The exercise of spirit: phenomenology in response to poetry.

Hackett, Chris

IN his elusive and exquisite poem "Moonrise June 19 1876," Hopkins articulates the experience of the rising of the moon seen from his room in St Beuno s College, North Wales, as he looks over the gardens to the little hill, Moel Maenefa. The intense but innocent solitude of the visionary culminates in the childlike assertion of brute desire--not a desire for what is missing, desire which seeks to cross an impossible distance, but rather a desire that articulates itself in the experience of a simple joy. This is a desire that does not arise from within, ecstatically stretching beyond itself by the supernatural power of sheer religious eros (as in "Hurrahing in Harvest," written a year later), but rather is something that settles on the visionary, whose simple, edenic, or original self, awoken in its childlike innocence by the soft light of the moon, is uniquely available to nature's voice, as if his fallen and disenfranchised "adult" self remains in sleep:

   I awoke in the midsummer not-to-call night, I in the white and the
      walk of the morning:
   The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe i of a finger-nail
      held to the candle,
   Or paring of paradisaical fruit, i lovely in waning but lustreless,
   Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, I of dark
      Maenefa the mountain;
   A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, I entangled him,
      not quit utterly.
   This was the prized, the desirable sight, I unsought, presented so
      easily,
   Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, I eyelid and eyelid of
      slumber.
   (121)

Hopkins plays like a child with the night scene; he enters into the edenic world of pure fantasy. The playful images of the moon caught on the edge of the mountain as it rises; the analogy of the moon shining like a fingernail held before a candle, looking like the glowing fruit of paradise; these are the simple, unreflective wanderings of a child's imagination. Here, in the effortless, un-conscientious vision that sometimes comes on a sleepless night, the fruit of paradise is given to be tasted, and the prelapsarian innocence, for which the "leaf and leaf" are "parted" like his sleepless eyelids, are no longer needed to hide the shame of sinful nature. The eyelid scales that protect his vision from reality have been shed; Hopkins has awoken to see and to taste, in the timelessness of the night, the original desire of edenic innocence.

One way to read Hopkins's poetry is as a relentless attempt to phenomenalize sacral desire, to make manifest a perceived spiritual encounter. But this is an audacious task, first and primarily because the Holy Spirit's (the third Person of Hopkins's God) mode of manifestation (since the Spirit, according to Christian theology, is divine manifestation) is beyond categorization. Can the poet, through the articulation of that Sehnsucht, that spiritual longing, which tastes in its ecstasy, whether given or aroused (or both), the eschatological consummation in the poverty of the present, make the cumbrous opacity of human words transparent to the fleeting encounter with God? This is a perennial question, with a shared pertinence for theology as much as poetry. (1)

Let us reflect, taking perhaps an idiosyncratic route, not by way of exegesis or criticism of the poem itself, nor by a psychology of the poet, or any other reductive means, but rather by responding to the poem as a given thing, by seeking the logic of its world, that is, by phenomenological reflection on the structure that the quest of the poem gives to be thought. And let us, if we are able, set to the side protests about this route, until we reach its terminus.

Let us reflect then, systematically and speculatively--for this mode of reflection is what is required--on the phenomenality of the poetic articulation of this religious desire incarnate in words. Let us ask ourselves: what is the shape of reality, of the relations of God, human spirit, and world, in which we find our thoughts constrained by the claims of the phenomenology of the poet, whose speech burns to speak the unspeakable?

If poetry is a first phenomenology, an articulation of desire's experience, then a speculative reflection on the shape or structure of this original phenomenology, which we will attempt here, is a second phenomenology, a way of making intelligible not the experience itself--for this is poetry's own irreducible task--but rather making desire's own poetic articulation intelligible in a new way. What is the structure of Sehnsucht's intelligibility? We proceed at two steps removed from the phenomenon itself by our "stepping back" into speculative perception; but, we must remember, whatever it loses in terms of the quality of direct experience, it gains in terms of our ability to see in a new way. Second phenomenology, though neither absolute nor perhaps ultimately to be preferred for its own sake, nevertheless grants a novel and auxiliary vantage for our vision.

We respond to the poet's response in order to share in that response of desire's vision in a new way. Is this literature or theology? We begin by bracketing the question. That is to say, we begin, like Hopkins, from the act, specifically the act of seeing, and not merely in its "possibility."

We are therefore trying to understand the poet on his own terms, taking his world as a given, and reflecting on its phenomenal structure by way of speculative exploration. The experiment requires of us a literary conversion: we must let the poet give us his world; we must bracket even critique. We set ourselves to this task and therefore attempt to appropriate for ourselves the hope, the desire, after Hopkins, of catching a glimpse of the Breath of God, breathed, if only for a moment, on the clear pane of our existence.

Let me propose to you, at the beginning if I may, a summary of the trajectory and scope of this meditation as second phenomenology:

Exploring the enigma of the phenomenality of the world, we trace a path: Reductio, Contingence, Conversion, Convergence. First we learn the rhythm of phenomenality, with which phenomenological reductio strives to become complicit: (1) One looks, then learns reception, which is dilated into givenness, and which finally flowers into the double implication of immanence (self) and alterity (world) that establishes the coveted "objectivity" of the "look" upon which poetry is founded. (2) Contingence, then, unfolds from within experience (Erfahrung), as its very shape, between the double-horizon of an abyssal transcendence within and beyond. Contingence is a de-centered opening, a passing-through, a site for the everpresent possibility of transcendence within which poetry springs to life. (3) From within contingence, then, the capacity for conversion, conversion of spirit toward the Spirit. This is the direction which poetry travels. (4) In the phenomenality of Spirit, we finally find poetry's terminus: creative freedom strives after the striving of Spirit, all the way from reductio to convergence--aspirating reciprocity which, with the eclipse, by an Opening, of the aporetic convergence between the mutual conditioning of possibility and impossibility, is refigured from within as kenosis ("self-emptying") and perichoresis ("the exchange of mutual indwelling").

