Brian Hamilton-Vise

Theology, Praise, and Poetry

Earlier today, I mentioned how I sometimes wish that I had studied literature in college, but I might also have said art history or classics. The point is learning to recognize beauty. Then I stumbled upon this passage in Vladimir Lossky’s Orthodox Theology: An Introduction:

bq. Nourished with contemplation, [theological teaching] does not become established in silence but seeks to speak the silence, humbly, by a new use of thought and word. That is why theology must be praise and must dispose us to praise God. A St. Gregory of Nazianzus, a St. Simeon the New Theologian, both of whom have merited the name “Theologian,” have expressed themselves with an inspired poetry. St. John of Damascus is the author of magnificent hymns that we still sing: with him theology becomes liturgical praise. Even his most scholastic statements give rise to poetic flights.

And this is the theology I know and love, speaking a careful and rigorous word, caught by the wind of the Spirit and therefore spilling over in beauty, lifting the hearer to the mystical heights of contemplation. It was appropriate, then, to see another list by Kim Fabricius: this one on the literal and the literary, a set of proposals beautiful in their own right.

18 December 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: Poetry, Praise, Prayer