A Cup on a Table in the Shadow of the Infinite: On the Incarnational Possibilities of Poetry

A Poetic Extension

The poet Marie Howe has published four collections of poetry, each of which has addressed questions of spirituality in their own unique manner. Her first—The Good Thief—was selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series. Atwood noted that Howe’s “poems of obsession . . . transcend their own dark roots.” ⁷ Her brother John died a year after the publication of that text from an AIDS-related illness, and Howe was the first to name the impact of that experience on her writing: “John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic completely.” ⁸ Her second collection, What the Living Do, was an extended elegy to John. In it, Howe stripped her language to the bone, slashing through any and all metaphor for the sake of making the life and loss of her bother as transparent as possible. ⁹ Her 2008 collection—The Kingdom of Ordinary Time—extended her usage of spiritual and metaphysical imagery. But it’s not as though Howe means to eschew meaning beyond what’s immediately available or seen in ordinary objects. As Spencer Reece has noted, the poetry “was dedicated to what Gerard Manley Hopkins called ‘this-ness.’ Describing things just as they are, before this becomes that.” ¹⁰ Howe herself said as much in an interview in the fall of 1997: “poetry carries the truth of ‘is-ness.’” ¹¹

Howe’s 2017 collection Magdalene imagines the Biblical figure of Mary Magdalene within our contemporary moment. Magdalene features a wide-ranging number of poems, many of which are voiced from the perspective of the mysterious Magdalene herself. Some are set in Biblical times, but many others function as a contemporary re-telling of the figure. Reece writes, “The ‘she’ of the poems is contemporary and it is historical and everything in between: the ‘she’ blurs.” ¹² Howe’s Magdalene transposes the woman into the contemporary landscape and somehow manages to leverage the figure’s spirituality and sensuality onto our contemporary world. Whether she’s hailing a cab, raising children, listening to the news, or reflecting on The Teacher, Magdalene “is a woman striving to be the subject of her own life, fully human and alive to the sacred in the mortal world.” ¹³

While any number of the poems in this collection could be used to illustrate the poetic re-deployment and expansion of Biblically revealed images, I will in this section pay special attention to Howe’s “The Teacher.” As Andrew Cunning recently noted, the poem is helpfully representative of Howe’s most-addressed themes: “the possibilities and limits of perception, the role of the perceived and the difficulties of cultivating pure presence.” ¹⁴ Howe writes,

When Moses pleaded, and Yaweh agreed at last to let the people

hear His Voice,

it’s said that he allowed each person to hear what each could bear

to the very brim of that and no more.

Afterwards the people said, Please Moses, from now on you listen.

We don’t want to hear it. You do the talking and listening now.

Being with the teacher was a little like that

as though he were a book too difficult to read.

So, I thought I had to become more than I was, more than I’d been.

but that wasn’t it. It seemed rather that

something had to go. Something had to be let go of.

It wasn’t that I saw something new – or saw suddenly into him.

not that, not ever

but that the room itself, whatever room we might be standing in,

assumed an astonishing clarity:

and the things in the room: a table, a cup, a meowing cat.

Here, like in so many of her other poems, Howe is dealing with questions and limits of perception. As Cunning puts it, “Perception is always made possible by that which limits it.” In his telling, Howe wants to remind readers that seeing requires a perspective (which is to say a limited location) and a seer. ¹⁵

The poem is thematically dived into two parts. The first half of the poem draws on Hebrew Scriptures—specifically the people’s response to God’s giving of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20. As the Biblical text tells us, “When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance.” ¹⁶ In Howe’s telling, “it’s said that he allowed each person to hear what each could bear / to the very brim of that and no more.” ¹⁷ Then the people insist that Moses has God speak to himself out of fear of their own death. As Howe puts it, “Afterwards the people said, Please Moses, from now on you listen. / We don’t want to hear it. You do the talking and the listening now.” ¹⁸

The poem shifts in the latter half to similar themes in the New Testament, subtly positioning The Teacher as the second Moses. The reader hears the voice of (a? the?) Magdalene reflecting on her encounter with the Teacher as she notes that “Being with the teacher was a little like that / as though he were a book too difficult to read.” ¹⁹ Howe is toying here with the excessive meaning of the Word made flesh, possibly even alluding to the mysterious ending of the Gospel of John: “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (Jn 21.25). As Cunning helpfully explains, “Seeing must be untethered from the urge to know fully and finally, and the teacher confounds any approach to perception founded on control and mastery.” ²⁰ We do, after all, see in a mirror dimly for the time being.

The poem seems to ask how one might step into that infinite meaning. And the poet proceeds to lay out a few options by way of Magdalene’s self-reflection. First, she thought, “I had to become more than I was, more than I’d been. / but that wasn’t it.” ²¹ Then “Something had to be let go of.” ²² And the letting go seems to refer to Magdalene’s desire to see and know clearly, along with her awareness of the connection between her own disposition and her ability to see clearly. As Thomas Aquinas so clearly stated, the issue is not so much with God’s ability to be seen as it is with the creature’s capacity for seeing such things.

In the wake of that letting go, Magdalene tells us that “that the room itself, whatever room we might be standing in, assumed an astonishing clarity: / and the things in the room: a table, a cup, a meowing cat.” ²³ The encounter with the Teacher transfigures, as it were, the ordinary. As Cunning tells it, “If Jesus cannot be seen, it is nevertheless in the afterglow of encounter with him that perception itself is transfigured.” ²⁴ When read in this vein, the sacramental and Eucharistic overtones of the poem’s ending are hard to miss: a chalice and a cat atop an altar. Indeed, the poem’s final conclusion seems to position to the final mundane thing in sacramental terms through its seeming reference to Eucharist and the altar of God. At least part of what must be let go of is the full, final grasp of the infinite meaning of the Teacher; in true Howe fashion, the poem suggests that the best way into that excess is through the everyday. In the letting go, Magdalene is able to see both the potential transformation of the Eucharistic elements and the creaturely beauty of animality all at once.

What’s most essential to notice, for the sake of the argument at hand, is the way in which Howe is playing with Biblical imagery. In Reece’s telling, “something from the Bible is getting rewritten here, re-addressed, which feels akin to the Jewish tradition of Midrash where the Torah is alive and flexible.” ²⁵ For Howe, Biblical imagery is indeed alive and flexible.

As we will see in turning to Austin Farrer’s theology of revelation, everyday objects take on special meaning and functions when received in the light of the divine.

Austin Farrer and Revelatory Images

At the outset of his 1948 Bampton lectures, Austin Farrer names the primary theme of his investigation: the doctrine of revelation, which he defines as “the form of divine truth in the human mind.” ²⁶ He sets out to theorize divine revelation by attending to three inter-related topics: Scripture, metaphysics, and poetry. Farrer was a published, professorial authority on the first two, and poetry remained throughout his adult life a consistent interest. Farrer interestingly thinks that when these three modes of discourse “rub together” they “kindle” one another. ²⁷

Drawing on the Thomistic tradition of grace and elevated natures, Farrer takes up the question of revelation by examining the human mind rather than turning first to the Scriptural texts. Those texts are surely, he thinks, revelatory, but they are revelatory in and through the images and metaphors deployed by their authors. ²⁸

Much of the groundwork of Farrer’s theology of revelation is straightforwardly Thomistic. He believes that the imago dei is grounded in the human’s rational capacity; he argues that God has enabled humans to know certain truths of God apart from direct divine self-disclosure; and he believes God sometimes (by way of grace, which is curiously muted in the lectures) expands the capacities of the human mind in order “to know and love the supreme and causeless Act, the pure and endless Being, the saving Charity.” ²⁹ He thus speaks of the natural capacities of the human and the super-natural capacities in which the human is enabled to function—by God—beyond its natural limits. Farrer refers to this super-rational activity as above the “luminous apex” of the mind. ³⁰ This super-natural act of reason—which in its natural state includes imagination, wit, and secular inspiration—is uniquely human and extra-human all at once. That is, the act is continuous with the thinker’s capacity while also exceeding that thinker’s natural capacities, and it is simultaneously that thinker’s very act of thinking. ³¹

