An Idiom for Mystery
Dana Gioia’s Christianity & Poetry
Brought to us in this expanded edition by Wiseblood Books,
Christianity & Poetry is the work of American poet Dana Gioia
– it was published in 2024.
The work of Dana Gioia has become a mainstay among the literary branch of that crowd Flannery O’Connor—with a little cheek, and we hope a little affection—might have called “Cathlick innerleckshuls”. Gioia’s 2013 First Things essay ‘The Catholic Writer Today’ has formed the kernel of a concerted effort to breathe new life into an overt Catholic literary tradition, and his frankness about the need for a restoration of the standards of artistry within the world of sacred and faith-related art have given air to the cries of many. His recent work ‘Christianity & Poetry’—which also made its debut in First Things but has now been published in an expanded edition as a part of Wiseblood Books’ Essays on Contemporary Culture Series—continues the theme in the realm of devotional and liturgical language.
The cry of Christianity & Poetry is a plangent one—and it is not just the cry of the poet. While the Catholic aesthetic may have seen a genuine growth away from the potential for mass-produced kitsch that threatened at the turn of the twentieth century, after decades of inconsistent, sometimes jarring implementation of the priorities of the Second Vatican Council, it has also suffered a deeply felt erosion of its artistic integrity and its capacity for awakening wonder, especially in the West. This affects not only those inclined to the beautiful and artistic, but everyone seeking to enter into the fullness of the Catholic faith and a profound encounter with God in His Church. In a recent address on the Jubilee of the Oriental Churches, our new Holy Father Pope Leo XIV recognized this erosion, particularly in the Latin West and urged that “[w]e have great need to recover the sense of mystery that remains alive in [Eastern rite] liturgies, liturgies that engage the human person in his or her entirety, that sing of the beauty of salvation and evoke a sense of wonder at how God’s majesty embraces our human frailty!”[1]
Gioia makes the same point in Christianity & Poetry, though he looks beyond the liturgy to the entire Christian linguistic landscape and draws from the profound riches of her Scriptural tradition as the seedbed and foundation of his plea. Further, he makes this plea from a different footing. He appeals not only to the need for a greater subjective experience of the faith, but for our language to pay proper homage to the very majesty of God and the primacy of Christ. As he pithily notes, “[t]he Incarnation deserves an ode, not an email”.[2]
Here we see the two interwoven strands of language at work—an objective expression of God’s Glory attempting to communicate Him to others so that He can become a part of their subjective experience. The importance of how we communicate, then, becomes apparent: if we are unable to give voice in due justice to His Majesty, we can damage the ability of others to properly encounter Him. We need a proper language, a suitable idiom, to enable us to do this well, and Gioia argues that poetry is an irradicable part of this idiom. Deeper than that, he argues that poetry is already an organic part of the Christian tradition that cannot be excised without bleeding, like trying to remove the left ventricle of the heart to make room for the right. To begin to understand this, it helps to take a closer look at the nature of words themselves.
In his De Trinitate, Saint Augustine delves deeply into this question through his theological exploration of Christ as the Word of God. He identifies Christ as the perfect expression of the Father’s understanding of Himself, a conception so alive that He is another Divine Person, consubstantial with the Father from all eternity. Augustine points out that man is made in God’s image and, in an analogous way, able to form such internal conceptions (Augustine refers to them as inner ‘words’), and give voice to them through language so that they can be perceived and understood by others. This is what it means to communicate.[3]
Now, because of our human and linguistic limitations, it often happens that what we can communicate is only a shadow of an original idea. Who hasn’t found themselves stumbling to find the words to express something profound, or beautiful? Who hasn’t experienced the real sadness, the real pain, of a failure to do so, and the disconnect we feel in our relationships when we do not feel fully understood? In her novel To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf puts this disappointing reality in the mind of her painter, Lily Briscoe, and finds “the passage from conception to work” (or from idea to expression) as frightening as any trip “down a dark passage for a child”.[4]
When it comes to talking about God, then, we have our work cut out for us, and we have tackled this problem with two key tools. Theology as a discipline aims to communicate with clarity. Its focus is the understanding of particular and discernible truths about God. As such, it makes use of language that is precise, simple and direct. Poetry has a different aim. Rather than attempting simply to clarify, it attempts to evoke and thereby reveal something in a way that appeals to more than man’s pure intellectual capacity. Poetry aims at experience, and with regards to God, attempts to get at something that cannot be communicated piecemeal with perfectly lucid statements, however effective.
Saint Thomas Aquinas identifies the gap that poetry can fill in a complete human understanding of reality, especially in the understanding of God. Following after Dionysus the Areopagite, Saint Thomas submits to the limits of theology—God, in His Infinite Greatness, is not able to be contained or explained according to finite language or thought.[5] Thus, for Saint Thomas, while we can say certain things about God, we can only really express aspects of His nature without expressing the whole, and certainly not in one sitting!
