Here is the beginning of a Vatican Information Service news-item:
ROMANUS THE MELODIST: FAITH CREATES BEAUTY
VATICAN CITY, 21 MAY 2008 (VIS) – During this morning’s general audience, Benedict XVI dedicated his catechesis to Romanus the Melodist, a Syrian “theologian, poet, composer and permanent deacon who resided in a monastery on the outskirts of Constantinople in the sixth century”. Before delivering his catechesis in the Paul VI Hall, the Holy Father visited the Vatican Basilica to greet faithful gathered there.
Romanus, the Pope explained, belongs to “that sizeable group of theologians who transformed theology into poetry” and whose numbers include “St. Ephrem the Syrian, … St. Ambrose, … St. Thomas Aquinas, … and St. John of the Cross. Faith is love and so creates poetry and music. Faith is joy and so creates beauty”.
Who better than Pope Benedict XVI to speak of the value of music and other arts in glorifying God and in drawing mortal men into proper worship? A highly cultured man who is said to be an accomplished pianist, he is also fluent in a multitude of langauges perhaps including Old Syriac — the language of at least St. Ephrem. Certainly, I can’t read any of the ancient poets or even the modern French or Italian poets in their own languages. I’m monolingual.
But I can speak one language fairly well and that’s a language that is a combination of the words of the Creed and the descriptive words of modern empirical knowledge. And that leads me to sometimes listen in bewilderment as flesh-and-blood priests or ministers, or their televised brethren, speak another language which I can understand but consider obscurantist. I write theology and philosophy in the language I sometimes seem to share with only myself and I also write novels in that language — some containing very amateurish poetry intended as a tease for real poets to speak of Creation as we now know it and also God in His role of the Creator who comes into view a bit more clearly with contemplation of a universe described well by general relativity theory and quantum theory. Even the areas of modern empirical knowledge that bother many Christians, evolutionary theory and history that doesn’t always flatter our favorite nations or characters or ethnic groups, point towards a Creator of a living, developing world — a morally well-ordered narrative.
We won’t be able to see that moral order until the artists and creative writers of our age speak in terms of the empirical knowledge which remains our age’s greatest contribution to human civilization. After all, poetry, even about the greatest of Christian truths, is concrete and grounded in our understanding of what lies around us. We need to be grounded in the past and that includes a need to appreciate poetry based upon earlier understandings of God’s Creation but we need good and creative and risky poetry which draws upon the understanding of God’s Creation which is developing in its empirical aspects. Physics and mathematics, history and some fields of philosophy, literary studies and the practical fields of engineering and management are doing fine. At the same time, few are working on a way to restate the truths of Christian revelation so that they can be understood in the context of God’s Creation as we now know it. We simply haven’t produced much in the way of theology or even spiritual guidance for those many modern souls who are ‘lost in the Cosmos’. And we’ve also not produced much poetry or narrative fiction that really deals with the modern realities.
Poetry, hymn-writing, muscial composition both sacred and secular, and all the other arts, need to be part of a living human culture. We need to keep alive that which we’ve inherited from the past but we need our own literature and music which is part of a greater culture along with our modern knowledge of mathematics, our deep and often disturbing knowledge of history, our knowledge of man’s bodily nature, our knowledge of matter and energy and fields at their most fundamental level. Our poetry and music, along with our metaphysics, has not yet grappled with what might be called the universe of Einstein and, until they do, they won’t be able to grapple honestly with that more important matter of God’s purposes for this universe, purposes which turn a universe into a world, a morally well-ordered narrative of sorts. And this last claim remains true even for those who know well the ‘final’ answers as well as man can know them — from the life and words of Jesus Christ. Knowing the purpose of a temple doesn’t solve all your problems if you don’t understand its construction well enough to repair it was time wears it away.
Until we have theologians and metaphysicians and poets novelists who can speak of the realities of evolution and genes within the context of God’s moral order, we’ll have no chance of understanding Creation in Christian terms. Let’s continue to read and study the poetry of Romanus and St. Ephrem, but let’s pray for a modern Christian poet who can speak of man as we now know him, an evolved creature of genes and proteins who lives in a world where matter and energy are well-described by such fields of knowledge as quantum electrodynamics.