Beginning to Imagine – in Dunedin – How the World Might Be Mended – Part 2a: Dyrness and the Poetics of Everyday Life

As indicated in yesterdays post the intention of the next few posts is to record some of what seemed to me to be important, or at the very least stimulating invitations to further thinking and exploration. In that sense what follows could best be considered as fragments; a mix of quotes, my own filtering of what I was hearing, and my own narration of the ‘places’ I was taken to in my own thinking and imagination. 

William Dyrness – “‘the Artists’ Role in Healing the Earth”. 

Background text: Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life. Pub. 2010. “The purpose of this book is to open our own sense of where God is working in our lives.” Except from the book here (PDF). 

Contents

1. Preface
2. The Method of Poetic Theology
3. Prelude to Aesthetic Theology: Theological Reflections on Love, Desire, and the Affections
4. The Historical Model: Theologia Poetica
5. Poetic Stewardship of Life
   Building Blocks for a Poetic Theology: How Did We Get Here?
6. Re-reading the Nineteenth-Century Romantic Heritage
7. Twentieth-Century Aesthetics: In Search of a Theological Voice
8. Dante, Bunyan, and the Search for a Protestant Aesthetics
9. Calvin, the Locked Church, and the Recovery of Contemplation
   The Trajectory of Poetic Theology: Where Can We Go?
10.  The Aesthetics of Church
11. Aesthetics and Social Transformation
12. Living and Reflecting Poetically: Systematic Implications

Fragments 

Mending the world is more of a challenge today that it was last year.

Dante – Inferno – Canto 12.

Our loves are put there to show us we are creatures of desire, made ultimately to love God.” “All our little desires are meant to be pointers to God.”

The medieval idea of theologica poetica was part of the humanist movement which included Dante etc.

The conversation about poetic theology is important right now because “we’ve had an aesthetic turn of culture, where aesthetics have replaced epistemology.”

“Truth is the way God does things,” he said, “and beauty is what truth looks like.”

“…Dante's emphasis on images which spark desire is contrasted with Bunyan's hermeneutic of suspicion; the role of seeing in one replaced by reading in the other. This leads to an aesthetic framework emphasizing the brokenness of the world and a distrust of earthly beauty; a preference for aesthetic forms whose `beauty' is hidden or
allusive; and a prophetic engagement and resistance against the world's brokenness…” (excerpt from the abstract for Dyrness’ paper “Dante, Bunyan and the Case for a Protestant Aesthetics” in the International Journal of Systematic Theology, Volume 10, Number 3, July 2008 , pp. 285-302).

Fiction (centaurs) point to the historical. History focuses on the specifics while poetry tends to describe what’s universal. Universal truth (“poetics”) illuminates our particular history.

Scripture tells God’s “universal story”. Fictional wisdom (for Dante) plays an important part in our journey toward God.

What’s been lost in the domination of the rational (facts) is poetic truth; the story… art carries us in a way that history never can.

We’re shaped by the “poetics” of our lives – by our hearts (what energises us, enlivens us; by desire and longing; by passion etc) – the poetics of our lives transform and shape us.

We need both/and – the rational (e.g. science) and the arts. We need metaphor and symbol, myth and story. Metaphor illumines “fact”.

The artist deals with poetics – with aesthetics - they “dress” the literal.

We’re defined by what we love. We’re on a journey of the affections of our lives. Symbols and signs move us; they are a means of transport. They transport us. 

To be continued.