This all matters to Farrer in that it is the process through which the revelation of the Scriptures occurred. As such, he believes, it should impact how we read and understand those Scriptures. One must remember, after all, that Farrer was steadfastly interested in a theoretical justification for lectio divina. ³² Farrer is clearly trying to thread a needle of sorts between adherents to verbal inspiration (whose souls he believes were genuinely nourished by their devotion to the Scriptures) and enlightenment liberals (whose rigorous scholarship “opened the scripture casket” only to discover “there appears now to be nothing inside”). ³³ Against these trends, Farrer sets out to develop a doctrine of Scripture that sets up readers to discover “the life-giving inspired word, and make the proper use of it when we have found it.” ³⁴ Revelation is not propositional; it is not event-based or grounded in the event of our response to reading; none of these approaches satisfies Farrer’s interests. Christ himself is the primary revelation, but the key, Farrer claims, lies in the spiritually supernaturalized (i.e., by the Spirit) apostolic church:

If the biblical books had not been taken to express the apostolic mind, they would not have been canonized: and we shall rightly suppose that the dominant images of the New Testament were the common property of the teaching Church. ³⁵

The apostolic community is key in that we do not have unfettered access to the sayings of Christ himself; they are only ever transposed in and through the Spirit’s revelation to the Apostles: “Christ both performed the primary action and gave the primary interpretation; the apostles, supernatralised by the Spirit of Pentecost, worked out both the saving action and the revealing interpretation of Christ.” ³⁶

It is crucial to note, however, that Farrer phrases this revelatory process in communal, historical terms by grounding the enterprise in “the work of the mystical Christ, who embraces both head and members.” ³⁷ This matters in that Farrer argues that the Apostolic community’s interpretive work

must be understood as participation in the mind of Christ, through the Holy Ghost: they are the members, upon whom inflows the Head. As the ministerial action of Christ is extended in the Apostolic Mission, so the expressed thought of Christ is extended in the apostolic teaching. ³⁸

Also crucial to note here is that Farrer argues this teaching is primarily set forth in the form of images (visual, verbal, and literary alike, in David Brown’s telling). ³⁹ The images are not themselves the whole of Christ’s teaching, but “they set forth the supernatural mystery which is the heart of the teaching.” ⁴⁰ In the end, the interplay between spiritual instruction and these great images is revelation. ⁴¹

This means that the process, inaugurated by and grounded in Jesus Christ, continues working in the Spirit-filled life of the early Christian community who produced the New Testament. Farrer writes,

As the divine action continues to unfold its character in the descent of the Spirit, in the apostolic mission, and in the mystical fellowship, so the images given by Christ continue to unfold in the apostolic mind, in such fashion as to reveal the nature of the supernatural existence of the apostolic church. ⁴²

This is why Farrer can claim that “the stuff of inspiration is living images.” ⁴³

But what do these revelatory images have to do with the natural knowledge we began with? Farrer begins assembling an answer to this question by speaking metaphorically of the “shadow of the infinite.” He writes,

Perhaps our awareness of the infinite Act depends on the materials for a shadow of him presented by finite existence: perhaps that sheerly given metaphysical mystery with which rational theology wrestles is the shadow of the Infinite in finite being. ⁴⁴

Indeed, our cognitive reception of the infinite Act within time-space depends on material things as a shadow of that infinitude. In the classical Augustinian and Thomistic sense, God is always already present; the issue is our perception of God’s presence, of our mind’s ability to apprehend the infinite that is “more intimate to me than I am myself.” ⁴⁵ In Farrer’s telling, the mind that deals with a finite object “as a shadow of the infinite” is placed between two presences: the infinite and finite, aware of both in one instance by symbolizing the infinite in terms of the finite, all of which enables one to see “the finite in the infinite and the infinite in the finite.” ⁴⁶

This is a point worth belaboring. Farrer clarifies that these are special cases. He is thinking of the one who “takes a finite thing as a symbol of the infinite in the process of thinking about the finite thing.” Put differently, this person, in their symbolizing process, “will take the form of a thinking about the finite under the light of the infinite, not a thinking about the infinite through its expression in the finite.” This is a thinking primarily about natural things (rather than God). ⁴⁷ Farrer even maintains it is possible for one to be symbolizing in the shadow of the infinite and be wholly unaware of both that process and the nature of the infinite God itself.

