Philokalia by Scott Cairns

First published: Lincoln, Nebr.: Zoo Press, 2002

Genre(s): Poetry

Subgenre(s): Devotions; lyric poetry; meditation and contemplation

Core issue(s): Acceptance; attachment and detachment; Incarnation

Overview

Scott Cairns, who taught at Old Dominion University in Virginia before moving to the University of Missouri, is a profoundly Christian poet, but he applies Christianity to a particularly broad range of experience, and his incarnational emphasis sometimes leads him to address physical and sexual subjects that many Christian poets have eschewed. Cairns takes the title of this collection from the Philokalia, a collection of sacred texts ranging from late antiquity to the late medieval period, cherished in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Literally, philokalia as a word in Greek means “love of the beautiful,” although Cairns clearly means to refer to the collection, not merely to the word as such. Cairns is an Eastern Orthodox believer who came to this tradition as an adult, and refractions of the qualities found in the original Philokalia—a stress on devotion, on daily acts of piety, on the religious significance of the natural world, and on religion as an ongoing, dedicated process, not an isolated gesture of zeal—are to be found throughout Cairns’s collection.

Philokalia is composed of a selection from each of Cairns’s poetry books of the 1980’s and 1990’s–The Theology of Doubt (1985), The Translation of Babel (1990), Figures for the Ghost (1994), and Recovered Body (1998)—followed by a generous selection of then uncollected poems, including Cairns’s important “Adventures in New Testament Greek” series. The title poem of Cairns’s first volume, “The Theology of Doubt” accepts moments of unbelief as the price for equally spontaneous moments of belief. “The Theology of Delight,” similarly, celebrates a random joy in the world through which divine luminosity can manifest itself. “Approaching Judea” is a whimsical poem featuring a pilgrim who comes to the Holy Land in pursuit of the unlikely quarry of moose, but which carries with it deeper meanings about the nature of the spiritual search.

The Translation of Babel was Cairns’s breakthrough book, and, as the title indicates, aspires to find a poetic language that can testify to the potential reparation of the fallen nature of humankind. A series called “Acts” is not based directly on the biblical book but concerns how the continuum of ordinary human feeling can acquire an aura of the sacred. Cairns also includes “The Translation of Raimundo Luz,” a sequence centering on a fictive version of the Brazilian city of Florianópolis, as a complement to the spiritual themes that became characteristic of Cairns’s poetry and on which this selection concentrates.

Figures for the Ghost refers to the Holy Ghost, the third person of the Trinity. “The Holy Ghost” uses rowing as a metaphor for a sense of mission in life, a reaching out to others motivated by the persuasive force of the Spirit. “Prospect of the Interior” continues the rowing metaphor but takes up a riskier and more agonizing journey.

The poems that first appeared in Philokalia itself take up the balance of the volume. “The Spiteful Jesus” castigates retributive conceptions of Jesus fashioned by authoritarian faith communities in order to discipline their members, opting instead for a radical and unexpected forgiveness. “Three Descents” contrasts the pagan figures of Aeneas and Orpheus to Jesus. Aeneas and Orpheus plumb the full dimensions of individual political and personal dramas, but only Jesus can serve as the pivot around which the total drama of existence turns. “The Modern Poets” reveals that there can be a sense of spiritual indwelling even amid the deracinated sites of modern cities, and in the modern poets who write about them.

The most important poems in this section are “Adventures in New Testament Greek.” The metanoia poem, for instance, concentrates on the themes of repentance and a contrite heart that the Greek word indicates. Refreshingly, though Cairns does not treat metanoia simply as the Greek equivalent of “repentance” but illustrates how it exemplifies a joyous turn, not just a dutiful swerve away from sin but a delighted embrace of the path of righteousness. Similarly, in the mysterion poem Cairns goes beyond a normative sense of “mystery” to canvass how mystery in the Christian sense is both here and there, both immanent and transcendent. Perhaps the most compelling of the “Adventures in New Testament Greek” series is the hairesis poem. Hairesis means “choice” in Greek, and it is the source of the word “heretic”; heretics “choose” to split off from the main body of doctrinal belief. While not encouraging heresy as such, Cairns, however, makes his audience see that every act of belief is some kind of choice, and he encourages a sense of choice, of mental self-determination, as a prerequisite to a meaningful confession of faith.

