Thursday, July 12, 2018

The agon of faith …

… Geoffrey Hill, Prodigal by Garrick Davis | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Besides, he was too busy asking himself questions about the reading material. I still have some of them in my lecture notes for the class: “Can the poet, by becoming virtuous in the moral sense, increase his poetic inspiration?” This was the kind of question that I gathered he was really asking himself during the course, though he never said them out loud. They were like an invisible thread, an obscure cause, behind the actual colloquy. Does God reward the moral poet in this way? Is the poet thus entirely at the mercy of God’s intentions? Does the scarcity or difficulty of a poet’s work reflect some failing in the poet?


Genuine faith raises questions, and never provides glib answers.

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