Mystical as that process might sound, Farrer wants to categorize it as a kind of natural knowledge: “the knowledge of existence at our own level, including the knowledge that it is existence of a secondary or dependent kind.” ⁴⁸ And so this natural knowledge (often taking the form of “natural images”) can be distinguished from revealed images in that they are naturally occurring and spontaneous. They don’t come to us as divine messages. But revealed images, he insists, are “authoritatively communicated.” Farrer writes,

The stars may seem to speak of a maker, the moral sense of a law-giver: but there is no pattern of being we simply meet, which speaks of Trinity in the Godhead or the efficacy of the Sacraments, but they are the product of faith already accorded to a revelation already received: they are not just there, like moral reason or the Milky Way. ⁴⁹

Revealed images are assembled from the content of the Scriptures and “draw their symbolic significance from that story.” ⁵⁰

This matters in that Farrer’s eventual treatment of poetry and prophecy follows similar lines of distinction. While both poetry and prophecy depend on linguistic arrangement, creative deployment of imagery, and have much to teach listeners, Farrer insists that poetry tasks as its object “the texture of human existence.” ⁵¹ Poetry, we can safely say, falls within the category of “natural imagery” in that it is constructed by the human agent in natural terms. Prophecy, on the other hand, is revelatory in that the prophet is a mere mouthpiece for the Word of God. ⁵² Poetry, according to Farrer, can teach and inform, but it is not revelatory. There is no supernatural action occurring, and so the content of the poetry is presumably riddled with that which can be known and determined apart from supernatural revelation.

Let’s return, for a moment, to our poem in question. Howe’s positioning of the everyday—a table, a cup, and a cat—seems to render poetically what Farrer was trying to theorize about everyday things “in the shadow of the infinite.” Remember Farrer’s answer to the question of how finite things foster the experience of the infinite in the mind of the creature: “Only in one way that I can conceive: in getting themselves taken by the mind as an embodied discourse about God, as symbols or shadows of God.” ⁵³ In “The Teacher,” Howe positions everyday, finite objects as symbols of the infinite “in the process of thinking about the finite thing.” Put differently, the poem has taken “the form of a thinking about the finite under the light of the infinite, not a thinking about the infinite through its expression in the finite.” This is a thinking primarily about natural things (rather than God, even if they are certainly related to God in Magdalene), even if such an enterprise never crossed Howe’s mind or intention. ⁵⁴

Such a claim, I believe, squares cleanly with Farrer’s own treatment of poetry and natural knowledge discussed previously. But I intend to push past Farrer’s own treatment of poetry in order to claim that Howe’s redeployment of the Biblically revealed images is itself part and parcel of the process of revelation and the incarnation alike. In order to articulate precisely what I mean by “redeployment of Biblically revealed images,” I now turn to David Brown.

David Brown, the Subconscious, and Poetry’s Revelatory Possibilities

In his 1990 essay “God and Symbolic Action,” which was republished in a recent critical edition of Farrer’s The Glass of Vision along with five other essays of commentary, David Brown sets out to characterize and defend what he calls “progressive revelation.” After nuancing what he hopes to hold onto in an interventionist model of revelation, Brown goes on to claim that Farrer’s distinction between poetic images and revelatory (or prophetic) images is under-developed. In light of that under-developed distinction, he argues that “we need more complex story than that.” ⁵⁵ Brown is most interested in problematizing Farrer’s claim that revelation occurs at the apex of the reasoning mind. He points out specific passages in which Farrer insists that neither revelation nor creative action occur in the “bottom of the mind”—that is, the subconscious. With this in mind, Brown sets out to explore “the role of images and symbols in our sub-conscious and unconscious to argue that something like what Farrer suggested might after all be right.” ⁵⁶

