On the Necessity of the Philosophical Poem

On the Necessity of the Philosophical Poem

- Kent Richter

Argument: It is suggested that human beings have three absolute ideals, three goals and values that are each complete and irreducible. They are Beauty, Truth and Goodness. As each is ultimate and underived, they represent for us something like the ultimacy of God. This were a kind of blasphemy except that the three might be speculatively considered a mysterious unity analogous (in a Thomistic sense) to the Trinity that is the one eternal God. Accepting such an analogy, we can try to imagine Beauty, Truth and Goodness as a unity and construct the possibility of an ideal philosophical art. To reflect the value of God himself, we might suggest, we bear a kind of moral duty to try to construct philosophically precise, beautiful poetry. Thus the content and the style of this work.

I

How might thirsty spirits crave

A glory vast as human wanting, even more,

Since hunger, too, is but reflection of the world that waits

Beyond the reaching finger. Worlds and worlds, their awesome

Majesty in astronomic distances and angstrom unit subtleties

Are hints of human souls stretched thin upon the wind

As thoughts and hearts seek that for which they’re made.

A

Beauty – awesome love of eyes and reaching fingers,

Softness in the colors, sounds and pleasures

Of delight-insisting motion in the world’s abundance –

Whispers an uncounted greatness, unreduced to any greater.

Love for Beauty, art for art and nothing more –

These are deep realities of dancing lives,

And tears of those more crippled, wishing frantically

For Beauty’s softness, Beauty’s startling lightning strikes

That split the darkest skies, caress the lonely child

And promise meaning in the misty air.

Beauty, let me hunger for your touch,

For you are glory in yourself unaided,

Hint of th’ uncreated One

We worship in our silent smiles.

No conjunction fits to move to Truth –

Not ‘and’ nor ‘but’ for Truth is other equal wonder there

Beside, within, outside what Beauty simply always is.

For truth as well is glory somehow final, somehow always,

Somehow likewise wonder for the hungry finite mind

That lingers, dazzled over knowing. Look,

How thinkers seek the distant stars for quasars,

Map in spectroscopic lines the minerals of stars

No human eye will see, no hand will bring to useful product.

Know for knowing’s sake, we say, like Beauty, like her offspring,

Valid, valued, loved for glory deep, intrinsic

As the blush is to the rose. And yet

Here language, logic, careful stark insistence thrive

To know precision in the microbe, in the philosophic nuance;

Here the knower risks all hope to understand,

To speak, to say the truth we love

And worship in our thoughtful labor.

Truth, let minds in forced and focused hope

Stretch words to worlds of fact and mathematics,

Hints of th’ uncreated One

We worship in our honest thought.

One more time conjunction-less we step to love another –

Not another, not a third, and yet a third, a motion in the b’loved flower,

Movement in the speech of truthful knowing.

Third, this love as pure as Beauty and as Truth,

Is love for Goodness, active will to do as doing should,

To speak, to breathe, to grasp, to paint, to make and make

In worlds and worlds what worlds have needed formed

By willing servants’ fingers. Loving Goodness, then,

Is moral effort’s hunger and its power,

Acting not for ends extrinsic, not for pleasures promised,

But for Goodness‘s sake alone, a love as pure

As love for Beauty,

Love for Truth,

A final and unfounded love that boils the sweat

Of every struggling action.

Goodness, urge and drive our marching,

Goal and glory non-contingent,

Hint of th’ uncreated One

We worship in our every moral move.

B

Ponder some Platonic spirit positing the great reduction

Of all value to the Good. For some shall urge in dialogic mutters

His fictitious Socrates who builds a bold ontology of forms

That all things in their various participations mark

Or fail to be. But this, let desp’rate, dirty realists declare

Confuses every struggling soul’s too-weary war

With beings’ barest being what they are.

And so while better chairs like chair-ness better be,

And free-er wills, no doubt, that moral effort know to be

The better human, still mistakes are made that leave

The scientist unknowing and the poet and the painter

Even worse. For surely know we well that human souls

That will t’ward humanness will not t’ward willing only,

But t’ward knowing and creating and

T’ward resting with delight in better poets’ words.

Tell as well of Mill who wills the good by otherward reduction

Of all human value to the only thing desired (he says), the pleasant.

Of course not merely porcine pleasures, notes the noble Brit,

But high ideals of education, value in the “pleasures”

Of the higher mind, as if the word by being quoted

Could be stretched to compass all enquiring hopes.

Likewise even great utility cannot alone its moral basis hold

As Basel’s Madman wildly cried, without some sidelong grasp

At sympathies ingrained in all-too-Christian Benthamites

Made good beyond their own bare definitions.

C

Come and sing, for sing we should

Of final goals and values three,

And hymn to Beauty, Truth and Good

A love that tempts infinity.

Come and sing as love demands

Where each is final, whole and right,

Where none in th’ other’s shadow stands,

And each its own pure source of light.

Come and sing, o child who sees

The worthy end of all our ways

As Beauty, Truth and Goodness, these

The glories hidd’n in all we praise.

Such worth in worship sung abroad

To rivals of th’ Eternal God.

II

“Blasphemy!” the singers of another song may cry,

Who find in holy praises for such values

Vain reflections, like the moon god’s daughters

Ling’ring in Satanic verses. “Worship only God,”

They rightly cry, the just insistence of a strident tawhid,

Strained as human wonders, taken for a greater Lord,

Confuse our clumsy triumphs (whatsoe’er their wholeness)

For the whole and non-contingent One,

The knowing, speaking, self-declared I AM.

