Introduction. 

In Wounded by Love: The Life and Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios, the Eastern Orthodox Christian elder proclaims: 

For a person to become a Christian he must have a poetic soul. He must become a poet. Christ does not wish insensitive souls in His company. A Christian, albeit only when he loves, is a poet and lives amid poetry. Poetic hearts embrace love and sense it deeply. (WBL, 218). 

The purpose of this essay is to consider how a Christian can find meaning, purpose, and inspiration in attaining the cultivated sensibility of a poet. By a poet, I mean a creative individual who is attuned to the relationality, ambiguity, and complexity of existence, as well as receptive to excessive, intensive, and indeterminate forces of sense and experience active within the world. 

The discussion is divided into three parts: 

1. Using the work of A.N. Whitehead and Martin Heidegger, the first segment will examine the desacralizing influence of science and technology on how Creation is perceived by human beings. 

2. The second section will provide an overview of Martin Heidegger, William Blake, Nicholas Berdyaev, and John Dewey in their relationship to aesthetic creativity with the intent to find inspiration. 

3. To conclude, the third segment will seek to provide a solution by proposing a vision of the cosmos which is attuned and receptive to the process of aesthetic creativity. 

The Order of Things: A.N Whitehead on the Origin and Development of Materialism and Modern Science. 

On September 8th, 1920, before the Empire Club of Canada, journalist and spiritualist, Ellis T. Powell delivered an address entitled: Scientific Imperialism, in which he made the following statement: 

(W)hat I mean by a Scientific Imperialism, the domination of the natural forces of this earth-.and God alone knows how powerful they are, how tremendous they are-into subjection to the mind of man, and consequently into the furtherance of his highest destiny. (ECCS, p290–303) 

The problem with the hegemonic paradigm of scientific imperialism is not what it has provided humanity, but what it has failed to address. There are deep and enduring spiritual repercussions that cannot be dismissed by mere vaunting of material and technological advancement. 

Opposed to this triumphalism, the mathematician-turned-philosopher, A.N. Whitehead, proposed that if humanity is to make real progress in its assumptions about the world, it must constantly reassess and renew the ground and content of enquiry. As he stated in Adventures in Ideas: “Our reasonings grasp at straws and our premises float on gossamers for deductions” (AI, p72). Whitehead preached a respect for the limitations of human knowledge and reasoning, the necessity for constant vigilance in comprehension and formulation, and an abiding fidelity to the continuity between the human being and the world it which it thinks, feels, and acts. 

In Science in the Modern World, A.N. Whitehead dedicated the first two chapters to “the antecedent conditions which prepared the soil for the scientific outburst of the seventeenth century” (SMW, p39). He attributed this outburst to three major contributing factors, “the rise of mathematics, the instinctive belief in a detailed order of nature, and the unbridled rationalism of the thought of the later Middle Ages” (Ibid). Of the three factors it is the instinctive belief in a detailed order of nature that he finds must crucial. This is because “there can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive faith in the existence of an Order of Things, and in particular, of an Order of Things” (SMW, p4). 

According to Whitehead, this faith in order is predicated upon a fidelity to the regularity of the tides and seasons. Humans are ostensibly creatures of habit, existing at the juncture between nature and nurture, instinct and learning. Habitual developments are intrinsic to the mutability of organic life, of which human beings are the peak of adaptability, dynamism, and responsiveness. As Whitehead poetically observes: 

Men expected the sun to rise, but the wind bloweth were it listeth…Accordingly the practical philosophy of mankind has been to expect the broad recurrence, and to accept the details emanating from the inscrutable womb of things beyond the ken of rationality” (SMW, p5) 

Despite the very real and inherent existence of contingency, unpredictability, arbitrariness, irrationality, and inscrutability within Creation, humanity has the uncanny ability to seek and find “an order of things which extends to every detail” (Ibid). 

From this, Whitehead lists a series of six developments which contributed to the pioneering of materialistic philosophy and modern science: 

1. The pure mathematics and numerology of Pythagoras and the belief in a structured rational harmony underlying apparent contingency (SMW, p19–20). 

2. The empirical method of Aristotle and deduction from general principles (SMW, p5&12). 

3. The positing of a prime mover or ordering entity by Plato which ensures law and consistency (SMW, p11). 

4. The principle of least length or action by Maupertuis, which was derived from the notion that an entity or being existing in time must achieve some form of providential perfectability (SNW, p61) 

5. The deductive reasoning applied dogmatically by Simplisticus and its empirical correction by Galileo (SMW, p8). 

6. The notion of the Ionian School that there is a primordial and self-sufficient material or substance underlying reality (CN, p19). 

