Tom Stack introduces a selection of Kavanagh’s poems, highlighting their mystical dimension. He alerts us to how we too, like Kavanagh himself, can experience poetry as “a hole in heaven’s gable”.
304 pp. Columba Press, 2003. To purchase this book online, go to www.columba.ie
CONTENTS
Introduction
Section I: [53 shorter poems]
Ploughman
Ascetic
To A Child etc.
Section II: [3 longer poems]
The Great Hunger: Introduction
The Great Hunger
Lough Derg: Introduction
Lough Derg
Fr Mat: Introduction
Fr Mat
Epilogue
Notes
Alphabetical Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
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Review |
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INTRODUCTION
As poets go, Patrick Kavanagh enjoys an exceptionally popular and influential place in the hearts of the Irish public. Even though Ireland can boast of two other poets who have been internationally honoured as Nobel Laureates, the Monaghan man continues to occupy a special niche in our affections (l). Although there may be for some a quirkiness in his appeal, the fact remains that Kavanagh offers us a uniquely distilled reflection of ourselves as a people and uncovers for us an intriguing spiritual landscape, both rich and recognisable. In this his poetry is both original and enduring.
It is noteworthy that in Patrick Kavanagh’s extant work of published poems, which number 253, no fewer than 138 of these include explicitly religious themes, images or allusions. This means that references to Christian faith, in one way or another, make their appearances in more than half of all his poetic writing. The religious content of his poetry is, therefore, extensive and of considerable weight. It represents a large, remarkable and even something of a self-contained segment of Kavanagh’s creative work with its own particular substance and strain. It is for that reason that this collection of poems appears as an anthology in its own right.
Patrick Kavanagh himself was clear in his belief that ‘poetry has to do with faith, hope and sometimes charity’ (2). Allowing that the poet’s work is marked by a definite religious texture, the question may be asked whether religious faith, as it is commonly understood, can be properly embodied in poetic expression. Is this crossover possible? Can the one medium be validly apprehended in terms of the other? It has been said that ‘in religion, as in poetry, we are required to make a complex act of inference and assent and we begin by taking on trust expressions which are in analogical, metaphorical or symbolic form and by acting out the claims they make: understanding religious language is a function of understanding poetic language (3). But poetry is not theology. The poetic statement is essentially evocative, whereas theology is discursive.
Poetry does not yield systematic statements. Rather it puts the imagination to work in an intuitive enterprise of discovery. Unlike prose, its special effect is to deliver a charge which reaches right to the marrow, so to speak, of the mind. It can stir our sensibilities often in a mysterious way, beyond the confines of rational discourse. The compound that makes real poetry does not render down to meet the requirements of raw reason. As Samuel Coleridge once remarked, ‘Poetry gives more pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood, and perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure (4). Likewise religious ideas, too, can be expressed in a manner that does not have recourse to the analytic style that we associate with strict theological investigation. Religious ideas may be conveyed in poetic form, just as poetic statement may concern itself with religious truth. Although poetic and religious discourse are distinct from one another, they are by no means mutually exclusive. In terms of meaning and appreciation, they both commonly converge.
Patrick Kavanagh’s inherited and sound familiarity with his own religious tradition helps his distinctly Catholic imagination continuously to inform his poetic utterance. Nevertheless, while we engage with his personal insights on major Christian themes, we need to exercise scrupulous care to avoid colonising his ‘point of view’ with our own religious assumptions. This we do by preserving a fidelity to the poet’s own mind and intentions and the independent provenance of his statements which are fashioned free of any institutional warrants. In deference to the poet, we shun temptations to read either too much or, for that matter, too little into his lines, never pressing his material into strict theological categories. In spite of his own stout claim that ‘the poet is a theologian’, this is hardly true, at least in a formal sense, although he does so often furnish us with his own formulation of the fruits of that discipline. His revelations come, as he says himself, ‘as an aside’. He is never an apologist for Christian faith. His is not confessional writing. His personal dialogue with God and the sacred entices us to share it with him, precisely because it issues always from his fresh and unusual approach. He clearly communicates a definite and personal version of Christian truths but always re-formed in the poet’s unique expression. It is neither false, forced nor sentimental. It is invariably simple in its depth, devoid of advocacy, always honest, sparing in style and sometimes daring in its laconic matter-of-factness. Once we accept the complexity and caprice of Kavanagh’s mind, we can savour the ambiguities and elusive features of his written lines, which by turns swagger and genuflect their way into religious terrain.
