Beeson Podcast, Episode 341 David Lyle Jeffrey May 23, 2017 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. Today we have a very special treat for you because I have a conversation coming up with Dr. David Lyle Jeffrey. He is Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities at Baylor University. He's been the provost of Baylor University. He is also Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Ottawa, that's in Canada. He's a native Canadian. He has professorships in Beijing and China. If I did nothing but read his resume, it would take the whole time. I'm not going to do that. David, it is an honor and a pleasure to have you as a guest on the Beeson podcast. D. L. Jeffrey : Thank you. It's an honor and privilege to be able to be in conversation with you anytime. Timothy George: Thank you. I asked David if he would have this conversation with me. We're going to talk in particular about poetry today. There's a reason I wanted to do that with David. He is a world class professor of Christianity and literature, loves poetry, has thought a lot about the whole literary tradition, not only in English but in other languages as well going, I think you're a medievalist, aren't you David by training? D. L. Jeffrey : That's how I started. Timothy George: You know a lot of things but I in particular wanted to focus today on poetry. I'm interested in poetry. I've never written a poem and yet I read poems every day. They nourish my life and I want to learn poetry better. I want to understand it better. Maybe we could just start by asking you to say a little bit about poetry. What is poetry and how can we understand poetry as a Christian vocation? D. L. Jeffrey : I think the best way to understand poetry is to approach it as an analogy to holy language in any genre. That is to say poetry is a speech set apart. It's elevated discourse. It's a kind of language that we only use for special occasions and special contexts. In that sense, it's a little bit like other things that pertain to the worship of the Lord I think in the tabernacle or the temple. They are Kodesh . They're set apart. Poetry by virtue of it's way of speaking, which is very closely imitative of God's way of speaking, is able to open a door to us into understanding that we might not get through prose. By analogy, I should maybe just say that by analogy God's way of speaking, what I mean is that virtually all the way through the prophets, every time God speaks if you can read it in Hebrew, you're reading poetry. Timothy George: Of course, we think of the Psalms in particular as having great poetic quality to them. But not only the Psalms as you say many other portions of scripture really have a poetic form to them and so we're drawn into a kind of elevated language that points us to the divine in ways that I think are not entirely rational. They're not entirely explainable, explicable. What do you think about that? Is there something mystical about poetry? D. L. Jeffrey : I don't know if I would use the word mystical but I certainly would affirm your general thought here. Many things that we want to understand theologically can not be understood entirely through logical discourse or some sort of rational paradigm because they are inherently paradoxical by nature. There are things that simply escape the tidy sense of logic that we have. Let me give you an example. Aristotle says that A is not non A. Something can't be itself and something opposite at the same time. But Jesus says that death may be life. We need obviously more than the regular way we talk to be able to understand what Jesus is saying. It's no accident I think that Jesus is a heavy user of biblical poetry. He quotes more often from the Psalms than any other book and the next most common is Isaiah. It's almost pure poetry. Timothy George: Fascinating. One word that often is used in talking about poetry is metaphor. Another one is simile. Can you say what metaphor and simile are? D. L. Jeffrey : Sure. Simile is just a comparison in which we say something is like something else or we use the word as to indicate the same thing. It's a kind of parallel relationship. We see an analogy so we call that a simile. But in a metaphor, we actually forcibly use a word, which is not connected to the thing we're trying to talk about and juxtapose that word upon the concept or upon the other idea in such a way as to force us to think about it all from the beginning all over again. Timothy George: Before we turn to our 17th century great poets John Donne and George Herbert, I want to ask you about the relation of poetry and truth because Jesus often uses this kind of metaphorical language, I am the door, I am the vine, I am the good shepherd. Of course we know that has a poetic reference to it, and yet it's nonetheless true because he uses poetry. Can you say something about poetry and how poetry and truth connect? D. L. Jeffrey : I think we need to understand that when Jesus, who is the truth, is talking about truth, he's not talking about truth in the simple way that we normally do. That is to say that we think about it as a correspondence between a word that one says and a reality that is. Jesus is talking about what I sometimes call to my students capital T truth. A truth that embraces all reality and which is actually bigger than our minds can reduce to a proposition. When he speaks about truth, he invariably does just as what you were mentioning. He makes a metaphor to help us understand that the kind of truth that he embodies is in fact embracing all of creation and all of our experience but in different ways accessible to us and some ways not accessible to us. I am the vine, you are the branches. We can eventually figure that out if he helps us. Timothy George: That's great. We need Him to be an interpreter as well as a poet. D. L. Jeffrey : I think that's really