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Discovering the essence of Christianity is too varied and diverse a topic for anyone to pin to solely one definition. How one approaches the topic of Christianity is often in accordance to their personal foundations of religious belief. Sometimes these beliefs are deeply seeded during childhood so, as children mature into adults, they seldom doubt that which has been taught to them for so many years. English poet, Florence Margaret Smith, was not one of these individuals. Smith, more popularly known by her nickname Stevie, was raised in and around the Catholic religion and Christian tradition for many years but still grappled with many issues surrounding the Christian church and the heralded deity they called Lord. Stevie Smith wrote theologically inspired poetry because she was an existentialist who was attempting to understand the Christian environment while Christianity had shifted from the existentialists point of view.
To be an ontological existentialist, one must participate in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of ones existence, according to Paul Tillich, German philosopher, theologian, and author of Courage to Be (124). Operating within this definition, Smith would be obligated to interact within the infrastructure of Christianity. She would have to attend church on Sunday mornings, visit with elderly women at socials after the service, and passionately immerse herself in at least one Bible study course offered within the House of the Lord, for a significant amount of time. However, Tillich does not just state one must become physically involved in any given situation to be marked as an existentialist, but become involved with the whole of ones existence in a cognitive situation. Smith is required at this point to completely surround herself, physically and mentally with the Christian tradition and all it represents to her and for others. Historically, Smith was quite involved both cognitively and physically with the Christian realm of the world from her baptism as an infant straight through to her funeral in the Anglican Church of the Holy Trinity.
She did not appear to have scurried away from the Christian world and theologies that surrounded this religions persona. Smith was aware of the presence of the Christian tradition and even the existence of a holy omnipotent somewhere beyond where mortal eyes can see. She had knowledge of that presence. Tillich stated, An existential knowledge is a knowledge in which these elements, and therefore the whole existence of him who knows, participate (124). Smith had knowledge of her surroundings within a Christian society and was gaining courage to be as herself within that environment. She was unsure, however, of where she fit into a courageous role of being staunchly independent and openly proud to be who she was.
For at the same time she had discovered existential knowledge was a key to understanding if she could only get involved within its structure. Soon she would learn a disheartening truth. In all existential knowledge, both subject and object are transformed by the very act of knowing (124). She discovered the one truth she could always rely on. This was that by looking for the truth, one always inadvertently changes it. By searching for answers within the infrastructure, the product only dampened her spirits.
Thus she began grappling within her poetry regarding the idea that we are able to transcend, in knowledge and life, the finitude, estrangement, and the ambiguities of human existence (125). She focused many of her poetic topics towards the acceptance of Death toward her position in life. Come Death and Tender Only to One are both vivid examples of how Smith seemed to dislike life and taunt Death to arrive at her doorstep and take her away from this world and the confusing Christian Lord. She lyrically proclaims in Come Death, a poem within the New Selected Poems of Stevie Smith, Ah me, sweet Death, you are the only god / Who comes as a servant when he is called, you know / Listen then to this sound I make, it is sharp, / Come Death. Do not be slow (Smith 146). Smith is begging the haste of Death to her bedside in an attempt to overcome the mortal restraints Christians suffer when trying to understand who God is.
By inviting Death, she solely took comfort in the one constant everyone on Earth will agree upon, which is the fact dying is the one thing every human has in common. As opposed to putting her faith in a debated theory, Smith turned to the reliability of the Reaper. However, Smith could never completely turn a deaf ear to the subject of God and His affect on her life. A longtime personal friend of Smiths, Reverend Gerald Irvine, declared, One could say she did not like the God of Christian orthodoxy, but she could not disregard Him or ever quite bring herself to disbelieve in Him (Mac Gibbon 9).
In that manner of thinking, Smith was not on a congruent page as the Lord of Christian orthodoxy, but seemingly she was congruent at some point in her younger life. Thus it is fairly obvious either Smith or the Church altered their paths so as to become non-congruent. Stevie Smith appears to have attempted to separate but became ensnared in a web of faith, God, and Christianity. In an attempt to disentangle these three titles, she became a confused and trapped woman in bonds of theological theory and biblical interpretation, which wound around her arms and legs, pulling her toward a cognitive captivity. In the existentialists point of view, with regards to the Fall of Man as described in the Old Testament, man had fallen out of favor with God and had therefore becoming something other that what he had been created as. Plato stated, Man is separated from what he essentially is in the conceptual world (Tillich 127).
Existential theology interprets this act as to mean man is essentially good due to the fact the essential nature of man was good at the time of the divine creation. Stevie Smith, thinking as an existentialist, would also believe humanity is generally good in their hearts and not deserving of a fire and brimstone eternity of hell and damnation. John Mahoney, author of Seeing Into the Life of Things: Essays on Religion and Literature, thought Smith was unhappy with the way people had begun to view God in the context of religion and faith. Stevie bemoans what men and women have made of God, how they have shaped institutional configurations that belie the purity of the message, how they have twisted Gods words into tortuous and stern creeds of good and evil, heaven and hell, rewards and punishments, into a forbidding, otherworldly asceticism (Mahoney 324). Smith had made a distinction between a God who had created the Earth and the God that was worshipped in the church buildings on Sunday mornings by flocks of Christians. Stevie Smith responds to this type of worship in a poem she wrote entitled, Our Bog is Dood.
Within this poem, the speaker tells a story of encountering a group of natives who believe blindly there Bog is dood because we wish it so / That is enough, they cried... And if you do not think it so / You shall be crucified (Smith, 58). She questions their allegiance to this deity and leaves them confused in their definitions of goodness and their god, upon which they never agreed. The speaker slyly retorts, Oh sweet it was to leave them then / And sweeter not to see / And sweetest of all to walk alone / Beside the encroaching sea / The sea that soon should drown them all / That never yet drowned me (59). Without any attempt to aide these individuals in coming to some sort of conclusion or realization about their god, the speaker leisurely exits the scenario to walk by the side of the impending swell of the sea that has proved to do nothing more than envelope those who are ignorant of the secret the speaker implies to possess. Although it is not necessarily a good idea to read every piece of literature as a narrative voice directly reflective of the author, in this instance, Smiths personal history tends to support this stylistic comparison.
The natives are most certainly representative of the Christians Stevie Smith has met along her journeys in life who h...
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Research essay sample on Stevie Smith And Christianity