It is remarkable that, in spite of the progressive distancing of Irish people from their traditional rural roots, Patrick Kavanagh’s singular appeal persists among young and old alike. In an era of waning religious sensibility, his genius nevertheless continues to mine the deepest spiritual seams of our culture which, it seems, still remain precious to us, as we embark on the third millennium.
For me, Kavanagh’s attraction lies, first and foremost, in the wonders of the unexpected evocations drawn from his poetic matrix of farm and field, gardens, orchards and wild flowers. I associate all these and more with charmed holidays of my youth on both banks of the river Shannon – in the County Clare of my mother’s country and the West Limerick-North Kerry of my father’s home. Kavanagh enlivens my recollection of pleasurable scenes, events and even my own mini-epiphanies – ‘the view that happened to no one else but you’ (Our Lady’s Tumbler) – that are the stuff of the poet’s patrimony. Besides, I retain the cherished memory of a rewarding, if limited, personal acquaintance with Patrick Kavanagh himself who, despite his ambiguous public reputation, I found to be a person of uncommon courtesy whose conversation I found as intriguing as it was memorable.
The Choice of Poems
The sixty poems in this selection from Patrick Kavanagh’s work can be described as pointing in a religious direction, either specifically or by way of inference and atmosphere, that is, in an explicit or implicit manner. All but eight poems touch directly on Christian themes and images (5). Those which are not overtly religious are included on the grounds that they relate to what he states is the ‘spiritual quality’ of his technique. An example of this may be found in the poem which bears the spiritually evocative title Ascetic. Although not explicitly religious, its lines offer an intimation of spiritual quest and transcendence together with its eucharistic overtone.
That in the end
I may find
Something not sold for a penny
In the slums of Mind.That I may break
With these hands
The bread of wisdomthat grows
In the other lands.For this, for this
Do I wear
The rags of hunger and climb
The unending stair.
Another poem, Epic, celebrates the uniqueness and importance of all that is local. It concludes:
… I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
Kavanagh points first to the parochial setting in preference to the wider world. He insists on the particular as seedbed of the universal. Poets, in giving flesh to the word, make their own importance, as do gods… as does the God of incarnation. For the Christian it is the mystery of God made flesh that leads to spiritual enlightenment.
Throughout the process of Kavanagh’s development, we find an ironic and even playful strain which proposes a special kind of detachment and a personal indomitability in the poet. This culminates in
what Kavanagh calls the ‘comic vision’. But this outlook has not to do with ‘funniness’ as it is commonly understood, but rather with a carefree attitude, by virtue of which the poet becomes free to adopt what might be called an untroubled seriousness towards life. This worldview includes a mixture of detachment, vulnerability and hope and, as such, also informs the condition of the Christian believer. In his poem The Self-Slaved, we read:
No self, no self-exposure
The weakness of the proser
But undefeatable
By means of the beatable …
Steadfast fidelity to his vision, together with the capacity to absorb personal reverses of whatever kind, ensures the poet’s ‘undefeatability’.
Kavanagh believed that his ‘comic vision’ eventually became enshrined in his literary enterprise. This he emphasised clearly and repeatedly in his prose writings.
For the reasons outlined above, each and all of the sixty poems in this collection may, I believe, contribute in one way or another to filling in the picture of religious substance which I hope may become visible through the reading of this volume. With the exception of the three long poems which, for organisational purposes, come at the end, the chosen poems are presented in the chronological order in which they originally appeared. In this way their sequence is aligned with the progressive stages of the poet’s life and work.
Conventionally Patrick Kavanagh’s work is divided into three periods which, in abbreviated form, run as follows: the pastoral simplicity of The Ploughman, the disillusionment and loss resulting from experience, and a recovered innocence and fulfilment which comes about in two distinct phases – the quest for recovery and the achievement of’ ‘rebirth’. These periods may not be regarded as watertight compartments in his poetic life. They overlap, shade into one another, sometimes erratically collide and even occasionally criss-cross chronologically.