true. Timothy George: Let me tell you how I got interested in poetry. It is not a very highfalutin story. It is in high school and I had a wonderful teacher. Her name was Lucille Johnson. She would read poetry out loud to us students and she would act it out. I remember her putting on gloves and ear muffs and reading poetry about snow and cold even though it wasn't cold in my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. We felt cold because Mrs. Johnson would make that come alive by reading these great poets. I'll never forget her reading William Blake, "Tiger, tiger burning bright." She just made that poetry live for us. She was the one who introduced me to the great poets we're going to talk about now, John Donne and George Herbert. Maybe it's helpful for our listeners, everyone's heard those names surely but maybe they don't know them as well as they should. Maybe you could introduce us to these two great poets and we want to talk a little bit about their poetry and actually read a poem from each one of them. Who were John Donne and George Herbert? D. L. Jeffrey : John Donne was an early 17th century person of a Catholic background actually. [His] family was called Recusance, that is they were people who were reluctant to give up their Catholic faith even after Anglicanism had become the state church and you were supposed to adhere to it in order to be what we might say today, patriotic. His family struggled with what was the right way to believe and to think and it's really pertinent to his whole life to understand that he wrestled with this both within his family and without. He had a brother who was tortured to death. He had also a very bad experience of having to go to Oxford, go to Cambridge, each place for three years. He went to Oxford at 11 years of age by the way. He finished up at Cambridge at 17 years of age with two degrees but he couldn't take the degrees because he was not willing to sign the oath. Here's a very interesting guy because he became one of the most important protestant preachers of the entire 17th century, powerful orator, a fundamentally deep theologian and very much affected by both traditions, by the Catholic tradition and the protestant tradition. That's John Donne. George Herbert actually is connected to Donne by family. That is to say George Herbert, his mother was a patron of John Donne when John was trying to put body and soul together somehow during his hard times financially. When George Herbert lost his father at the age of three, John Donne became effectively his godfather. These are people that are interesting in a number of ways because then Donne talked Herbert into leaving his potentially interesting political career and becoming an Anglican priest just like himself. Donne had a direct role in Herbert's choosing to be a pastor. Timothy George: This is something that's fascinating to me about both of these people. They were pastors. They were preachers. It has to be said I think that Donne was a much more famous preacher in his lifetime and of course was the Dean of St. Paul's cathedral so spoke to hundreds of thousands of people whereas Herbert actually ended up in a rather small country parish not too far from Salisbury, Bemerton. D. L. Jeffrey : Yes. Timothy George: Talk about these contrasts. One is a great city famous tall steeple pastor we would say today and Herbert just lived his Christian life out there in a rural area. I think there's a something about that contrast that is fascinating to me and yet both are drawing from a deep well spring of faith and spiritual life and nourishment. D. L. Jeffrey : Yes. They are. Donne was brilliant as I've suggested as a University student. He caught everybody's attention then he went on to what we would call today law school, and he was a star there. After he had shown so much promise, he was made into as it were a member of the foreign service, and he was sent to Spain and to Italy and he came back fluent in both languages. He was astonishing and people said to him you've got to do something really significant but then what happened was he actually showed a real interest in faith. He showed a deep interest in fact in becoming of service to the church. When that happened he was quickly appointed, and his career was like a Roman candle. It was like a skyrocket. He went straight to St. Paul's. This is an unbelievable kind of shift from a guy who was a Catholic recusant to being a Dean of St. Paul's in a matter of less than two decades. George Herbert had also a very great promise. At Cambridge, he was made a public orator. He was also brilliant. He was encouraged to go into government service but he actually began much earlier in his career and in his lifetime to develop a really deep inwardness. John Donne is an extrovert. George Herbert is an introvert. Herbert in his introversion and in his desire to have a life, which we might call a contemplative life almost, a meditative life felt that he should be someplace away from the bustle and the politics of London, so he actually made a choice to make himself available for a small country parish, this little parish of St. Andrew's church in lower Bemerton, not too far from Salisbury cathedral. He was though an introvert, his whole nature was to be hands on as a pastor. John Donne's was a much more political and imminent and visible publicly but he didn't do what Herbert did. Herbert would bring the sacraments to people when they were sick. He would provide food and clothing for people that needed it. He and his wife adopted three nieces who were left orphaned and raised them, they lived a very lovely rural life in which Herbert was a hands on shepherd to a small flock. Timothy George: And he wrote about a lot of these pastoral activities in the little, really it's a classic The Country Parson in which he talks about the importance of pastoral