As our culture seems increasingly to reject its own hard-earned wisdom, it is good to remember that we wait in hope.
It was disconcerting this week, reading Plato’s Phaedrus with my section of freshman at Wyoming Catholic College, to realize once again that the sophisticated Athenian world of the 4th Century BC was a glittering surface over deep abuses and corruptions. Socrates and Phaedrus, the two interlocutors of the dialogue, take it for granted that older men routinely, with all the means at their disposal, try to seduce “beautiful boys.” The serious philosophical considerations of the dialogue arise from this reality of the ancient world, which the classical scholar Sarah Ruden describes in detail in her book, Paul among the People, in a chapter called “No Closet, No Monsters? Paul and Homosexuality”—highly recommended reading. The endeavor of Socrates in the dialogue is to move Phaedrus away from his acceptance of tyrannical passion and toward the love of wisdom.
Socrates is by no means willing to jettison eros itself, because in its best form it is a divine madness that leads the soul into the presence of the highest good and the highest beauty. This emphasis on madness (mania) might strike us as disconcerting. Isn’t philosophy supposed to be a dispassionate, syllogistically reasoned ascent to higher truths? Certainly not for Socrates. He praises mania as opposed to what we might call “official consciousness,” the publicly acceptable mental space in which we can easily categorize everything in our experience.
But the true “madness” that Socrates praises is more than “getting outside our comfort zone” or “thinking outside the box” (both clichés the instant they were first uttered). Mania describes a soul overpowered by experiences that can hardly be described at all. Prophets are mad in this sense because they hear God Himself. True poets are recipients of something beyond themselves. “No surprise for the writer,” as Robert Frost laconically puts it, “no surprise for the reader.” Read the prophets of the Old Testament, read the great poets of the tradition, and you encounter the challenge of holiness or tragic limitation, a perspective that calls us to greater fullness of life. In many ways, the Socratic dialogues offer a corrective to the solemnly disingenuous “respect for marriage” that even the homoerotic ancient Greeks would see as comical in its affront to nature.
But the Socratic vision of transcendence is not ours. In the Platonic world, a boy might be an image of divine beauty that a lover reverences as he would a statue of Apollo, but such erotic love can never be sacramental. Plato’s reader looks in vain for a vision of men and women in the real, incarnational communion of real marriages.
Nietzsche dismissed Christianity as “Platonism for the masses” because he saw it as rejecting the body and the earth. But quite the opposite is true. Mary’s quiet response to Gabriel opens the inner transformation of the world. The Holy Spirit will overshadow her, Gabriel tells her, and somehow, perhaps because her response seems as distant as possible from mania, we draw back from imagining the terrifying holiness of the shadow. Yet the moment of her overshadowing recalls what happens in Genesis 15:12 when God makes the covenant with Abraham: “a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.”
Imagining is the work of poets, which brings me to recommend a book that I received at the Catholic Imagination Conference in Dallas back in October, the new anthology Christian Poetry in America since 1940, edited by Micah Mattix and Sally Thomas. The poems collected are worthy of meditation, and I have read several poems every morning since October. Some are by poets I know personally (Dana Gioia, James Matthew Wilson, and David Middleton), others by poets I have read before (such as Paul Mariani, Jay Parini, Christian Wiman, and Andrew Hudgins), but most are by poets new to me. They are all wrestling with the questions of our daily life of faith. The editors do not draw back from fears and improprieties and doubts, and as a result, there is something edgy and appealing and deeply real about the whole book. I have found myself repeatedly startled by real poetic pleasure, both in the depiction of ordinariness and in moments of vision.
At the very end of the book—and fittingly for this week—comes “Advent” by a young poet named Chelsea Wagenaar. The speaker of the poem cares for her husband as he slowly recovers from a slipped disc and she waits for the arrival of the child in her womb, whom she addresses:
Before you, before your
cloistral assembly of parts, I knew
words waiting to become you:
Face. Hair. Cuticle. Was it this way
for Mary, overshadowed by the Spirit? —
Her body not hers, reworded with the promise
of flesh? How can this be? I echo her,
though I have known a man.
Here? I ask him, and soothe cream
into his skin, the two divots in the small
of his back—gates that keep the invisible hurt.
May it be as you have said—
and I picture her trembling hands,
the hour dusk, everything vague and blued,
hour all the shadows become shadow.
Wagenaar imagines Mary’s terror (her trembling hands) in the “hour all the shadows become shadow.” What has she (either the poet or Mary herself) taken on in this act of faith, this uncertain anticipation of the fruits of her vow? What is it that has overshadowed the world?
Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.
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The featured image is “The Tiburtine Sibyl announces the advent of Christ to Augustus” (1660) by Pietro da Cortona, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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