“ON THE FARM”: R.S.THOMAS -NATURE AND REDEMPTION.

           On the Farm

There was Dai Puw. He was no good.
They put him in the fields to dock swedes,
And took the knife from him, when he came home
At late evening with a grin
Like the slash of a knife on his face.

There was Llew Puw, and he was no good.
Every evening after ploughing
With the big tractor he would sit in  his chair,
And stare into the tangled fire garden,
Opening his slow lips like a snail

There was Huw Puw, too. What shall I say?
I have heard him whistling in the hedges
On and on, as though winter
Would never again leave these fields, 
And all the trees deformed.

And lastly there was the girl:
Beauty under some spell of beast.
Her pale face was the lantern
By which they read in life's dark book
The shrill sentence: God is love.

R.S. Thomas.

Early June with the sun shining, trees, blossoms , birds’ nest and song how easy it is to see Nature as genial and a blessing. “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here” went the Max Ehrmann poem ” Desiderata”. Popular in the sixties it sounded ever so romantic!

Wordsworth in a poem like “Tintern Abbey” treats Nature as a blessed power which when contemplated can have a redemptive effect on us. In his famous “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” he states his aim to “use language such as men do use” particularly those whose speech has been shaped in rural settings such as the Lake District. It would be simplistic to say that Wordsworth’s attitude to the rural enviromnent is idealistic. He shows the reality of rural poverty and suffering unforgettably in poems like The Ruined Cottage, Michael The Thorn and rural stoicism in a poem like “Resolution and Independence”; yet there is nothing in Wordworth I can think of that presents the rural character so bleakly as the poetry of the Welsh priest R.S. Thomas, featuring the lives of the Welsh peasantry and small farmers living in the Welsh uplands representative of the endurance and fortitude of people who have lived there for generations.

This is the stark environment in which Thomas worked as a priest, serving from 1936 to 1978 in six different Welsh parishes. What ever Thomas is as a poet he is not romantic.

“On the Farm” presents (we presume) three brothers and one sister. Two brothers are “no good” and the third worse even than that. There is nothing attractive about any of them or their lives. The poem exposes their blatant mental vacancy: two of them with little or no ability to do productive work, one debilitated by the work he does do so he is unfit for anything else.

In the final stanza we are made aware what Thomas is doing. The sister as “lantern” gives a light which rescues the brothers from darkness. In her they could read what otherwise they would be incapable of understanding. For “life’s dark book” is unreadable to them, only she can represent it in person:

And lastly there was the girl:
Beauty under some spell of the beast.
Her pale face was the lantern
By which they read in life's dark book
The shrill sentence "God is love".

What she represents is the meaning of the book otherwise “dark” to them: ” God is love”. The phrase is shrill because to make sense to them, to get through to them, her voice has no doubt become shrill to overcome thir obdurate emptiness but nevertheless she gives the love they need.

It reminds me- on a small scale- of Dickens’ great novel Little Dorrit -possibly the greatest novel in the language -in which Amy Dorrit alone brings to her father incarcerated in prison and her empty-headed brother and her vain sister, both with their “mind -forg’d manacles”- the love without which they would be as nothing.

Thomas is right: you cannot romanticise the peasant life he shows. Nature of itself cannot redeem the empty mind, the universe does not save them; what alone has the possibility to get through and give them lives to live is signified by a sister who shows them by action and “shrill voice”the love, which is the love of God.

” CAN SOCIALISTS BE HAPPY?”: WHY DOES UTOPIA NOT WORK?

I have just been reading Orwell’s essay entitled “Can Socialists Be Happy”?” it sounds a challenging title, particularly from a writer of the Left who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930’s. Interestingly Orwelll was encouraged to ask the question by comparing the writings of Charles Dickens with a number of more recent writers who had tried to make Utopia convincing. He discusses H.G. Wells who wrote among other things science fiction including Utopian novels (eg. A Modern Utopia, The Time-Machine, War of the Worlds, Men Like Gods).

Here you have a picture of the world as Wells would like to see it. It is a world whose keynotes are enlightened hedonism and scientific curiosity. All the evils and miseries that we now suffer from have vanished. Ignorance, war, poverty, dirt, disease, frustration, hunger, fear. overwork, superstition all vanished. So expressed, it is impossible to deny that it is the kind of world we all hope for. We all want to abolish the things that Wells wants to abolish. But is there anyone who wants to live in a Wellsian Utopia?

