The Personal as Postcritical and Theopoetic

Abstract

Exploring Polanyi on religion in Personal Knowledge and Meaning as mystical, metaphoric, and mythic as well as ritual and belief, I seek to clarify the meaning of the personal through a lens combining postcritical and theopoetic perspectives. Stanley Hopper’s theopoetic similarly criticizes, and seeks unconscious depths beneath, modern dualism, deepening Polanyi’s discussion of the religious efficacy of figural language. The personal for Polanyi embraces tacit commitment, from-to emergence, communal connectedness, creativity shaping our world, integrating self and world through figural language, process of discovery, and affirmation of God as presence and integrative agency in our existence and understanding. Poteat deepens the personal with effects of first-person-singular grammar. While affirming via negativa, letting go of frameworks, Polanyi insists traditional frameworks are essential to religion. He criticizes modern poetry for shattering Christian frameworks. Not recognizing religion in its fragments, he misses an unrealized potential for understanding religion as the depths of the tacit dimension. Letting go all frameworks, thoughts, rules, and goals in the via negativa, we dwell in mystery within which God presences through evocation of poetic images, and we experience our personhood as elusive selves enveloped in and impelled by divine Mystery.