“Music, Prayer, and ‘Something Understood’: Jean Molinet and George Herbert on the Ineffable” (original) (raw)
Related papers
“Who Really Knows?”: Religion and Ritual: the Poetics and Performance of the Ineffable
Journal of Dharma Studies, 2019
to explore the ways in which the very ineffability of the divine is conceived and expressed across five world religions-Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. We were particularly interested in the productive tension between kataphatic (positing) and apophatic (negating) modes of understanding the divine. For my own research, the quest after Bapophatic negation^pointed me to Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad's Bneti neti^declaration, its student-teacher questioning, to Nāsadīya Sūkta's dialetheism, and its ultimate unknowability. The Bneti neti^(na-iti naiti) ādeśa instructs the seeker of ultimate knowledge of brahman that no matter how one describes it, no matter which and how many predicates one uses, brahman is Bnot so, not so.^Occasionally in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, as in the dialogue between Yājñavalkya and Gārgī, it is said that the pursuit of brahman with incessant questioning will only cause one's Bhead^to Bshatter.^What Bneti neti^and such head shattering dialogues suggest is that any attempts to contain the infinity of brahman in the confines of rational thought or language will have to be negated, and in the act of negation itself that the infinity is projected. With Bneti neti^on one side, the other necessary brink of ineffability was the Nāsadīya Sūkta-the Hymn of Creation in the Ṛgveda. The hymn famously brings into play the twin of ineffability, namely, unknowability. It imaginatively and poetically posits the process of creation, yet plays constantly with various types of negation and contradiction, and most importantly, interrupts itself throughout the verse asking the question Bwho really knows?^. The question ultimately proves to be radically rhetorical: the hymn not only owns its own uncertainty, ignorance, and inability to know the nature of creation or the creator, but also doubts
This dissertation explores the theological, philosophical and historical connections between pseudo-Dionysius (6th century Christian Theologian under pseudonym), and Jacques Derrida (contemporary French Philosopher influenced by phenomenology, structuralism and heideggerianism). They have in common a critical dialogue with Theology itself: “Theo-logy”, the possibility or impossibility to understand God and talk about godhead, but also to talk to a theistic God as such. Therefore, I consider that prayers – with their affective and spiritual functions, their expected or unexpected forms, and their ritualized or shifting borders – represent a revealing crux for both projects. It constitutes a strategic entry into dionysian mysticism and derridean texts, useful to link and to distinguish their ideas. First of all, both Denys and Derrida have strong logical reasons to consider that the Absolute is beyond thought, infinitely elusive or other. Secondly, both Denys and Derrida have reasons to believe that language and meaning are relative or shifting. These claims are likely to challenge the theological basis of prayers (systematic, dogmatic or simply epistemic), that Denys and Derrida radicalize through precise movements of language that a vague “negative” label doesn't exhaust. In both contexts, combining the conceptual paradox of an ever-escaping object of meaning with particular linguistic operations bears profound consequences on the possibility and forms of embodied theology (prayers, in that case). Following the Dionysian operations of a “crossing of names” and the Derridean “gestures of deconstruction” yields new forms and functions for prayer, towards a dynamic and neverending prayer to nowhere, nobody, or beyond, balancing the risks of mystical reunion, pure hope and adoration with those of silence, perplexity and madness. Is this prayer eventually more destructive than generative, or does it contain unique intentional promises? What are the limits of prayer when its address and contents are destabilized by radical theological and philosophical treatments? What forms of devotion or ethical responsibility does this new notion of prayer lead to? Without confusing the two, there is a common "family resemblance" shared by practical apophatic theology (Denys) and ethical a-theology (Derrida), or between Christian mystical prayers and postmodern agnostic hospitality. A heuristic concept of 'intentionality' can help navigate their prayers, and mediate between beliefs and attitudes, meaning and longing, identity and difference, engagement and silence. Although such considerations on prayer may seem speculative for both entrenched atheists and believers, they may produce concrete effects on practices. As for now, the central questions of prayer will have to change from “what name should I use to call on 'God', and what are the rules to follow?” to “what would it mean to address a deity as such, and how to perform the impossible?”. [This Master's Thesis is dedicated to Dr Michael Purcell (1956-2013), UnEd Divinity School, for his practice of hospitality towards foreign students and kind mentoring advice.]
Divine and human agency in the poetry of George Herbert
Anglican Theological Review, 2023
In this article, I explore the technical poetic strategies by which George Herbert represents the relation between divine and human agency. In Herbert's poetry, God works upon the human will not by external influence but by indwelling human nature and enabling it from within. I show that Herbert follows the contours of an Augustinian theology according to which God is both immanent and transcendent, both "in and beyond" the human being. My reading of Herbert considers two groups of poems: first, poems of divine revelation that depict God and humanity engaged in a dialogue in which only one voice speaks ("JESU," "Heaven," and "Coloss. 3.3"), and second, poems about believers' growing awareness of the interpenetration of divine and human agency in their lives ("Aaron," "The Odour"). In both groups of poems, God's action is represented as both internal to and beyond the resources of human agency.