visitation and prayer as a pastor, caring for your flock. It's wonderful even though it's dated of course. It's still a wonderful manual for people, pastors to read today. D. L. Jeffrey : It sure is. He says in his large collection called The Church within the overall volume called The Temple, he has a preparatory section called The Church Porch in which he says this to people who would be like himself a pastor. He says resort to sermons but to prayers most. Praying is the end of preaching. Timothy George: Isn't that great. Praying is the end of preaching. Love it. I want to go back to Donne. I want to read one of Donne's poems. Would you tell us which one you've chosen to read for us and then you'll read it. D. L. Jeffrey : Yeah. I've chosen actually one of his divine poems, which most people know through especially Holy Sonnet 14. Holy Sonnet 14 is the one, Batter my heart, three-person'd God. I want to read number 5, less known. It's because it shows Donne's intellectual interest. He was very interested in science, the new science, the things that were coming along that caused doubts and confusions but he was interested and wanted to absorb it into a kind of theological synthesis. This is a poem which shows those kind of interests as he was in a way conversing with the Lord about his intellectual doubts and his intellectual progress. Here is Holy Sonnet 5. I am a little world made cunningly Of elements and an angel-like sprite, But black sin hath betray'd to endless night My world's both parts, and oh both parts must die. You which beyond that heaven which was most high Have found new spheres, and of new lands can write, Power new seas in mine eyes, so that I might Drown my world with my weeping earnestly, Or wash it, if it must be drown'd no more. But oh it must be burnt; alas the fire Of lust and envy have burnt it heretofore, And made it fouler; let their flames retire, And burn me O Lord, with a fiery zeal Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal. Timothy George: Wonderful. Two thoughts come to mind. I am a little world, this idea that within a person there is in some ways a reflection of the entire cosmos. D. L. Jeffrey : That's right. Timothy George: That's I think a part of that classical idea that he's picking up on there. Then you sense this gravity of sin, the darkness, the difficulty of overcoming it, the purgation, the burning that has to take place. He was conscious of both I think his utter sin and I think we can even use this old fashion word depravity and at the same time the amazing overcoming grace of God. D. L. Jeffrey : Yes. He was. He lived all of his life in conscious need of repentance. He felt he was, he never could quite be done with repenting. He had of course lived a pretty raucous life as a young man. He was what we would today call a rather daring young fellow somewhat promiscuous for sure. He had before he settled into a marriage he had various and sundry kinds of relationships. He was embarrassed about them later on. He also had the problem of continuous doubts, which he talked about in the poetry, talks about elsewhere and he worries about these things as if they might be in fact a problem for him, simple problem that he needed to repent of. Donne was the farthest thing in some ways from a person who thinks that once saved, always saved. Timothy George: Yeah. D. L. Jeffrey : He believed that he needed to persevere in God's grace. He needed to continually be repenting before the Lord, to be honest before the Lord, examining his conscience before the Lord in order to be in relationship with him. Timothy George: We think of Donne as we've been talking about him of course he's one of the great poets of all time, certainly in the English language. Yet he was a preacher. I find reading his sermons enormously inspiring and challenging as well as his poetry. His sermons have a poetic quality to them. Here's a couple of lines from one of his sermons. “Even in the depth of any spiritual night in the shadow of death, in the midnight of afflictions and tribulations, God brings light out of darkness and gives his saints occasion of glorifying him, not only in the dark though it be dark but from the dark because it is dark. This is a way unconceivable by any, inexpressible to any, that those who have felt that manner of God's proceeding in themselves, that be the night what night it will, they see God better in the dark.” Wow. When I read those words. Here's a person who's like Jacob wrestling all night with divine. D. L. Jeffrey : He is. One of the big influences on his life was the book of Job. He felt that Job and Job's experiences, he only has five sermons on Job out of 160 sermons that we have but they're pretty indicative of his sense of this connection between darkness and the light of the Lord's grace and revelation. He actually more or less argues in several places, poems as well as in his sermons that there is a sense of the need for appreciating how dark things would be without the Lord in order to appreciate the gift of God's grace and the light of salvation. Timothy George: Yeah. Wonderful. D. L. Jeffrey : The contrast is very strong in him. Timothy George: Let's turn to George Herbert for a few minutes. The younger contemporary of John Donne, not as famous in his lifetime but certainly over the years, over the centuries his light shines with great luminescence, right into our own times. T.S. Elliot was a great fan of both Donne and Herbert and helped to revive an interest in them in the 20th century. Tell us what poem you've chosen from Herbert and then we'll listen to it. D. L. Jeffrey : Sure. Let me read the poem with which he finishes his collection. It's actually called Love (III). He has a Love (I) and Love (II). He increasingly as he goes through these poems, which are substantially conversations with the Lord. Herbert's poems are prayers. He is inviting us to as it were listen in on these prayers as readers but at the end of this collection, he concludes with a testimony. It's a personal testimony. Most of his poems are written as it were in present tense but he gets to the end he gives a poem in past tense Love (III), in which he is looking back on what has been the story of his life. His life too has had in it this sense of unworthiness, which I think what ought to be periodically in all of our minds as believers for we are unworthy of what the Lord did for us in Jesus. He's reflecting on that and also at the same time telling us what a tremendous relief it is to enter in to the presence of the Lord. Here it is. Love (III). Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning If I lacked anything. “A guest," I answered, “worthy to be here”: Love said, “You shall be he.” “I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee.” Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, “Who made the eyes but I?” “Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame Go where it doth deserve.” “And know you not," says Love, “who bore the blame?” “My dear, then I will serve.” “You must sit down," says Love, “and taste my meat.” So I did sit and eat. Timothy George: After that. I think we just need silence, don't we, to take it in. D. L. Jeffrey : Yeah. Timothy George: And think about the expression of the inexpressible love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. That poem you just read, Love (III), by George Herbert, has had a profound impact on the life of many people. Not long ago I read an article in the British paper, The Guardian, by a person who was called the man who converted me from atheism. It was a story of Herbert and how this journalist, secular, no faith, little faith, came to faith through reading that particular poem and the great Simone Weil had a similar experience back in 1938 as she was displaced and afflicted and dissatisfied with the emptiness in her own life. She spent Holy Week at a Benedictine monastery sitting alone in the chapel. She read the very poem you just read to us, Herbert's Love (III). In that moment, she said, "Christ himself came down and took possession of me." Well, we don't think of poets as evangelists but there is a sense in which there was a wooing and a drawing to the power of Christ through his love revealed in poems like that one. D. L. Jeffrey : Absolutely. I think one of the things that happens in a poem like that which has been very powerful one for me too, the first one I read it by the way, I read it by myself. It wasn't spoken aloud to me but tears came to my eyes unbidden because what happens is that he invokes with that poem, the presence of the Holy Spirit and he puts you right into, as it were what George Steiner called Real Presences. There is a sense of the real presence of the Lord in that poem because the Lord was present to him. He describes in that witness, that testimony, the experience of his life being taken out of his own sense of self worth, which is poor and drawn into a sense that the worth of the Savior and what the Savior did for him and then sat down and made comfortable in the presence and in the body of Christ. I think that's a kind of thing, which is perhaps only achievable in poetry. We can write that out, you're a theologian. You can write that out in terms of a formula theologically and it would be instructive for the likes of me and others but it wouldn't have that power, would it? Timothy George: We're almost out of time David but I wonder if you might just say a word to those who are listening particularly to pastors, a lot of people listen to this podcast from all walks of life, some believers, some not believers but maybe as an entrée into poetry and into this kind of poetry. What would you say to them as an encouragement in that way. D. L. Jeffrey : One of the things I would say is that while we don't have probably in most of our experiences the experience of Herbert. He took his family to morning prayer and evening prayer every day of his life and therefore was bathed in the Psalms, went through the Psalms every month, morning and evening prayer. We don't have maybe quite as much as that experience as we should but we should try it. We should try actually to read our way through the Psalms about once a month and recognize in them and in the speeches of the Lord from the prophets recognize that there is a mode in divine discourse which is higher than our normal speech. I think then what I would recommend to pastors is read poetry. Read poetry by people who really do love the Lord and whose poetry breathes in their words, in their stances and in the meter something of their desire to offer something beautiful for God. This would be particularly true of both these poets. They see the beauty of the possibility in the poem that is perfectly wrought as an offering, something that is a kind of work that they can offer up in gratitude to God. There's gratitude through both of these poets from beginning to end. They are two amongst many we could talk about, Hopkins, Elliot, we could name others, from which the pastor can learn much about how to think with the words of the Lord, to think with the words of Scripture and to be somehow not just literally there but to be there spiritually as one speaks those things. That's what communicates. Timothy George: Yes. My guest today on the Beeson podcast has been Dr. David Lyle Jeffrey. He is Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities at Baylor University, a wonderful scholar, a person of deep faith and great learning. Thank you so much David for this very wonderful inspiring conversation. D. L. Jeffrey : My honor and my pleasure Timothy. Thank you. Timothy George: God bless you. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming addition of the Beeson podcast.