It has been some time now since the question of the conditions of the possibility of some phenomenon, event, or notion, what we may call the logic of its manifestation, has, for the discourses of philosophy and theology, more or less replaced the question of causality (which has been reduced to efficiency). (2) That is, today we move from what is, as it happens, to the question of how it manifests--description--and then, if we are brave, to the theoretic reflection on the description, viz., how this is the case; or better, what it may mean. Both of these moments of our inquiry are completely intertwined, and, in tact, mutually condition one another. These are strictly sine qua non, distinguished here only to unite more fully. Thus, we ask after the intelligibility of the phenomenon, which we take as given. Its meaning-full-ness is taken for granted--as that which happens--but we seek to follow its movement, to learn the rhythm of its conditional structure, the reason of the happening, access to which is in the happening itself. Possibility, then, is primary: What happens just happens, "the rose blooms without a why" (Silesius 54); (3) the task of the philosopher (as much as the poet) is always to break the circumscription of possibility, to reduce oneself to the widest possible transparency to what happens. But his task is also, just as much, to attend to the logos of the happening, not only to probe it but to allow himself to be probed and illumined; and then to follow the purview of the opening to its end. (4) This phenomenal transparency of condition I take to be the central element of the Kantian legacy that is alive today, for theology primarily, but also for philosophy (insofar as philosophy is already theological, at least by anticipation). With this in view, one could rightly venture to say that the enduring validity of the discourse of phenomenology rests on its unmoving and thorough fidelity to this change of circumstances and orientation. Thus, phenomenology's mode of thinking is shaped by a commitment to this principle of possibility. Even so, it is crucial to remember that the distinction between the how of the happening and the how of its intelligibility cannot be simply collapsed, since to do so would be a priori to deny the full possibility of intelligibility to the phenomenon itself, as well as, indeed, its particular intelligibility over any number of regional ontologies. The actuality of possibility is transcending; intelligibility transcends the rationality of the happening.

In order to elucidate this further one might ask: How does this change of orientation exemplified by phenomenology shape the way we may approach the central questions of philosophy itself, questions with pertinence for theology and poetry as well? For example, a basic question from Aristotle to Hegel to Derrida: How do we think the relation between particularity and universality? How do we think these adequately at the same time? How, that is, can we do justice to the integrity of the given in our acts of knowledge? Put another way: How do we think about the intelligibility of what happens? The phenomenologist, at least, by already making a prior reductio--a fundamental letting be, without judgment--refuses to make the natural reduction of a particular either/or: privileging either universality or particularity; either the integrity and priority of the categories (Aristotle or Kant, it doesn't matter) over against the demand for irreducibility made by the individual thing's distinctiveness and incommunicability--or vice versa. This would be to settle with an original option either for realism or nominalism: but this is no longer possible. We are nevertheless seeking after the possibility of a "new naivete," an edenic vision without compromise. Hence phenomenology attempts to suspend this question for a time in order to let experience speak, to let appearing appear. Now the essential question, whether the speaking of things is wholly or primarily external to the mind of the perceiver, or whether the mind in some way fundamentally participates in the speaking of things themselves, need not be immediately answered by phenomenology, but it must eventually begin to be investigated. We presume very well when we perceive that the answer is likely not located in one side of the binary. Could one disagree with Paul Claudel when he says that the poet "speaks for the things of the world," through deep fidelity to the giving of the world? Nevertheless, all this is to say that in this essay, I will refuse to answer this question, but I will in no way refuse the question itself. We are forbidden to do so by the principle of reductio itself. Phenomenology and its reduction find themselves most fully alive fight here, hovering "in the between," in the question itself, for it is the question that is the whole of phenomenology. Phenomenology, then, is an enigmatic inquiry, it raises itself to the uttermost limits of its own investigation; its answers can only become even greater aporiae. It is pure restlessness, seeking to pass beyond itself; its end, so to speak, is beyond its own capacities and work.

WHAT we have said so far is this: the reductio of phenomenology, in which one vigilantly refuses all facile-ity, all reductions of the other to the same (Hegel), or, just as crucially, the same to the other (Levinas), is ever self-transcending, self-opening, even self-abandoning--the step back is already a step forward, into the inexhaustible depths of the question. (5) The reductio, as it is ascetically deepened and purified and continued, anticipates and unfolds into a letting be, Gelassenheit, a religious posture of radical opening to alterity, an alterity that is simultaneously interior depths and exterior heights, en-static just as much as ek-static--there is a movement that is double-transcending, and seemingly abyssal in both directions. We are, by the power of the word, a passing through--"all doors and windows" to be sure--but as such we are always a movement, in movement, a rhythm of the givenness of ecstatic desire. (6) Strangely-wonderfully--only here one begins to sense the meaning or essence of all phenomena, or enigmata. For things do not go away; they only continue to speak, and here with greater and greater simplicity and texture. One finds oneself there in their happening, even if the final question of the plenitude or vacuity of the abysses is not answered, but only intensified.

Here we are forced to say: we must refuse to make another fundamental distinction concomitant with the first, which we have been exploring, i.e. between philosophical and theological discourses. This distinction, though, according to Christian theology no doubt real and therefore essential, is, at least, for our task here, unhelpful for the main reason that, phenomenologically speaking, the distinction between religious and banal, sacred and mundane experience is not at all immediately apparent. So fidelity to the "things themselves" demands the bracketing of the very question, at least here at the beginning. But like the former question, the bracketing does not erase the question; rather, it lets the question be truly asked. This we take to be essential for a properly phenomenological exploration of the phenomenality of poetry as a mode of seeing revelation. So, to this vantage we step back (reductio). The proper answer to this question is only found in positive revelation, and is therefore dormant at this point, though indeed arcanely latent in all that we will do.