After characterizing and defending progressive revelation, Brown argues that the idea implies the possibility

of God communicating in the context of an existing canon of assumptions, as it were—which the community of faith believes itself to have reached in relation to God and which in consequence conditions what the believer is led to understand by whatever God says to him. ⁵⁷

And so Brown turns his attention to natural symbols, arguing that “revelation is a dialogue that develops in terms of their elaboration and refinement.” ⁵⁸

One of the fascinating payoffs of such a definition, Brown clearly tells us, is that it provides us with a model of dialogue wherein the human agent need not always register and acknowledge God’s dialogical action. Put differently, God can speak in and through the subconscious of a human agent without the human agent registering God’s presence or action at all. ⁵⁹ On this possibility, Brown writes,

This is important because it makes it a medium through which God can act upon us, without destroying our freedom in the process. For in speaking thus [God] speaks without us being fully or even at all aware of who it is at work, addressing us. The crucial decision thus becomes clearly ours and not God’s, in the sense that what finally matters in determining whether the dialogue continues to develop is whether we choose to bring these images to conscious awareness so that they can be creatively used and communicated to others. ⁶⁰

Revelation can conceivably operate in and through the creative transformation of symbols in our subconscious over time. ⁶¹ But this need not force all other types of revelation (i.e., divine intervention, divine interaction, etc.) out the window. Brown holds on to those possibilities and even names his preferred four tests with which to determine what ought to be classed as revelatory experience: “the character of the recipient, the unexpectedness of its challenge to our existing perspectives, its congruity with other such experiences,” and whether or not classifying it as something besides revelation would denigrate the content in question. ⁶²

If Brown is correct about the revelatory capacity of transformed signs in the subconscious, then Farrer’s distinction between natural images (i.e., poetry) and revealed images (i.e., in the minds of the apostles, which lead to Scripture) cannot hold in a time-bound manner. Take, for example, the way so many post-apostolic poets have drawn on and deployed revealed images from the Scriptures in their poetry. It should come as no real surprise that Biblical images operate in artists’ subconscious minds. To the extent, then, that poetry deploys and builds on previously revealed images, it is emerging not merely from “the natural mind” as much as “the natural mind in the wake of receiving revealed images.” The revelatory content is at work in the subconscious of the post-apostolic poet and so might emerge into the poetry itself. The poetry, then, can be made according to the super-naturally revealed Biblical images, taking its own symbolic structure from those stories and thereby making its poetic claims Biblically significant. This is strangely a natural phenomenon of human thinking and creating which depends on (former) super-naturally charged cognitive acts.

The images, after all, have already been revealed; we do not need super-charged acts of cognition to make use of them. Those supernatural images can now be naturally deployed. One must remember Thomas Aquinas’s point: the content of divine self-disclosure is not itself irrational. Thomas’s point, rather, was that they were non-irrational insights that could not be initially discovered by way of rational activity alone. And they have not been—they were given to us in the Scriptures by way of the apostolic witness. And so now we can make use of those insights in natural ways. Put differently, the goods have been crafted, and they’re simply lying on the table, ready for the poet’s use and re-deployment.

Consider the now-infamous way that Radiohead’s front-man Thom Yorke wrote the lyrics for the band’s Grammy-winning 2001 album Kid A. In an interview shortly after the album’s release, when Yorke was questioned about the cohesion of the lyrics, he said,

I have a different relationship with the lyrics this time around. To me, it’s like looking at things on a shelf . . . no, that’s not right. They’re more like shattered bits of mirror than anything else, like pieces of something broken. I don’t have any attachment to it other than . . . well, it made sense to me when it was there at the time, and when we play it, it makes sense.

And when questioned about some of the violent imagery in the album’s lyrics, Yorke explained,

That came out of top hats. I blame the top hats. I had all these fragments that I couldn’t do anything with, which is why I cut them up and put them in a top hat, and pulled them out when I was desperate. That’s pretty much true of all the album’s lyrics, except maybe “How To Disappear.” ⁶³

Yorke’s process of lyrical composition illustrates what I mean when I speak of “poetic redeployment.” Scripture’s revelatory images have been produced and transmitted. They are materials metaphorically that have been thrown into the proverbial top hat. And the poet who reaches in, grabs a few images, and then shuffles them around into new shapes and conglomerations is making something new out of the old materials. Just like Yorke’s old phrases took on new meaning when they were re-deployed, so too do the Biblical images when the poet re-works them.