Well perhaps Wells is the wrong writer to read to make Utopia appealing. So Orwell looks wider. He tries the early Fabian Socialist William Morris. But Morris’ News from Nowhere is as unattracive as it sounds : “It is a sort of goody-goody version of a Wellsian Utopia. Everyone is kindly and reasonable, all the upholstery comes from Liberty’s, but the impression left behind is of a kind of watery melancholy.”

What about the further-back past? Orwell turns to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The early parts are ” “probably among the most devastating attack on human society that has ever been written”

claims Orwell- a judgement to ponder- but he goes on:

In the last part, in contrast with the disgusting Yahoos, we are shown the noble Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses who are free from human failings. Now these horses, for all their high character and unfailing common sense, are remarkably dreary creatures. Like the heroes of various other Utopias, they are chiefly concerned with avoiding fuss. They live uneventful, subdued, “reasonable ” lives, free not only from quarrels, disorder or insecurity of any kind, but also from “passion”, including physical love. They choose their mates on eugenic priciples, avoid excesses of affection, and appear somewhat glad to die when their time comes. In the early parts of the book Swift has shown where man’s folly and the scoundrelism lead him, and all you are left with, apparently, is a tepid sort of existence, hardly worth leading.

Against these Utopias Orwell points to Huxley’s Brave New World as actually reflecting the fear we might have of these organised Utopias: A book like Brave New World is an expression of the actual fear modern man feels of the rationalised hedonistic society which is within his power to create.

Huxley’s “rationalised hedonistic society” is a society in which sex is so readily available that it has become vacuous; in which promiscuous relationships have taken the place of marriage and the requirement of raising a family is state- provided. The living connections between what Burke pointed to as the unborn, the living and the dead have become severed. Meaningful living is unavailable to a generation uprooted from the past dwelling in such a society.

Readers can make up their minds how close we are to this whether we desire it and the kinds of alternative to it.

But to get back to the title. In showing imagined Utopias as undesirable Orwell. asks where in literature we find a living sense of happiness to pose against these failed Utopias. It is Dickens he points to: the Dickens of Pickwick and the concluding scenes of Christmas Carol where the Cratchit family are shown enjoying their Christmas dinner.

the Cratchit family do give the impression of enjoying themselves. They sound happy as, for instance,the citizens of William Morris’s News From Nowhere don’t sound happy. Moreover -and Dickens’ understanding of this is one of the secrets of his power- their happiness derives mainly from contrast. They are in high spirits because for once in a way they have enough to eat…. The steam of Christmas pudding drifts across a background of pawnshops and sweated labour…

Dickens is master of showing human enjoyment and happiness. This may surprise readers who also know his novels -the later ones- as dark. But as Orwell points out the two go together. He prizes the creative enjoyment and revelry of the poor because he knows how hard won it is.

So if Utopias are to be desired but yet fail where does this leave us?. It is worth reminding ourselves that the Judaeo- Christian narrative begins with a kind of perfect world- the Garden of Eden which cannot last. Ever since humankind has had to take account of sin and death and also the difficulties of earning bread (“In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread” Genesis 3:19).

The Bible suggests however the struggle is not mainly socio-economic (which does not stop the prophets speaking out about exploitation and justice to the poor is a preoccupation) but to do with our relationship with God; so to imagine a society- Socialist or whatever- in which our social problems are resolved is unrealistic. The struggle for meaning and meaningful living is central to our human search; and that search cannot be resolved by a Utopia- socialist or otherwise- that attempts to take the struggle away.

“COMPUTERS CAN WRITE POETRY”: “YES THEY CAN”; “NO THEY CAN’T”.

THis is how the powerful critic F.R. Leavis described the possibility back in 1970 in his essay ““Literarism” versus “scientism”“.