It is these advancements which paved the way for Galileo and Newton, who Whitehead describes in his Essays in Science and Philosophy as the “parents of modern science…Galileo was the Julius Caesar and Newton the Augustus Caesar of the empire of science” (ESP, p178). 

It was Galileo who upheld the uniformity of the material universe, dispelling the myth that the various regions of nature and reality could function and interact in different manners. For example, that heavenly bodies acted in a manner distinct from mundane entities, and that each element acted according to its own supposed nature. Meanwhile, Newton asserted that minds, bodies, durations of time, and places where physical things; posited the immutability of space and time; and demolished the notion of final causes. What remained of Creation was an absolute and neutral space of activity populated by enduring and isolated bits of matter interacting in absolute and immediate avenues of time. 

Whitehead was troubled that this billiard-ball universe had denuded the cosmos of all beauty, value, sense, and purpose. Nature had become “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly” (SMW, p54). Aesthetic valuation was reduced to the status of irrelevant illusions, with art “treated as a frivolity” (SMW, p196) among the advanced industrialised nations. Ethics was dismissed as subjective affair, characterised by a “creed of competitive business morality…entirely devoid of consideration for the value of human life” (SMW, p203). Finally, God was deprived of tenderness, patience, and goodness; relegated to the “frigid title of the First Cause, and was appropriately worshipped in white-washed churches” (AI, p123). 

Flight of the Gods: Heidegger on Enframing. 

It is this same undermining of the integrity of nature by the technoscientific weltanschauung that prompted Martin Heidegger to provide the following dirge in What are Poets For?, as part of Poetry, Language, Thought: 

Night is falling. Not only have the gods and god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. (PLT, p89) 

Deprived of divine inspiration from the likes of Apollo, Dionysus, Pan, and Christ, the world has descended into a night of nihilism under the hegemony of scientific imperialism. However, Heidegger was not against science and technology per se. For, as he states in The Question Concerning Technology: 

What is dangerous is not technology. Technology is not demonic; but its essence is mysterious. The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger. The transformed meaning of the word “enframing” will perhaps become somewhat more familiar to us now if we think enframing in the sense of destining and danger. (HBW, p232) 

As far as he was concerned, the issue is the valorisation of technological enframing (Gestell) above and beyond all other modes of revealing and disclosure. As Heidegger even admits, “Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic” (HBW, p222). A pertinent example of technological enframing is alluded to above with Plato’s positing in Timaeus (28a) of a demiourgos, or divine crafsman, who rationally, purposively, and beneficently imposes mathematical uniformity on the primordial chaos to order the cosmos. By interpreting divine agency in this manner, notions of design, measurement, manufacture, utility, and domination are subliminally imputed into modes of thinking about existence. 

Enframing is problematic because it “conceals a former way of revealing… conceals revealing itself…Enframing blocks the shining-forth and holding sway of truth” (HBW, p232). Enframing imposes immediate and utilitarian demands upon beings and entities, stifling the organic process of their disclosure and reducing them to the status of Bestand (standing-reserve) (HBW, p225). It is a mode of being directed towards extraction, storage, transformation, and distribution. It is not so much a bringing-forth, but a forcing-out. 

The Merits of Building: Martin Heidegger on Poetic Dwelling. 

The desacralizing effects of scientific imperialism are problematic for the aspiring Christian poet who is called, in the words of His All Holiness, Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople: 

(T)o accept the world as a sacrament of communion, as a way of sharing with God and our neighbours on a global scale. It is our humble conviction that the divine and the human meet in the slightest detail in the seamless garment of God’s creation, in the last speck of dust of our planet. 
(Global Responsibility and Ecological Sustainability, June 2012) 

In “…Poetically Man Dwells…”, included in Poetry, Language, Thought, Martin Heidegger offered a vision of what it means to inhabit a sacramental cosmos when he asserted that “Poetic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building” (PLT, p213). Furthermore, “Man not only cultivates what produces growth out of itself; he also builds in the sense of aedificare, by erecting things that cannot come into being and subsist by growing” (PLT, p215). In other words, an essential aspect of human existence is the act of creation. 

However, there is a danger here, as such creativity can be pursued as a means towards an end rather than as an end in itself. Or, as Heidegger observes, “Merits due to this building, however, can never fill out the nature of dwelling. On the contrary, they even deny dwelling its own nature when they are pursued and acquired purely for their own sake” (PLT, p215). This is to say that the meaning of dwelling should not be interpreted merely as building alone. Indeed, as Heidegger notes, “Building in the sense of the farmer’s cultivation of growing things, and of the erecting of edifices and works and the production of tools, is already a consequence of the nature of dwelling, but it is not its ground, let alone its grounding.” (PLT, p215). 