This mode of poetic expression is quite different than what Farrer envisions with his non-revelatory “natural images.” The use of the revelatory content in new interrogative, interpretive ways can itself shed new light on the images. In and through the natural, creative, cognitive acts of the poet, new interpretive layers can be disclosed regarding these revelatory images on the condition that they disclose some new thing in and through the redeployment. Or, drawing on the newly revealed insights, new images can become possible if, following Brown’s work, they are actually consistent with the body of recognized revelatory materials that precede them. And so post-apostolic poetry, I am arguing, can be revelatory whenever it re-deploys Scripture’s revelatory images.

Poetry as Incarnation

I have been arguing that post-apostolic poetry which re-deploys Scripture’s revelatory images is revelatory. In this final section, I aim to demonstrate that it is not, however, merely revelatory. Drawing on Paul DeHart’s semiotics of the incarnation, I will here argue that in addition to being revelatory, such poetry ought to be considered a constitutive element of the process of Christ’s incarnation. Such an insight has significant implications regarding the Church’s engagement with the dynamics of culture and cultural production.

In Unspeakable Cults, DeHart addresses the problem

that an orthodox or catholic theology of the incarnation or hypostatic union (granting absolute significance to a discrete event or set of events centering on Jesus of Nazareth) appears to clash with historical consciousness (for which all temporal events are essentially finite and relative). ⁶⁴

That is, DeHart interrogates the contemporary church’s unquestioned assumption of the New Testament’s historicity. But he’s also not interested in another historical-critical takedown; rather, he works to synthesize a creed-affirming, high, and Chalcedonian Christology with the most intensive and critical claims out of the historical-critical school. In his own telling, he’s not trying to smooth out the tensions between these two schools of thought as much as he is “arranging them to crash into each other.” ⁶⁵

The secret to modeling sustainable path between these two seemingly opposed fields of thought, he argues, is semiosis. As he explains, “semiosis is a promising master-image or model for understanding the metaphysics of the incarnation, and . . . such a model helps address the problem” of the supposed tension between creedal Christology and modern historical consciousness. ⁶⁶ More specifically, semiosis enables DeHart to take up the mechanics of language. It places the tools of “signs” and “representation” firmly in his tool bag. Semiosis enables DeHart to interrogate the ways that interpretation is inextricably bound up with all modes of communication, which has significant implications for both our reception of the New Testament witness and the incarnation alike.

DeHart ends up arguing that the interpretive work of the Church community—wherein they continue attempting to make sense of the infinite, excessive meaning of the Word in history—is itself part of the process of God’s incarnation. This all matters for the issue at hand in that I’m drawing on DeHart’s semiotic read of the community’s ongoing interpretive endeavors in order to lay the theoretical groundwork for my own constructive (though clearly related) claim: the poetic re-deployment of revelatory images is itself part of the revelation process. Hence, my claim that post-apostolic poetry is itself a key component in the church’s continued reception of God’s revelation.

In order to drive the point home, let’s consider both Farrer’s treatment of supernatural revelation through images before examining one of those images in particular. As Farrer tells it, the thought of Christ himself was expressed in dominant images, one of which is his appropriation of the Biblical type “Son of Man.” It is these images that “set for the supernatural mystery which is the heart of the teaching. . . . It is because the spiritual instruction is related to the great images, that it becomes revealed truth.” He continues, “The great images interpreted the events of Christ’s ministry, death, and resurrection. . . . And the events interpreted the images; they interplay of the two is revelation.” ⁶⁷ And as Robert MacSwain notes in his introduction to the critical edition of those Bampton lectures, David Brown had already observed that by “images” Farrer is thinking of verbal and literary images rather than visual imagery. ⁶⁸

As Farrer himself points out, the process initiated with Christ continues with the life of the early church in the Spirit, all of which resulted in the New Testament’s emergence. Farrer explains,