Now we may say more: the mystery of what is (being?) is manifestation, a manifestation that comes from beyond what happens, but not without it. Yes. And the essence of manifestation? Well, the ordo phenomenalis is this: A look (Schau) or reductio, which is an opening to the enigmata of things--their speaking, their silence, their depths and heights. One finds oneself opening, seeking to receive more purely the enigmata. One longs to be faithful to the giving. Reception is the proper mode of the perceiver. Here one finds the seeming inexhaustibility of the givenness: things are there so fully! Their there is therefore here, given to me with such finality and bearing such immensity. I step back from the banality of vorhandenheit; things leap into my field of experience with all the more sharpness, intelligibility, and determination to be given. The remoteness and emptiness of things is stripped away. Thus the enigmata press into my awareness with such freedom; the fullness of their happening is both gripping and enlivening. Enigmata come with such haste, like messengers speaking with urgency and swiftness--even if they have been waiting at the door for unknown amounts of time. Even their absence is present, ever-seeking to catch up with what pours itself into my reception. But as the absence arrives, so does it recede; their hiddenness and transcendence have a certain mode of appearing too. The givenness is seemingly ceaseless and total. Here we learn this lesson: "Experience means the way or mode in which something is given to us" (Steinbock 2). Now one finds here that one is implicated in the arriving. At the very least one must look; one must open the door to the clamorous knocking. When one does, the implication is double: the givenness is a deepening of the receptive mode; one's desire, once broken open by the arrival of the given, itself seemingly corresponds to the inexhaustibility of what is given. Here desire sets itself to work; one's receptive posture continues to carve itself room within; the dilation of the self does not stop until one arrives with this realization: the world of enigmata and now the self are given. The self receives itself; it discovers its own enigmatic quality that pervades it as it epektastically abandons itself into the double-abyss. (7) Look-reception-givenness-implication: the happening of the movement is incomplete until it self-surpasses and translates itself into the letting be. Here one finds oneself implicated by the dizzying movement of things; one must speak, and in so doing, one is discovered by oneself in the speaking of things, as if for the first time. "I am a stranger to myself" (Augustine, Confessions X.vi.9). The contingency and sheer gratuity of the world permeates one's own movements; one falls into the rhythms of the world's happening. One finds that one's opening is concomitant with one's awareness, that the given of enigmata arrives and communicates the communicating self. Thus, intentionality is alive and a free happening. The movement to implication is therefore one of giving oneself up, of sacrifice: the look is first understood as a self-authored movement--this is not abandoned but only re-doubled as it unfolds into the complication of the reception: one can only receive the giving--though, to be sure, one learns the rhythms of the happening and thereby experiences a particular freedom in the world of enigmata--but only through a fidelity to their irreducible transcendence and intelligibility. The world of the happening of depths and heights is strangely home. The world is thus in deep continuity with one's awareness; it is, in this sense, itself one's spiritual realm. Spirit pervades all that is, since it is an act of self-transcending opening. This freedom is definitive of spirit: spirit is the phenomenality of what is, in the sense that spirit is free to manifest itself. Its free happening opens up what is. In this sense spirit is already outside of self; the world is inexperience-able without the manifestation of its own spiritual depths. Here the alterity of enigmata is not reduced, since the spiritual act of reduction is continually purified in the happening that is one's own opening. As the reductio continues, one finds oneself implicated in the phenomenality of phenomena; then one discovers one's own implicatedness by implication. One is implicated, not merely by the reductio, nor even by the act of letting be; one's essential implication is that one is oneself implicated in some mysterious way: the appearing of things brings me into appearance. The poet sees himself in peering through the veil of the world's appearing. One is oneself first let be; my very letting be is given.

So contingency, opening up between what is (the question) and what is happening (the asking of the question), or, one might otherwise say, between essence and existence, is total. Experience of enigmata is the pedagogy of contingency. Contingency, then, is the horizon of what it means to be here: One doesn't have to be; and there are no necessary beings enclosed within the great category of what happens. The essence of manifestation is free, it is donational, it is expression, self-expression. Voluntary. self-disclosure is the meaning of being enigmata.

THUS in terms of our experience of enigmata, there is a double surplus corresponding to the double-transcendence of interiority and exteriority. First, in the experience of a thing, there is a surplus of thought over the manifestation. There is a certain freedom thought possesses vis-a-vis the appearance, e.g. a capacity to manipulate the appearing, to inform it with personal content, etc. Second, there is also a surplus of the appearing over thought: one's capacity for experience is surfeit by the phenomenal appearing. The play between these excesses is poetry's own. The appearing transcends the grasp of the mind, though, in essence, it is potentially knowable, even if infinitely so. Intentionality, then, is the unity of thought with experience that emerges from within this double-transcendence in the phenomenal event. Interestingly, experience is always possible--because of the double-surfeit there is a seeming inexhaustibility to any experience; it is possibly infinite, not only because of the limitation of thought vis-avis a thing (or vice versa) but also and especially because of the intelligibility that pervades the surfeit itself in both directions. Meaning is fuller than what is comprehended. Specifically, the purpose of enigmata is enigmatic, as also for the specific enigmata of thought.

Yet appearing involves the not-appearing of what appears; a certain invisibility undergirds the manifestation of a phenomenon. Here we see a "major law" for the logic of experience, for it "deals simultaneously with the phenomenal and non-phenomenal" (Lacoste, "Perception" 4). This invisibility appears as such. What appears, appears fully, always, but as voluntary disclosure, as self-giving to spirit, what appears requires giving as transcendence. There is an inexhaustibility to what appears, an even-more that always lies beyond the appearing. The possibility of more to give means transcendence. (8) The visible and invisible always come together. We may add to this: there is a strange reciprocity between visibility and invisibility. First, "the visible lets the invisible appear" (Lacoste, "Perception 5). Appearing is an opening beyond its happening. Thus the unitariness of the phenomenon, its intelligibility, depends upon the appearing of the invisible, which, together, is the totality of the appearing thing. What is, is always more than what happens, though what is, is always fully present in what happens. This leads to our second point: the invisible is the condition for appearing of the visible. There is a transcendence, perceived as such, at the heart of manifestation. Without the appearance of the invisible, as such, the appearing cannot appear. The appearance is both irreducible to its appearing, and irreducible to its alterity. It really appears. And without pointing beyond itself to its own "depths," the appearing cannot appear, for the appearing is the appearing of transcendence. This pointing beyond itself, what we could call symbolic appearing, is the nature of appearance. Every phenomenon is a poetic phenomenon; the poet simply reaches this poetic quality and draws it out. Immanence is the manifestation of alterity; alterity unfolds from immanence. The exploration of this dynamic reciprocity is at the center of the discipline of phenomenology. It is crucial to note here that in this way phenomenology naturally leads us to a reversal of criticism: "Everything is critical of my perception of it" (Lacoste, "Perception 7). The interrogation begins, has already begun, before one's awareness begins. Reductio is only a return to this pre-natural attitude. One is, as spirit, as interrogated. Thus the transcendence in reductio that pervades experience demands recognition. Phenomenality, as we have already seen, but now with more vigor, is conditioning as much as it is conditioned. This is only a fuller expression of contingence.

