Michael Centore“Have mercy on me, a poet!” To many, the vocations of the poet and the monk seem incompatible. The young Thomas Merton, having had a taste of each, considered the former immanent, worldly, and vain, whereas the latter was “transcendent”, sacred, concerned with the “reality of God”. But there are many poets, even of a secular cast, whose ethos bears striking similarities to the ancient mystical practice of hesychia, or stillness. If these similarities are more than coincidental, why are there so few hesychast-poets? Could there be such a thing as a deliberate hesychastic poetics? If so, what would its praxis look like? If not, is that all the worse for poetry, or for monasticism?
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Vigen Guroian
“What the word says, the image shows silently; what we have heard, we have seen.” That is how the Seventh Great Ecumenical Council, held at Constantinople in 787, summarized its defense of the use of icons in Christian worship. What the council confessed to have heard from scripture and to believe, is that God became man in Jesus Christ. According to the Gospel of John “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:13–14). Through an act of unfathomable kenosis, the infinite had become finite, the uncircumscribable was circumscribed in a human being, and the invisible was made visible.