Dwelling is a more primordial than building, it denotes an embeddedness of an embodied subject within a lived environment. Human creativity then, is not creation out of nothing, but a process of producing and sharing norms, meanings, and values. Beyond the sheer toil of manual labour in search of merit there is a great endeavour of measuring. This is because “Man, as a man, has always measured himself against something heavenly” (PLT, p218). As a mortal and embodied being existing within the spatial and temporal medium of Creation, the human being is always measuring against its creator, seeking to create value, exercise purpose, and intensify experience. 

The Eternal Spheres of Visionary Life: William Blake and Transcendental Immanence. 

In Shelly’s Alastor, or, The Spirit of Solitude, we find a poignant example of what it is to dwell in a technoscientific wasteland interpreted purely as building. Addressing a swan on the purpose of consciousness, the poet laments: 

And what am I that I should linger here, 
With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, 
Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned 
To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers 
In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven 
That echoes not my thoughts? (S-MW, 285–290,p100) 

The existential angst experienced by the Shelley exemplifies a subject disenchanted by a world where the possibility of transcendence, of measuring, has been curtailed by the reductive materialism of techne. 

Enter William Blake. For him, transcendence was included with the very notion of selfhood. He railed against the propositions of Lockean empiricism which held that a subject’s psychic life was merely an epiphenomenon of the really existing material world, utterly discounting the value of perception and imagination. 

Blake identified an ontological wound within the human subject that was sourced in the false dichotomy between mind and body, subject and object. Like A.N. Whitehead and Martin Heidegger after him, Blake would trace this primordial injury back to the dawn of Western Civilization itself. We see this in his repeated use of the term, six thousand years, signalling his estimated beginning of the Fall. However, much of his ire was directed at the New Science of empiricism, popular in his day, that assumed nature and humanity as finished subjects and final realities. In Milton, Blake invokes the reader “To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering,” whose “Science of Despair…is to destroy the wisdom of ages to gratify ravenous Envy” (WBCP, M, B2, P41, p604). 

For Blake, empiricism reduced the self to a passive spectator in the drama of existence, reacting to impressions received from the external world. At the opening of Vala, or The Four Zoas, Tharmas, the potency of unitive bodily sensation makes the following lament: 

Sometimes I think thou art a flower expanding 
Sometimes I think thou art a fruit breaking from its bud 
In dreadful dolor & pain & I am like an atom 
A Nothing left in darkness yet I am an identity 
I wish & feel & weep & groan Ah terrible terrible 
(WBCP, VFZ, P4, p276) 

Through Tharmas, Blake demonstrates the contradiction of the empiricist position by having the primordial being bemoan the insignificance of the self while simultaneously displaying a complex interior life wracked by existential angst at such a reality. 

In Milton, the eponymous poet returns from the afterlife to correct his errors, only to realise that the fulfilment of his vocation requires the annihilation or overcoming of the self. By proffering the False Religion of personal immortality and salvation, wily Satan has encouraged selfishness within humanity. Indeed, Blake found the notion of an authentic self and personal immortality rather egotistical. 

Instead, Blake held that each individualised self was compressed manifestation of an impersonal and transcendent unity. This is what has been referred to various heterodoxic Christian contexts as the Pleroma, the fullness of being, or totality of divine power. The self is but a node or focal point of a greater consciousness. As Blake explains succinctly in Jerusalem: 

What is Above is Within, for every-thing is Eternity is translucent: 
The Circumference is Within: Without, is formed the Selfish Centre 
And the Circumference still expands going forward to Eternity. 
(WBCP, J, CH3, P71, p784) 

Therefore, the task of the poet is: 

To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes 
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity 
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination 
(WBCP, J, CH1, P5, p640) 

While the Human Imagination is singular, the Worlds of Thought are plural. There is a single font of imagination from which the individual human mind draws and contributes. At all times, the prophetic and poetic minds dwells in the Milton’s “Eternal Spheres of Visionary Life” (WBCP, M, B2, P34, p590). This is because: 

(F)or Cities 
Are Men, fathers of multitudes, and Rivers & Mountains 
Are also Men; every thing is Human, mighty! Sublime! 
In every bosom the Universe expands, as wings 
(WBCP, J, CH2, P34, p700) 

In visionary power, the rift between subject and object is sutured. Rather than a regressing to a purer and more primordial state prior to the corruptive socialisation process, prophetic potential is forged in the very process of living. The achievement of a mature soul, visionary prophetic power comes through self-exploration and self-transformation, the recasting of the self in a new mould. As Blake explains in Milton: 

Judge then of thy Own Self: thy Eternal Lineaments explore 
What is Eternal & what Changeable? & what Annihilable: 
The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself 
(WBCP, M, B2, P32, p585–586) 

Rather than dying an Eternal Death by living in fear or anticipation of future immortality and salvation, Blake invokes the aspiring prophetic poet to dwell immanently with Creation by embracing and ascending to the Eternal Now. Only by dwelling immanently within the world can it paradoxically be transcendent. 

