not just as distant models but as ever-present interlocutors. Sustained dialogue with the dead (‘husks of what was rich seed’ [Hill 2013: 7]) allows for substantive differences of value and spiritual orientation to be worked out, and thus to push back against relativism, indifference, and what Hill calls ‘the feral openness of our time’ (Hill 2008: 310). For Hill, too, the only legitimate aim of poetic language is to open access to truth, where ‘words clawed my mind as though they had smelt / Revelation’s flesh’ (Hill 2013: 62), all the while conceding the central theological understanding that our grasp of truth remains forever partial and fleeting, something that Hill insists ought to be reflected in the ‘density’ of the poet’s medium. Among those who succeeded in turning that constraint into something verging on claritas is George Herbert. As Hill remarks in a 1991 Times Literary Supplement essay, ‘No other English poet can convince us, as Herbert can, that the “otherness” of figurative language is, even as we meet it, instantly turned upon itself “in a sense most true”’ (Hill 2008: 358). A few years later, the point is restated in more general and authoritative terms when, with evident approval, Hill remarks how Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘sometime pupil of Walter Pater, leans away from the aesthetic equation, takes the weight of the more awkward stresses of the world which, in justice, contains aesthetics as a good but is not to be either ruled or saved by them’ (Hill 2008: 406).