Particularity and the Christian Story
Patrick Kavanagh wrote: ‘Real technique is a spiritual quality, a condition of mind or an ability to evoke a condition of mind.’ One aspect of this technique was the poet’s predilection for what may be called ‘particularity’. The way that this technique comes into play is in his unfailing preference for the particular, which is typically expressed in a definite and concrete image, usually drawn from the most ordinary objects and events. In this way he works towards his personal, poetic insights, often reaching to a statement of arresting significance. Thus Kavanagh attempts to ‘forge’, as he wrote, ‘a concrete, as it were, essence’, by ‘smelting into passion the commonplaces of life’. (After Forty Years of Age) The poet’s concentration on particularity is a hallmark of his writing which he himself acknowledged. ‘The true work of the poet is the ability to project the particular case into the larger consciousness: to show even the most insignificant detail as of universal importance (6). This is how Kavanagh employs his individual style in his approach to material reality, which enables him convincingly to address the transcendent dimensions of our world and our lives within it. As Seamus Heaney has said of Kavanagh: ‘It is when [his] ethereal voice incarnates itself in the imagery of the actual world its message of transcendence becomes credible (7). The Kavanagh technique of particularity is evident in his poem Advent, the third stanza of which reads:
O after Christmas we’ll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning
We’ll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.
And we’ll hear it among simple decent men too
Who barrow dung in gardens and under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won’t we be rich, my love and I, and please
God we shall not ask for reason’s payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God’s breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour
And Christ comes with a January flower.
The imagination’s true home, to start with, is the definite image set in time. From there only can it make its way outwards and upwards from finite considerations towards the infinite and the timeless – crossing from the temporal to the eternal. This imaginative order has major implications for our understanding of the Christian way. The God of Christianity is in the first place identified through story. Out of its story emerges what we call revelation, the truths which we come to confess as the proper object of religious faith. God is characterised principally through relationships, activities and events unfolding over time, in particular situations. This story is written in the Bible, partially in the special literary genre which is termed ‘spiritual language’ (8). It includes the element of mystery in its pages and it can only be fully understood and embraced when read through what we might call the lens of faith. Reflection on Christianity’s origin and the manner in which it first emerged historically, confronts us with the profound drama of a definite time and place: the nativity event distinguished only by its ordinariness. It is for this reason that the birth of Jesus has been referred to as ‘the scandal of particularity’. It is called ‘scandalous’ because it may seem that being involved in the untidiness and shame of history somehow compromises the transcendence and universality of God. This is where and how Kavanagh’s poetic technique of particularity aligns itself in one sense with the story of faith. For the Christian, the particularity par excellence occurs in the mystery of the incarnation through which God enters the world of the finite, becoming flesh in the person of Christ at the village of Bethlehem, some two thousand years ago.
Sacramentality
Against the backdrop of the Christian story we can begin to seek in Patrick Kavanagh’s writing what it is that establishes it as an unusual repository of lively and unique features of the Catholic imagination. There are two distinct but inter-related levels at which we find this imagination at work. First, there are those poems in which religious images and themes are explicitly and directly explored and, secondly, those in which Christian beliefs appear more obliquely.
It is at this second level that we can discover a climate of divine presence, a knack of presenting material objects as bespeaking God’s handiwork and a sense of the transcendent mirrored in the physical realities of our environment. This is a poetic gift that may be described as displaying features which resemble what the Catholic tradition calls sacrament, which, in turn, gives rise to a distinct habit of religious perception known as the sacramental outlook. A sacramental perspective ‘sees’ the divine in the human, the infinite in the finite, the eternal in the historical. Properly understood this will never be mistaken for some kind of idolatry, pantheism or magic. True sacramentality affords the Christian believer something of a glimpse of God.
