Of beauty and a father's love.

Jeffrey, David Lyle

He fathers forth whose beauty is past change: praise Him.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Pied Beauty"

Like many academics, I am a bit of a pack rat. One of the things I have allowed to collect dust and still be lugged around is a box of old LPs from the sixties.

On the back of one of these faded jacket covers there is a photograph of a young pop/rock balladeer slumped in an evidently British stair well, back against the wall by the cast iron downspout. Beside him stands a tousled, smiling child of four or five years of age, hands folded together, almost as if in prayer, rested upon the singer's knee: a child and a father. It is a beautiful image and, in the context, entirely incongruous.

The singer is Phil Ochs, the album Pleasures of the Harbor (1967), and the liner notes beside the photograph are in the form of a poem weighty with the singer's ambivalence about returning home to Los Angeles: To face the unspoken unguarded thoughts of habitual hearts A vanguard of electricians, a village full of tarts Who say you must protest you must protest It is your diamond duty ... Ah but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty

Protest--in sharp, abrasive questioning of authority--was then the west-coast watchword that spread east. Its "missionaries" included Ochs's touring friends and fellow balladeers Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and T-Bone Burnett, each a kind of prophet against a culture they saw as too easily anesthetized by American Beauty, each singing against the grain of musical and cultural cliche, often raspy and nasal-toned in their resentment and disdain. In this one album Ochs, however, broke step; he paused to reconsider the prospect of beauty, of healing, and notably for my purposes, the persistence of a father's love. It wasn't to be for long, and it didn't set a trend. Ochs himself returned to rebellion rock, The Ringing of Revolution, musical settings of the poems of Mao Tse-tung and more to match. He took his own life in April 1976.

If any here remember that album, or others like it in the work of T-Bone Burnett (e.g., "The Power of Love," "Heffner and Disney," and "Trap Door") or Bob Dylan's memorable lament "I dreamt I saw St. Augustine" (John Wesley Harding) or the last song on Dylan's album New Morning (1970), "Father of Night, Father of Day," you might recall that there were strong notes of ambivalence regarding the love and wisdom of fathers in this musical movement, despite the dominant acrimony and intentional, conventional disdain. One of the most important of these motifs now seems to have been borne of a deep nostalgia, a yearning after spiritual fulfillment, an ache for a lost beauty paved over, even, and this is to the point of my remarks, a yearning for a love which somehow got lost through willed or unwilled absence of the fathers. There is a strong undertone of poignancy in this music that runs counter to the self-assertive mainstream drift of much of early twentieth century poetry and fiction.

Lost Beauty

Let us recollect: from certain Victorian and turn-of-the-century writers, such as Samuel Butler (The Way of All Flesh [1903]), whose entire life's work was motivated by hatred of his father and then, subsequently, his self-appointed surrogate fathers, on to James Joyce in Portrait of the Artist (1916) and Stephen Hero (1944), who extends his hatred to the Catholic Church and all paternity, fathers had become the representative enemy of freedom--political freedom, artistic freedom, and perhaps above all, sexual freedom. Death of the Father (Freud), the Death of God (Nietzsche) and the Death of the Author (Barthes) reflect a common and widely colloquialized impulse toward the rejection of any authority beyond the self. Intellectual formulations aside, fatherhood became unfashionable for many not very intellectual reasons. Among these are its implications regarding responsibility for others, a necessary exercise of sexual restraint, and--perhaps because of fatherhood's tacit contradiction of increasingly insistent denials that aging is inevitable--its signal that others will succeed us, that we too shall someday die.

The anti-patriarchal impulse persists in many forms, not least in religious contexts. Certain strains of postmodern feminism have taken up where classic modernism left off, and a rejection of fathers and fatherhood now obtains fairly widely in liturgical revision and biblical translation as well as in fiction and poetry. (1) One recent novelistic evocation from the Protestant side is Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible (1998), in which the mostly invisible and faceless Baptist missionary pastor provides an incontrovertibly stupid and ugly foil against which each of the women struggles to find intelligibility, freedom, and, yes, each in her own way, beauty. This too has become a topos of modernity.

Nevertheless, since the 1960s, something counter has been struggling to find its dissentient voice. If one were writing an American literary history of this admittedly liminal development, one would want to account for the appearance of less ugly, less totalizing, and more ambivalent evocations of fatherhood. (One might include here the love-hate characterizations of fatherhood by Chaim Potok in his Asher Lev novels, or the unresolved yet largely fearful apprehension concerning the way in which father love is expressed in such reminiscences of childhood as Theodore Roethke's poem, "My Papa's Waltz.") But few even of these more ambivalent visitations can be associated with simple affection for a father, let alone with regard for the father's own affection as, in its expression, something beautiful. That bette noir of the early feminists, "Father Knows Best" is kept in the public memory largely as a laughingstock; along with other dated idealisms it is recalled as only a quaint and vulnerable cultural stereotype which now, in gentle mockery, must be written off--the good father as at best a harmless incompetent. The eventual dismissal of such cliches in sit-com surreality gathered a more bitter edge in soap opera and in such prime time offerings as The Simpsons and South Park. And meanwhile, in fantasy films of the 1980s the father figure had grown more malevolently dark--a Darth Vader, sinister and faceless.

Meanwhile, with the sexual revolution in full sway, real-life fathers were abandoning their families in ever-larger numbers, while religious "fathers" clergy, were falling prey to pornographic addiction and gross abuse of the vulnerable to a degree that has since become a national scandal in more than one country. It has become clear that in making sexual freedom the highest good the Playboy generation had begun to amass vast social costs in pursuit of its own gratification--and equally clear that it was all too willing to pass on the bills to the next generation. In the wake of such bitter consequences, as well as of so many lame to lamentable efforts to cope with these consequences, it must now seem almost a political absurdity to seek in all that detritus of ugly fatherhood in the 20th century for exceptions, epiphanies of beauty, harbingers of a healthier, holier, self-transcending love.

But they are there for the finding, and we who seek to recover some knowledge of the holy should, I think, pay them careful attention. Not least were they evident in the worldwide response of youth to the late, aged and ailing Pope as an exemplar of faithful and fatherly priesthood: in the closing years of the twentieth century the immensely popular recording of the Pope in prayer ("Abba Pater"), paralleled his massive appeal to the young in worldwide youth rallies. The equally countercultural recording by Cliff Richards of the "Our Father," or Lord's Prayer to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne," also a huge success in the marketplace of the young, seems likewise to have identified a deep upsurge of longing for a species of fatherhood that had, not long before, seemed to many an irretrievable archaism. (2) We might think also of the work of the Harvard professor turned apostle to the disabled, Henri Nouwen. In his Return of the Prodigal--a meditation on Rembrandt's painting--he observes that "though I am both the younger son and the elder son, I am not to remain them, but called to become the Father" (121). This slender book had and continues to have an enormous influence, not least because it has been seen by its reviewers and readers alike as "a beautiful book, as beautiful in the simple clarity of its wisdom as in the terrible beauty of the transformation to which it calls us" (Gamez 29).

In the novel, one might adduce Leif Enger's Peace Like a River, in which a self-dewing father searches for his outlawed son, accompanied by his other children, and in the end exchanges his own life for the breath of life, quite literally, for his children. Nor is it possible to overlook Marilynne Robinson's exquisitely crafted and Pulitzer prize-winning Gilead, in which the dying pastor-father of a young son sired in his antiquity writes an epistolary personal meditation on the Fifth Commandment, recollecting the blessings of his own generational history so as to make of it in turn a gift, a legacy, a blessing for the son whose manhood he will not live to admire. Each of these works is countercultural. Yet it might readily be argued that each, in the sense that John Paul's Letter to Artists suggests, affords an epiphany of beauty--a glimpse of the beauty of that fatherhood for which the Apostle Paul once declared "the whole family in heaven and earth is named" (Eph. 3:14-15). (3) There is much more of this sort of "epiphany" than Hollywood and the critics think, and much of it rises well above the level of Disney's Finding Nemo--though it is there too. As counter-cultural culture, a sign of contradiction, the recent artistic reconsideration of a loving fatherhood merits extended reflection.

Beauty and Holiness

My remarks here must be preliminary. I want merely to draw on some notable passages from Christian aesthetic theory which, I believe, undergird the papal Letter to Artists, and then, with that as a framework, consider briefly two late twentieth-century poems which, in my judgment, provide just such epiphanies of beauty as the Pope may have been thinking about, and which offer, in particular, a revelation of the beauty in a father's love.

First, a brief reminder of the hidden sources.

Scripture itself is replete with passages inviting reflection on the subject of beauty. Many of these, such as the divine instructions to Moses in Exodus (25-33) concerning art and the artist, connect beauty to God directly, and make of worship the focus for its use and appreciation. Thus Aaron's garments are to be holy, therefore yapeh, beautiful (Exod. 28:2-3); and in the act of worship one "ascribes unto the Lord beauty and glory"--the terms are made to be nearly synonymous in Ps. 29:2-3. The families of God's people are invited to "worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness" (I Chron. 16:29; cf. Ps. 96:9), the Psalmist declared that "strength and beauty are in his sanctuary" (Ps. 96:6), and he prays "let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands" (Ps. 90:17)--suggesting that our human capacity for beauty is derivative, even as we are derivative, imago dei, made in the image of the First Artist. When Zion is called "the perfection of beauty" from which "God will shine forth," it is almost surely the heavenly Jerusalem that is being invoked (Ps. 50:2; cf. Lam. 2:15); in the Day of the Lord the redeemed of Zion will have again a share in their Creator's beauty (Zech. 9:16-17; Ezek. 16:7-14), suggesting that the evocation of a distant and transcendent beauty calls forth our longing for permanence in the evanescent beauty which enchants us in the here and now.

Further, it is this deeper human yearning after beauty--and yet inevitably acute sense of the gulf fixed between our fractional capacity and the fulsome radiance we intuit--that in biblical literature colors all aesthetic reflection and makes it apparent that beauty is an object of primary desire. In itself, however, desire is unstable. Thus, while in both the Bible and in the poets erotic desire can act as a natural precursor or even analogue for our desire for God, confusion is an ever-present peril. Eros is never without a seductive potential for narcissism, idolatry, and desperate confusion concerning what ultimately is most to be loved. In Hebrew one can discern the double semantic charge in terms for beauty applied both to God and to human beauty: hadar, no'am, tip ara may apply to human handsomeness and regal beauty (Esth. 1:11, 2:7) as well as to divine radiance or glory. But these terms may also signify the terrible beauty of the Lord in his appearance in judgment upon the nations: "In that day the Lord of hosts will be for a crown of glory and a diadem of beauty to the remnant of his people" (Isa. 28:5--tip ara). Meanwhile the beauty of women and the beauty of Zion or of the sanctuary and worship can, in parallel fashion, be called up by the same term (yapeh: e.g. Cant. 4:1-6; Ps. 27:4; 50:2). (4) Upon this double-charged nexus of transcendent and finite desire, it may be said--at least from a Hebrew point of view--that the Gentiles regularly foundered. Israel, when it wavered, likewise. This is the point of view of the wisdom teacher in Proverbs (7-9), and in the Christian thinking of St. Augustine it yields up an echo, a distinction, even a principle that synthesizes all of the biblical sources I have referred to and more: what keeps the love of the beautiful from becoming a disordered affection is rightful worship, which is to say, a right order of reference to beauty's divine source--what Augustine calls its "holy signification": I, O my God and my Joy, do hence also sing a hymn unto Thee, and offer a sacrifice of praise unto my Sanctifier, because those beautiful patterns, which through the medium of men's souls are conveyed into their artistic hands, emanate from that Beauty which is above our souls, which my soul sigheth after day and night. But as for the makers and followers of those outward beauties, they from thence derive the way of approving them, but not of using them. And though they see Him not, yet is He there, that they might not go astray, but keep their strength for Thee, and not dissipate it upon delicious lassitudes. (Confessions 10.34.53)

In Augustine's aesthetic (cf. Confessions 7.9.15; 13.20.28; On Christian Doctrine 2.40.60, etc.), our innate yearning after beauty is redeemed by being directed beyond the beauty of creatures and their art to "that Beauty which is above our souls." In such a scheme of reference it turns out that we may be liberated, in fact, to see in works of artistic beauty or the beauty of creation an epiphany, a revelation of something higher--a "grace beyond the reach of art" (Alexander Pope). When Jacques Maritain speaks of the "end beyond" art, "of which beauty is the correlative" (170), the ultimate locus of beauty is less in the work of art itself than in that toward which its beauty strives and yearns.

Maritain's "rich work of meditation" (Ralph McInerny) which, along with Etienne Gilson's Arts of the Beautiful, provides grist for the aesthetic mill in John Paul II's Letter to Artists, has an evident neo-Thomist orientation. One hears in its phrasing echoes of Aquinas on the "yearning of the intellect" as well as of Thomas's notion (in his commentary on the De divinibus nominibus of Pseudo-Dionysius), that Beauty is, in effect "one of the divine Names," and that "the existence of all things derives from divine beauty" (Maritain 163). If Maritain had been a ressourcement theologian rather than the neo-Thomist philosopher he was, one might have expected to see a more clear grounding of the aesthetic in the biblical sources which lie just beneath the surface of his reflections. One example must suffice: in Maritain's Thomist way of putting it: ... the essential characteristic of transcendentals is the fact that they cannot be enclosed in any class; they transcend or go beyond any genus or category, because they permeate or imbue everything, and are present in any thing whatsoever. Thus, just as everything is in its own way, and is good in its own way, so everything is beautiful in its own way. And just as being is present everywhere, and everywhere diversified, so beauty spills over or spreads everywhere, and is everywhere diversified. (163)

Albeit at a lower philosophical register, one can almost hear over these medieval phrases the familiar Ray Stevens song, with its chorus of children singing the refrain. Actually, the biblical passage half-remembered in this passage in Maritain's prose is considerably more potent than either the scholastic apologue or popular song allows. From Eccles. 3:11, it reads as follows: He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity in their hearts--except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.

In this evocative biblical text, temporal beauty is described as proportionate to a divine creativity so suggestive and fruitful in its character that it calls forth a yearning for beauty's source: the word here translated "eternity" is ha'-olam (also "the universe"), a term provocatively associated with God's fatherly love and provision in that most familiar of Jewish thanksgivings: "Baruch 'atah adonai elohenhu melech ha'olam, ha motzeh lechem min ha-aeretz." To such an immense desire our prayers of thanksgiving quite intimately correspond: the ache in the heart for the infinite is indeed for the "end beyond" not merely for the gift but for the Giver; not merely toward beauty but toward the Divine Artist. And yet our longing for embrace with the eternal must now in some measure remain unsatisfied--the beginning and the end are beyond our time-locked reach. As the pre-socratic philosopher, Alcaemon of Cretona put it, this is the very definition of our mortality: "Men perish because they cannot join the beginning and the end" (Burnet 195). (4) Accordingly, all mortal longings are constrained--even the desire to shape our own life-story. Yet candid recognition of this limit sets us up, so to speak, to comprehend the definitive, ultimate epiphany: "Ego sum alpha et omega--I am the beginning and the ending" (Rev. 1:8; 22:13). The annunciation to John on Patmos of the final revelation of the Christos declares at once an end-term for each incomplete narrative, and the closure--and disclosure--of the overarching story into which all other narratives fit. Only the Divine Author, we now see, may consummate his work of art--beginning and end are to be joined in Him--and wittingly or not, that is the closure toward which all our stories, whether of agony or of ecstasy, strive and yearn: "Even so come, Lord Jesus."

All this the biblical writers find achingly anticipated both in our love of beauty and our desire for God. Each anticipatory glimpse of the author of the Big Story is thus epiphanos, epiphany; each vision of the final closure is apokalypsos, revelation in its full polyvalent range of mystical meanings. On such a view, as Maritain suggests, "beauty is not perfection, because that would leave nothing to be desired" (167); rather, as he says, in great art from the Greeks onward, beauty has accordingly been sought as an "infinite to be mirrored in the work, or participated in by it ... a kind of epiphany of the natural spirituality of art" (176). It is this deeper notion that is imbricated in John Paul II'S Letter to Artists.

Epiphanies and Beauty

Now, "epiphany," whether as used by Maritain or by the late Pope, is likewise a strong word.

"Epiphany" ("manifestation" or "appearing") in the New Testament applies strictly to Christ. In such contexts it can have, accordingly, overtones of theophany about it. In more general anthropological usage it can apply to other divine beings, and what passes for theophany in one perspective may become at the least epiphany in another; one may think here of the god Ungit appearing to Redival and then Orual in C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces.

Since James Joyce in Stephen Hero, it has, however, far more often been used in a lesser, even de-sacralizing way to describe a moment of realization or recognition--merely of the luminosity of particular, often quite mundane nature (e.g., "I was watching MTV last night, saw Britney Spears, and had an epiphany. Did you know that if you rearrange the letters in 'Britney Spears' they spell out 'Presbyterians'?"). That is to say, used loosely, the word cheapens; it loses its hold on mystery and the metaphysical.

By contrast, to speak knowledgably of "epiphanies of beauty;' as did John Paul II, is to trope, to juxtapose two distinct orders of reality, to make a double-edged point. (He too was an artist.) But it seems to me that the last Pope's intention was in fact to re-sacralize in art-language what has largely become emptied of divine reference or association in the language both of art and theology over the last century. This is to imply that beauty has still a deep transcendent reference, dependent in part on attunement in the perceiver: one and the same perceptual event can have both a terrible beauty and a tender grace. The connection is captured by Lewis in his depiction of Aslan, of whom he has one of his characters say that, " ... as for Aslan himself ... people who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time" (The Lion 117-19), and then later, in The Horse and his Boy, we are told that from the Lion radiates a light so extraordinary that "no one ever saw anything more terrible or beautiful" (166). In The Last Battle, we see the triumphant returning Aslan "coming, leaping down from cliff to cliff in a living cataract of power and beauty" (209).

We are reminded in other contexts that in the Hebrew Bible the term hesed, God's tender covenant love, can also be translated as "beauty" or "loveliness" (e.g. Isa. 40:6). Context can make the luminosity of such beauty more evident: what to one person may appear as the ugliness of a fearful imposition can reveal to another the very beauty of holiness, as Lewis, in Till We Have Faces, is evidently at pains to show us.

It may perhaps be remarked here that epiphanies in the New Testament are generally of Christ because the Incarnation itself was expressly a revelation, an appearing in human form, of God the Father. To put this in Hans Urs von Balthasar's way, "Jesus is himself the Father's assumption of form, the Father's eidos" (1.606). Jesus is not merely

a sign or signal from the Father; he is "one with the Father" (John 1:1-4; Chapter 17). Jesus speaks of himself repeatedly in what we might call epiphanic terms: "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9). In this way, a strict Old Testament limitation on human encounter with God--one overcome only rarely for singular Old Testament patriarchs such as Abraham by the oak of Mamre, Jacob at the Jabbok, and Moses on the mountain--is here gloriously overcome. (5) The faithful Jew of antiquity had typically dreaded to see God, as Jacob put it, panim el panim, face to face (Gen. 32:30), for fear of being struck dead for unholiness. In the narrative encounters with God in the Old Testament there is thus always mediation, whether by angelic being, fire, cloud or whirlwind. God the Father remained concealed more than revealed. In Christ there is suddenly a full disclosure.

In Jesus the normative Jewish expectation was then stunningly reversed: many people now saw and bore witness to what their eyes had seen, their ears heard, and their hands had touched (1 John 1:1). In the language of John's gospel, "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). Thus, a revelational paradox lies at the heart of the Incarnation: "No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared Him" (John 1:18). And yet again, to Philip, "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9).

Artistically speaking, among followers of Christ the strictures of the second commandment thus loosened. Michelangelo, like medieval dramatists and artists before him from Ravenna to the Netherlands, give "a face [even] to God the Father" (John Paul II, 12), whether as a mirroring of his Son in the Pantocrator, or more rarely as the Ancient of Days in the Sistine ceiling or the biblical illustrations of William Blake. Even those images which, anthropomorphically, suggest God's antiquity, reveal him nonetheless in beauty and strength. (6) Yet over time, epiphanies of the Father become images of his revelation in Jesus almost exclusively. (7) "He who has seen me has seen the Father" repeats the Jesus of many of these paintings and icons (figuratively, in his iconographic gestures); "I and the Father are one:' The poets and painters are confident in their remaining depictions of God the Father as a more physically massive, more beautiful and glorious perfection of that which is, as for example in Raphael's "Disputa del Sacramento" still recognizably Jesus. These redactions strive at--and often achieve--real beauty. In the medieval iconography of the Trinity, for example, the "Throne of Mercy" motif exemplifies a grace at once terrible and tender, a source both of heartbreak and of hope. In it God the Father cradles Jesus on his knee, but it is not the child Jesus of the Madonna icons; rather it is the crucified Christ, offered as Atonement--an unimaginably holy sacrifice for the redemption of an unholy world. This Fatherhood is resplendent in the beauty of dignitas; it is also terrible in the self-offering exactitude of a father's love for all his children--even those who have turned away from him. (9)

Epiphany, Beauty, and a Father's Love

I am aware that by this point in my remarks the philosophers among you may be longing less for beauty than looking for my argument. Meanwhile, those who are artists and lovers of art may be equally impatient for something like an epiphany, or, as Maritain might say, for some exemplar of that beauty of which we would speak and which might constitute an "intuition," a glimpse such as art alone and argument rarely (if ever) gives us. Here--and inherently so for our subject--we confront a characteristic antimony. Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson) captures it, whimsically, about as well as anyone: I don't know what you mean by "glory" Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't--till I tell you. I mean, 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you'!" (124-25)

Dodgson, of course, was an academic. He knew by much experience that argument, after all, intrinsically seeks a temporal closure, a kind of glorious perfection or triumph to which, as Maritain suggests, beauty by definition has often much longing but is more accepting of limit. No great poet lifts pen from the page of a last revision and shouts "Sic probo!"--the lineaments of the most memorable verse bespeak an asymptotic trajectory of desire toward some realization, yet even then must invariably fall short of proof and closure. And yet, if you who are philosophers will permit me, that is part of the beauty of beauty. (10) As the ancients knew, even our experience of inconclusive desire or recognition of imperfection conveys some attendant. confirmation of beauty's glory. Thus, in respect of our deepest longings and most cherished aspirations for relationship, beauty will almost always surpass argument. It is not only children who prefer Alice.

Accordingly, I am going to conclude by giving way to art. To be particular, I wish us to consider two poems that deal with the uncompleted aspiration and yet healing trajectory of a father's love.

The first poem I wish to consider is by the late Anthony Hecht, my onetime office mate and friend, and comes from his Pulitzer Prize-winning volume The Hard Hours. It is the volume's title poem, and is dedicated to one of his two estranged sons. As you will see, "Adam" has an epigraph. Some of you will recognize that it comes not from Genesis, as initially the title might lead us to expect, but from the book of Job. ADAM Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew? "Adam, my child, my son, These very words you hear Compose the fish and starlight Of your untroubled dream. When you awake, my child, It shall all come true. Know that it was for you That all things were begun" Adam, my child, my son, Thus spoke Our Father in heaven To his first, fabled child, The father of us all. And I, your father, tell The words over again As innumerable men From ancient times have done. Tell them again in pain, And to the empty air. Where you are men speak A different mother tongue. Will you forget Our games, Our hide-and-seek and song? Child, it will be long Before I see you again. Adam, there will be Many hard hours, As an old poem says, Hours of loneliness. I cannot ease them for you; They are our common lot. During them, like as not, You will dream of me. When you are crouched away In a strange clothes closet Hiding from one who's "It" And the dark crowds in, Do not be afraid--O, if you can, believe In a father's love That you shall know some day. Think of the summer rain Or seedpearls of the mist; Seeing the beaded leaf, Try to remember me. From far away I send my blessing out To circle the great globe. It shall reach you yet. Copyright 1990 by Anthony Hecht (Cited here, with permission, from Collected Earlier Poems, Alfred A. Knopf 1992)

The first stanza is set in quotation marks, as if it were paroemia, a borrowed text, a voice separate from the narrator's. It is metonymically, though not literalistically, precisely that--a synthesis of the intention in the Divine Artist which endows human art--and procreation. It presents Adam to himself as one loved into being as the image of a heavenly Father, and it affirms that all things of whose beauty we dream and on whose substance we live were themselves an act of divine love toward us who are also of adam, adamah--of the earth, earthy; of the humus, human.

The second stanza goes on to relate the primordial Father's love to the love the poet feels for his own firstborn son, whom he in fact named Adam. Here the quotation marks have fallen away; the poem becomes a type of haggadic commentary, a memory transcribed in words as if it were a kind of living present gloss on an absent though painfully recollected Text. The poet, too, is a father--a Jewish father. As such he obeys the Deuteronomic injunction of the great Sherna (Deut. 6:4-7; cf. Ps. 78:5-8). But the diaspora into which his son has gone is the result of marital separation and divorce. With this child he has neither custody nor real conversation; his poem of love goes most probably unread and unheard; he aches with an agonized father love for a relationship gone wrong, for a denial of the possibility of relationship and closure. A great emptiness eats at his heart.

The closing stanzas acknowledge that what are "hard hours" for a father will be echoed in hard hours for his son, and that out of them the son may have dreams of a father--a father absconditas--dreams far less untroubled than those of Adam's blissful sleep in the garden. The narrative voice anticipates fear, separation anxiety, the relentless pursuit of a mysterious intergenerational tag-team curse--and yet urges this Adam to believe, if he can, "in a father's love that you shall know some day" Whether that knowing is to be of this or another surrogate relationship, or transposed to a halting father's love in another generation (as Adam takes his own turn, so to speak), hangs in painful ambiguity over the final stanza.

The last stanza borrows also, as does the epigraph, from Job--its poetic evocation of a beauty God alone can give (38:28ff.). We realize that over the aching, heart-breaking incompletion of the poet's fatherly love arches the voice of God from the whirlwind, speaking to Job, calling him to reckon with his losses as reducible neither to formula nor to reason or analogy, but rather, sub specie aeternitas, to consolation, comfort for a loss which must remain incomprehensible to any attempt at understanding which is unable to conjoin the beginning and the end of our cosmic story.

And yet the poem concludes with an assurance of persistence in the Father's love--and blessing--that will circle the earth, all diasporas notwithstanding, to find out the beloved child: "it shall reach you yet" the promise says; you will one day be restored to your Father. All manner of biblical texts are here recollected, from the Psalmist's intuition that no matter where on earth he hides himself God will find him and know him (Psalms 139), to the Abrahamic covenant blessing (Gen. 12:1-3) to the words of the Psalmist that remind us that messages of the Father's glory and beauty (Ps. 19:1-2) reach out into all the earth and echo in the poetry of men in all the nations, whatever language there may be spoken (19:3-6).

This is a heartbreaking poem of broken relationship--yet it ends in a promise of a father's love which, against all odds and all distance, will find out the beloved child and confer upon his own heartache the hesed, the covenant love and promised blessing. Because Hecht's poem works on two levels, and with beauty to recollect both a greater beauty and the "end beyond" the work of art, it successfully constitutes, I suggest, an 'epiphany of beauty" one which reveals something of the first Father's love.

And yet ... this poem is overwhelmed with its author's own mortal failure, and in particular the failure of fatherhood. As Hecht knew very well, with a point so double-edged one can get cut both ways.

The other poem in my diptych is by Gjertrud Schnackenberg and is likewise a title poem, from her much acclaimed volume The Lamplit Answer. It captures a memory of her own father, a Lutheran pastor. From its triplet stanzas to its polysemous imagery and language it is reflexively a deeply Christian and theological work of art, and aesthetically, about as close to a "perfect" poem as one is likely to find in American literature of the last half-century. SUPERNATURAL LOVE My father at the dictionary-stand Touches the page to fully understand The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand His slowly scanning magnifying lens, A blurry, glistening circle he suspends Above the word "Carnation:' Then he bends So near his eyes are magnified and blurred, One finger on the miniature word, As if he touched a single key and heard A distant, plucked, infinitesimal string, "The obligation due to every thing That's smaller than the universe" I bring My sewing needle close enough that I Can watch my father through the needle's eye, As through a lens ground for a butterfly Who peers down flower-hallways toward a room Shadowed and fathomed as this study's gloom Where, as a scholar bends above a tomb To read what's buried there, he bends to pore Over the Latin blossom. I am four, I spill my pins and needles on the floor Trying to stitch "Beloved" X by X My dangerous, bright needle's point connects Myself illiterate to this perfect text I cannot read. My father puzzles why It is my habit to identify Carnations as "Christ's flowers" knowing I Can give no explanation but "Because:' Word-roots blossom in speechless messages The way the thread behind my sampler does Where following each X I awkward move My needle through the word whose root is love. He reads, "A pink variety of Clove, Carnatio, the Latin, meaning flesh." As if the bud's essential oils brush Christ's fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh Odor carnations have floats up to me, A drifted, secret, bitter ecstasy, The stems squeak in my scissors, Child, it's me, He turns the page to "Clove" and reads aloud: "The clove, spice, dried from a flower-bud" Then twice, as if he hasn't understood, He reads, "From French, for clou, meaning a nail." He gazes, motionless. "Meaning a nail" The incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail, I twist my threads like stems into a knot And smooth "Beloved" but my needle caught Within the threads, Thy blood so dearly bought, The needle strikes my finger to the bone. I lift my hand, it is myself I've sewn, The flesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own, I lift my hand in startled agony And call upon his name, "Daddy daddy"-My father's hand touches the injury As lightly as he touched the page before, Where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore The flowers I called Christ's when I was four. From The Lamplit Answer by Gjertrud Schnackenberg (Copyright 1985 by Gjertrud Schnackenberg Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC)

This poem hardly needs exegesis so much as a slow rereading, pausing perhaps over the symbol-rich imagery and philology that are part and parcel of its meaning as well as the vehicles for achieving that meaning. The lamp that evokes the Word (Ps. 119:105), the flower that invokes at once our flesh and the central Christian doctrine, the needle's eye through which every wisdom (including that of the poetic imagination) must stoop to pass, the butterfly psyche, the scholar's pondering of a tomb, the art that tries to spell out love's perfect text, the mystery of "Christ's flowers" which cannot be explained or given argument or proof any more than can the mysterious connectedness of verbal sound and deep, primordial, speechless longing: all are here unfolded, stanza by patient stanza through the eyes of a little child, who leads us. The needle moves through "the word whose root is love"; "the incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail." Her little injury brings home the greatest injury of all: the child calls out Eloi, Eloi; abba, pater; the father's hand touches the wound as tenderly as he touched the meaning in the words--and the memory of it, recollected in maturity, becomes likewise an epiphany of the beauty of the first Father's love, the "end beyond" all mortal beauty, invoking the ultimately ineluctable mysteries of the Incarnation and Atonement.

However paradoxical, for such great mysteries to grow their meaning in us we must first become transparent to simplicity. "Except ye become as little children" (Matt. 18:1-6; 19:13-15) is a familiar injunction which, among other important things, reminds us that the uncomplicated character of a child's affection allows it to seek unselfconsciously for a Father's love. In many an artist's image of Jesus with the children we can nevertheless find a deep register of conscious longing for an enduring beauty; even though most probably only subconsciously it is reflected, poignantly, in the Phil Ochs album photograph (Ochs never, as far as I can tell, became himself a father), This is what a father's love is like, say the images: warm, attentive, generous, gently teaching. And yes, of this image, too, the singer has it right: "in such an ugly time, the true protest is beauty."

It is not true of these matters of beauty to say that they cannot be reduced to words. However imperfectly, they can. But it is true that, in respect of our glimpsing the way in which artistic beauty refers us to ineffable Beauty, that such matters can seldom so effectively be reduced to argument. That is why, in the kingdom of God and for the sake above all of our worship of God, we need art: art allows us a special access to the holy: it is a handmaiden to faith. It is certainly not to be surmised on this account that art in itself is fully adequate to our search for the holy. But great art can give us a glimpse, when referred to its source, of the deep echo in beauty, especially in the beauty of a holy love, of the beauty of holiness and thus of the love of our heavenly Father. Our experience of that beauty, as Gerard Manley Hopkins so memorably put it, is necessarily partial, pied, and freckled. But when we can give glory to God for the dappled, for the imperfect, for the antinomies of "swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim," we may come to the true "end beyond"--to that grace beyond the reach of art which is our proper worship.

"He fathers forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him'--Hopkins

Baylor University

Editor's Note: This essay was delivered as the keynote address on the morning of Monday, July 25, 2005, at the Opening Plenary Session of Oxbridge 2005, the 6th triennial C. S. Lewis Summer Institute conducted by the C. S. Lewis Foundation, at St. Aldate's Church, Oxford. The theme of the 2005 Institute was "Making All Things New: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Twenty-First Century." We reprint this essay with the permission of the C.S. Lewis Foundation.

In its meditation on the vital role of beauty in the Christian tradition, Jeffrey's essay provides a companion piece to Darryl Tippens's "'The Passionate Pursuit of the Real': Christianity and Literature in Our Time" (54.1). In its attentive analysis of the work of two contemporary poets, Anthony Hecht and Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Jeffrey's essay also complements the two review essays on contemporary poetry in this issue, and sustains Christianity and Literatures long tradition of honoring the work of poets.

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--. St. Augustine's Confessions. Trans. William Watts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1977-1979.

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Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass: And What Alice Found There. London: Macmillan, 1872.

Enger, Leif. Peace Like a River. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001.

Gamez, Luis R. Rev. of "The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons, by Henri J. M. Nouwen:' New Oxford Review 69.10 (1992): 28-9.

Gilson, Etienne. The Arts of the Beautiful. New York: Scribner, 1965

Hecht, Anthony. "Adam" Originally appeared in The Hard Hours; Poems. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems. New York: Oxford UP, 1948.

Jeffrey, David L. Houses of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture. Waco: Baylor University, 2003.

John Paul II, Pope. Letter to Artists. Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1999.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1916.

--. Stephen Hero. London: J. Cape, 1944. Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel. New York: Harper Flamingo, 1998.

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NOTES

(1) A review of some of the most pertinent feminist liturgical and theological criticism may be found in chapters 13 and 14 of my Houses of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture.

(2) Both of these appeared in 1999, on the eve of the millennium.

(3) Biblical citations are from the New King James Version (Nelson 1982).

(4) The greater number of terms for beauty in Latin than in the Greek of the Septuagint meant that the narrower semantic range (Jas. 1:11--"what is lovely to look at"); astaios, "fair," and kalos, "fine" was to be augmented creatively by terms as diverse as decorum, splendor, honorem, gloriam, dignitas, as well as pulcher and voluptatem. In a surprising reversion to resonance in the Hebrew, the Vulgate has "the words of the wise are pulchra" (Prov. 22:18), and "the ways of wisdom are pulcher."

(5) Hugh of St. Victor, in his twelfth-century book on literary instruction, held Alcaemon to be the "first inventor of fables" and useful for understanding the primordial purposes of literary fiction (Didascalicon: De studio legendi, 3.2).

(6) Cf. von Balthasar, who takes the stronger Septuagint reading of Numbers to say, " ... concerning Moses we have the testimony from God himself that he did not reveal himself to Moses as he had to the other prophets, in dreams and enigmas, but 'with him I speak mouth to mouth, with clear evidence ... and not in riddles ... and he has beheld God's form.... "von Balthasar's argument depends to some degree on this point (The Glory of the Lord: a Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1,606).

(7) Cf. Ps. 96:6. Melville seems to have thought the suggestion of strength was essential in divine beauty, and in Moby Dick has Ahab comment on Michelangelo's depiction of God the Father in the Sistine Chapel in that connection (chap. 86).

(8) Cf. Etienne Gilson, The Arts of the Beautiful (162-63), who elaborates the incarnational theology that undergirds this emphasis.

(9) von Balthasar here adduces Barth: "If we seek Christ's beauty in a glory which is not that of the Crucified, we are doomed to seek in vain" (55-56), and Gerhard Nebel, in Daas Ereignis das Schonen responding to Rilke's phrase "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of the terrible;' the analogia eventus pulchrie et Christi (65), the very summation, temporally, of "the beauty of holiness" (Ps. 96:9).

(10) Diotima, in Plato's Symposium hints at this in her discourse on eros, as does Augustine in his discussion following upon the passage in the Confessions (at 10.34) cited above.