The phenomenal event is always a moment of transcendence and, as such, is the event of the overcoming of distance--and therefore the refiguring of a relation, and finally, then, a new figuration of the perceiver. Thus there is a distinction that pervades between one's own reality and one's self-awareness. Between the reality of one's existence and one's own awareness of self is a non-collapsible distinction. One transcends oneself. One, on the one hand, is the mysterious depth of one's own reality. From this vantage one experiences oneself as inwardly transcendent; one's own reality extends beyond one's self-awareness, yet consciousness is well aware that it is from these depths that one's vitality flows forth. One's inwardly transcendent reality is, for consciousness, potentiality and vitality. On the other hand, there is one's own self-awareness, which exhibits an "over-against-ness" within oneself. This alterity within emerges in the form of freedom for oneself. This freedom is always and wholly dependent upon its "source," its own transcendent depths. Between naturans (the depths of one's reality) and naturata (self-consciousness) is the unity of a life, or "spirit." "The living I has its own life ... The personal spirit thus has in itself its own nature, in which it lives, ceaselessly realizing itself for itself through its nature, defining itself and revealing itself to itself" (Bulgakov 89). In this way experience teaches me that I am not the other, though I am not without the other, even in myself. Further, then, the en-static transcendence that occurs between one's depths and one's self-awareness corresponds to an ek-static transcendence as the trajectory of life emerges and projects one's awareness out away from itself into the "world." The world, then, strangely includes one's mysterious inner depths, along with the body and the entire world of experience. In this way, phenomenally, the whole world, in psycho-corporeal unity, is the spirit's "body." The poet is at home in experience. (9) Thus the vast reaches and diversity of experience are all "spiritual" of "hominized." Thus genuine alterity--that which is by nature not-spirit--finds its home in the immanence of spirit. (10)

The personal spirit is not enclosed in itself ... but open for the world; and the world becomes the precondition for the personal spirit as living personality, for the spirit lives not by its "I-ness" but by the nature [i.e. its en-static transcendent depths] inherent to it. This nature must be understood here in the broadest sense as a not-I that enters into I and lives in it ... the life of the spirit is an active penetration into the world as one's own nature. (Bulgakov 91)

In this way the spirit is "conditioned" by the world, even as it conditions the world in its freedom. Now spirit's "proper nature is not exhausted by its proper spiritual world but potentially includes the entire created world, into which all the windows and doors are open for the spirit" (93). Thus human spirit, because of the convergence of its unique transcendence visa-vis the world as well as the irreducible alterity of the world and the alterity of its very own depths (the complexity of this triple nexus is its proper mode of freedom), the spirit can dissolve itself by failing to realize itself as both "gift and task" (96). This drama of double en-static/ek-static transcendence is the form of one's self-identifiable conditionality. One is given to oneself in order to arrive beyond oneself. Thus, in light of this, the phenomenality of "the self" in its own dramatic self-conditioning, i.e. the experience of one's own phenomenality as spirit, is ultimately shaped by a pervading "porosity," an openness that charges one with a positive sense of alterity that shakes one to the very depths:

[T]he finite spirit experiences itself as encompassed by and destined for another; it experiences "absolute dependency" (in Augustine and Schleiermacher's sense) without being able to grasp what it is that it depends on; it experiences that all its petty thought is the content of an infinite thought which towers over it just as infinitely (cogitor ergo sum: "I am thought therefore I am"); it experiences, finally, that its entire personality cannot take one step into freedom of slavery without being an image of a free archetype which cannot be grasped because it is absolute and infinite. (Balthasar, Glory 450-451) (11)

The root of the awareness of self then is a horizon that unfolds into inexhaustible depth. Amor pondus. My weight is my love (Augustine, Confessions 13, 9, 10). (12) The self is a measure within a Measure, a Measure that is without measure. The infinite alterity is at the root of every thought and action; at the bottom of every desire for another thing is transcendental desire for the Absolute Measure who is non-aliud. (13) At times one may become strangely aware of this: "in him we live, move and have our being" (Ac. 2:17). One experiences a non-experience. (14) Possibility of convergence is created in this moment: A possibility that knows no limit, only an end (in the convergence of the impossible, see below). One's subjective opening becomes objectively possible, capax Dei (Augustine, De Trinitate XIV.II). (15) The word of the poet, an exercise of spirit, calls, as it were, from "deep to deep," letting appear on the surface of language the spiritual depths which it signifies.

