The Near and Distant God: Poetry; Idealism and Religious Thought from Hölderlin to Eliot by Ian Cooper

Abstract

512 Reviews The book is rounded offwith an attractive selection of contemporary illustrations, mainly from almanacs, and a clear index. University of Exeter W. E. Yates The Near and Distant God: Poetry, Idealism and Religious Thought from Holderlin toEliot. By Ian Cooper. London: Legenda. 2008. 184 pp. ?45- ISBN 978 1-906540-00-5. This philosophical and theological investigation ofmodern poetry identifies post Enlightenment German thought as the defining forebear ofmodern religion. This is a religion thatoscillates between thepossibilities of divine presence and absence, epitomized in the opening line of Holderlin's 'Patmos' that provides the title for thisbook. Cooper begins his account with the tension between the epistemological revolution enacted by Kant inKritik der reinen Vernunft (1781) and Kant's own philosophy of religion. Kantian idealism deems a perfect being unknowable to the human subject. The idea of such a being remains sufficient to orient the subject towards the summum bonum, possible only at the noumenal level. Yet what if this summum bonum has been achieved within the limits of phenomena, in the historical person of the incarnate God? Kant neither resolves nor resists this ten sion, towhich Hegel's hermeneutic of Spirit provides a dynamic response. Once Christ departs from his disciples at his Ascension?the near God thus becoming the distant God?Spirit is realized in the self-consciousness of the community and religious faith reaches its zenith. Cooper sees this response as fundamentally sacramental and reaching itspoetic epitome inHolderlin's verse: ifhistory can be the site of theWord made flesh experienced as sacrament?not just representing butmanifesting and enacting what itrepresents?then so too can the poetic word. When Holderlin's poetry resists itsown elegiac bent, it is 'thrown beyond itself (a process Holderlin terms 'hyperbole') with 'an emphatic propulsion into the space after the poem; that space grounds the hermeneutic of redemption' (p. 34). Yet is this propulsion, with itspotentially transformative, sacramental efficacy,a sufficient response towhat Cooper terms themodern 'crisis of redemption'? Not for the next group of thinkers identified in Cooper's lineage. D. F. Strauss's Das Leben Jesudeconstructs the historicity ofHegel's religion of Spirit; theNietzschean promise of eternal recurrence rejects the trajectory ofKantian and Hegelian ideal ism towards a reality beyond history; F. H. Bradley's idealism limits the realm of subjective experience to 'finitecentres', whose reality can be guaranteed only by an Absolute thatparadoxically can have no existence beyond the realm of particularity. Cooper's book ismost compelling as he demonstrates how two pairs of poets? Morike and Hopkins, Rilke and Eliot?deal with this ultimately theological issue. The study's intricate philosophical framework is fleshed out as Cooper describes ideas echoing and enriching one another inverse. Morike emerges as thatunlikely being, the Biedermeier mystagogue, who draws readers through theminutiae of botanical observation and interior decor into themystery of Incarnation and of Spirit. Hopkins gambles all on his hope that poetry can eschew 'endless, unre MLR, 105.2, 2010 513 deemable metaphoricity' (p. 111), the spectre raised byNietzsche that overshadows twentieth-century aesthetics, by instead revealing an inherently sacramental view of word and world. The 'tallnun' of'The Wreck of theDeutschland', who prays aloud to God as her ship founders, proves capable of the propulsion?'heart-throe'? that characterizes Holderlin's optative poetics. In Rilke and Eliot the post-Kantian burden pushes poetry to the precipice where life confronts death with dizzying urgency. As the resolute non-Christian among these four poets, Rilke allows the poetic persona of the tenth of his Duineser Elegien to walk towards death as if towards eternal nothingness, but Cooper argues that the poetry leaves room for the possibility that both words and lifemight refer to something beyond themselves. The deflating ending of the cycle?'wenn ein Gluckliches fallt'?hardly resembles Holderlin's propulsion beyond poetry, but this concluding sag 'gives up language so as not to give up on language, and [thus] gets back the thought of redemption' (p. 144). Cooper early on establishes this as a study in neither influence nor reception. Instead the thinkers he assembles here are protagonists in an episodic theological drama forwhich post-Kantian thought provides the script.Cooper's staging of this drama would have been enhanced...