By Robert Royal
The proverbial Martian who visited the United States in this 250th year (a full quarter of a millennium) of our existence would be struck by many things. But probably by nothing more evident than the great gap between what, on the one hand, we say and do every day, and on the other, what we would like to be. We worry about how technologies like AI are coming to define us, but we are mostly blind to how we have already defined ourselves—confined ourselves, in fact, even before the devices took control—to a vision of the world and of ourselves that is materially prosperous but flat. In recent years, the Church has been trying to compensate for this with terms like Dignitas infinita and Magnifica humanitas, concepts that, in their own argumentative way, do attempt to address the problem. But they fall far short because what we desperately need now are not still more arguments, but serious, artistic poetry.
The incomparably great Dante Alighieri already understood all this at the beginning of his Paradiso:
Trasumanar significar per verba non si poria; però l’essemplo basti a cui esperïenza grazia serba.
To transhumanize through words cannot be done; but let the example suffice for him to whom grace reserves the experience. (Trans. RR)
Some scholars have said that, through some inexplicable inspiration, Dante invented this idea of “transhumanism.” Perhaps he did. But he certainly meant something different by it, something Christian, unlike the grotesque transmodern projections emanating from the thickets of AI in our day.
And nota bene: he also recognized several profound issues, just as he embarked on writing a poem about the only realm in which we attain true happiness, a state for which the term “human dignity” is a pale and distant shadow, as if we were all merely Victorian ladies and gentlemen claiming a decorous position in polite society.
But we are His sons and daughters.
Christianity, that is, the truth about human existence, is far fiercer, and exists on an entirely different plane from that. And grasping that truth at all requires considerable skill, an indirect path… and poetry. (See “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” by Emily Dickinson).
We need arguments, of course, to avoid falling into “subhumanism.” And to keep poetry from becoming sentimentality or idolatry. And also to remind us that what exceeds human reason is not, therefore, irrational, but participates in something that, beyond us, paradoxically makes us more ourselves. Because it introduces us into the presence of the Truth beyond truths. This has long been understood in the Christian tradition. Modern rationalism and scientism see the transcendent as unjustified; within the Faith, that transrationalism is precisely what shows the very power and truth of Christ.
As St. Ambrose, who knew a thing or two about such matters, put it: Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum (“It did not please God to save His people by dialectic [i.e., argument]”). His follower, the great St. Augustine, wrote: Si comprehendis, non est Deus (“If you comprehend Him, He is not God”). And in more recent days, St. John Paul II urged us to rediscover a more ambitious reason, a reason that appreciates its limits and seeks the answers it needs, but goes beyond what human powers can achieve on their own. These can only come to us as revelation (“thoughts beyond their thoughts were given to those high bards”) or, in its own way, what we might call a kind of poetry.
The fact that almost no one reads or values poetry anymore is a problem, because it already makes us blind to the ways we will have to speak about that something beyond ourselves, even before we get to the question of the divine.
For me, the most luminous example is the modern American poet Wallace Stevens, who began his literary career as a non-believer and converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. In his great early poem Sunday Morning, an elderly woman does not go to church but still feels “The need of some imperishable bliss.” Thus Stevens offers this vision of the world:
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
This is already a very different world, more wondrous than the one our science and our politics present to us. While still an unbeliever, Stevens also wrote about “the necessary angel,” that is, “reality.” It is no surprise that someone who could perceive and record “reality” in this way ended up becoming Catholic. Reality is what Plato called “what is”; and He who in the Scriptures tells the Hebrews in a striking poetic image that He has borne them on “eagles’ wings,” then reveals more philosophically that His name is “I am.” Or as Jesus put it in a burst of the purest poetry: “The Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
We hear much these days about the many young people who are now turning toward Christianity, mainly toward Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. They speak of seeking something solid amid postmodern uncertainties. They also express a thirst for “mystery,” in the traditional Latin Mass and in other time-honored practices.
But “mystery” is presented through the “poetry” of words and symbols that are themselves the product of a long development that has proven capable of leading us to something transhuman and, at the same time, makes us more ourselves than the beings we inhabit in our everyday lives. One might almost say—though I will not, because it would degrade it—that it is a kind of “sacred technology” that has proven its efficacy over times far longer than any individual human life, and even than the span of entire nations and civilizations.
Therefore, let us learn to read poetry again: the poetry of literature and the poetry of God. In this 250th year of America, we may discover that it leads us to something incomparably greater than “human dignity” in this world and in the next.
About the Author
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West, and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.