I was, I confess, a little amused when, sitting at a formal lunch next to the director of a City Art Gallery, I was told by him, in the tone of saying something very impressive: ” A computer can write a poem”. I replied, very naturally, that I couldn’t accept that, adding that it was one of the things I knew to be impossible. When he responded by being angry , fierce and authoritative, I reflected he was a German, if an emigre, and that in any case his business was Kunst and he hadn’t said a computer could paint a work of art. The other occasion on which I was confronted, point-blank, with the preposterous and ominous claim, which by then I had discovered to be pretty current, it made a profound impression on me. The testifier was a philosopher, a lady and cultivated; her place and conditions of residence gave her access to a friendly computer laboratory. She had taken advantage of the opportunity, I gathered, to develop an intense experimental interest: “It’s incredible” she said, ” what a computer can do; it’s awfully fascinating; you know a poem can write a poem.” I couldn’t let that pass; with the appropriate urbanity I said: ” Well, “poem” means different things” there was no Teutonic anger this time. There was a sudden descent, a heightened nuance of pink, a concessive philosophic laugh, and then “O well, yes; but it’s great fun”.

Leavis is a very fine writer. As criticism this works in a novelistic way. The two characters encountered are made vividly alive (we are perhaps less happy with asserting national cultural characteristics so boldly, as Leavis does with the art director, but in 1970 our kind of political correctness in these matters was less common ) and the types of contrasting ways of defending the idea are very effectively presented. On the one hand, there is what one might call dogmatic materialist fundamentalism that does not brook dissent; on the other, a kind of philosophical playfulness, subject to embarrassment when it senses opposition, while resting on a self- indulgent sense of fun. Both kinds of response , one might add, remain characteristic of our modern Britisn intelligentsia.

You might read the passage and say however, “Well this was fifty years ago, in a different world in which people had not adjusted to the new reality computers were to bring”. Leavis, however, goes on to ask the fundamental question and to demonstrate the danger of letting go the meanings of our most important words.

That any cultivated person should want to believe that a computer can write a poem!-the significance of the episode, it seemed to me, lay there. For the intention had been naive and unqualified. It could be that because of the confusion of different forces of the word “poem”. And yet the difference is an essential one; the computerial force of “poem” eliminates the essentially human- eliminates human creativity.

We can , of course, choose to “want” to believe a computer can write a poem. The technology is far advanced from its rudimentary 1970 stage and computer addicts can develop programmes in which an Emily Dickenson poem, say, is broken up into individual words which when fed into a programme can be so managed as to produce a combination of words and phrases put together in short lines which can give it the look of a quizzical Emily Dickenson style composition-until, that is, you begin to read it. Or you can organise rhythmic and rhyme pattern that present a ballad-form. You can even-for I have checked You Tube- organise events in which you get people to choose between two “poems”- one written by a human the other by a computer, and find the audiences, by immediate reaction with a show of hands can mistake one for the other. “Great fun!” as the philosopher in the story said.

Or is it? The value we put on the word ” poem” and the creativity it manifests is made a mockery of if it can also mean it is “created” by a computer programme being designed to follow the human brain’s linguistic patterning. Because poems are not cerebral constructs, they are not merely or mainly brain-work but creations of the whole person, body, mind and spirit working together.

To pretend a computer can write a poem is to reduce the significance of the word and the wondrous power of the creative imagination as it expresses itself in language.

But in an era, dazzled by technology, in which science and technology are made the central agents of progress it is vitally important to insist what it is science within its limitations can do and what it cannot and what computers can do and what they cannot.

So let us be grateful for well-designed and programmed computers; but for the sake of what is precious in our humanity don’t become over-impressed.

“APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH”: TWO POETS, TWO MEN, TWO AGES

April is the cruelest month, breeding 
Lilacs out of dead land, mixing 
Memory and desire, stirring 
Dull roots with spring rain, 
Winter kept us warm, covering 
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding 
A little life with dried tubers. 
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbargersee 
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, 
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. 
Bin garkeine Russin, stamm'aus Litauen, echt deutsch. 
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's, 
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, 
And I was frightened. He said, Marie, 
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. 
In the mountains, there you feel free. 
I read much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow 
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 
You cannot say or guess, for you know only 
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, 
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, 
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only 
There is shadow under this red rock, 
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock), 
And I will show you something different from either 
Your shadow at morning striding behind you 
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. 
              Frisch weht der Wind 
              Der heimat zu 
              Mein Irisch Kind, 
              Wo weilestdu? 
"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; 
"They called me the hyacinth girl"
- Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden, 
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not 
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither 
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, 
Looking into the heart of light, the silence 
Oed' und leer das Meer.
T.S.Eliot The Wasteland.

April: the month that heralds the season of spring; after long winter, the release towards renewal and regeneration; the time of year traditionally when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love. Also, usually, the month of Easter, of faith gathered round the ritual of death and resurrection.