The interplay and event continues in the existence of the apostles. As the divine action continues to unfold its character in the descent of the Spirit, in the apostolic mission, and in the mystical fellowship, so the images given by Christ continue to unfold in the apostolic mind, in such fashion as to reveal the nature of the supernatural existence of the apostolic church. ⁶⁹

Furthermore, he crucially notes that the images do not remain static. Rather, they lived with “inexpressible creative force” in the minds of the apostles, and some even “grew together into fresh unities, opened out in new detail, attracted to themselves and assimilated further image-material.” ⁷⁰ The apostolic community’s interpretive work—guided as it was by the Holy Spirit—must be “understood as participation in the mind of Christ.” ⁷¹ Inspiration, for Farrer, is thus an operation of the Spirited body of Christ in history.

But we ought to ask: does the interpretive process, which I’ve now established is part and parcel of the revelatory process, end with the apostolic community? Or, put differently, did the apostolic community definitively and comprehensively interpret the full meaning of that singular image at the heart of God’s revelation—The Son of Man? The ending(s) of John’s Gospel seem to suggest that the apostolic community believed they were only scratching the surface of the full depth and meaning of that infinite sign:

This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. ⁷²

DeHart tends to agree, which is precisely why his turn to semiotics is so helpful. For DeHart’s purposes, the semiotic revelation of the standard slippages at play in all communication is strikingly relevant for a community seeking to make sense of who and what the Word of God was and is. DeHart is thus interested in the communal, interpretative activity that constitutes Christology. That interpretive activity simply is an irreducible part of the incarnation in his telling. To the extent that God discloses something of God’s self in the incarnation, then “the believing communities and their Spirit-directed labor of understanding are not just a secondary result of the incarnation, but the vehicle of its expression and actualization in history.” ⁷³ The extent to which meaning is made and God is revealed in the incarnation of the Word in time-space depends on a kind of extension of interpretation in history. DeHart is pointing here to the interpretative work, stretched out across time, through which the meaning of that Word comes to be understood. It is crucial, he reminds us, that Jesus’s entry into history was simultaneously an entrance into the field of signs and communication of his particular time-space. But equally important is the infinite nature of this particular Word. DeHart insists that the incarnation is “unspeakable,” which is to say that the meaning of that word forever surpasses the hearer’s understanding. There is an unspeakable surplus of meaning in the Word of God which the community of saints continues interrogating, interpreting, and living into well beyond the confines of Jesus’s incarnation itself. ⁷⁴ With those insights in mind, DeHart is claiming that the Church’s interpretive work in Christological investigation “was inevitably stretched out into a temporal interpretive process through communal cultural activity. His epiphany, so to speak, had to ‘lag behind’ his advent and departure.” ⁷⁵

It is this lagging of the epiphany of Christ that drives DeHart to repeatedly insist that a high Christology (at least developed along these lines) requires a high Pneumatology. Taking seriously that interpretative, historical process while also affirming the Chalcedonian definition requires one have a high view of the Spirit’s role in the historical, interpretive process. It is the Spirit that helps the church make sense of—or make meaning out of—that excessive historic happening. The church simply is a cultic community to the extent that it continues processing that excessive surplus meaning wrapped up in Jesus’s life in the world. The church’s collective worship and ongoing theological investigation is marked by its imperfect “hearing” of the Word which necessarily exceeds our cognitive grasp. The infinite meaning necessarily eludes us this side of the eschaton; for now, we still see through a glass dimly—hence DeHart’s claim that “short of the eschaton the church remains a cult of the unspeakable.” ⁷⁶

So, to summarize, the complex historical happenings (i.e., the cultural psychology of Jesus and the cultic veneration of his divine person) are temporal events formed and directed by God (via the Spirit and Son) in order to project the Spirit and Son into the world. Hence DeHart’s own sense of his project’s fidelity to Chalcedon. If that council insisted that Jesus was fully human and fully divine, this project extends the logic to say that the whole Christ event—the incarnation and subsequent historical reception that continues the incarnation—is fully historical and fully cultural, “precisely as the vehicle of the missions of Son and Spirit.” ⁷⁷ Rendered in this manner, both the cultural dynamics into which the Son entered and the cultic reception were (and continue to be) the “essential conditions” of God’s presence in history. ⁷⁸

In his 1992 examination of Farrer’s revelatory images, Ingolf Dalferth argued that Jesus Christ is surely revelatory in himself, but it is not solely his figure that is revelatory; so too is the Spirit’s disclosure to the apostolic community regarding the meaning of that revelatory Word. Dalferth writes, “God’s self-revelation comprises both Jesus’ self-interpretation and the apostolic interpretation of Jesus’ self-interpretation summarized in the confession ‘Jesus is the Christ.’” ⁷⁹ Key here is that the interpretive part of the process happens by way of the Spirit in the Church:

Just as the Father indwells the Son by his Spirit, opens his eyes to his salvific presence and inspires his complete conformity to his divine love, so the Spirit of the Son indwells the Church as the body of the living Christ, opens our eyes to the truth of the gospel and inspires our conformity to Christ in faith. ⁸⁰

And this is not just the private thoughts of the apostles. Rather, as Farrer stresses, this “must be understood as participation in the mind of Christ, through the Holy Ghost.” ⁸¹

It is thus in the creative play of interpretation over time that the church in history “co-constitutes the full expression of the Word in history.” ⁸² This is what DeHart evocatively calls a “lagging epiphany” wherein the historical work of the church’s interpretation of the surplus meaning of Christ’s entry into history is itself counted as part of the ongoing incarnation. So too with the redeployment of those revelatory images in post-apostolic poetry. Hence my claim that post-apostolic poetry is both revelatory and a constitutive part of the process of Christ’s incarnation. Marie Howe’s “The Teacher” must thus be received by the Church as part of the ongoing, cultic reception of the infinite meaning of Christ’s incarnation. Howe’s particular usage of the images: teacher, table, and cup are themselves distinct from their originary appearance in the New Testament scriptures. But they must be received as part and parcel of those images’ ongoing meaning-making process in and through the Pentecostal life of the Church.

Conclusion

I have been arguing that Marie Howe’s poem “The Teacher” is both revelatory and a constitutive part of the process of Christ’s (ongoing) incarnation. The poem is revelatory and part of the incarnation in and through its re-deployment of the Biblical images that make up revelation, as they were articulated by Austin Farrer. As I tried to make clear at the outset, though, Marie Howe’s poetry is, for all intents and purposes, a test case. It is a singular cultural product through which I could make the argument. But to the extent that my proposals are successful, the categories I am applying to the poem—that it is both (1) revelatory and (2) part of the incarnation—can and should be applied to any cultural good which redeploys Scripture’s revelatory images. To the extent that the above argument is successful, Howe’s poem satisfies those criteria. But we need not believe that I’m pointing to a category of one; the category is, I want to suggest, in conclusion, rather expansive.

It must be stressed, too, that not everything that falls within the category (of cultural goods redeploying revelatory Biblical images) is straightforwardly rosy and comfortable. One need not work too hard to imagine a parishioner’s concern over the claim that Monty Python’s The Life of Brian and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ are both revelatory and part of the process of Christ’s incarnation. But both works of art are re-deploying key revelatory images in constructive ways. They are certainly bound up with the cultural processes that make up the Church’s attempt to reckon with the infinite meaning of Christ’s incarnation, and so (to the extent the argument is sound) it makes good sense to understand these works as interpretive attempts within that lagging epiphany DeHart spoke of.

Such an argument has significant implications regarding the Church’s cultural engagement. Rather than looking for “Christ figures” operative in any given story lines or using cultural goods to “illustrate the gospel,” the Church ought to be both more open and more inquisitive in its cultural engagement, “looking for the resurrection of the dead,” as it were, in all things. That is, if the Church were to believe that a new film or gallery installation might conceptually be counted as a crucial component of the process of Christ’s incarnation, it seems they would approach those cultural goods with curiosity and reverence, hoping the re-worked revelatory images shed some new light on the nature and meaning of the infinite Christ, which is destined to ever-elude our grasp.