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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2011
Can poets (can men in television)
Be saved? It is not easy
To believe in unknowable justice
Or pray in the name of a love
Whose name one's forgotten: libera
Me, libera C (dear C)
And all poor s-o-b's who never
Do anything properly, spare
Us in the youngest day, when all are
Shaken awake, facts are facts
(And I shall know exactly what happened
Today between noon and three)
That we, too, may come to the picnic
With nothing to hide, join the dance
As it moves in perichoresis
Turns about the abiding tree.
This is the final stanza in W. H. Auden's Compline, one of the poems that make up his Horae Canonicae. It is a striking fact that the technical theological term ‘perichoresis’ can appear with such effect in a modern poem. It may take a little homework to enable the reader to appreciate its effectiveness; but there can be no doubt that it invests the poem's conclusion with great imaginative force.
To save the homework, let me explain that the term ‘perichoresis’, from the Greek for ‘encircling’ or ‘encompassing’, acquired the technical sense in theology of ‘mutual interpenetration’. Taken over from its less happy usage in Christology into trinitarian theology, it was used by Pseudo-Cyril and John of Damascus to refer to the co-inherence of the three persons in the one eternal God. In G. L. Prestige's words, ‘it stands as a monument of inspired Christian rationalism’. One might add that in Auden's poem it becomes also a focus of inspired Christian imagination.
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