This is why we say God is a ‘mystery’, and why Gioia states that poetry is a necessary player in forming a proper idiom for this mystery—a way to properly speak about God.
As we said above, poetry uses symbols, rhythm, and sound to communicate God’s reality, because it evokes that reality as a holistic picture rather than the small pieces we need for comprehension and clarity. This, in conjunction with what we can understand about God, gives us a richer, fuller account of His reality that appeals to our entire human nature. As such, we can enter into a kind of encounter with God’s reality that brings about not only a partial understanding of some aspect of His nature, but the beginning of a real face-to-face interaction with Him.
In a post-Enlightenment West that has systematically detached itself from this encounter—either through a philosophical skepticism about the existence of any objective reality, or a tendency toward a puritanical rationalism that casts doubt on anything but pure and absolute intellectual clarity—we are starved for it. This hunger is apparent after even the most cursory glance at the culture and the radical lengths to which it is willing to go to feel anything at all—true or false. Poetry, rightly ordered, has the capacity to feed this hunger and direct it toward that which it really craves, which is always God, the absolute Reality.
There is a problem, however, and this is where Christianity & Poetry leans toward an optimism that rings against a stark background. The same detachment that has caused this hunger has also dramatically altered the pattern of our cultural way of thinking. Owing to the pathways of rational thought that have encased and formed the West for two hundred years, the ability to receive what poetry has to offer is limited in the extreme. We see two trends—either the contempt for poetry that ignores it, or the reactionary hunger that abandons the Reality that poetry seeks to express and feeds on a cycle of untethered self-expression, which places little emphasis on communicating any objective Truth and focuses instead on sharing ungrounded and rapidly altering emotional impulses. It is one thing to argue that man needs poetry, but another altogether to properly lay the groundwork for preparing him to receive it.
To the average person (including the average Christian), poetry is not a language at all, in that it communicates very little. Gioia argues that, as human beings, “[w]e are drawn to beauty, not logic. Our experience of the divine is not primarily intellectual. We feel it with our bodies. We picture it in our imaginations. We hear it as a voice inside us. We are grateful for an explanation, but we crave inspiration, communion, rapture, epiphany.” Certainly, but the belief that these heights can be attained through a “Great Awakening” in Christian poetry is one that places a faith in that medium that must be matched by a concerted effort not only to write luminescent verse, but to properly equip those who will read it. Language is made to incarnate, yes, but it is also made to convey—and if the receiver is not set to receive, it cannot convey anything at all.
A poetic idiom may bear the mystery of God, but very few are still from the neighborhood that naturally speaks in it. Thus, the language of poetry must be taught once more to the point that it becomes co-natural to us, embedded in our beings, in order that it may resonate with all these good things, and not only resonate, but communicate what is real. True poetry must be sacramental, in that it should lead us on from itself and further into the life of sanctifying grace, which is none other than a deeper union with Our Father. Otherwise, we run the risk of idolizing the aesthetic because it merely presents the feeling of the real, without communicating it.
What then? Do we abandon the Poetry Project? The crassness of that term ought to reveal the utilitarian problem with such a question. It is not a project. Certainly we should not abandon poetic expression, and Gioia’s argument that writing good poetry is a necessary first step in the great awakening he desires is sound. Truly good poetry should awaken something in the heart regardless of how “cultured” one is. If it is working properly, it will begin this work. That said, if we do not adequately cultivate the seed-ground, great poetry will be missed by hearts that are not prepared for it.
For those who are interested in the artistic life of the Church and its engagement with the culture, Christianity & Poetry is not only a shot across the bow, but a shot to the arm full of thoughts that need thinking. The ideas only surfacing in this review are given the air they need to breathe, and the solutions that Gioia proposes for giving life back to this medium within Christianity should be read, considered, and re-read to grapple with the depth of his proposals. Further, his work on the influence of Christian poetry within the wider poetic world is a timely reminder that Christian realities are potent realities, and the world is in keen need of them. For those interested in growing their own ability to participate in the gift of poetic expression within the Church, to be fed by the riches Gioia alludes to, we highly recommend having a look at the other poetic works available at Wiseblood Books, which has made some real strides in the cultivation that Gioia so compellingly encourages.
[1] Address of the Holy Father Leo XIV to Participants in the Jubilee of Oriental Churches, Wednesday, 14 May 2025.
[2] Dana Gioia, Christianity & Poetry
[3] Saint Augustine, De Trinitate, Book XV, ch. 10, par. 19.
[4] Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 27.
[5] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-I, Q. 12.
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