The (Calvinist) Spirit of Understanding

Abstract

Perhaps something in the nature of faith lends itself to homily, to repeatedly telling allies and skeptics alike that faith is good for them, although I do tend to think such mystification flows from its apologists’ failures of imagination and lapses of hard thinking rather than from faith as such. Whatever the case, after surveying the proceeding pages, I worry that I do not draw far enough away from the pontifical tradition. I’ve argued that for Charles Bernstein, and in many ways the larger association we call Language writing and the tradition of innovative poetry, poetics is a practice of faith that enables interpretation. This act of faith sees meaning made and sustained by what we tend to think puts it at risk—the break between sign and referent, or what we saw Bernstein call “the inevitability of metaphor, the linguisticality of perception, the boundedness of thought… the beauty of error… and the uncanny delight of chance.”¹ In the course of this argument I have tried to suggest that such a faithful model of poetics makes room for the imagination to persist beside reason, just as it seeks to allow what is mysterious, absolutely other, and inscrutable, even impossible, about our experience of the world into our thinking about it. Still none of these discussions show clearly how faith actually works. It would be easy to embrace many of the aesthetic arguments I’ve forwarded without embracing faith itself as a poetic procedure or a philosophical model.