The Poetic Realm: Seeing God as He Truly Is

One of the most helpful pieces of advice I have ever been given in my time and capacity as a priest was bestowed upon me while working at my parish assignment in seminary. Every week, I made the trek an hour north to a large church in New Haven, Connecticut, where I was trained in everything from singing and serving, to preaching and chairing parish meetings. It was on a Sunday after I had preached a homily on the Last Judgment; Great Lent was imminent, and we as third year seminarians had been released on an unsuspecting world to practice our ministrations. Having been newly ordained a priest, I was brimming with the confidence of one who had done well in his classes and received the acclaim of his peers. Homiletics was one of my strongest school performances. As we filed into the lunch room downstairs, I was accosted by the usual line of people complimenting me on my oratorical prowess. But at the end of the line was an older woman with a dour face. She looked at me and without hesitation said, “You preach like someone who’s never read a fiction book.” Oof. I had no riposte; she was right. I hadn’t read any fiction for at least a decade.

This comment, which has stuck with me these past 10 years, was revelatory for me. In my quest to better myself, I had lain aside any pretense of leisure in pursuit of that “pearl of great price”; academic knowledge. After my reception into the Orthodox Church, and more rigorously in my preparation for seminary, I traded in Tolkien, Lewis, and Herbert for Lossky, Hopko, and Schmemman. I wondered at how it could be so obvious to someone who hardly knew me, and yet I knew it to be true. I had become neglectful of a part of me that, in my previous incarnation as a Protestant Christian, had been critical. I was always reading a story; I never went anywhere without a book, to the point that it drove my wife crazy. But what would cause such a seismic shift in a habit that was foundational to my personhood?

The answer to this is Pragmatism. I had become preocupied with “…that form of history, which, neglecting circumstantial details, is occupied in the scientific evolution of causes and effects” (OED, 1971). Yuck. I had grown distasteful of the things which had so occupied my childhood as to define who I was, in the interests of who I thought I needed to become. Heretofore I would not have considered myself a pragmatic person; “head in the clouds” would have been a more accurate epithet. I loved art, music, poetry, and narrative. A sensitive soul, I connected with people on an intimate level through shared stories and experiences, but in my mind, that did not describe a scholar, a theologian, a historian, a great mind; all of which I aspired to be. If God dwelt in the lofty halls of thought, I had only to ascend their gilded staircase to meet Him. I had subscribed to that great doctrine of the post-enlightenment period. I had become a Pragmatist.

What I neglected to realize was that God does not dwell as disembodied knowledge, accessed through mechanical reading and rote memorization. He is not a series of attributes that can be boiled down to constituent facts, easily digested and internalized. Our God is a Living God, a God Who reveals Himself through stories and songs, a Spirit that animates a living body, which is His body, the Church. I had committed that great cardinal sin, which is to create a box and then attempt to fit God in that box to be carried around and shown to people as a trophy or proof of my great knowledge. No wonder the sermons didn’t land; no wonder that woman could smell my cold rationalism on me from a mile away. I had forgotten my first love, that true and great prize. I had left the Poetic Realm.

This place exists in opposition to the Pragmatic Realm, the place of cold logic and utilitarian action. The Poetic Realm is the noetic Kingdom which cannot be circumscribed and which refuses categorization; it is the place where, far beyond knowing things, we come to truly know and be known by God. Pragmatism demands that we know and then do. Poetic existence desires that we learn and be. This is a very great difference, because it shapes our ontological existence. The only true path to lasting change and ascension to meaning is through the Poetic Realm. I was struck by an admission made by Saint Sophrony;

“I first met with the notion of tragedy, not in life but in literature.” —Saint Sophrony, His Life is Mine

He spoke of this in opposition to the world around him. He understood that true meaning of tragedy and its inevitable partner redemption were to be found outside of “the confines of this earth.” Again, he makes his point ever clearer;

“Though the concerns of the spirit prompt a nobler quest, the genius in the realm of science or the arts sooner or later realizes his inability to consummate his vision. Again, the logical denoument is death.” —Saint Sophrony, Ibid

Even in the Realm of Pragmatism, the arts have their place, illustrating in stark relief, the facts of life. But mankind must transcend this knowledge and be changed by something greater; the desire for holiness.

Fr. Pavel Florensky created a schema for understanding this process. He drew a distinction between mere art and true art, in the form of theurgy– “the art of God-work.” This is “…the task of the full transformation of reality by meaning, and the full actualization of meaning in reality.” He envisioned this theurgy as “…that ladder down which God descends into the world and illumines matter, transfigures substance, and up which man ascends to heaven.” All meaningful work happens in this space, the space of theurgy. To get even more granular,

“Florensky distinguishes among three basic kinds of human activity: practical, theoretical, and liturgical (God-serving). The first produces things or ‘tool-machines’ in a broad sense; the second produces theories, or ‘concept-terms’; and the third, ‘holy things.’” —Victor Bychkov, The Aesthetic Face of Being

All are necessary for human existence as a whole, but they exist in ascending order of importance. Theurgy (and here we can substitute the term “true art”) can be found in all of these modes of existence to varying degrees, but the highest embodiment of theurgy is found in the third category, that of liturgical life. Therefore, when the human being engages in the gathering of meaning through artistic expression and consumption, this activity finds its telos or culmination in the liturgiucal life.