The term ‘sacramentality’ in the Catholic Christian tradition means the shaping of a spiritual outlook that allows created reality to exercise a symbolism enabling us to gain access to a world of spiritual realities beyond that of immediate sensory perception. In sacrament we divine God’s presence in particular material entities, in events and relationships(9). Sacraments, in their formal and ritually designated mode, are restricted to a classical seven in number. But the notion of sacrament goes beyond the liturgical canon. In its broader sense it can be a recognition of God’s presence and power implicit in and across the entire range of creation. The sacramental event or occasion does not, in any way, violate the order of material reality but endows it, by the invocation of God’s word, with a new and profound layer of meaning. The sacramental vision does not tamper with or twist the integrity of God’s creation. It simply enhances it. A sacrament is not some ‘holy thing’ arbitrarily imported from outside our universe. It is a sign elicited from creation already existing. The Christian community makes sacrament by specifying certain gifts of nature as privileged signs which, by the direct authority of Christ in the case of canonical sacraments, entitles it to read these same signs as celebration of God’s love for us. Thus, our sacramental moments emerge from the already grace-filled elements of God’s creation. The principle of sacramentality is rooted in the incarnation, the Word made flesh, abiding in our material world. The particular event of God taking on our flesh and blood in Jesus Christ constitutes the sacrament of sacraments.
Patrick Kavanagh had a special gift for investing the natural world with spiritual significance. He could turn apparently inconsequential items of every day into an experience of hope and delight. In this sense he was graced with what might be called a sacramentalising talent. Something of this illuminative skill is to be found in a number of the poems included in this selection. In the poem A Christmas Childhood the Epiphany event is suggested by the silhouette of ‘three whin bushes’ on the horizon resembling mounted figures, which represent for the poet the ‘Three Wise Kings’ as they approach Inniskeen, or maybe Bethlehem itself. In the poem Kerr’s Ass naming items of a donkey’s harness ingeniously moves the imagination to contemplation of ‘the god of imagination’.
Parochial or Provincial
As we move away from the link which Kavanagh delicately forged between particularity and sacramentality, it is also relevant to notice the significance he attached to his mythology of the parish or local community as his own, everyone’s own, enduring and special place. The parish, as the poet’s irreplaceable and primary social, cultural and religious unit, is seen as a unique resource – for Kavanagh, replete with rich significance. As such, it is another symbol for him of particularity. Paradoxically it represents that which is both limited and limitless. The parochial, as he understands it, is contrasted with the provincial, which is the indeterminate and unremarkable territory, together with the unimaginative mindset that, as he believed, goes with it. He wrote: ‘Parochialism and provincialism are opposites. The provincial has no mind of its own; he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis, towards which his eyes are turned, has to say on any subject. This runs through all activities. The parochial mentality, on the other hand, is never in doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish (10). Moreover he claims, ‘Parochialism is universal; it deals with fundamentals.’ This perception coincides with the task of the poet which is that of transforming apparently insignificant places and events into symbols resonant of larger truths. There is an insistence always on the potential for movement from micro- to macro-cosmic relevance in the unique resources of the local milieu. This emerges in poems such as Epic and both the In Memory of My Mother poems in each of which homely and domestic episodes lead on to statements of wider significance and enduring reality.
Three foundational doctrines of Christianity are encompassed in Patrick Kavanagh’s work. These are creation, incarnation and redemption. These are not dealt with in a conventional manner but are imaginatively presented by way of his own unique poetic vision. All three infiltrate his poetry in a personal and intriguingly original manner.
Creation
Kavanagh’s approach to the theme of creation corresponds closely in its inspiration to the scriptural notion of a pre-existent creative Word, or Logos, as it is classically termed. It is this which, in the Christian tradition, establishes the design and pattern of the universe and reveals to us the purposes of God as its creator. In the biblical account, this generative Word, together with its incarnation in time, within our world, is to be found in the Prologue of St John’s gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.’
In the Irish language the strongest term for ‘word’ is briathar which is the same word used for ‘verb’, that which entails action or that which happens. In the original Hebrew of the Book of Genesis the term used for the Word likewise denotes action, which is creative, continuous and providing. This creative Word of God is the source and instrument of God’s own poetry in which we human beings are analogously invited to share. But the creative Word or Logos, the eternal, utterly ‘other’ God of the Christians does not remain detached in some cosmic solitude but breaks into our physical, sensible world at a moment of historical time in a specific place, which we have come to know as the mystery of the incarnation. ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.’ This, in the Christian perspective, is the definitive graced and truth-bearing event as narrated at the very beginning of the gospel of St John.