The Ecstasy of the Moment: Berdyaev and the Creative Act. 

In The Beginning and the End, Nicholas Berdyaev stated that: 

There is a metaphysical inequality among human beings in accordance with their individual gifts, and it goes with the preservation and support of personality and the worth of every living creature, of all the children of God. It recognizes an equality of the unequal. (BE, p225) 

For him, the individual person is sacred: not part of the whole but containing the whole. Like Heidegger and Blake, Berdyaev recognised that the human being is not an atomised entity, but a relational subject embedded within a lived environment of which it is equal part producer and product. An essential attribute of the personality is creativity, for “the personality is the realisation within the natural individual of his idea, of the divine purpose concerning him” (SS, p162). 

Berdyaev uses the terms personality and spirit almost synonymously, identifying it with the values of freedom and creativity rather than being. This is because “Spirit is not being, but the existent, that which exists and possesses true existence, and it is not subject to determination by any being at all. Spirit is not a principle, but personality, in other words the highest form of existence” (BE, p102). Furthermore, “Personality is spirit, free spirit, and the link between man and God. It is a link of man with God which is outside objectivization, and outside the false submergence of man in his own closed circle. Through it is revealed infinity and eternity and authentic beauty” (SF, p246). Spirit is something found in other values such as creativity, freedom, justice, and love, that is, the existential structure of subjectivity rather than the objective scaffolding of the world. In short, “the nature of spirit is Heraclitic and not Parmenidean. Spirit is fire and energy” (FS, p15). 

It is through the work of humanity in its creative endeavours that God is revealed and disclosed in the world. In The Destiny of Man, Berdyaev asserted that: 

From the ethical point of view the essential human striving is not for happiness any more than for submission and obedience, but the striving for quality, self-development and self-realisation, even if it brings suffering and not happiness and be achieved through revolt and rebellion. Man is free being called to creativeness…Man does not exist apart from the divine element in him, noy symbolically but really divine. (DM, p82) 

Furthermore, as Berdyaev explains in the Meaning of the Creative Act, “creativity is inseparable from freedom. Only he who is free creatives…creativity is born of liberty” (MCA, p144). This is freedom is not the political variety where certain rights are guaranteed, but a mysterious and terrible existential freedom concerned with creation meaning, purpose and value in the dynamic acts of thinking, feeling, acting within the world. It is also an eschatological activity of transcendental immanence seeking to move outward towards the future as a horizon of possibility and upward towards God as the source of creativity. As Berdyaev explains in Slavery and Freedom: 

Creativeness is liberation from slavery. Man is free when finds himself in a state of creativity. Creativity leads to ecstasy of the moment. The products of creativeness are within time, but the creative act itself lies outside of time. (SF, p253) 

Like Breathing: John Dewey on Art as Experience. 

For John Dewey, like all good pragmatists, art and life are about experience. Existence itself is an event. However, Dewey defines biological life as a cyclical movement of alienation and reconstitution, epitomised by rhythmical tension that permits growth and development. As he explains: 

Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it — either through effort or by some happy chance. And, in a growing life, the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed. If the gap between the organism and environment is too wide, the creature dies. If its activity is not enhanced by temporary alienation, it merely subsists. Life grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives. (AAE, p12–13) 

Furthermore, experience is characterised dialectical exchange affecting and being affected, of doing and undergoing. It is to act and bear the consequences of such as action. Indeed, as Dewey affirms in The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy: 

Undergoing, however, is never mere passivity. The most patient patient is more than a receptor. He is also an agent — a reactor, one trying to experiments, one concerned with undergoing in a way which may influence what is still to happen. Sheer endurance, side-stepping evasions are, after all, ways of treating the environment with a view to what such treatment will accomplish. Even if we shut ourselves up in the most claim-like fashion, we are doing something; our passivity is an active attitude not an extinction of response. Just as there is no assertive action, no aggressive attack upon things as they are, which is all action, so there is no undergoing which is not on our part also a going on and a going through. (EDV1, p49) 

In other words, a living organism engages adaptively, dynamically, and responsively with its lived environment to create a functional and perceptual relationship of meaning, reference, and significance. This dialectical relationship is one of autonomous dependence in which the organism is equally a product and producer of the environment due to an intrinsic need for ensuring its existential and material fruition and sustenance. An organism becomes an individual to the extent that it produces a functional and perceptual relationship of meaning, reference, and significance its interaction with the environment upon which it is structurally dependent for its existential and material needs, wants, concerns, and desires 

Though living beings are continuously undergoing experiences, affecting and being affected, often these experiences are inchoate (AAE, p36). That is to say, they occur and unfold without the passionate involvement of a responsive subject actively extracting meaning, value, purpose, or relationality from them. 

