MUSIC, POETRY, AND EUCHARIST

In his 2004 book Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God, and in a subsequent lecture at the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference (2007) at Villanova University, Denys Turner developed an account of music as "proto-typically Eucharistic," one based on an analogy between the modes of signification proper to each. In this essay, I expand Turner's analysis by proposing not only music itself; but also the relationship between music and poetic language, as another possible artistic locus of eucharistic theology. My analysis turns upon what Turner identifies as the semiotic or "sign -like" character of the sacrament and, more specifically, upon the precise manner in which the elements (bread and wine) consumed during the Eucharist are thought to signify Christ's body and blood. The idea, in broad strokes, will be that if music is, as Turner suggests, exemplary of the semiotic character of the Eucharist, then an account of the relationship between music and poetic language may reveal a somewhat different, though equally semiotic, way in which art and eucharistic theology can be brought into fruitful dialogue. I make this argument primarily through an analysis of the twentieth-century Argentine poet Francisco Luis Bernardez (1900-1976), a committed Roman Catholic who participated in the Argentine avant-garde of the early and mid-1920s and was deeply invested both in its general attempt to revitalize art in the wake of the First World War and in the specific question of poetry's relationship to music. Though Bernardez wrote a number of theologically astute eucharistic poems, I will suggest that even his non-eucharistic poetry is nonetheless informed by and modeled upon a Eucharistic understanding of signification. The point of focusing upon non-eucharistic poetry is to show not only that poetry can be about the Eucharist (obviously it can), but rather that the act of poeisis might itself be understood as an enactment or dramatization of something of the Eucharist's mystery.