How immeasurably important then is this way of life to the Christian, and even moreso, to the priest! To exist in this space is to speak the language of God, to communicate with Him in a manner free of all barriers. These terms then become, at their pinnacle, synonymous with worship, which we offer to God alone. True art reflects the great truths of the world, and liturgy becomes the vehicle, the language, the mode that constructs and conveys it. Think of choral or orchestral music; these masterpieces have always been imagined in an environment of worship. Without the liturgical framework, we would not have Bach, Handel, Palestrina, Chesnokov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff, or Tchaikovsky. Most of their greatest works were created in pursuit of this truth.

They became submerged in the endeavour of theurgy, and their works moved beyond both machine-things and philosophical concepts to transcend the very reality which surrounded them. In doing this, they moved beyond their (and our) present situation which was (and is) a predatory-mechanical culture and into a contemplative-creative culture.

This zone of contemplative-creativity is the place where, for us as Christians, the real work of person-craft happens.Throughout our days, we move through the lower regions of existence. For the mechanic, the repair and maintenance of machines is his very necessary goal. For a teacher, the communication of ideas and concepts in the education of their students is essential. When left to their own devices, very seldom does the average person “break through” into the work of theurgy in the banality of everyday life. Our energy remains outwardly focused. We bring order to a world of chaos by pressing our will onto the objects and ideas that surround us. We manufacture. But to be a Christian is to participate not in the manufacture of our world; it is to participate in the creation of it. Creation is a property that is properly attributed to God;

“By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the Word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.” —Hebrews 11.3

And again;

“Oh Holy God… Who out of non-existance has brought all things into being…” —The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom

In the Liturgy, we move into a contemplative-creative space, participating in the timelessness of the Liturgy, bringing into our world something from beyond it. Far from forcing our will onto the material things that surround us, we call upon God to come and make those things new, to recreate them. Our prayers arise to God as incense alongside curling wafts of fragrant smoke. The proclamation of the Gospel from a gilded book becomes the word of life that guides us into the way of God’s commandments, which are eternal and inalienable. The very Holy Spirit of God descends upon the gifts of bread and wine, transforming them into the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. These things, which are unarguably material (and sometimes existential or philosophical) bring forth a different ontological reality; that is, they become symbol. But not as the world understands symbol. For the Orthodox Christian, symbols do not merely indicate that which they point toward, but truly manifest the real being of a greater truth, hidden and secret from man. The prayers, the words, the gifts; all of these connect to that theurgical world and make real the transcendent.

It is possible to accomplish this outside of the Liturgy, but it is rare, and difficult to do. For this, we need art. True art. Recently, I had a conversation with my eldest daughter about what “good music” is. She intimated that the music she loves makes her feel nostalgic, but for a time and place that she has never experienced, and yet nonetheless understands on a deep level. We talked about how this is absent from most popular music, which is manufactured to create certain stimuli, to be catchy, and to make money. But true art, the efervesence of the soul responding to something invisible, brings us to a place of understanding which defies even our own explanation. This music has a timeless quality to it, because it connects to a greater reality. It is unconcerned with the world, in its essence. It takes the mundane and transforms it into a reflection. Not a mirror’s reflection which presents to us our current state, but a promise of what that state could and should be. It is a creation in the truest sense of the word. Because it is only God Who can create ex nihilo, or out of nothingness, we must use our matter to mirror that perfection. For the musician, it’s melody. For the poet and writer, words. The painter uses colour, and the sculptor, stone and wood. These things exist on the material and philosophical plain, but the end result is metaphysical. What makes a good poem good? What makes a painting a masterpiece? What about Chesnokov makes us weep and thrall? Ignoring the critic in all of these instances, we are at a loss to describe them. The critic examines technique, composition, novelty. These things do not, in and of themselves, move us. The critic does not truly understand art, nor the historian Liturgy. Only the one participating with true art, the one engaging in the co-creation between God and the artist truly understands.

In the deepest parts of ourselves, we need this. We long for it. It is at the core of our very being. Entering into the work of God, we become somehow whole and holy.

Welcome to the Poetic Realm.

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them.

There I can find, as in old letters, The days of my life, already lived,

And held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open To another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree Rustling over a gravesite And making real the dream Of the one its living roots Embrace:

A dream once lost

among sorrows and songs.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Ich liebe Meines Wesens Dunkelstunden