Incarnation
The incarnation of the Word ushers in a new world of hope and meaning, destined to be completed in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus. This is the restoration of ‘all things in Christ’ (cf Ephesians 1:9) fulfilled in what is called the paschal mystery (11). These events reveal for the Christian a spiritual panorama filled with the prospect of fresh and freely conferred significance: a new gift of God unfolding for every last human being and, indeed, in its own way, embracing every single created physical entity and item in our universe. This healing and revaluation touches every tiniest crevice of creation. This we believe is so, now that the person of the all-holy God breathes intimately among and within us. God is no longer remote, unimaginable, vague and outside our ken. By virtue of his identifying totally with our flesh and blood, he has become, as we say, ‘one of our own’. The implications of the incarnation are manifold and they embrace all created Being and that in the entirety of its detail. Although the mystery of God is addressed in human terms by our imagination, it must be by the genuinely grounded imagination and not the imagination of make-believe. When we speak and think of God in human categories, as we must, our biggest problem is in trying to visualise, and even somehow comprehend, the divine in terms of the insufficient power of our finite minds. God, by definition, must always remain in essence outside the reach of the human intellect. God-language can only be embarked on by way of analogy, that is, by similarity and dissimilarity held in tension by the realistic imagination.
Historically, the human quest for God has tended to take either one or other of two routes. One is by way of the exaggeratedly ‘spiritualising’ tendency, which operates in such soft focus and widely angled lens that it misses particularity and eschews all that is definite, resulting in a pseudo God, who is so ethereal that it is ultimately ephemeral. The authentic Christian way is rather the long plod through our material world, through our lived lives, with all the ordinariness, puzzlement and pain that this entails. In other words, the incarnational way (12).
Perhaps it was in this context that the Anglican Archbishop Temple once offered the cheery paradox when he observed: ‘One ground for the hope of Christianity lies in the fact that it is the most avowedly materialist of all the great religions.’ By which he meant, I suggest, that Christian belief in creation, incarnation and redemption makes for a profound respect for nature, time and history. It is at our peril that we attempt to leap-frog over the finite and the temporal in our journey towards the Absolute. If we take God out of our world and consign him to some cloudy, celestial sphere, where he becomes altogether inaccessible, then he is effectively banished from our real lives.
Patrick Kavanagh reminds us of this when he writes in his poem Sensualist:
Do not stray
In the abstract temple of love.
There are no priests on the altars
Of Metaphysic
You have heard this truth before
Well, what matter!
Is the Body not the temple of the Holy Ghost
And flesh eyes have glimpsed Truth.
Redemption
Kavanagh’s approach to the theme of redemption finds expression in the language of spiritual re-birth. As in the themes of creation and incarnation, redemption is interwoven symbolically with the thread of innocence – a recurring leitmotif of the poet’s religious sensibility. This state or condition of childhood innocence makes for a quality of knowing that is conducive to an immediate recognition of primal truth and beauty, which flows from the mystery of redemption. It must be noted that Kavanagh’s celebration of redemption is never attempted through ‘Easter’ poems. In one indirect, but arresting, allusion to the resurrection, he writes that after Calvary ‘Men were afraid With a new fear, the fear Of love. There was a laugh freed For ever and for ever.’ (Lough Derg) God’s love for his people is established definitively by the resurrection. The assurance conveyed through the experience of the new ‘freedom of the children of God’ (Rom 8:21) perhaps brings with it an intimation of the comic vision so dear to Kavanagh’s heart – itself offering an earnest of redemption.
However, Kavanagh does not poetically explore the mystery of the resurrection of Christ in any memorable way. This may be connected with the manner in which his religious imagination was stocked during his schooling in Christian doctrine. In his time Patrick would have acquired a brand of religious knowledge which stressed dependence on the suffering and death of Christ as the ground and source of man’s salvation. The doctrine of the resurrection would have been learned primarily as a proof of the divinity of Christ rather than as the keystone of all Christian life.
On Kavanagh’s redemptive horizon there is a tension between both the creational and incarnational presence of God in our world and the event of Calvary with its salvific consequences. The first-graced beauty of nature, intimately touched by the divine, through the power of the Word, had brought forth in Kavanagh’s words ‘a suddenness of green and light’ that pre-dated the crucifixion: ‘All that was true before the piteous death of the cross.’ (Why Sorrow?)