Eliot’s “April is the cruelest month denies all this” negates, as it remembers, all this. His April sees no possible fruition. Hence the cruelty of memory mixed with desire; he lives in a place and time gone sterile: the desire for love, the desire for sex, the desire to celebrate faith in unity are all still remembered but no longer meaningful.

“The Wasteland” decisively confirms a new age of poetic expression in English. The Great War, the First World War, is over but the poetry has nothing to celebrate: there is, apparently, no hope of European renewal, only an awareness of lack of continuity of the desire for life, faith, renewing love. Hence, a poetry of changing voices, fragments, with no narrative progression.

Was this the problem of Eliot or the age?. Eliot’s wife suffered from a severe hormonal condition that eventually led to being a patient at a mental institution. Eliot wrote in a letter: “To her the marriage brought no happiness to me ot brought the state of mind that led to The Wasteland.” (Collected Letters of T.S. Eliot Vol 1).

Yet it also reflected powerfully an age, devastated by war, torn by fragmentation and a lack of cultural continuity and shared faith. Given the continuation of all these through the century the wasteland may be seen as not only personal but societal.

Compare this with the opening of The Prologue of Chaucer’s masterpiece “The Canterbury Tales” also featuring April.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote [sweet]
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote  
And bathed every veyne in swich licour [plant vein,liquid]
Of which vertu engendred is the flour; [potency]
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth [west wind,also]
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth  [woodland,heath] 
The tendre croppes and yonge sonne      [shoots]
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne, [Aries]
And smale foweles maken melodye         [birds]
That slepen al the nyght with open ye   [eye] 
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages); [incites, their, hearts]
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken stronge strondes [professional pilgrims]
To fernes halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; [far-off shrines, known]
And specially from every shires ende 
Of Engelonde to Caunterbury they wende,  [go] 
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,    [blessed,Thomas Becket]  
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.  [helped, sick]

In Chaucer there is a continuity, lacking in Eliot, from the Nature that pricketh in the hearts to the longing to go on pilgrimage. In Eliot the holiday , going to the Alps in winter is exclusively enjoyed by the well off, not by the variety of classes which “The Prologue” shall introduce us to . And though for many of Chaucer’s pilgrims the religious aspect is less holy day than holiday there is no need to inquire, using the Biblical prophets: “What are the roots that clutch out of this stony rubbish” ; there is a combination of faith and culture that holds it all together.

Eliot’s sterility is replaced by a perceived vital connection linking the life of Nature with the life of folk with shared faith.

As a man Chaucer is in mid-career, a successful diplomat and an experienced poet. He is a Londoner where Norman French is the common tongue of Court and upper society so he is helping to develop the possibilities of a new poetry in “southren” English in that great era of English poetry with Langland and the poet of Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight developing on the alliterative tradition of North WestEngland.

Chaucer is now recognised as one of the very greatest of poets in English. Eliot after “The Wasteland” journeyed towards a renewed Christian faith that found expression, specially, in “The Four Quartets”

For Chaucer the world was all before him, for Eliot, at this point, the world was collapsing around him.

“ALL OUR DOINGS WITHOUT CHARITY ARE NOTHING WORTH”

O Lord, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send thy Holy Ghost, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee: Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

“Charity” is in Latin “caritas”, in Greek “agape”, in modern English translations, simply, “love”. It is, for Christians, but not only for Christians, the essential virtue.

The prayer appears in Thomas Cranmer’s The Common Book of English Prayer 1549 rev.1552). It is a collect (a short prayer, in Cranmer of one sentence, read by the minister in the Anglican liturgy) used on the Sunday before the start of Lent, the period of forty days leading up to Easter in the Christian calendar.

I have many readers who are Christian but also readers of different religions and probably readers with no religion at all. To some the above prayer will (perhaps) be both beautiful and profoundly moving, to others perhaps interesting, but without stirring any form of commitment. Its theme, however, is universal.

In a recent post I named Cranmer (along with the King James Version of the Bible, the Authorised Version, and Shakespeare ) as a maker of the English language during its freshest, most potent and expressive phase, making possible an extrordinary flourishing of the language and representing a standard by which English today might be tested.