In all the New Testament Greek poems, Cairns is not intent on explicating individual words so much as on talking about how the biblical language has an aura of its own that, despite the huge success of the Bible in translation, is only partially translatable into the lexicon of other languages. Similarly, in “Sacred Time” Cairns points out that this familiar phrase is as much spatial as temporal and that we domesticate it when we make sacred time just an intensified version of the model of temporal extension to which we are already accustomed. This tension between nuance and understanding, plenitude of definition and popular accessibility, ranges throughout Cairns’s oeuvre.

Christian Themes

Cairns is Eastern Orthodox, but he was not raised in that faith tradition, coming to it as an adult through his reading in ancient sacred texts. Cairns is comparable to contemporary Eastern Orthodox converts like the theological writer Frank Schaeffer, who combine a devotion to Orthodox liturgy and tradition with a Protestant piety and fervor—although Cairns is much more liberal politically. Cairns’s poetry can suggest a difference between American poetic converts to Eastern Orthodoxy from Protestantism and those formerly Protestant poets who have converted to Roman Catholicism. Whereas the Catholic convert Robert Lowell, in the work he published in the late 1940’s and 1950’s, assumed a deliberately ornate style, Cairns’s plainspoken style is reminiscent of contemporary Protestant poets such as Walt McDonald or Julia Kasdorf. He does not often use rhyme or traditional verse forms, and, despite the complexity of some of his vocabulary and allusions, does not wish to make reading the poem a difficult experience. Cairns combines an Orthodox sense of liturgical blessing and internalized pilgrimage with a Protestant stress on the accessibility of the Word in the biblical sense—and the word in a poetic sense—to every professing congregant. Cairns is not seeking after conventionally devotional subjects; if he is a poet of divine redemption, he is also a poet of the human sin and despair that in Christian terms necessitates such redemption.

Cairns refers to theological concepts such as apocatastasis (the doctrine that all that has been lost will be found someday and that good and evil will ultimately be reconciled), which, although generally Christian concepts, receive special emphasis in Orthodox Christianity with its emphasis on resurrective life and participation in the spirit of God. He tries to take these abstract concepts and endow them with the sinew of poetic language.

Sources for Further Study

Cairns, Scott. Compass of Affection. Orleans, Mass.: Paraclete Press, 2006. Philokalia, an omnibus collection of new and selected poems, was published in 2002 by the Nebraska-based Zoo Press. Zoo Press experienced financial difficulties shortly thereafter, and many of its books, including Philokalia, were pulled from publication and, as of 2006, were are not available for purchase in bookstores. This volume is substantially similar, though not identical, to Philokalia in content; it includes a number of new poems Cairns wrote after 2002. It is likelier to be available through bookstores and libraries.

Cantwell, Kevin. Review of Philokalia. Prairie Schooner 77, no. 4 (Winter, 2003): 192-196. A positive review that stresses the ambition and reach of Cairns’s religious vision.

Holden, Jonathan. “’Both Good and Beautiful’: A Review of Poetry by Scott Cairns.” New Letters 70, no. 2 (Spring, 2004): 207-209. One of Cairns’s influences and the subject of the dedication of his poem “Salvation” gives a sophisticated account of Cairns’s poems as unconventional religious verse that can appeal to both the believing and nonbelieving reader.

Wolfe, Gregory. Review of Philokalia. Image 42 (January, 2004): 3-4. Even though Cairns’s liberal politics and convictions are very different from Wolfe’s conservative views, the editor of Image takes a very positive stance toward Cairns’s work, appreciating his nimble shifts in emphasis and perspective and the generous sense of the celebratory possibilities of Christian verse that his poetry offers.

Wright, David. “Poetry, Prayer, and Parable: The Playful Provocations of Scott Cairns.” Christianity Today 47, no. 10 (October, 2003): 17-19. Traces the development of Cairns’s career and gives particular attention to biblical themes in the volume.