The trajectory of Kavanagh’s religious imagination leads him to chose nativity scenes in order to express ideas of redemption and spiritual regeneration. His version of spiritual regeneration, moreover, takes the form of the mystery of the re-birth of innocence. The nativity theme, which embodies the gift of new beginnings for mankind, is by its nature lyrical- the divine infant and the circumstances of his birth in Bethlehem. Foremost among these nativity poems is A Christmas Childhood. This taps a wellspring of seasonal sentiment and succeeds by virtue of the delicate evocation of place and expectant atmosphere. The linking of images from farming activities and local colour with the birth of Christ connects his native Inniskeen with Bethlehem, and the historical nativity event with contemporary life. In another strong poem, Advent, Kavanagh builds up the sense of mystery and wonder as the Christian prepares for the coming of the Saviour. God’s presence among his people is renewed by the nativity. The recharging of creation with the divine presence puts ‘newness… in every stale thing’. (Advent)
In the sonnet Canal Bank Walk, with its waters ‘pouring redemption’, we are plunged again into baptismal sacramental imagery. The sacrament of Christian initiation by which one is re-born, as the liturgy says, ‘To a new innocence by water and the Holy Spirit’, and from which flows spiritual renewal, is central to the poem. Again we note that the baptismal motif is delivered in a way re-formed, as always, by the poet’s imagination:
O unworn world enrapture me,
… give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
In his poem entitled Is Kavanagh touches on the baptismal image of water:
Mention water again
Always virginal,
Always original,
It washes out Original Sin.
While the wide sweep of Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry covers the three major Christian themes which we have dealt with above, it is to be re-emphasised that they occur not in conventional or systematic theological form but rather in a free ranging fashion, inventively conceived and with constant dashes of originality which issue always from the poet’s unusual ‘point of view’, as he himself reminds us.
Trinity
The elaborate theology of the Trinity need not concern us bur its role in Christian tradition is noted since it is a recurring, important religious archetype appearing in one way or another throughout Kavanagh’s poetry and he has frequent recourse to its versatility as a basic model of Christian faith and imagination. Refinements of the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity may appear so abstruse as to be off-putting and to some may seem to verge even on the fanciful. But it remains, for all that, a primordial entity that captured the poet’s intuitive powers. For the believer it constitutes an image, a concept, a reality and thus a truth, by which it becomes too a source of prayerful reflection.
The term Trinity itself, growing from its biblical rudiments, dates from the 200s AD. At the Council of Nicea in 325 a clear definition of the Blessed Trinity was formally professed, as it is still to our day, in the Nicene Creed which is recited at Sunday Mass everywhere and nowadays, indeed, professed across a wide spectrum of other Christian traditions.
The salient point arising from Christian teaching on the mystery of the Trinity is that at the very heart of the Godhead we find relationship – a relationship of absolute loving. This it is that constitutes the innermost nature of the Christian God. God though one, is nevertheless also a community, a community of love. Thus God is not to be found in solitary confinement, but always and forever communally, in the company of each person, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Moreover, the model of a triune God discloses an important practical truth which supplies the context for ordinary Christian living – that is in relationship with others. Normally, there cannot ever be what one might call ‘a solitary Christian’ because he or she will always be called to exercise faith, hope and love precisely as a member of a community, large or small, be it in marriage, in a family, among neighbours or, more exceptionally, within a religious congregation. Yet another dimension of the Blessed Trinity is that Christian teaching asserts that the triune God dwells through faith in the depths of each individual person (cf John 14:23). This profound reality for the Christian becomes the ground and guarantee of the absolute value of every human being and the ultimate source of self-esteem.