"For the Spirit of God and the spirit of man differ by nature, and yet one spirit is made out of two different ones by cleaving, in the sense that the Spirit of God is indeed blessed and perfect without man's spirit, but the spirit of man is only blessed by being with God" (VI, 4). (16) Where is Spirit, the Spirit whose creative breath breathes in the world and in the life of the poet's soul? It has not appeared, though we sought to make possible its arriving at every opportunity. The best we could say is that what is given bears an inexhaustibility behind its very own transcendence, that the self-surpassing quality of things does not test until it rests in God. Poetry, from this vantage, only gives a humble anticipation, a sort of luminous negative theology, as it were. Then, phenomenality would be only possible by the mediation of enigmata. A hermeneutics of Spirit is called for. (This has already, for the poet, first been given by the Church, of which the Sacraments are the first events, but these also serve as a guide to a hermeneutics of Spirit in the world: poetry is "sacramental.") This we must say is one dimension of Spirit's phenomenality. Enigmata are themselves saturated by the Enigmata of enigmata; spirit is life by a participation in Life; its origin, its end, its meaning and identity is found beyond it, in the double-direction of the Infinite Spirit. Put another way, as spirit to matter, so Spirit to spirit. But what is the content of this "so"? We must say, in order to articulate rightly the ordo phenomenalis Spiritus, that the Spirit knows no limits to its phenomenality, that it is always opening beyond its own self-appearing, that the Spirit "blows where it pleaseth" (Jn. 3:8). Surely the creativity of poetry, if real, rests finally on this foundation. Yet what does this mean? Is the Spirit truly given? Or do we only have the Spirit "hermeneutically"? Does the Father give good gifts to his children of an illusion instead (Lk. 11:13)? The Spirit is the "deposit" of our eternal inheritance (2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5). God gives the best gifts first, as the miracle of the wine also demonstrates (Jn. 2). God "gives the Spirit without measure" (Jn. 3:34). So I repeat: What does this mean for us? After we remind ourselves that God can appear because God is God, we must also say that God must appear as God, and therefore as infinitely transcendent and hidden, as the Enigmata par excellence. Our question is how God appears. God appears, but we do not see him. In the Gospel we see a Body, we hear the enigmatic sayings, we see the deeds, but we do not see God in himself, only his humanity, through which we may see God in the eternal Kingdom. Now we only see his self-hermeneutics in Christ. So Christ is the hermeneutics of Spirit. But this is not our "object." Our object is no object, but Spirit. Our inquiry, as a speculative phenomenology on poetic creativity, concerns primarily the third Person, not the second. Though indivisible from Christ, Spirit is not Christ. Rather, Spirit is Gift, the Vitality shared between Father and Son. Spirit is also uniquely God's nature (Jn. 4:14), which is why Spirit completes the eternal perichoresis: "The Holy Spirit is a kind of inexpressible communion of fellowship of Father and Son, and perhaps he is given this name just because the same name can be applied to the Father and the Son" (Augustine, De Trinitate V, 12). (17)

So the Spirit bears no Face of its own. (18) The Spirit is thus pure phenomenality, Offenbarkeit. (19) To know God is to know God in his self-knowledge, that is, only through the activity of Spirit. So what we have seen above about the nature of phenomenality has some correspondence to divine phenomenality. Spirit is the givenness of God. As donum, Spirit is the divine "communicability" itself. "He is the gift in whom all gifts are given" (est donum in quo omnia dona donantur). (20) Spirit is wholly gratuitousness and therefore absolutely creative: liberalitas. Spirit is thusly the convergence of freedom and necessity, in God and for creation: God is absolute love. He creates solely for the sake of his own goodness. Spirit is both the creative "ground" of God himself and the creative "ground" of the creation. As such, Spirit is the absolute creative freedom of God, Spiritus creator:

If within God's identity there is an Other, who at the same time is the image of the Father and thus the archetype of all that can be created; if, within this identity, there is a Spirit, who is the free, superabundant love of the "One" and the "Other," then both the otherness of creation, which is modeled on the archetypal otherness within God, and its sheer existence, which it owes to the intradivine liberality, are brought into positive relationship with God. (Balthasar, Theo-Logic III 180-181)

Spirit is the Love that is comprehensive of God. As liberalitas, this Love is absolutely without ground, beyond being. And thus, to know God is to love him and vice versa. (21)

From this vantage we can repeat with more clarity that the "opening" (in the Heideggerian sense) that is the phenomenality of spirit takes an analogical shape in Spirit; it remains even as it is engulfed in the Opening of an ever-greater Life, i.e. a Life ever-greater than the relation between the infinite and finite, as in Hegel. This Life is infinite self-subsisting self-relation, beyond the difference between distance and proximity. Its appearing is at one with its disappearing--always transcending its own phenomenality (Lacoste).

The human spirit is to the world like Spirit is to creature, and is such in this way: The possibility of experience is inexhaustible; there is a pure possibility of limitless opening, of communicability: The theologian says "the soul is, in a sense, all things." (22) Just so does the Spirit dwell within the world, driving it forward, raising it to the "fullness of Christ" (Eph. 4:13) unifying its shattered unity with a unity beyond the world's own order of unity and difference. (23) Thus it can be said, with all analogical caveats (any likeness is always posited "within an ever-greater unlikeness") that as the spirit of a human person is to its own nature (both its interior depths and external heights: body, world, etc.), so also is the Spirit of God to himself: "for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God" (1 Cor. 2:10-11). The faceless Spirit unifies the difference (between Father and Son) and distinguishes the unity (that is Father and Son). The Spirit "orders" God--if we may dare use the expression--as the spirit, or life, within a human being "orders" the immaterial and material elements that compose it, making it a total form or complete unity. Spirit is not a phenomenon, but is rather the phenomenality of the phenomenality of all phenomena, the condition of possibility of any transcendental condition as such. This provides a freedom for poetry that rests on what is first a radical chastisement of language. Since there is, in the Spirit, a Word that infinitely transcends human speech, poetry, when it falls over to this Word, in the Spirit, becomes "charged" with new life. Our poet is enthused (en-theos-ed).

For the phenomenality of the Spirit who is phenomenality as such, what can we now say? As we have already seen above, so also here: the non-collapsible difference between what is (essence), and what happens (existence), guarantees, in a peculiar way, the limitlessness of the quest. Immanently, in God (for whom the distinction between essence and existence does not obtain), this difference is expressed in the relations among the persons vis-a-vis the divine ousia. Economically, i.e. in relation to the creation, this unity and difference beyond oneness and multiplicity, fullness beyond stasis and ecstatic bliss beyond kinosis, is comprehended in a limited way, according to the dialectical movements of the perceiving spirit. In the world this is how we see. The contingency expressed here is reciprocal: what is depends on its happening to be what it is--and to become such--just as what happens depends on what is, the inexhaustible transcendence of such, in order to begin to occur. One cannot rest but must rather continue to follow this rhythm which defines oneself and open up from within this contingent indecision to greater and greater alterity (Again: the reductio trains one for religious decision.). (24) One also has the privilege of performing this act for the world of enigmata. Divine Spirit, Enigmata, is without impediment and without inhibition in the world: the world is capable of becoming at any time the Spirit's site of manifestation. And it is true to say that the world always is such.

