Good letters

Image magazine’s updated website includes 'Good Letters', a daily blog that will focus on the intersection of faith and contemporary art. A dozen or so of Image's favourite writers have been handpicked to post on literature, art, music, film, theatre, and more from a variety of backgrounds and viewpoints. Their intention is that these bloggers will be producing meditations rather than polemics and that their blog will be marked by reflective prose rather than political pronouncements.

Today's blog is on Auden, God and Art and highlights both Auden's view of prayer as the paying of atention and his passion for proper names:

"To pray is to pay attention or, shall we say, ‘to listen’ to someone or something other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention — be it on a landscape, or a poem or a geometrical problem or an idol or the True God — that he completely forgets his own ego and desires in listening to what the other has to say to him, he is praying ...

“Auden’s passion for proper names in his poetry had a moral and theological point: like prayer, it was a form of attention. A proper name was a sign of personal uniqueness, and Auden used the word ‘miracle’ to refer to anyone’s sense of the unique value of their own unpredictable individuality. ‘To give someone or something a Proper Name,’ he wrote, ‘is to acknowledge it as having a real and valuable existence, independent of its use to oneself, in other words, to acknowledge it as a neighbor.’… When human beings imagine a beholder who finds such value everywhere, they think in terms of God, or as Auden wrote in another late poem [the 1965 ‘Epithalamium’], ‘the One…/ Who numbers each particle/ by its Proper Name’ — a deity who knows the personal name of every electron in the universe, rather than thinking about them in statistical terms.”

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