The traditional paradigm, offered by way of human representation of the triune God of Christianity, depicts the Father as Creator, the Son as Redeemer and the Holy Spirit as Sanctifier. Christian writers have always sought and gleaned a wide variety of insights to the nature of the Godhead. In their exploration of the mystery, theologians from different cultural backgrounds and in successive historical eras have constantly propounded new and differing views as to how aspects of divinity may be apprehended and explained. All these attest to the richness and vitality of the enquiring mind of faith as it scrutinises the one and same inexhaustible Reality. From earliest times two distinct currents of thought regarding the trinitarian God flow from the east and the west, the Greek and Latin traditions. Just as in our own time Kavanagh ploughed his unusual religious furrow, so on the grand cerebral scale did noteworthy scholars from different philosophical and theological traditions, east and west, attempt to disclose in meticulously analytic writing, the truth of God implicit in the Bible. From apostolic times, through the Greek and Latin fathers of the church, the medieval schoolmen, Reformation figures and outstanding modern scholars, the tradition of wisdom on the trinitarian God has evolved. In its time the Christian community has wrestled with the great heresies, as well as accommodating the sometimes idiosyncratic but precious religious input from saints and mystics (13). Each in his or her own way, including the poet, has sought elucidation of the mystery of God whom Kavanagh acknowledges as ‘the One and the Endless, the Mind that has baulked / The profoundest of mortals.’ (The One)
References to the mystery of the Trinity are woven through Christian culture in general, and through the Irish religious tradition in particular. They appear frequently in St Patrick’s Confessio (5th century) which is a foundational document witnessing to Irish Christianity. Historically the Trinity has given its name to numerous institutes of learning. It surfaces in popular culture as sportsmen and women ‘bless themselves’ in contest, while children become acquainted with the Trinity in their very first religious lessons and prayer: ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’
Kavanagh invoked trinitarian images in a personal way and in this displayed a predilection for the Word and the Holy Spirit which he renders by its older title, the Holy Ghost. Whereas the Father is usually associated with creation, the Word with the Son, the second person as pre-existent to the incarnation, and the Holy Spirit with the life of holiness, yet the Spirit is also understood as the creative agent interchanging with the originating Word, made flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. The activities of each person of the Trinity may be attributed to the others. The distinction of persons does not exclude or restrict their exchange of functions. Three in One, One in Three. Patrick Kavanagh’s simple, but profound, ‘geometric’ poem The Circle celebrates the Blessed Trinity into whose mystery the poet draws all of life.
FOOTNOTES
1. William Butler Yeats, originally from Sligo, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Seamus Heaney, a Derry man, became a Nobel Laureate in 1995.
2. P. Kavanagh, Collected Pruse. All subsequent prose quotations from Kavanagh are likewise from Collected Pruse, except where otherwise indicated.
3. John Coulson, Newman and the Common Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1964), p.4.
4. Samuel Coleridge, quoted by A. E. Housman in his Leslie Stephen lecture of 1933 entitled ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’.
5. These are Ascetic, Iniskeen Road: July Evening, Epic, Innocence, Kerr’s Ais, The Hospital, The Self-Slaved, Question to Life – all of them with their own spiritual innuendo.
6. Kavanagh describes technique as ‘a method of getting at life’. Kavanagh wrote on the primacy of the ordinary’: ‘If I happen to meet a poet and I have met poets – I would expect him to reveal his powers of insight and imagination, even if he talked of poultry farming, ground rents or any other commonplace subject. Above all I would expect to be excited and have my horizons of faith and hope widened by his ideas on the only subject that is of any real importance Man-in-the-world-and-why.’
7. Seamus Heaney, ‘From Monaghan to the Grand Canal’ in Preoccupations. 8. cf Northrop Frye, The Double Vision, Language and Meaning in Religion (University of Toronto Press, 1991).