By contrast, active engagement with an integral experience can be distinguished by three primary elements. 

1. “Experiencing like breathing is a rhythm of intakings and outgivings” (AAE, p58). That is, integral experiences are enacted from the dialectical interaction of a responsive subject with its lived environment. 

2. An integral experience is defined by the extraction of meaning, value, and purpose from the event or happening, as well as relating and connecting it to other such experiences. Mobilizing an analogy used by William James, Dewey states that the “flights and perchings” of an active experience are “intimately connected” (AAE, p58). 

3. An integral experience possesses an internal dynamic which discloses some truth about how the responsive subject interacts with its lived environment. Only then can the “energies active in it” be seen to “have done their proper work” (AAE, p42). 

There are various reasons an aesthetic experience may come not to full fruition or consummation. Dewey provides the following list: 

The enemies of the (a)esthetic are neither the practical nor the intellectual. They are the humdrum; slackness or loose ends; submission to convention in practice and intellectual procedure. Rigid abstinence, coerced submission, tightness on one side and dissipation, incoherence and aimless indulgence on the other, are deviation in opposite directions from the unity of an experience. (AAE, p42) 

In short, there are three discernible enemies of experiential consummation. These are as follows: 

1. While all experiences possess structural intensity, or hushed reverberations, a dull, boorish, or uncultivated subjectivity can stifle them in the cradle. 

2. Similarly, experience can be absconded by the asphyxiating force of habit where the activity of a conscious subject is dictated by routine and procedure. 

3. If a conscious subject is unable associate between experiences, then the prospect of extracting meaning, purpose, and value from future events or happenings is attenuated. 

Take Delight in all Things: Inhabiting the Sacramental Cosmos.

All things considered; several conclusions can be drawn about how a Christian can dwell poetically within Creation. 

Returning to St. Porphyrios in Wounded by Love, the elder gives the following advice on approaching the sacrament of Creation: 

Take delight in all things that surround us. All things teach us and lead us to God. All things are little are droplets of the love of God — both things animate and inanimate, the plants and the animals, the birds and the mountains, the seas and the sunset and the starry sky. (WBL, p218) 

Mediating on this notion, certain metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality can be revised. 

There should be a cosmological shift away from the ontological foundations of materialism and idealism towards a dynamic universe of experience, concern, and feeling. This includes an emphasis on events, occurrences, and becoming over substance, stability, and being. Rather than enduring bits of matter, the ultimate constituents of reality are instead discrete and finite droplets of God’s love which function as the carriers of innovation, manifestation, modification, and variation within Creation. 

God is not a distant and dispassionate spectator of an accidental universe, nor a despotic and vindictive tyrant. Rather, God is a tender patient parent to His Creation, informing persuasively through His providential love, will, and desire. As voluntary and sacrificial act on behalf of God to extend the communion in love of the Holy Trinity, Creation can be seen a spatial and temporal medium for the creation of value, exercise of purpose, and intensification of experience. 

In short, the following two statements can be made about God and Creation: 

This asserting can be summed-up concisely in the following statements: 

1. While God is eternal, He is never still. The Holy Trinity is the mutual communion in love between the three divine persons who are at once and the same time expressions of a pure movement of divine repetition, forever moving in a dynamic relation from potentiality into actuality. 

2. The inherent goodness of Creation lies not in its actuality, but its potentiality. Not in its being, but its becoming. 

Inhabiting this sacramental cosmos is the human being which operates as an active and hierarchically structured multiplicity of interacting and overlapping levels of anatomic organisation. It engages adaptively, dynamically, and responsively with its lived environment to create a functional and perceptual relationship of meaning, reference, and significance. 

This dialectical relationship is one of autonomous dependence in which the organism is equally a product and producer of the environment due to an intrinsic need for ensuring its existential and material fruition and sustenance. An organism becomes an individual to the extent that it produces a functional and perceptual relationship of meaning, reference, and significance its interaction with the environment upon which it is structurally dependent for its existential and material needs, wants, concerns, and desires. 

To this extent, the human being can be described as an embodied subject. This is to say that its functional and perceptual activity precedes and anticipates its conceptual and volitional activity. In short, functional and perceptual activity precedes and anticipates conceptual and volitional activity. 

Consciousness is not a transcendental property standing outside of experience, officiating, and organising its content, but a function enacted with experience itself. Consciousness is less a substance and more a dynamic process composed from a communion of mind, body, and world through which an embodied subject interacts with its environment. Consciousness is a microstructural process enacted and operative with the wider macrostructural dynamic of mind, body, and world in communion. 

