A Poetics Of Orthodoxy

What makes one poem better than another? Do Christians have an obligation to strive for excellence in the arts? While orthodox Christians are generally quick to affirm the existence of absolute truth and absolute goodness, even many within the church fall prey to the postmodern delusion that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” This book argues that Christian doctrine in fact gives us a solid basis on which to make aesthetic judgments about poetry in particular and about the arts more generally. The faith once and for all delivered unto the saints is remarkable in its combined emphasis on embodied particularity and meaningful transcendence. This unique combination makes it the perfect starting place for art that speaks to who we are as creatures made for eternity.

What makes one poem better than another? Do Christians have an obligation to strive for excellence in the arts? While orthodox Christians are generally quick to affirm the existence of absolute truth and absolute goodness, even many within the church fall prey to the postmodern delusion that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." This book argues that Christian doctrine in fact gives us a solid basis on which to make aesthetic judgments about poetry in particular and about the arts more generally. The faith once and for all delivered unto the saints is remarkable in its combined emphasis on embodied particularity and meaningful transcendence. This unique combination makes it the perfect starting place for art that speaks to who we are as creatures made for eternity.

Professor and scholar, teacher of poets and poetry and convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, Donald Sheehan wrote these wide-ranging essays with a common commitment to understanding the ways in which the ruining oppositions of our experience can be held within the disciplines of lyric art—held “until God Himself can be seen in the ruins . . . and overwhelmingly and gratefully loved.” That is what Sheehan means by “the grace of incorruption.” Part One weaves together themes from Sheehan’s life and pilgrimages; the spiritual art of Orthodox Saints Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac and Ephraim of Syria, and others; the literary art of Dostoevsky, Frost, Salinger, and contemporary poets including Jane Kenyon; and the philosophy of René Girard—examining the nature of penitence, prayer, personhood, freedom, depression, and the right relationship to the earth. Part Two delves into the poetics of The Psalms, especially LXX 118: a “poetics of resurrection.” “I am dead certain that my response to this volume will chime with those of others whose work is held up to the light in The Grace of Incorruption. In one beautiful sentence after another, we must share the uncanny sense of never having understood our own hearts—not until we saw them reflected in the great heart (and mind) of this nonpareil commentator. Don Sheehan did not merely understand poetry; it was part and parcel of his own great soul." —Sydney Lea, Vermont Poet Laureate “This was a very difficult book for me to read, as—now and again—my own tears blinded me to the page, and my own sobbing shook the papers in my hands. That is to say that Donald Sheehan’s journey—through both brokenness and beauty—to a deep and healing calm is at once personal and universal. With a poet’s visionary prose, a scholar’s acuity, and a pilgrim’s devotion, Donald Sheehan offers his reader access to the profound, compelling stillness at the heart of all things. He proves an exceedingly good guide along the way.”—Scott Cairns, author of Slow Pilgrim: Collected Poems “In this beautiful book, Dostoyevsky, Orthodox liturgy, and Holy Fathers ancient and modern converse with Shakespeare, Frost, Salinger, Jane Kenyon and René Girard, sharing insight into such realities as memory, violence, depression, stillness, self-emptying love, personhood, and ‘the anthropology of the Cross.’ This conversation, a ‘spiritual ecumenism’ effected in art, gathers finally round the heart and source of all tradition of poetry and prayer in Christian East and West alike: the Psalms of David. Orthodox Christian contributions to Anglophone poetry and poetics are few. Don Sheehan was not only a fine interpreter of poetry, but a poet himself, working in the medium of prose. The philosopher Malebranche famously wrote that ‘attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul,’ and the Orthodox liturgy bids us continually to ‘be attentive.’ The essays in this volume capture that spirit of loving attentiveness -- never lacking in form -- for which Don ardently strove, and which characterized his approach to art, to other people, and to God.”—Fr. Matthew Baker, Fordham University

