Christian poetics, past and present

The story of Christian poetics--that is, of Christians thinking consciously as Christians about the nature and significance of literary art--is the tale of a movement struggling almost in spite of itself to come to grips with its own doctrine that human beings are created in the image of God. The faith was born into a pagan culture and has survived into a secular one which shows signs of returning to paganism. The Church has perforce used the languages, the markets, and the forms of the surrounding culture. It has transformed them and been transformed by them. In the West, as the faith and the culture grew up together, this process has at times made them all but indistinguishable. But the relationship has always been ambivalent. What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? asked Tertullian; and the answers, while legion, have never been simple or easy. I Specifically, Christians have struggled to apply to literature the general New-Testament principle about being in the world but not of it (In. \7: \ \-\6). They were rightly wary of a culture based on idolatry--hence of its literature-hence of literature in general. But they could not escape the literary foundations of their own origin, nor the fact that they, and all humankind, were created in the image of One who expressed his inmost nature from the Beginning as the Word. This tension gives rise to the seeming contradictions of their collective response: condemning literature as dangerous at worst and a waste of time at best while producing some of the greatest poems the world has ever seen. And In the process, a few of them have found in the imago dei the only coherent explanation of why the human race is, for better or worse, a tribe of incorrigible Makers