There is a primal and irreducible affectivity between the embodied subject and its environment. This perceptual reality is an indeterminate actuality which evades the artificial and sanitised impositions of the conceptual and volitional faculties. Simply put, the structure and content of consciousness is predicated upon the nature of its embeddedness within a given environment. At the same time, however, the structure and content of consciousness informs the way the environment is presented and disclosed to consciousness. 

Experience is the dynamic interaction, extended in time, between consciousness and the environment. Just as the mind is not an isolated shadow theatre of impressions and ideas, neither is the world a desert of dead things and objects. Consciousness is a dynamic process reciprocally imbued by, and imbuing, the animate and meaningful universe in which it is embedded. Conceptual and volitional consciousness emerges from the primordial pre-reflexive activity of the body through its interaction with the environment. 

It is through the sensorimotor system that the body performs its role in the world competently, acknowledging and interacting with its environment in an adaptive, dynamic, and responsive manner. Through these attuned responses, perception and sensorimotor activity are cohered into a dynamic interaction of embodied consciousness and the environment. Just as perception is not a passive recipient of sensations, neither is sensorimotor activity merely mechanical reaction. Sensorimotor knowledge precedes cognitive knowledge. Experience is not a force acting upon the embodied subject, but an activity the embodied subject undertakes within the concrete flux of reality. To abstract consciousness from its sensorimotor embodiment and worldly embeddedness is to castrate its virility and confuse its nature. 

Through its practical engagement with the world, the embodied subject regularly becomes functionally integrated with the beings, entities, and things within a given environment to the extent that they become phenomenologically transparent, dissolving the subject-object dichotomy. Everyday life for the subject is a ceaseless encounter with objects for certain purposes: cars for travel, phones for communication, combs for styling, hammers for fixing and repairs, and so on. The subject’s relationship to these objects is not forged in detached theoretical observation, but through adaptive, dynamic, and responsive interaction. 

To be an embodied subject is also to be embedded within a lived environment, as self are world are mutually constituting. The lived environment that sustains and determines embodied activity is equally informed and maintained by such sensorimotor dynamism. The dynamic communion of the body’s primordial adaptive intelligence is ground of all human action and creativity, determining the totality of structural and functional relations. In short, the dynamic communion as embodied activity can be described as world-forming. This is to say that the human hypostasis is not a fixed being in relation to other beings and entities but is relationality itself. To be is to act. 

The creative output of embodied human activity: art, architecture, music, music, literature, poetry, etc., are the products of a reciprocal relationship between the embodied human hypostasis and its lived environment, combining subjectivity and objectivity. The world acts upon the subject just as much as the subject acts upon the world. 

The art of life involves a dynamism of volition and expression which is attuned to the vicissitudes of existence, an aptitude for knowing how to remember and when to forget. The human being should not be a prison to the past, nor absorbed in the present, but primed for the future. Human evolution is qualitatively different from natural evolution. Not only is it a matter of biological and environmental pressures, but of psychological self-interpretation and critical understanding. Humanity is not only merely engaged in the struggle for survival but also implicated in a struggle to understand both itself and life by transforming its inequalities and sufferings into strengths that permit the cultivation of individuality and self-actualisation. 

As creatures in possession of behavioural and cognitive traits such as abstract thinking, linguistic communication, symbolic representation, forward planning, concern for the future, and technological innovation, humans stand over and above the animal kingdom, though very much a part of it. In this sense, they are a recapitulation of the natural world. Not simply a product of it, but also capable of changing and augmenting it to suit their wants, desires, and needs. 

While flora and fauna persevere in their being as individuals within an environment, human beings reproduce themselves as living characters symbolically and technologically without being restricted in their interactivity through pure sensation of impelled reaction. Instead, they display a form of consciousness defined by an intentionality that is equipped to synthesize and conceptualize sense impressions by relating them through experience and imagination to project, express, and identify itself prospectively, socially, and materially within Creation. 

Human beings are ostensibly creatures of habit, existing at the juncture between nature and nurture, instinct, and learning. Habitual developments are intrinsic to the mutability of organic life, of which human beings are the peak of adaptability, dynamism, and responsiveness. The tectonics of habit are formed by modifications in nervous pathways. New currents can either cut new channels to the brain’s nerve centres or follow old ones. Over time and through age, a tendency towards the latter becomes predominant. 

Habit accounts for much of human subconscious activity, liberating the mind to focus on other interests and pursuits. In the process of conceptualization, habit is also active in the association of ideas. As impressions are constantly being synthesized into new constellations of ideas, habit can assist by simplifying the process by introducing considerations from experience. While this is helpful in the quotidian circumstances of everyday life, it can be detrimental to the imagination in the long-term, with a reliance on repetition and suggestion producing dry and prosaic mindedness. 

True wit and genius come from analogy and correspondence when habitual routine is ruptured by a novel, yet often subtle, trajectory of connection is made between hitherto unrecognised forms of association between experiences. Often, these new associations challenge and disrupt existing assumptions and paradigms, producing a fundamental reorientation of concepts and practises. 

When Christ issued the Great Commandment (Matthew 22:35–40, Mark 12:28–34, and Luke 10:27), He was highlighting that ascent upon the vertical axis of the Cross to God is predicated upon extension along the horizonal axis of Creation. His demand was for humanity to be perceptively and affectively attentive to the difference and inequality present in Creation as a sacramental medium of becoming. True wisdom (Sophia) in this case, is the cultivation of a concerned attentiveness which is aesthetically receptive to the relationality, ambiguity, and complexity of the world and existence, as well as morally authentic and pragmatic in its compassion and empathy. 

In its aesthetic creativity, the human being as an embodied subject can choose to represent the depth of relationality in which it enveloped, or to express the intensities of sense by which it is immersed. Either way, it is imperative upon the Christian as a poet in a sacramental universe to ensure the Day of Judgement is feast of creativity rather than a harvest of woe. 

Two Primary Aesthetic Dispositions: The Elaboration of Depth and the Expression of Intensity

There are two primary aesthetic dispositions which the aspiring Christian poet can adopt: 

1. The elaboration of depth, associated with a monastic concern for the relationality and interconnectivity of Creation. This mode of aesthetic creativity is involved with exploring the temporal and spatial rhythms enveloping the embodied subject. It endeavours to disclose the primordial dimensions and dynamic movements that give Creation its voluptuousness of meaning and significance. In short, it is an attempt to lay total claim to being through an emotional attunement to the existential tenor of time and space. It is to recognise that the embodied subject is irrevocably immersed within a confluence of complimentary and conflicting rhythms of movement pervading the depths of existence. As a poetic gesture, the elaboration of depth is dedicated to penetrating to interplay of tensions underlying the world and investing perceptually in their emotional animation. It is receptive to the resonance of time and inquisitive to the extremity of space, speaking for the vitality of Creation by representing its different and contrasting registers. It is to feel the encroachment of other beings and entities, to realise that even stillness has a voice, and that even the most stable object is exuberant with waves of expression. 

2. The expression of intensity, affiliated with holy foolishness and the desire to communicate the hidden sensual intensity of the sacramental cosmos. This orientation is defined by a declaration of faith in life and a receptivity to the violence of sensation laying siege to the body. Behind seemingly fixed and stable entities are seething intensities of sense which anticipate their incarnation into organised forms. Rather than perversion, this aesthetic orientation is motivated by pity and empathy for the being or entity which is subjected to excessive and unbearable forces of becoming. To this extent, the expression of intensity is inclined towards combat and struggle, forever striving to bring the ideal and abstract into concrete actuality. It is not concerned with the past or present but committed to summoning forth a universal future through the realisation of impersonal forces. By engaging with potencies of isolation, deformation, dissipation, expansion, contraction, conjunction, and disjunction, the holy fool aspires to unleash the vital power of transformation and new possibilities for becoming in the world. 

Conclusion

In the Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, the author writes to ‘A’ that “the artist dreams no dreams. That is precisely what he does not do, as you very well know. Every dream is an obstruction to his work” (HB, p216). This supplemented in the next letter to Elizabeth Fenwick Way, when O’ Connor states: “Strangle that word dreams. You don’t dream up a form and put truth in it. The truth creates its own form. Form is necessity in the work of art” (Ibid, p218, her emphasis).

Similarly, in his biography of St. Thomas Aquinas, G.K. Chesterton writes:

That strangeness of things, which is the light in all poetry, and indeed in all art, is really connected with their otherness; or what is called their objectivity. What is subjective must be stale; it is exactly what is objective that is in this imaginative manner strange. In this the great contemplative is the complete contrast of the false contemplative, the mystic who looks only into his own soul, the selfish artist who shrinks from the world and lives only in his own mind. According to St. Thomas, the mind acts freely of itself, but its freedom exactly consists in finding a way out to liberty and the light of day; to reality and the land of the living. In the subjectivist, the pressure of the world forces the imagination inwards. In the Thomist, the energy of the mind forces the imagination outwards, but because the images it seeks are real things. All their romance and glamour, so to speak, lies in the fact that they are real things; things not to be found by staring inwards at the mind. The flower is a vision because it is not only a vision. Or, if you will, it is a vision because it is not a dream. (STA, p182-83, his emphasis)

Both the elaboration of depth and expression of intensity speak to a form of metaphysical realism in a primal desire to unlock the strange powers contained with Creation. To dream, in O’Connor’s sense, is to cheat the primal desire for otherness but appropriating and possessing the things of the world through intellectual domination in violent enframing – the dream is a beastly machine of instrumental mastery over nature. The aim of the poet then, is to give access to the real by freeing the world of objects from human appropriation through a recognition and enjoyment of them – a celebration of being in otherness. In applying these two dispositions, it is not to create an other, but to become an other – to let otherness speak through the human tongue in all its strangeness.

