Seamus Heaney: Reaching for the sacred

The autumn 2024 issue of Studies opens with eight previously unpublished letters from Seamus Heaney to a close friend, Peter Steele SJ, priest, fellow-poet, and fellow-academic. They are remarkable for their warmth, intimacy, and good humour. They are also striking on account of the sense they give of Heaney’s attentiveness to the rhythms, the rituals, and the structures of sacredness that governed the life of his friend. Steele’s poems based on Catholic liturgy, his homilies, his meditations on the Stations of the Cross – all of these were enough to make Heaney grieve ‘for the youth in me and the celebrant with his altar boys away back there in the first aisle of the world’. What he responded to most in Steele, however, was his character, ‘his steady, learned, merry, moral self’. It was this ‘braiding of faith and intellect’ that made Heaney see him as ‘like a spiritual director to me’.

The letters published here, as well as another set of still unpublished letters between the two men, were discovered by Steele’s Jesuit confrere and friend Gerald O’Collins SJ in repositories in Melbourne, Australia, where Steele lived most of his life. The discovery was too late to be brought to the attention of Christopher Reid for possible inclusion in the 2023 volume The Letters of Seamus Heaney. Fr O’Collins introduced and, with Manfred Cain, edited the letters. Unfortunately he died just weeks before Studies came out.

In ‘”Ave atque vale, pater”: The Heaney-Steele Letters’, Eugene O’Brien takes a close look at the eight letters. He notes that they corroborate what we already know about Heaney: his warmth and his wit as well as his dedication to language and his conviction of the significance of art and poetry – the taproot, O’Brien says, of his friendship and connection with Steele. What is apparent here too, though, is Heaney’s sense of the ‘confluence of religion and poetry, both of which are devoted to very specific incarnations of language that may touch or signify aspects of the transcendent not available to ordinary language’.

Catriona Clutterbuck, in her essay on Heaney’s final volume of poetry, Human Chain, explores his reckoning with what he terms ‘poetry’s call to seek beyond yet stay on course, to open up yet hold the line’ – to traverse the distance between the intimately felt world of human experience and the unknown future that may hold a promise of transcendence. In ‘”Crosshatched” Connectivity, Vulnerability and Creative Renewal in Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain’, Clutterbuck notes Heaney’s final image of a kite, symbolic of human hope, that rises higher until the string breaks and it takes off. ‘Though it may become ‘lost’ in the blue of unconfirmable possibility,’ she remarks, ‘such hope is never lost to the inner eye of human beings’ sense of the imminent extraordinary within our immanent, fallen lives’.

In ‘A lavish talent for friendship: Heaney the letter writer’, a review article on The Letters of Seamus Heaney, Patrick Crotty notes the empathy, courtesy, and indeed humour that characterises Heaney’s voluminous correspondence, the scale of which, he says, is ‘old-world – indeed almost Victorian’. He further considers Heaney’s negotiation of fame and privacy, his relations with other poets, and his discretion in talking about religion and current affairs.

Concluding the set of essays on Heaney is Thomas O’Grady’s ‘Seamus Heaney’s Second Life’. He ruminates on the poet’s ‘afterlife’ in this world – the life after passing away, in which, citing WH Auden on Yeats, he ‘became his admirers’. Paying specific attention to ‘The Harvest Bow’, from Field Work, O’Grady judges that Heaney passes the tests of greatness that Auden set for Yeats. ‘The Harvest Bow’, he says ‘epitomized for me the capacity of Heaney’s full body of work to make, as Auden’s Counsel puts it, ‘personal excitement socially available’.

This issue of Studies includes a small number of contributions unrelated to the core theme of Heaney and the sacred. The first of these, however, also concerns the sacred and serves the good purpose of problematising sacredness itself. In ‘The Priest as Sacred Figure: Reflections on Violence, Religion, and the Holy in Twentieth Century Ireland’, Liam Kelly OFM brings the insights of René Girard regarding violence as the ‘heart and secret soul’ of the sacred to bear on the Irish experience of priestly violence. The fallacy that he identifies at the base of this phenomenon is the conflation of the sacred and the holy. Irish priests in the recent past were effectively managers of society’s sacred economy, but those days are gone now, leaving them free ‘to bear witness to the holy, now that their service to the sacred is ended’.
Terry O’Reilly, a renowned scholar of the Spanish Golden Age, particularly of its literature and spirituality, died last year after suffering for a number of years from motor neurone disease. In ‘Terence O’Reilly: A Scholarly Life’, his son Tom describes his academic contributions, mostly during his decades as Professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University College Cork. ‍Most noteworthy was Terry’s rigorous study of early Jesuit history and of the patristic and medieval influences on the spiritual culture of St Ignatius of Loyola.

In ‘Rescuing the Common Good from Integralism’, Patrick O’Riordan SJ addresses the rise (or indeed the return) of Catholic Integralism, the belief that the state ought to recognise the spiritual authority of the Church and aim to promote the common good as defined by its moral teachings; also that civil laws should be in harmony with Catholic doctrine. This stance, O’Riordan argues, entails a radical misunderstanding of what the Church means by the common good, especially as that doctrine was elaborated at the Second Vatican Council and in the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI.

Another contribution to this issue is Declan O’Keeffe’s account, in ‘Dublin City Walls and Defences, c. 1170–c.1317’, of the development of the city of Dublin in late medieval times, with the merging of two settlements and the subsequent erection of defensive structures. Also featured here are the work of two Irish poets, Mary O’Donnell (who also reviews Peter Sirr’s The Swerve in this issue) and Liam Aungier.