FINALLY, let us return to our poet, and begin where he ends the poem, which was the experience that served as the point of the beginning of his poetic articulation, the vision that gives the poem. The reductio of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

   This was the prized, the desirable sight, I unsought, presented so
   easily,
   Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, I eyelid and eyelid of
   slumber.
   (121)

Yet let us be warned, as Hopkins seeks to tell us: there is no capturing God in experience and so certainly not through something so paltry as the analysis of experience. We cannot make God appear any more than we have chosen, on our own accord, to be in existence. (25) The vision is always something received, never generated out of oneself. But we can say this much: for the poet, God is manifest through the world as the world is manifest through God. (26) And when we "see" the invisible Spirit--the invisable Spirit--we see the absolute simplicity of God; we constantly see the always "greater dissimilarity" that pervades between God and creation. (27) The poem fades from the mind even as it remains, dormant on the page. As Spirit draws near, the world opens up from within and is transformed; Spirit recedes in its drawing near, yet gives a "token" of its hidden presence in the poetic phenomenon, for which the law is reductio in mysterium.

Das Ganze im Fragment. The irreducible whole appears in the manifestation as an invisible vanishing point. The fragment that appears thus points beyond itself to a hidden totality; the manifestation is the beckoning of the whole, an invitation. So also for the relations of the manifestation by which we learn to call it "thing": the relations are disclosed and fade off into the horizon of the eventness of the phenomenon. It comes and goes from somewhere, always giving more; there is always more to give. Every thing signifies everything else, but there is more. The appearing is a play of alterity and encounter, a brush with transcendence and the disclosure of hiddenness. These two elements, the opening and withdrawal, the call and response, are one in the trace, the moment of rapturous difference (if we may conscript a concept). What holds this together? Only love--for love alone both creates unity and preserves difference. And thus love alone inhabits the maxim: si comprehendis non est Deus. (28) So the contingency of phenomenality--its most essential attribute--points beyond itself to an ever-greater alterity, of which faith is, and can only be, the proper mode of perception, toward convergence, in a faith that is filled with love. Thus is the divine Breath mutually shared between the Original Source and the First Eternal Other, the completion of their unity and the fruitful expression of their difference; the convergence of absolute freedom and absolute necessity is only absolute. One awakens here after the long night of purgative reductio; this is the greatest possibility beyond the impossible. From Hopkins to St. John of the Cross:

   How gently and lovingly
   you wake in my heart,
   where in secret you dwell alone;
   and in your sweet breathing,
   filled with good and glory,
   how tenderly you swell my heart with love. (640) (29)

Only here the convergence between possibility and impossibility, the essence of conditionality, is transcended: for this convergence is never closed--this is its very meaning--but always opening to the ever-greater difference which always already pervades it, making it what it is and calling it to its ever-greater destiny. The path from reductio to convergence is redoubled and immersed in a greater path: the eternal path from kenosis to perichoresis that is, as theology tells us, the Life of the eternal Trinity. Reductio becomes self-abandonment into the ever-greater Life; convergence becomes perichoresis, the mutual indwelling of absolute givenness. Through eternal conversion one awakes into the phenomenality of phenomenality. Videntem videre. To see God is to be seen by him. So here, within the phenomenality of Spirit, we may yet pass from possibility to faith and from faith to vision. We may see the world from within the great poetry that gives it to us. What we ultimately find is that such a possibility is already vision, but, even so, only "through a glass, darkly." Yes:

   A breath that fades
   from the pane,
   but a mouth that speaks!

The speculative structure of this poetic realism, with its movement from reductio to convergence inlaid within what it finds itself believing is a much broader and deeper movement within which it vaguely participates, leaves us perplexed. On the one hand, this participatory in-laying is the whole depth of the poet's own work--the meaningfulness and whole significance of the poem resides in the hope that the world he seeks is indeed glimpsed in a passing way, and that his constructive description of this event of disclosure is by virtue of the life within language itself, capable of being passed on to the reader who receives it. In this brief meditation, we have received Hopkins's work in a rather strange way, seeking to rigorously explore the structures it gives to be thought through to the ends that it gives, and wholly on its own terms.

On the other hand, it is strange that the poetic realism of the poet's work, its freedom to respond and explore the limit of the world's givenness by the power of language, is the means by which the world gives itself to be ever-more than it at first appears. It is as if Hopkins glimpses the edenic state of the world, the real world behind the world that is brutely given in the scientific or again in its ordinary everydayness, by means of the poetic power of language, which must be rooted finally in this primordial origin of the pristine creation, somehow intact behind or below or within what appears (and thus, of course, not in a static way, but rather in a manner for which the "logic" of poetry is the privileged means of access).

When we seek to penetrate the givenness of the world to the ground of its sheer actuality we find the absolute contingency of the given. Appearances are in flux and language immerses the mind of the poet within it in order to draw meaning out from it. Here we find our own act of phenomenological vision as wholly implicated in this contingency, to such a degree that we are left with a decision. Our reason, language, and thought are not self-grounding; we are ever open to an abyss. The brackets that suspend our preconception so that we can enter into the poet's world must eventually be stripped off again. Yet the poet demands a change in us. We therefore have to see the world in one of two ways: Either the world, as given in absolute contingency leads us beyond itself, by way of excess, to an ever-broader horizon of intelligibility, or this givenness is the excess of an arbitrary irrationality. Either the meaningful intelligibility of the world points beyond itself to a higher meaningfulness within which it participates, albeit in a veiled and mysterious way, or the brute contingency of reason and vision is a sign of its own brute anomaly--the poet's vision is an illusion. Hopkins certainly seems to hope, by means of his poetic act, that the former is true, and that the power of poetic realism is indeed grounded in a revelatory givenness, accessed by the poetic act itself: receiving language and the world as finally caught up within a higher divine speech. Hopkins, in proposing something to us to think, also proposes something to be believed. This is part of the original phenomenon of the poem itself--the very poetic quality/nature of the poem, if you like. In order to finally understand the poem, the distance of critique is abolished and we are confronted with nothing but the reality of the real with which we too must engage. We are compelled to ask, then: what allows our poetic intelligibility to make the most sense? What gives the widest scope and intelligibility to our vision? We could believe that faith gives true magnification to vision, but--either/or. Hopkins points one way; but we are free.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Works Cited

Athanasius On the Incarnation. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1996.

Augustine, St. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.

--. De Trinitate. Trans. Edmund Hill, O. P. Hyde Park, NY: New City P, 1991.

Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Glory of the Lord v. I: Seeing the Form. Trans. Erasmo Leiva Merikakis et al. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1982.

--. Theo-Drama V: The Last Act. Trans. Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998.

--. Theo-Logic I: Truth of the World. Trans. Adrian J. Walker. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000.

--. Theo-Logic II: Truth of God. Trans. Adrian J. Walker. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004.

--. Theo-Logic III: The Spirit of Truth. Trans. Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005.

--. "Theology and Sanctity." Explorations in Theology I: The Word Made Flesh. Trans. A. v. Littledale and Alexander Dru. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989.

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics I.1: The Doctrine of the Word of God. Trans. G. W. Bromiley. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1934.

Bonaventure, St. Commentaria in quatuor libros Sententiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi. Opera Omnia t. I. Rome: Ad Claras Aquas, Quaracchi edition. 1882.

Bulgakov, Sergei. The Lamb of God. Trans. Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008.

Congar, Yves. I Believe in the Holy Spirit. Vol 3. Trans. David Smith. New York: Crossroads, 1983.

Cusa, Nicholas. De docta ingnorantia. Trans. Jasper Hopkins. Minneapolis: A. J. Benning P, 1981.

--. De li non aliud. Trans. Jasper Hopkins. Minneapolis: U of MN P, 1979. della Mirandole, Pico. Oratio de hominis dignitate. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1998.

de Lubac, Henri. Medieval Exegesis. Vol. 2. Trans. E. M. Macierowski. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI: 2000.

Eckhart, Meister. Selected Writings. NY: Penguin Books, 1995.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.

John of the Cross, St. The Living Flame of Love. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington, D.C.: ITS Pub., 1991.

Kelly, Anthony J. The Resurrection Effect: Transforming Christian Life and Thought. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008.

Lacoste, Jean-Yves. "Dieu connaissable comme aimable: Par dela foi et raison." Recherches de Science Religieuse: Foi, raison et experience mystique 95:2 (2007), 177-97.

--. Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan. New York: Fordham, 2004.

--. "Perception, Transcendence and the Experience of God" Veritas: Transcendence and Phenomenology. Ed. Peter Candler and Conor Cunningham. London: SCM, 2007.

--. "Zur Theologie des Geistes." Internationale Katholische Zeitschrift Communio 15.1 (1986): 1-7.

Lubac, Henri de. The Discovery of God. Trans. Alexander Dru. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996.

--. Medieval Exegesis 2: The Four Senses of Scripture. Trans. E. M. Macierowski. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000.

Marion, Jean-Luc. Prolegomena to Charity. Trans. Stephen Lewis. New York: Fordham, 2002.

Riches, Aaron. "After Chalcedon: The Oneness of Christ and the Dyothelite Mediation of his Theandric Unity." Modern Theology 24.2 (April 2008): 199-224.

Silesius, Angelus. The Cherubinic Wanderer. Trans. Maria Shrady. New York: Paulist P, 1986.

Steinbock, Anthony J. Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience. Indianapolis: IN UP, 2007.

Thomas Aquinas, St. De Veritate. Trans. Robert W. Mulligan et al. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.

--. Summa Theologiae. Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1964-76.

Torrance, Thomas F. Reality and Scientific Theology. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic P, 1986.

Notes

(1) Pertinence, that is, for the question of the reality of "religious poetry." As well as for the deeper questions, which I would like to explore here, as to the meaningfulness of poetic creativity, the unfathomable reaches to which we endeavor to employ language.

(2) See Torrance, especially chapter 1.

(3) "Die Rose ist ohne warum; Sie bluhet, weil Sie bluhet." See Silesius, Bk I, p. 54: "The Rose does have no why; it blossoms without reason, / Forgetful of itself, oblivious to our vision."

(4) By way of an anticipation of what is to come let me introduce two references. Riches calls for a "spiritual phenomenology" that corresponds to the liturgical experience of the living Christ, as guided by Christological dogma. The third and sixth Ecumenical Councils in particular are a "purview" meant to raise the mind of the believer into the salvific taxa of Christ's analogical being. The life of the mind becomes a sequela Christi. For something similar, see de Lubac's incredible analysis of the logic of the exegesis of Origen and Bernard in the second volume of his Medieval Exegesis: "The soul begs for a kiss, when she is in quest of one of these divine meanings which are revealed only in prayer. The search takes on the gait of a long pilgrimage ... It also takes the gait of a hunt: the stalker follows one track, then another, going, coming back, laboring until the Lord uncovers for him the explication that satisfies him .... Christ leads the soul to understand him. The discovery of the spiritual sense of Scripture, which is procured through Jesus, is also truly the appearance of Jesus .... The Word hides himself, then lets a glimpse of him be seen, then hides himself again. He bounds over the mountains, only to disappear in the bottom of the valleys. He comes, approaches, then retires forthwith. He shows himself for an instant only to stir up desire." For Bernard "there is a whole [quoting Jean Leclerque] 'dialectic of presence and absence, of possession and non possession, of certitude and incertitude, of light and darkness, of faith and eternal life'" (159-60). For de Lubac, Bernard's antiphonal exegesis is modeled on the encounter with Christ in the lectio divina, but also as lived in the chanted hours of the community. This experience of Christ shapes the mind of the contemplative as the soul is conformed wholly to Christ. One learns the "mind of Christ" (1 Cor. 2:16).

(5) I will use the term "reduction" for this sense. For the properly phenomenological reduction, I use the Latin, reductio.

(6) For Lacoste's description of Heidegger's Dasein as "'all doors and windows," see Experience and the Absolute, 11.

(7) The notion of epektasis, concerned with an "infinite stretching" of the soul by desire in God's eternity, is critical in the mystical theology of St. Gregory of Nyssa.

(8) One could ask here: What about the possibility of manifestation of mystery as such? Is this reserved for the divine Spirit? Of, is all spirit essentially mystery? Appearing as enigmata pushes one to think this way. An affirmative answer to this would require, it seems to me, a new distinction, akin to the Eastern Christian distinction between ousia and energeia. I am wholly unprepared to make such a move at this point, though it may mean, already within the horizon of this meditation, a revision of our conception of intelligibility.