In The Correspondence of William James, the thinker writes to a friend:

Poets may be laughed at for being useless, impractical people. But suppose the author of the “psalm of Life” [Henry Wadsworth Longfellow], had attempted to invent steam engines, (for which I suppose he has no genius) in the hope of being useful, how much time would he have wasted and how much would we have lost! But no, he did better, he followed his taste, and redeemed his life, by writing the “Psalm” which is as useful a production as any I know. (C, V4, p489)

In this poem, A Psalm of Life, the aforementioned Longfellow exclaims in the opening:

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Then in ending, he makes clear:

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

The poem urges that life is real and that personal action can have consequence. This can be linked to William Wordsworth’s The Excursion with its invocation that:

For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these [natural
phenomena]
A simple produce of the common day.
…My voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted: – and how exquisitely, too –
Theme this but little heard of among men –
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish: – this is our high argument.
(PW, lines 52-71)

Furthermore:

…I exult,
Casting reserve away, exult to see
An intellectual mastery exercised
O’er the blind elements; a purpose given,
A perseverance fed; almost a soul
Imparted – to brute matter.
…Science then
Shall be a precious visitant; and then,
And only then, be worthy of her name:
For then her heart shall kindle; her dull eye,
Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang
Chained to its object in brute slavery;
But taught with patient interest to watch
The processes of things…[it shall] serve the cause
Of order and distinctness
(PW, lines 199-1259)

What Wordsworth articulates here is that the human mind, in engaging the world through its creative force and an attuned disposition, participates in the disclosure of order, distinctness, and even moral significance within the world by understanding its relational processes. Reality is precisely the marriage between the human mind and Creation, not as empty dreaming but through embodied interaction that is adaptive, dynamic, and responsive. 

The elaboration of depth and expression of intensity are exactly what Wordsworth speaks of when he rhymes about:

Authentic tidings of invisible things;
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power;
And central peace, subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation.
(PW, lines 1144-1147)

To be a Christian poet then, is not just to feel the possibilityof invisible things, but also to appreciate the central peace that comes with believing this very possibility. It is, as St. Porphyrios tell us, to embrace love and sense it deeply.

Sources and References

~(WBL) Wounded by Love: The Life and Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios (Denise Harvey, 2005) edited by the Sisters of the Holy Convent of Chrysopigi. 

~(ECCS) The Empire Club of Canada Speeches 1920 (Toronto, Canada: The Empire Club of Canada, 1921, p290–303) by Ellis T. Powell . 

~(AI) Adventures in Ideas (The Free Press, 1967) by A.N. Whitehead. 

~(SMW) Science and the Modern World (The Free Press, 1967) by A.N. Whitehead. 

~(ESP) Essays in Science and Philosophy (Rider, 1948) by A.N. Whitehead. 

~(CN) The Concept of Nature (Dover, 2004) by A.N. Whitehead. 

~(PLT)Poetry, Language, Thought (Perennial Classics, 1971) by Martin Heidegger. 

~(HBW) Heidegger: Basic Writings (Routledge Classics, 2010) by Martin Heidegger. 

~(S-MW) Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works (Oxford World Classics, 2009). 

~(WBCP) William Blake: The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics, 1977). 

~(BE) The Beginning and the End (Harper Torchbook, 1957) by Nicholas Berdyaev. 

~(SS) Solitude and Society (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938) by Nicholas Berdyaev. 

~(SF) Slavery and Freedom (Semantron Press, 2009) by Nicholas Berdyaev. 

~(FS) Freedom and the Spirit (Semantron Press, 2009) by Nicholas Berdyaev. 

~(DM) The Destiny of Man (Semantron Press, 2009) by Nicholas Berdyaev. 

~(MCA) The Meaning of the Creative Act (Semantron, 2009) by Nicholas Berdyaev. 

~(AAE) Art as Experience (Penguin, 1980) by John Dewey. 

~(EDV1) The Essential Dewey: Volume One — Pragmatism, Education, Democracy (IUP, 1988) by John Dewey. 

~(HB) The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979), edited by Sally Fitzgerald.

~ (STA) St. Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox” (Doubleday, 1956) by G.K. Chesterton.

~ (C) The Correspondence of William James, 12 volumes, (UVP, 1992-2004), edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley.

~ (PW) The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth: Volume 5 (Macmillan & Co., 1896), edited by William Knight.