106 - Towards a Christian Poetics

Towards a Christian Poetics
By Michael Edwards
Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1984. 246 pp. $13.95.

The chapters of this book are separate essays which deal with diverse and major topics: tragedy, comedy, story, writing, language, music, painting, and translating. Like beads on a string, they are held together

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by a single interest. The author threads through each topic what he calls "the Christian dialectic" concerning the human situation: the remnants of a glory which once was ours are now combined with the misery of our condition after the fall. Art responds to this situation by identifying fallenness, and by giving hints both of the former glory and of a transformation yet to come.

Although he includes essays on painting and music, the author is primarily interested in language and poetry. The human situation of grandeur and misère can be found in language most readily, since it is so co-extensive with the human condition. With the help of Jacques Derrida, he describes our fallen state in language as a loss of consonance between signified and signifier, language and presence, or name and nominated. Poetry grants enough wholeness to speak to our lack and to hint at both our Edenic integrity and the hoped for re-creation of our language.

The author, despite the weight of the topics and the inclusiveness of the themes, is not ponderous or insistent. He comments intelligently on a large body of texts, and, while drawing from them all a single point, he does so without being superficial or coercive. While also often original, his observations are always appropriate both to the topic discussed and to the unifying themes.

The style deserves further comment, however, because it is integral to the meaning of the book as a text in "Theology and Literature." Works such as this book have the effect of drawing attention not so much to theology or to literature as to the author as a certain kind of person or to the position the author holds as a special kind of place. As though from above, the author comments on an array of aesthetic topics and phenomena implying that only by standing back far enough can the critic recognize the terrain. The chief point is the height which must be achieved before the observations can be made. For what is theologically significant is not the "dialectic" that Edwards finds in various works of art and in language, but the universality which he attributes to it. And that point depends on position.

The title of the book, therefore, should read "From" rather than "Towards," for the work does not describe movement to that position, but assumes it from the outset. And there is no indication as to how the reader would follow him "towards" the goal of this height or bow the reader would know when it has been achieved. The ladder has been pulled up behind the author.

While a divine perspective is in itself theologically and aesthetically suggestive, it has some more immediate consequences. The first is the theological result of denominating as Christian, because of the universal dialectic, works which are Greek and in other ways not Christian. And if the Christian dialectic is found in all the arts and if it is fundamental to how they are and mean, then the distinctions between arts and genres are superficial indeed. In short, the height, while it grants scope, blurs

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distinctions which have been theologically and aesthetically important to maintain.

While, by being god-like, the implied author does not grant the reader hints of how to do what he himself has done, he does illuminate the field of theology and literature with an eschatological light. The reader can see more limited projects and problems afresh. Anyone interested in the religious importance of the arts, particularly literature, will benefit from the inclusive perspective Edwards provides.

Wesley A. Kort
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina