In my last post I outlined some scriptural support for theological beauty and I highlighted the necessity of adopting a specifically Christian conception of beauty that can reconcile “the father of lights” and the transfiguration with the ugliness of the cross and the humility of Christ. In Part Two I want to consider Allen Tate’s incarnational poetics.
Who was Allen Tate?
Allen Tate (1899-1979) was a poet and literary critic from Kentucky. He went to Vanderbilt University, where he met Robert Penn Warren. He was a member of the Fugitive Poets with John Crow Ransom, and is most often labelled a Southern Agrarian, along with Caroline Gordon, his sometime wife, and the previous two, Warren and Ransom. Wendell Berry is considered a contemporary descendant of this literary movement.
What were Allen Tate’s views on Aesthetics?
I’ll make Balthazar proud and first assert that Tate’s Catholicism is the most important facet of his aesthetic theory. Of the Southern Fugitives in general, Francesca Murphy writes: “The history of the ‘earth’ of the South became the archetypal image through which the Fugitives perceived the transcendentals. This earth acts on its inhabitants as a concrete given: a fence, and a boundary for the imagination, as well as a means of transcendence. To imagine it is to be drawn into a dense, singular fact” (Christ the Form of Beauty 70). For Tate, the particulars of a location are as important to the theological view as the universal. In fact, the particulars are the door through which the universal may be encountered. Siding with T.S. Eliot, as a voice of conservative modernism, Tate et al were ticked off at the Scopes Monkey trial, and though they didn’t hold to literal 7 day creation, they thought there was more at stake. I see them envisioning this trial as an influx of northern liberalism on a political level, which took the right to free thought, as a right to conquest. The trial represented “colonial” aggression from the north that was about to wipe away what they saw as the sin of tradition. To Tate, tradition represented something else: the memory of a history of encounters with a place, with particulars. Tradition in this sense is a house of the memory of interaction with God. To scrap tradition and move on with the modernity of the northern eastern seaboard was not an option. Somewhere during the debates about civil rights and racism in the 60s, we have lost the secondary argument, that liberalism has a way of undermining local particularities while it extends the rule of individual rights and “equality”.
Tate would call this impulse “The Angelic Imagination”, in an essay of that title, bearing the secondary clause: “Poe as God”. The distinctive mark of this imagination is that it: “Surges toward essences without touching upon the mater in which they are enclosed... Poe’s disembodied mind is said to parallel that of the Cartesian dualism. Poe’s imagination is an absolute: it flies directly up into beauty, without crossing the material world” (Murphy 95)
In Tate’s words:
“The reach of our imaginative enlargement is no longer than the ladder of analogy, at the top of which we may see all…that we have brought up with us from the bottom where lies the sensible world. If we take nothing with us to the top but our emptied, angelic intellects, we shall see nothing when we get there. Poe as God sits silent in darkness. Here the movement of tragedy is reversed: there is no action” (Murphy 96).
In Poe, Tate sees Descartes. In Tate we should see Jacques Maritain. In Maritain we should see Aquinas and Dante (not to mention Beatrice). Back to Poe: Tate’s problem: like Descartes, the angelic imagination “ends in solipsism” (96). Where Descartes’ skepticism lead him to doubt the very existence of the world, Poe’s angelic imagination does away with the world so as to live in thought. Descartes’ had a crisis; whereas Poe’s nationals see an economic opportunity. To quote David Bowie ( but it's Kurt Cobain I hear): “You’re face to face, with the man who sold the world”. The second stanza highlights the predicament that Tate feared:
I laughed and shook his hand,
I made my way back home,
I searched for form and land,
Years and years I roamed,
I gazed a gazely stare,
We walked a million hills -- I must have died alone,
A long long time ago.
The death of the world, the real, leads to the death of the self. What is the fix? Murphy leads us to Dante and Beatrice: “The radiance which shines through this feminine figure (Beatrice) gives its beholder a sense of reality, but only when the witness binds themselves to this one, single form” (97).
The theory of being-in-the-world that pre-figures much of this conception is decidedly anti-cartesian, anti-Kantian, pro-Thomistic. For Maritain, we engage the world through the intellect. We see a flower. Our mind forms a phantasm or an image of that flower. Our illuminative intellect then activates the phantasm and the intellect-in-act encounters the phantasm of the flower-in-act, revealing a glimpse of the essence, or form of the flower (for more on this see Maritain’s Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, p. 70-74, or Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, q. 84). Catherine Pickstock calls this process “hylomorphism” : “the form of the thing is already synthesized before it ‘informs’ the mind (even though the active intellect must bring out its full coherence)... the thing fulfills itself in and through its comprehensibility. Such a view regards the knowing of a thing as commensurate with the known thing’s own constitutive repetition. For when the species is formed in our mind, the thing perceived happens again (since being is an event), or repeats itself, though in a different mode” (After Writing 131). What all of these thinkers are defending is the convertability of knowledge to being and to beauty. One will notice that using the post-modern variants of Kantian representation, beauty becomes disengaged with reality, the real, God. Beauty is purely cultural, and not the penetration of God in culture, the incarnation. Tate and others were attempting to preserve the Thomistic tradition of essence, participation and analogy, which, as we all know, is assailed from all sides.
In Part three of Theological Aesthetics I will consider Karl Barth's contention that Beauty is not a front running concept of God.
