St. Augustine called poetry “the devil’s wine.” It wasn’t one of his more insightful statements. In some ways, the most important aspect of religion is its poetry. We have to outgrow the science and ethics of any earlier understanding, but the art of the ancients only grows more precious with time.
Many believers are more comfortable believing that religion describes reality exactly. When some first learn that religion is spoken in symbolic language, they may feel disappointed and betrayed. “If the stories aren’t true, then what good are they?” More importantly, they may feel if scripture is poetry, that we should abandon it for a description of life that is easier to understand? Their reasonable question is, “why doesn’t religion just come out and say what it means?”
We sometimes forget that words are invented and may not resemble reality much at all. Language can be a kind of trance that loses its relationship to the world as it tries to describes it objectively. Religious poetry is the homage words pay to the unspeakable depth of living. When we speak in the rhythmic language of poetry, our static world of ideas is reanimated by tuning to the deep vibrations of life. Poetry is wine alright, but it is a nectar that awakens us to that deep pulse under girding our lives and weaving us together with every other being into one electric web.
I was introduced to this quote last evening. In it, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, Ilya Prigogine seems to be making the same point about the limitations of language – “the wealth of reality, which overflows any single language, any single logical structure.” A very poetic image for a physicist. Here’s the whole quote:
“No single theoretical language articulating the variables to which a well-defined value can be attributed can exhaust the physical content of a system. Various possible languages and points of view about the system may be complementary. They all deal with the same reality, but it is impossible to reduce them all to one single description. The irreducible plurality of perspectives on the same reality expresses the impossibility of a divine point of view from which the whole of reality is visible…. the real lesson to be learned from the principle of complementarity, a lesson which can perhaps be transferred to other fields of knowledge, consists in emphasizing the wealth of reality, which overflows any single language, any single logical structure.”
Order Out of Chaos by Ilya Prigogine p. 225
I’m reading small “d” divine as religious. Thank heaven we have both poets and physicists who bring us this message. But as this quote shows, the poetic voice is, for most people, the more memorable – one that we can carry in our hearts throughout the days.
the song of deborah, and the song of the sea are some of the oldest language in the Bible. Job, the song of solomon, and many of the psalms are stunning poetry. verse is the original oral tradition of the carriers of culture among pre-literate peoples, including ourselves when we’re children. It’s both internal and communal, heard in the soul and among listeners together. religious gatherings are among the few groups of people that still sing together. Parlor readings disappeared when radio began to replace interpersonal entertainments. Speech and rhetoric are fairly ignored in public school curricula. speaking and listening opens the same two way interface as prayer. When the religions of the book created the sacred word, writings were made to be spoken in a largely illiterate society. spirituality is more communal than solitary. Poetry is a sublime art of the soul. Recitation, song, liturgy, story, these are some deep spiritual disciplines to meet our most human needs.
James, very nice images, thank you.