Cranmer’s prayer is simple, direct , powerful. Monosyllabic words predominate. We seem to be moving to a positive from “O Lord who hast taught us that all our doings” to anticipate a favourable effect, whereas what we get is the negative counterplay of the second half of the phrase “without charity are nothing worth” resulting in the surprising force of the conclusion of the phrase, empowered as it is by inversion. We, today, would tend to say “are worth nothing” which would flatten the rhythm (with a slack ending) ; “nothing worth” (with two beats on first syllable of “nothing” and “worth” makes both words powerful, giving climactic force to the declaration.

Notice again ” doings”. Again we would attenuate it “the things we do” or else we would make them “actions”: same meaning, but more abstract and distant than the physically active “doings”.

The words are given, where possible, physical force. Along with “doings” look at the verbs “taught, “Send” , “pour”. Where there is superlative “that most excellent gift” the gift is given further substance: “the very bond of peace and all virtues” – or what holds all the virtues together meaningfully.

Then another powerful and daring climax : “without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee”. After all those monosyllables a clutch of longer words marked by alliteration makes us pick out the words precisely before the shock force of the living being “counted dead”. How can the worldly great or the self-centred in general be so discounted? The daringness is to be given a God’s eye view presented as we know it through Christ’s teaching on the primacy of “Love”. If charity is a Heaven-sent gift, which gives us life then all that is contrary is counted dead. “Dead before thee” shows the damning force of God’s valuation contrasted to what the world values.

The prayer holds together a dramatic conjunction of two forces: one making for charity, one in negation of charity within the perspective of God, who in Love provides those with faith in His gift of charity the blessing of fuller life as opposed to those lacking the gift who are rendered as naught without it.

The prayer has, I suggest, still the power to shock. We may think ourselves the star turn- leading goalscorers, sexy singers, the richest businessman in town, a top academic-one whose actions leads to a sense of self- importance – but we are suddenly told, our “doings”, our achievements, our ambitions ” without charity” are “nothing worth”. Charity comes before everything else and has to contain our “doings”, not the other way about, as the “rich young ruler” also found out.

The power of the message of the poem cannot be distinguished from the power of the style of writing. It is true Cranmer and his associates are often translating traditional material from the Latin but Cranmer’s greatness is to create a distinctive English style that reads well in public for centuries.( I have heard reports it is regaining popularity in Anglican services). To do this he developed English speech rhythms where the beat would fall on the words that need it most “whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee”. (Probably the final two words read best as anapaestic, rather than equivalent beats, with a rise in emphasis on each syllable to the long e-sound of “thee” acting to perpetuate the eternal consequences of being before God as Judge. There is a strong emphasis on monosyllabic , physical sounding words of Anglo-Saxon origin, consolidating English as a language of muscular force rather than a more musical romance language, like Italian.

The critic Ian Robinson places Cranmer as the starting point of modern syntactic English prose:

“Cranmer developed an English prose syntax, the first time this had been done since King Alfred the Great insisted that translations from the Latin must be into genuine English”.(1)

Almost five centuries later we remain his beneficiaries.

NOTES

Robinson, Ian The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment Cambridge University Press 1998

God said “Let Newton be, then there was Light”

KEEPING FAITH IN THE CREATIVE SPIRIT.

Genesis begins ” In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the waters. And God said, Let there be light.

In that very confident age when the creation appeared to have been satisfactorily explained by Newtonian science Alexander Pope expressed it in an epigram:

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night
God said, " Let Newton be, then there was light".

The orderly , law-governed cosmos demonstrated by Newton’s science was seen as justifying natural religion. Newtonian science seemed successfully to marry science and religion: having demonstrated scientific laws mathematically, he concludes: “It is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions” (Bk2 Principia 1687 ) thus pointing to theism. (Blackburn Dictionary of Philosophy O.U.P. 1996.). Natural religion lessened dependence on revelation. God’s workings could be studied by the empirical methods , so well advanced by eminent philosophers, like John Locke (1632 -1704) who, as well as his great philosophical work Essay Concerning Understanding 1689 also wrote The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695).

All this prepared for a rational-minded belief in a God who set off creation, whose intentions, in what had been shown to be an ordered universe, were benevolent. But God did not necessarily intervene within human affairs and any claim of mystical understanding or of visionary revelation was regarded with suspicion, the cause of the troubles of the recent past, that had led to the Civil War, and the superstition of the Middle Ages. John Toland, a radical thinker, wrote a work entitled Christianity Not Mysterious 1696( Blackburn ibid. on Deism). God became distant, religion became formalised, ethical, common-sensical and well -regulated.