Abu Hamid al-Ghaz&257;l&299;, a Muslim jurist-theologian and polymath who lived from the mid-eleventh to the early twelfth century in present-day Iran, is a figure equivalent in stature to Maimonides in Judaism and Thomas Aquinas in Christianity. He is best known for his work in philosophy, ethics, law, and mysticism. In an engaged re-reading of the ideas of this preeminent Muslim thinker, Ebrahim Moosa argues that Ghaz&257;l&299;'s work has lasting relevance today as a model for a critical encounter with the Muslim intellectual tradition in a modern and postmodern context. Moosa employs the theme of the threshold, or dihliz, the space from which Ghaz&257;l&299; himself engaged the different currents of thought in his day, and proposes that contemporary Muslims who wish to place their own traditions in conversation with modern traditions consider the same vantage point. Moosa argues that by incorporating elements of Islamic theology, neoplatonic mysticism, and Aristotelian philosophy, Ghaz&257;l&299;'s work epitomizes the idea that the answers to life's complex realities do not reside in a single culture or intellectual tradition. Ghaz&257;l&299;'s emphasis on poiesis--creativity, imagination, and freedom of thought--provides a sorely needed model for a cosmopolitan intellectual renewal among Muslims, Moosa argues. Such a creative and critical inheritance, he concludes, ought to be heeded by those who seek to cultivate Muslim intellectual traditions in today's tumultuous world.

The Greek Bible and the services of the Orthodox Church have proved a rich source of language for many poets of modern Greece, and perhaps for none more than for Kostis Palamas, Angelos Sikelianos and Odysseas Elytis, whose overlapping careers span the period 1876-1996. A blurring of the boundaries between Orthodoxy and 'Greekness' (hellênikotêta, which all three poets celebrate) has often led critics to assume from the Christian borrowings in the poetry the Christian allegiance of the poets. Through detailed analyses of selected poems, focusing on their relation to Biblical and liturgical source texts, this book questions whether the work of these poets is compatible with Christianity at all. It asks whether a Christ who is assimilated, along with the Virgin Mary, into the ancient Greek pantheon, or presented as a symbol of Beauty, or as object of the erotic desire of the women of the Gospels is still within the realm of Orthodoxy. Above all it asks whether, when the poetic ego appropriates to itself words which in their original context belong to Christ or Jehovah, there is any room left for the divine, or whether the poet has not in fact elbowed God off the stage altogether.

Radical Orthodoxy, whose founding father is John Milbank, claims that God has been pushed to the margins in modernity and that a false and misleading neo-theology has taken hold that needs to be revisited and contested. It is this return to the premodern that often leads theologians to have reservations about Radical Orthodoxy when they might otherwise have some sympathy for many of its positions. Radical Orthodoxy, like most traditional theology, claims that the power of God is in all creation and that God sits everywhere for all to partake of. But there appears to be a failure to see that the church and theology do not set in place systems that live out this basic assumption. Liberation theology, while sharing much of the same assumption that God is everywhere and to be shared, at the same time engages in a critique of the structures that claim to facilitate this vision, and finds them wanting. From here, then, liberation theologians attempt to refigure our understanding of shared power in order to broaden the vision, while it may be argued that Radical Orthodoxy simply restates the assumption with little political critique of the issues. Perhaps this point explains why this book is titled The Poverty of Radical Orthodoxy rather than Radical Error!

This dual-language compilation of seven complete major works and many shorter pieces from the Confucian period through the Ch’ing dynasty will be indispensable to students of Chinese literature. Stephen Owen’s masterful translations and commentaries have opened up Chinese literary thought to theorists and scholars of other languages.

John D. Kerkering's study examines the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America. Kerkering argues that writers such as DuBois, Lanier, Simms, and Scott used poetic effects to assert the distinctiveness of certain groups in a diffuse social landscape. Kerkering explores poetry's formal properties, its sound effects, as they intersect with the issues of race and nation. He shows how formal effects, ranging from meter and rhythm to alliteration and melody, provide these writers with evidence of a collective identity, whether national or racial. Through this shared reliance on formal literary effects, national and racial identities, Kerkering shows, are related elements of a single literary history. This is the story of how poetic effects helped to define national identities in Anglo-America as a step toward helping to define racial identities within the United States. This highly original study will command a wide audience of Americanists.