9. The term symbol as used in sacramental language enjoys a special connotation. It means more than simply representing another reality, as by way, for example, of dramatic token. Thus it differs from conventional signs such as traffic signals or natural symbols like that of smoke indicating fire. Symbolism, as understood in the religious domain, is the only way in which spiritual realities may be truly apprehended and genuinely experienced. According to Catholic tradition the symbolism involved in sacramental signs actually effects that which it signifies. In this sacramental order, the Eucharist stands out as of paramount importance, engaging as it does most attention from both believers and from those others whose curiosity it naturally arouses. The nature of Eucharistic presence is, however, often misunderstood. The Sacrament contains the body and blood of Christ, under the signs of food and drink. In our approach to the Eucharist, we have to guard against two false interpretations. On the one hand, in no sense is Christ’s presence less than real – a view sometimes rendered by the reductive phrase ‘mere symbolism’. On the other hand, our understanding of the sacrament must avoid an extreme physicalism. In the Eucharist, of course, no chemical change in the elements occurs. This is why theologians, in marking out a middle way between these two extremes, have embraced the term ‘transubstantiation’. By this is meant that the outer appearance and physical constitution of bread and wine remain, but the inner reality (known as ‘substance’) undergoes change. Christ’s body, blood, soul and divinity are present in the ‘species’ of the sacrament, as they are technically called. The key question concerns the way in which this presence comes about. It is not that the bread and wine remain as just signs or representations of Christ. Nor at the other extreme, is Christ become present in a physical way – namely in the way material realities are normally present in their surroundings. Change happens on the level of Being and it is this that is the new ontological reality. In the Eucharist the manner of presence is unique and so does not admit of empirical analysis. It is analogous to how the soul is present in the body. For this reason one speaks of ‘the mystery’ of the Eucharist and even Aquinas refers to the ‘spiritual’ presence of Christ in the sacrament. In this context, Kavanagh, in The Great Hunger, says of Maguire, ‘He read the symbol too sharply and turned / from the five simple doors of sense / to the door whose combination lock has puzzled / philosopher and priest and common dunce.’
10. It may be noted that Kavanagh wrote his prose and poetry before the issue of ‘inclusive language’ arose.
11. The Paschal Mystery: The Second Vatican Council, in its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (par 5) says of Christ: ‘He achieved his task principally by the paschal mystery of the blessed passion, resurrection from the dead and glorious ascension, where by dying he destroyed our death and rising, he restored our life.’ On a wider plane, the paschal mystery refers to the whole of salvation offered to human kind as an event which converts the whole history of men and women. Two stages may be distinguished in this event. The first refers to the paschal event as something which happened in time over two thousand years ago. The second refers to the way the paschal mystery exists in sacramental symbols today, that is, through its enactment in the liturgy. The word ‘paschal’ comes from the Greek pascha which, in turn, is derived from the Hebrew pesach, referring to the annual commemoration of Israel’s first Passover in Egypt. This was the charter event that marked the Jewish people’s liberation from bondage. The Jewish pasch is the memorialising of God’s covenant with his people. In Christianity one is initiated into the paschal mystery through baptism. The death-resurrection motif is central to the life and liturgy of the Christian community. The pilgrimage of faith for all is patterned on Jesus’ passing over to God the Father, through his redemptive death and resurrection in which the followers of the Lord are incorporated.
12. The so called ‘spiritualising tendency’ is exemplified in what has become known as the Gnostic mindset. Gnosticism was an early heresy in Christianity and its particular intellectual and spiritual bias has continued to haunt mankind’s quest for the Absolute. The teaching of Gnosticism involved a teaching of dualism between spirit and matter. The former was good, the latter evil. This attitude was a form of Syncretism, drawing from a mixture of Jewish, oriental sources, and an exaggerated version of earliest Christian elements, especially from one group within the primitive Christian community at Corinth. Gnosticism advocated an escape from a world of matter to the world of spirit. It tended towards what we would now call a snobby intellectualism, the original Greek word gnosis from which it was named, meaning knowledge. It claimed ‘enlightenment’ and something of a secret knowledge or a revelation concerning God and the source of all reality. It repudiated the possibility of the divine being rooted in or linked to the material in any form. It was both escapist and elitist in that it propounded a privileged, fast-track access to the deity. Gnosticism came to prominence in the second century AD, led by figures such as Marcian, Valentius, and Basilides. This heresy was vigorously opposed by second and third century church fathers, like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria and notably by St Ireneus, the outstanding incarnationalist theologian. Near our own day the Gnostic bias surfaced in vestigial form in aspects of puritanism and even infiltrated strands of post-Tridentine Catholicism. A famous collection of Gnostic texts was rediscovered in 1945 near Nag-Hammadi, a Coptic site in Egypt.
13. The theologian Karl Rahner SJ emphasises that the same reality is to be found in the mysteries of both the Trinity and the incarnation. The gift of what he calls ‘God’s self-communication’ to us is central to his theology. The God who comes to us as Spirit, the Word of God and inexhaustible source, is God’s own self. This restores the notion of manifestation to the theology of Trinity, or in other words restores the link between Trinity and incarnation.
