Bible Books

040

The Enigma of the Divine

Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry

Robert Atwan, George Dardess and Peggy Rosenthal, eds.
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998) 580 pp., $35.00 (hardback)

Jesus has a peculiar and persistent life in world poetry. Thousands of poets have dared to approach the topic, hoping to grasp a piece of it. But whether He is the subject of praise or abuse, there is always a divide between Jesus and the poet, as though this subject were the one subject that cannot be the topic of a poem. Even in this recent anthology of 300 poems, spanning a thousand years or more, and coming from many countries and cultures, we are reminded most of the enigma of Jesus.

The most successful poems about Jesus glance at their subject from an angle, like T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” (not included in this collection), in which the magi never speak directly of Jesus but only allude to their journey toward an undefined something that was “satisfactory” but that continues to torment them.

Divine Inspiration traces Jesus’ life from birth to resurrection, and includes sections devoted to Healings, Parables, Encounters and other aspects of his life. The editors have good credentials: Literary critic Robert Atwan previously published a comprehensive two-volume anthology of poetry related to the Bible, Chapters into Verse (Oxford, 1993); George Dardess teaches the Bible and world literature at Allendale Columbia School, in Rochester, New York; and Peggy Rosenthal has published a respected book of sociolinguistic criticism, Words and Values (Oxford, 1984). They have gathered numerous little-known poems from out-of-the-way places, such as a collection of 17th-century Chinese poems first anthologized here, new translations of Latin hymns and Hungarian poems receiving their first translations. Throughout these varied works we encounter the puzzle of Jesus.

It is this Jesus problem that leads to a sort of dissatisfaction with almost all the poems, a dissatisfaction that points as much to the reader’s own limitations in understanding as to the poets’. And yet, this puzzling quality of Jesus imposes an interesting coherence on this multicultural collection. An elusive fragment from Thomas Aquinas (1227–1274) about the “hidden Deity” whom he cannot see, for instance, jostles next to this obscure insight by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926):

they [the disciples] flap about the table anxiously searching for some way out. But he, like an evening hour, is everywhere.

(from The Last Supper)

The dark night of the soul of the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross (1542–1591), describing Christ taking on the “weariness and labors” of mankind, is recalled centuries later in the dark night of a very different Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca, who describes the “thorn driven to the bone until the planets rust to pieces.” Traditional praise of Jesus often suffers from rote conventionality, but conventionality keeps tipping into something more personal, as in lines written by Karol Wojtyla before he became Pope John Paul II: “Within your eyes, I, / drawn by the well, / am enclosed.”

Ambrose’s fourth-century hymn “Aeterne Rerum Conditor” (so loved by Augustine), ends “Shine on our torpid minds, O Light…,” as though recognizing the numbness of a mind trying to comprehend God.

“Medieval poets had assumed a communal religious belief,” Peggy Rosenthal writes in her introduction, but “modern poets presume communal doubt.” Yet doubt and belief are rolled into each poem in this anthology in varying degrees, since each 041poem addresses Jesus, who arouses endless doubt and belief. “Freed from the requirement of belief, poets…have felt liberated to explore any personal attitude toward religion whatever: they can doubt it, scorn it, ignore it, test it out, even believe in it if they will,” Rosenthal adds. The difference between this and traditional Jesus poetry seems one of degree, distinguishable only by the extremity of the doubt and the frankness of the language. Thus a furious convert like the French poet Charles Péguy (1873–1914) ends up sounding like the 20th-century Jewish author Primo Levi, who writes: “He…will preach abomination…And die unsated by slaughter, leaving behind sown hate,” hate so easily transformable to its complementary passion of love. In Paul Zimmer’s “The Day Zimmer Lost Religion,” the convert who recants ends in a readiness that could go either way:

But of course He never came, knowing that
I was grown up and ready for Him now.

Jesus does not enter only into doubt, but into the particularities of each nation, and often becomes a figure of social justice, a challenge to the powers that continue to deny him in multiple cultural contexts. The images are dark—for example, a baby’s mutilated corpse lies on a trash heap in modern South African poet Oswald Mbuyoseni Mtshali’s “An Abandoned Bundle”: “Oh! Baby in the Manger / sleep well / on human dung.”

Poetry, especially after the Reformation, moved from an institutional communal development to individual originality. But originality has a way of being continually co-opted by the traditional subject matter. There is a powerful impulse in many of the more contemporary poems to debunk the Jesus mythology, to brush aside the divine elements of the story. Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s “Christmas Sonnet” deconstructs the Christmas tale: “And I, on my poor donkey, ride toward Egypt / with no star any longer, and far from Bethlehem.” But, paradoxically, there is no way to debunk this myth without entering into it. That’s because the core meaning of the Christian myth is that Jesus “emptied himself” (Philippians 2:7) into humanity. Ironically, these poets’ attempts to create an all-too-human Jesus almost always end up looking like praise. Robert Lowell’s “The Holy Innocents” (1946) submits the Christmas story to urban mockery—“The oxen drool and start / In wonder at the fenders of a car”—but ends with an odd image of helplessness become powerful—“Lamb of the shepherds, Child, how still you lie.” The many efforts to emphasize the human Jesus often end up praising him as divine. Indian 042poet Dom Moraes (1938–) sees Jesus as a sort of masseur:

For each blind dawn he kneads my prostrate thighs
Thumps on my buttocks with his fist
And breathes, Arise.

But a restored Christ rises up out of the comedy.

In the final move, the editors suggest, the poet becomes a Christ, his poem a divinizing word. But again, if the poet puts Jesus into his own image, is this not a version of the poet being put into His image? In the beginning was the Word; and each of these poems is one more twist and turn of the original gift.

In “The Answer,” Welsh poet R.S. Thomas captures the long, rich tradition (and long, rich frustration) exemplified by the poems gathered together in this rich volume:

There have been times when, after long on my knees crein a cold chancel, a stone has rolled from my mind, and I have looked in and seen the old questions lie folded and in a place by themselves, like the piled graveclothes of love’s risen body.

The Enigma of the Divine

Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry