These pagans had, however, arrived at an intellectual maturity, where philosophical reflection had deepened traditional religion until the bold natural theology of Aristotle, with its prime mover and final cause, and Plato’s absolutely transcendent Good, understood as one god, supreme, father of all, had become something like the common sense of all educated persons. They had an interest in wisdom but little hope that anyone actually could be wise. This is not the Athens of Plato, where the question of philosophy was a question of life and death, but the Athens of the Roman Empire, where Roman curiosity has become a kind of indulgent decadence, a place where interest in ideas was only increased by a doubt that any of them finally were to be credited and adopted. Very religious indeed, as the city is chock full of idols their various devotions are multiplied by their decadent curiosity, which Luke describes by recording that “all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17:21). In the very center of the Acts of the Apostles, we watch as Paul comes to Athens he finds a great “market place” of ideas, where “Epicurean and Stoic philosophers” meet him amid the Jews and gentiles of a city that, as Paul himself proclaims, must be “very religious” (17:18 22). I return to Mariani’s work, once again, because his own discussion of the vocation of the Catholic poet seems such a fruitful point of departure in answering the question, what must the Catholic artist do, in our day or in any day?įor his answer, Mariani draws our attention finally and above all to the example of Saint Paul, and to surprising effect. Saint Augustine’s Confessions is the most obvious antecedent alongside those distinctly modern features of his poetry that come from Lowell among others. It is not a secret diary blown open by the wind or a police blotter plunging downward in a column of newsprint, as it were, but a prayerful record of self-discovery made in the presence of God. His poetry, as explained in my essay, restores the term “confessional” to its sacramental significance. To many, it has seemed a juvenile butt-end to the long romantic quest for individual authenticity and self-expression, one that grew the more exaggerated the clearer it became just how little self most poets actually had to express. The first so-called “confessional poet” was Robert Lowell, whose self-fascination was brilliantly interwoven with a poetry of intellectual and formal complexity over several decades, however, such poetry became not merely embarrassing because of its content, but embarrassing because it had no substance or quality of any kind except for that of shamelessness. During that time, American poets have often restricted their work to an indiscrete and indulgent self-disclosure they confess whatever is oddest, weirdest, or most perverse in their life story so that the thrill of the poem is, typically, limited precisely to the shock of scandal, the itch to the ears. If you should have heard that term, “confessional poetry,” before, I would not be surprised in fact, we hear it used, not always admiringly, to describe some of the main impulses in American lyric poetry over the last half century. I had written about Mariani’s work before, and have been reading it for two decades, and so have frequently referred to him as one of the few authentically and admirably confessional poets of our day. It was occasioned by the appearance of his book, to be his final prose collection, called, The Mystery of It All, wherein he offers a compelling account of the vocation of the Catholic poet. Not long ago, I published an essay celebrating the work of the Catholic poet and literary biographer, Paul Mariani.
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