On poetry and the sacred

DERMOT ROANTREE [from editorial of Studies, autumn 2024] :: In his 2008 essay to accompany a 15-CD box set of Seamus Heaney reading his own poetry, Irish poet Peter Sirr remarked that Heaney’s imagination is ‘to an extraordinary extent nourished by ritual’ and is ‘always reaching for a sacral framework’. Heaney picked out these phrases as especially resonant when he wrote to Sirr to commend him on the essay. They struck him ‘as a remembrance’, he said – a truth only tacitly known, perhaps, that is brought suddenly to the fore. The context of Sirr’s remark was Heaney striving in ‘The Tollund Man’ to come to an imaginative and moral apprehension of ritualised slaughter in the ‘man-killing parishes’ of Denmark’s remote past and Northern Ireland of his own time. If the configurations of sacredness that Heaney inherited through his Catholic upbringing were no longer readily available to him, could he not still see the world, especially human life, as imbued with the sacred?

In the aftermath of the Enlightenment, at least among the ‘cultured despisers’ of religion, the sacred was held to be a category that belonged to religious discourse alone. In essence, this is what ‘disenchantment’ meant – a secular, demystifying re-reading of the world. Yet by the end of the 19th century new thematisations of the sacred began to emerge, even among writers with no religious commitment, though many of them acknowledged a debt to monotheistic religious culture. The most conspicuous starting point of this development might be Émile Durkheim’s response to the outrageous abuse of Alfred Dreyfus in his 1898 essay ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’. Even for a secular intellectual, there may be something about being human that sets a person apart, much as it has always done in the great religions. The human person,’ Durkheim writes, ‘whose definition serves as the touchstone according to which good must be distinguished from evil, is considered as sacred, in what one might call the ritual sense of the word’. He continues:

It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have given to their Gods. It is conceived as being invested with that mysterious property which creates an empty space around holy objects, which keeps them away from profane contacts… Whoever makes an attempt on a man’s life, on a man’s liberty, on a man’s honour inspires us with a feeling of horror in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned.

Strains of this same sense of sacredness are apparent in the work of many twentieth-century thinkers, people as diverse as William James, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek. Perhaps the most fruitful opening out of the concept during that time, however, was in the field of hermeneutics. For Hans-Georg Gadamer in particular, there is a sacral element in artistic creation, as it discloses the transcendental, raises ordinary reality ‘into its truth’, and transforms the observer. ‘A work of art always has something sacred about it’, he says; ‘Ultimately every work of art has something about it that protests against profanation’. And this holds for poetry most of all. Gadamer insists on ‘the essential priority of poetry with respect to the other arts’. All human understanding is linguistically mediated – even the visual and plastic arts are dependent on language. Poetry, however, is a special kind of language; due to its ‘forgetfulness’ of the formal elements that govern language, it is able to reach beyond the strict instrumentality of everyday speech and access deeper, existential truths, truths about being human and being in the world. It is, Gadamer says, ‘the highest fulfillment of that revealing which is the achievement of speech’.

Poetry as revelation. It is more than incidental that poetry has been an essential mode of transmitting the message in scripture-based religions. More than incidental too that, in a notable instance of the ‘interdisciplinary turn’ in contemporary academic culture, theology has come to pay ever closer attention to poetry, seeing it to offer insights not conveyed by grand ontological or epistemic systems. Poetry is not theology, of course, nor is it prayer; but there are clear affinities between the disposition of the poet – and indeed the reader of poetry – and the attitude of prayerfulness to be found in many religious traditions. In particular, both share a sense of attentiveness – attentiveness especially to the depth, the mystery and the strangeness behind the ostensible meaning of things in the world. And this attentiveness is not a matter of strenuous effort but rather of quiet receptivity. It’s about knowing how to look at the world in a certain way – about letting the world speak, letting it disclose itself. Simone Weil, for whom attention was the very substance of both love of God and love of neighbour, insisted that attention entailed ‘suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object’. She added:

Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains.

Inscribed on the backrest of a bench on the Seamus Heaney Walk in the Devil’s Glen, Co. Wicklow, is a couplet written by the poet himself which resonates well with Weil’s sense of prayerful attention: ‘Walker, pause now and sit. Be quiet here. / Inhale the breath of life in a breath of air.’