The modern spiritual affect of perplexed affirmation, or, the David Hume of R. S. Thomas

Abstract

Abstract Long known as a poet of divine silence and Holy Saturday, R. S. Thomas is also a laureate of a modern spiritual affect we may describe as perplexed affirmation. In this state, one has difficulty inhabiting, of being fully present to, an experience of the sacred, an experience of God. In some ways, perplexed affirmation seems to be a product of cultural shifts toward what is spiritual but not religious. Here, openness toward possibilities of sacred encounter finds itself increasingly bereft of theological and liturgical systems that might mediate and at least partly explain experiences of particular intensity. Thomas frequently enacts such states of perplexed affirmation in his poetry. In this essay, I explore how this affect derives partly from Thomas’s reckoning with David Hume. Thomas names Hume in a handful of poems as a figure who complicates and perhaps destroys a traditional vision of the world. But if Hume complicates thought, including theology, he empowers experience. For Thomas, this means that Hume demarcates modern limits the poet implicitly surpasses through faith, or through experiences of the sacred he can no longer fully conceptualize. This dialectic evokes an expansive and counterintuitive vision of spiritual experience that figures in some of Thomas’s most famous religious poems.