Jean-Luc Nancy on Prayer: The Poetic Invocation of God
Re-Treating Religion. Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy (Fordham University Press), 2012
'My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?' Demythologised Prayer, or the Poetic Invocation of God in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy A thesis only marginally stressed in Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, though revealing one of its essential structures, is that a deconstruction of Christianity should be understood as a form of demythologization. Or, as Nancy has it, Christianity ‘‘understands itself in a way that is less and less religious in the sense in which religion implies a mythology (a narrative, a representation of divine actions and persons)’’ (D 37/57). The seemingly strange statement that the Christian religion increasingly understands itself ‘‘in a way that is less and less religious,’’ is a reformulation of Nancy’s central thesis that Christianity is a religion retreating from religion.1 Insofar as religion is mythological in nature, Christianity distances itself not only from the religious but also from the mythological. I shall focus on a key moment in this selfdeconstructive movement of Christianity: that of prayer, or more generally, of addressing God. According to Nancy, prayer—as one of the central elements of the Christian religion—reveals how Christianity contains in its heart, or rather as its heart, the absence of its God in principle and therefore the germ of its own secularization. If Nancy is right, then the basic structure of Christian prayer is revealed in the exclamation ‘‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’’
This paper compares George Herbert’s imagery with the aesthetic of the early twentieth-century Imagists, whose tenets still dominate English-language poetry. Both the Metaphysicals and the Imagists constituted watershed moments in Anglophone poetry. But while Imagism, like much modernism, eschews rhetoric as didactic, Herbert is unashamedly pedagogical and catechistical, within a complex intellectual tradition of Reformed theology and medieval allegory. Herbertian images are symbolic and intended to startle the reader into recognition, where the modernist image is objectivist and aims to startle the reader into new perspective. Modernist Imagism is religious despite itself, inclining both to paganism and to the sensuous, and to a Romantic metaphysic, as seen in lyrics by poets ranging from H.D., Richard Aldington, and Ezra Pound to William Carlos Williams and Denise Levertov. Yet Herbert’s imagery has more claim to Pound’s definition of the image as an “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”
George Herbert, a perfiguration of the ideal Restoration clergyman, was supremely known as what Barnabas Oley (a Royalist divine) claimed, 'primitive holy and heavenly soul', had the power to manipulate and communicate the God to create a strong mythological impulse of the religious domain of the seventeenth century England (Poetry Foundation 2&3). Herbert's primary aim and concern was to relocate the soul to a new and higher place to attain his God, and to deliver His messages to his fellow people. The creative impulse of Herbert's poetry is so akin and deep as to interpret something like that of mythological stories. Herbert shared the basic theological concept of his age to vivify the inner recesses of his soul by making a mythological milieu with his devotional prayer. Herbert's The Temple is a plea of his dejected heart to God, is a record of his spiritual journey throughout his devout life all by alone, and likewise might be able to find out the rebirth of his soul at the cost of his enormous prayer-his painful sacrifice. Herbert's aim is to establish a sense of devotion in such a way as to make the soul proficient how, through prayer, to be perennial from its obsession and eternal damnation. This paper is exploring Herbert's deepest attempt of bridging a close connection with his God, and thereby exploring the different voices into an unified sense of devotion.
A God Nearby: Three Medieval Views of Immanence and Transcendence
American Journal of Biblical Theology Publications, 2021
This work explores the writings of three great medieval theologians, all doctors of the church, and all enormously influential not only within their time but for centuries to come. Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas Aquinas all held positions of significant sway within their monastic circles and their writings have continued to be points of reference, both for Catholic and Protestant theologians to this day. Simultaneously, a development of the twin themes of God’s attributes of transcendence and immanence is an appropriate starting point not just for theology proper but for theology in general, and these three writers each contributed to an orthodox position which keeps a balanced position of these attributes in mind.
Article Can Music “Mirror ” God? A Theological-Hermeneutical Exploration of Music in the Light
2014
A theological exploration of the potential of non-liturgical instrumental music for the transmission of religious Christian faith experience, based on a hermeneutical tool drawn from Jean-Jacques Nattiez as applied to Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel. The article explores musical composition, reception, as well as the piece of music in itself, to discover common traits and keys to understanding its "meaning", and relate it to current thought and development in theology; in particular to themes of creativity, theological aesthetics, the Ascension, the artistic vocation and meaning-making in contemporary culture, through music and films.