(9) In terms of subject and object: "[T]hese two poles of experience are not incompatible. The greater the subjective engagement does not mean the less there is of the objective reality that calls it forth. Nor does it mean that the greater and more overwhelming the objectivity of the reality--person or event--that the less there is of a subjective response to it. Paradoxically, these two polarities of experience are, in fact, not poles apart. It is a denial of experience to assume that there is no crossing from one to the other, or any possibility of relating the two. An objectivity that owes nothing to subjectivity, or a subjectivity necessarily undermining the objectivity of what is given in its arresting otherness, be it an event, a person or a work of art, are both caricatures .... The polarity of subject and object, if grounded in personal experience and open to the testimony of others, is not a dichotomy: subject and object, though they may be distinguished, cannot be separated" (Kelly 123-4).

(10) Yet for counterbalance one must see Lacoste's explication of not-being-at-home-in-the-world (Experience 29-32). There is an unfinished and unsettling dimension of experience that is greater than the sheer fact of unrest and mysterious transcendence. The enigmatic quality of the enigmata is also profoundly ambivalent and thus potentially terrifying. The eschatological view of what I am saying here about the world as home offsets, but in no way abolishes, this ambivalence.

(11) See also his earlier Theo-Logic I, originally published in 1946: "One thing is true: in its act of self-possession, the worldly subject understands that it is already possessed and comprehended, that the eternal prius of being known is the intrinsic form of its knowledge" (259).

(12) Pondus meum amor meus. Eo feror, quocunque feror.

(13) For Thomas, in every act of thought and will, God is implicitly thought and willed. See De Veritate XXII, a.2, ad. 1. See de Lubac: "If the mind did not affirm God--if it were not the affirmation of God--it could affirm nothing whatsoever. It would be without laws; like a world deprived of its sun. It could no longer exercise any rational activity, and could only sink back into the dark limbo of obscure psychical subjectivism. It could no longer judge. It would have lost its light; its norm, its justification, its point of reference, the one thing which can serve as a foundation for all else" (Discovery 41). For God as "non-aliud," see Nicholas of Cusa's late work (1462-3) De li non aliud. For Cusa, God is not another thing among things but also not other to any thing; rather, God is the coincidentia oppositorum, the convergence of all distinctions. For a typical statement of Cusa on negative theology see De docta ingnorantia 1.24.

(14) See Balthasar: "The experience of human totality and human depths is not, therefore, the way which opens up to the Christian experience of faith, even though this human depth and totality is subsequently put at the service of Christian experience and, what is more, has already been incorporated by God himself into the image of the man Christ. If experience ... even in a worldly sense is not a state but an event ... it follows that it is not man's entry (Einfahren) into himself, into his best and highest possibilities, which can become an experience (Erfahrung), but, rather it is his act of entering into the Son of God, Christ Jesus, who is naturally inaccessible to him, which becomes the experience that alone can claim for itself his undivided obedience" (Seeing the Form 222). "In faith and through it ... I am made open and dispossessed of self .... The important thing is the movement away from self ... Christian experience can mean only the progressive growth of one's own existence into Christ's existence, on the basis of Christ's continuing action in taking shape in the believer" (224). See also 412.

(15) Eo mens est imago Dei, quo capax Dei est et particeps esse potest. "The mind is the image of God, which is capable of God and able to be partaker in him."

(16) "As the soul is the life of the body, so God is the life of the soul." Eckhart (after Augustine), Sermon XXXI "The Man in the Soul."

(17) See also VI, 7.

(18) See Balthasar's Theo-Logic III. Commenting on Jean-Yves Lacoste's notion of the "facelessness" of the Spirit: "Who or what is the Spirit? ... in Scripture he has no face" (115). See Lacoste "Zur Theologie des Geistes," 5-6. See also Congar 144.

(19) See Barth: "Becoming manifest has to be something specific, a special act of the Father or the Son or both, that is added to the givenness of the revelation of the Father in the Son ... This special element in revelation, is undoubtedly identical with what the New Testament usually calls the Holy Spirit as the subjective side in the event of revelation" (449).

(20) Bonaventure, Sent. I, d, q 3 c (I, 129b). See Balthasar, Theo-Drama V, 65. See also Theo-Logic II, 174-6, 181. Balthasar summarizes Bonaventure's notion of Spirit as liberalitas vis-a-vis the creation: "the ground of the very reality [wirklich] of the creation in the first place, is a proper name of the Holy Spirit" (176).

(21) See Jean-Yves Lacoste. Dieu connaissable: "En ses origines grecques et une fois devenue romaine, d'autre part, la rationalite est illimitee. Et de la sorte, une question ne se pose jamais: celle d'un acte de connaissance dans lequel l'homme excede sa definition d' 'animal rationnel.' Cette question se posa toutefois lorsque la connaissance de Dieu et des choses divines en vint, en monde chretien, a etre consideree comme excedant les prises de la raison. Que peut alors exactement la raison?" (177).

(22) "quodammodo animam esse omnia, inquantam est in potential ad omnia; per sensum quidem ad sensibilia, per intellectum vero ad intelligibilia." Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia. 84, 2.2. See also Esse et Essentia V.

(23) Colossians 2:9-10 is also pertinent here: "For in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power."

(24) In this sense Balthasar is wrong in his critique of Husserl and of phenomenology in general, viz., that it withdraws human being from the exercise of decision in experience. See for example, his essay "Theology and Sanctity" in Explorations in Theology I, 205.

(25) Now the question to be raised: What does it mean to "quench" the Spirit (1 Thess. 5:19)? Is there a phenomenal reduction performed that limits Spirit's manifestation? There certainly seems to be. This is an issue worthy of a complete treatment in itself.

(26) "[I]t is the Holy Spirit in the triad, not begotten but the sweetness of begetter and begotten pervading all creatures according to their capacity with its vast generosity and fruitfulness, that they might all keep their right order and test in their right places" (Augustine, De Trinitate, VI, 11).

(27) "Invisable" as "that which one cannot target." See Marion 81.

(28) See Augustine, Sermo 52 n 16; Anselm, Proslogion II.

(29) See pp. 708-714 for John's essential commentary on this, the final verse of this his last and greatest complete work.