And yet, and yet,

Come myst’ry more,

Come risky hymn t’ explore

The brittle theologic yearning,

Hopeful ontologic burning,

In the personhood of th’ One and three

Who is the absolute To Be.

The Beautiful, the Good, the True –

The ultimates of all we cheer and know and do,

Perhaps with Thomas might we sing their story

Admittedly but as analogues to greater glory,

So we loving, trembling move to speak

Of God’s own triune pow’r in concepts weak,

Yet boldly love to hope to seek to find

A finite hint of God in th’ finite mind,

And risking finite similes go on to dare

To pray that God himself had placed them there.

Thus we dare audaciously to sing

A human song of love in terms we bring

As finite and as human as our greatest love

As if they were enough to hymn our God above!

But hymn we must, and surely hymn we should,

And in the Beautiful, the True, the Good

We stretch to love a glory more than we attain,

Attempt to sing, but never to contain.

And let us add, though pointless to the wise,

That these three glories cannot each comprise

Some sep’rate god, some deity alone competing

With the others for a final, highest seating,

But in God, as in ourselves, we seek to mingle

All as one, perfected, bonded, single.

For if our hope is wholeness, truly free,

Then three are truly one, and one is three,

And thus we seek in God beyond what seeking’s done:

That God is God alone, and three and one.

III

Returning to this mundane orb

We set our feet again in human dust and wonder

At the Beauty, Truth and Goodness sought

By human souls for glory in themselves.

And yet we stumble home from Triune visions not

With empty insufficiencies and cautions only,

But with hope for unity in threeness, oneness

In the bounty of the glory of the ideal, final values:

Beauty, Truth and Goodness, surely

One and three in every human soul

As God Himself in glorious aseity.

Earth-bound hope, then, dim reflection

Of a wonder past imagining,

Might guess if love of beauty may in poets’ dreams

Be woven glory in a mathematic truth,

The two as one then breathed into a frantic, hungry world

For nothing but the love of goodness,

Thus the three in one,

And one within their threeness.

See, as if ‘twere visible,

Some loving poet’s soul

That wept itself in tears to know

A world as thirsty for the Triune God

As crying deer for desert springs.

Imagine poet’s love that moved,

That breathed into the world with power,

Lived compassion, craving giving

Hope for sheep without a shepherd,

Then as one whose love for Goodness

Vibrates in the world of dusty roads

And hands a cup of water

To an unnamed child.

Think as if ‘twere possible

A poet cum philosopher of reason,

Pouring pond’ring sweat upon the arguments

Of daring struggle. Think a sweeping

Thomist vision, Plantinga’s analysis,

That fairly bears the challenges of harsh denials,

Brave as vain Nietzschean honesty.

This poet’s wish in words and language,

Thought and reason, carves and builds

Its gifts in straining nuance for the truth

That yet might form by grace

And effort in a lying world.

How might such exacting labor

State for knowing’s sake a bare

And struggling logic, all for love of Truth,

But Truth to flow like water pure

Made cleaner for the struggle to be sure,

And poured with love as strict as mild

To calm the thirst of th’ unnamed child.

Dream as if a vision were enough

A poet full of song as Ganga with her holy water,

Flowing words as music sweet as life,

Dew distilled to sunrise-pure reflection.

Oh that we might listen to the dripping honey

Here or there a dangling line

To awe the homely heart that pauses

For a hint of angel voices in their chorus!

Oh to startle at th’ exploding image,

Skyward spiring metaphor that lifts the soul

To broader visions of the land! Imagine

Poetry to strict precision married

And in love, that argument like music moves

And Truth with veils seductive draped

Is dancer to its sigh- and tear-enticing tune.

And so might Beauty sigh and move

Like summer evening air to draw

Our unrestrained delight to thoughts that prove

The Truths that hide behind our awe.

And so might Beauty’s waters roll

From Goodness-driven mercy, called to be

By soft compassion for the lonely soul

To poems moved by unguessed sympathy.

And so might Goodness-woven Beauty

In its Truth-expressing glory wild

Pour honesty, delight and duty,

Sung to baptize th’ unnamed child.

Come poet, called to folly never really done,

To Beauty, Truth and Goodness all as one.

Conclusion

Never earth-locked child would dare to sigh

Upon the philosophic page his unenlightened labors

Claiming some reflection of the uncreated

But that duties theoretical demand it.

Never fool unbidden thinks to rise and guess

In verse the unity of godhead somehow

Labeled, pasted, argued in iambic feet,

Except that glory calls us all to foolish errands.

Blinder poets seeing more have whispered wonders,

Thinkers too in prose as crystal stated propositions.

Still the minstrel must the poem theorize,

The theory sing, as if to say we soldiers stand

For duty where we die upon the wall,

For all are called to stand in awe and sigh,

To think and reason, state and argue,

Love and offer life-blood smiling softly

At the Triune one we worship

Where we weep for joy.

And might this poem have Truth? Let better thinkers say,

But let them sing with glory on their way!

And whether Beauty? May the sweeter poets write,

But sing with argument, precision tight!

And whether Goodness was the poem’s source and guide?

Let God alone decide.

Philosophical Poem 1