Deism expressed faith in God as a watchmaker or clock-maker who set the universe into operation and left it to follow the given laws. This attitude affected the eighteenth century church, where rational minded common sense, a spirit of moderation and good -will guided followers away from extremism but not, it might be said, from complacency.

During the pre-Romantic and Romantic periods, however, reaction developed against the limitations of the rule of reason; the kind of experience it tended to distrust and deny, including emphasis on salvation and the visionary became re-emphasised. In religion there was the Methodist revival started by the Wesley brothers. The poet and artist, William Blake exemplifies the reaction against conventional thinking and practice. Brought up within one of the many non-conformist sects in London, he despised the conformist religious establishment and he loathed empirical philosophy which was sceptical of the visionary and revelatory spiritual experience which he knew to be real. Similarly, Coleridge, although continuing Church of England, rejected empiricism for idealism. Idealism was a rejection of a materialist philosophy that treated the action of the spirit as a development from the material base , rather than the organising principle from the beginning.

Blake and Coleridge in their poetry were concerned, though in a very different way from Pope, with the meaning of “creation” and the ways in which poetic creation mirrored or exemplified the divine process. The word “create” ( along with its derivatives” creation” and ” Creative”) were vital to them and the imagination was seen to be the source of creativity. Coleridge sees the imagination of the artist as reflecting the divine process of creation: “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”. Here Coleridge is drawing on the answer given to Moses in his encounter with the divine presence in the Book of Exodus.(see Exodus 3:13-14)

How does this fit in with Christian theological conceptions of “Creation”? I looked this up by checking the New Lion Handbook of Christian Belief (ed. Alastair McGrath2006. Lion Hudson).

“But how are we to understand this idea of “creation”? What does it mean to speak of God “creating” the world? Three main ways of conceiving the creative action of God became widely established in the Christian church.

1.Emanation. This term was widely used by early Christian writers to clarify the relation between God and the world. The image that dominates this approach is that of light or heat radiating from the sun , or from a human source such as fire. This image of creation (hinted at in the Nicene Creed phrase “Light from Light”) suggests that the creation of the world can be regarded as an overflowing of the creative energy of God. Just as light derives from the sun and reflects its nature, so the created order derives from God and expresses the divine nature. There is, on the basis of this model, a natural or organic connection between God and the creation. (See Gospel of St. John 1.1,4, 8-9) “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…..In him [the Word of God] was life; and the life was the light of men” and “He[John the Baptist] was not that Light but sent to bear witness of the Light, that men through him might believe. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world”.)

2. Construction. Many Biblical passages portray God as a master builder, deliberately constructing the world according to a definite design The image expresses the ideas of purpose, planning and a deliberate intention to create. (See Psalm 8. 3 “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained” or Job38.4 “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”)

3. Artistic expression. Many Christian writers, from various periods of the history of the church speak of creation as the “handiwork of God”, comparing it to a work of art, which is both beautiful in itself as well as expressing the the personality of the creator. (see Psalm 19.1 “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork” or Psalm 104.2 “Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain”.)

Of these, it can be said that both Blake and Coleridge see in God the action of emanation in the “overflowing of His creative energy”(see above definition) making creation possible. They see God not primarily as architect or designer as in (2), nor as in (3) presenting a finished creation but as in (1) in emanation moving within, involved in, His creation. For Blake there is continuity from the energy of the creative God for whom “eternal energy is creative delight” (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”) to the energy of the creative artist. To Coleridge there is continuity between God the great I AM expressing His being continuously through His creation to the secondary, more limited but also greatly creative imagination of the great poet. As I understand the Coleridge quotation, I see him meaning, that God sustains creation through every moment as a continuous presence, permanently involved. In great poetry and great art, in general, this kind of imaginative involvement, is reflected in a more limited way, in the human world but in one that is inspirational pointing us to the greater creative action of God. To me this God, so variously pointed to in Blake and Coleridge, is more inspiring than the God of Newtonian science.

However, sadly, in the meantime, the marriage between religion and science has become a divorce; and the result has been the decidedly messy consciousness of our age.

But there is more to be said on that later.