Chris McIntosh is a fellow enthusiast for the poetry of R S Thomas. Indeed she is an RST pilgrim who recently went looking again for the haunts of the finest religious poet of the second half of the 20th Century (see her post for 17 July). She asked in her recent comment if I'd come upon Thomas's 1990 collection, Counterpoint, and confesses reluctance to write about them. And when you read them you can understand why the hesitation. Yet they are a remarkably important contribution to Christian thought, representing a voice too often muted in Christian spirituality. So at least some thoughts and initial reflections.
Some of the poems in Counterpoint assert faith at its most interrogative, that is, to read them is to be interrogated, asked questions we'd rather not answer, but that won't go away. And for those who need certainty and not only assurance but chronic reassurance, some of them contain carpet pulling assertions that leave comfortable faith discomfited on the floor. And some of them contain that pastoral tenderness that was seldom sentimental, but understood and respected human fragility, shared that wistful longing to know, to really know, who God is and what God is about, in a world with so many hard and dangerous places, so many dark corners, so much that causes hurt.
Much of Thomas's poetry is therefore in the minor key, and much that would be called negative emotion is drawn into a vision of human existence where the negative has its positive counterpoint, and the minor anticipates the major, even when the major is indicated rather than intimated. To change the metaphor, Thomas's poetry, like Van Gogh's painting, acknowledged, even celebrated light, but against cobalt blue, implied menacing shadow, even in some paintings, impressions of unrelieved dullness or darkness. The contrast of dark and light, minor and major, despair and hope, doubt and faith, carefree joy and recurring sorrow, mirrors for Thomas the poet the task of Christian theology, which is not to explain away the negative, or deny it, or make such experience occasion for guilt. For Thomas any escapist or triumphalist theology lacks a sufficient metaphysical humility, claims more than is warranted by human experience, and simply leaves unaddressed by Christian theology those experiences inevitable in mortal existence, of ambiguity, of desolation, of existential ache for meaning, belonging and hope. You can't have Van Gogh without the cobalt blue – the starry night is glorious because as well as the swirling spheres of coarse brushed gold, there is the background of contrasting space, distance, darkness.
At times in the Counterpoint collection, there is a sense of a Christian holding on to faith by fingertips and precarious toe-holds. But taken as a whole they are poems of astonishing grasp, a profound Christian theology in which God is neither trivialised nor analysed, but acknowledged as the overwhelming Reality that permeates and penetrates a universe in which all human existence would otherwise be fleeting accident registering for nanoseconds in a story bleakly eternal. Thomas's poetry has as its theological sub-structure the Christian story. And the four suites of poems in Counterpoint demonstrate a soul that has learned metaphysical humility, not docility, not resignation, Thomas is not God's 'yes-man'; but in his questioning he will accept neither trite answers nor final negations. Because at the heart of Thomas's poetry, as the glowing core from which his creative energy was drawn, is the cross, the crucified Christ, the God who scandalises all theology by being born human, suffering, dying, and thus through love defiant in resurrection, contradicting the tendency of the universe to atrophy and die. Wherever else the universe is going, according to Thomas it will not outrun the grasping arms of the crucified God. Here is just one poem, whose last clause captures in six words, the eternally patient movement of God, outwards in Love, towards a recalcitrant but cherished creation.
They set up their decoy
in the Hebrew sunlight. What
for? Did they expect
death to come sooner
to disprove his claim
to be God's son? Who
can shoot down God?
Darkness arrived at midday, the shadow
of whose wing? The blood
ticked from the cross, but it was not
their time it kept. It was no
time at all, but the accompaniment
to a face staring,
as over the centuries
it has stared, from unfathomable
darkness into unfathomable light.
R S Thomas, Collected Later Poems, (Bloodaxe, 2004), page 108.
Four question marks in one poem. And those last six words. Van Gogh's starry night again?