1

Virtue and Voice: Geoffrey Hill’s Christian Contextures

[in His Critical Thought]

In his early essay “Poetry as ‘Menace’ and ‘Atonement’” Geoffrey Hill reproves efforts
towards “a theological view of literature” as “too often … not theology at all, but merely a
restatement of the neo-Symbolist mystique celebrating verbal mastery”; he then adds, “If an
argument for the theological interpretation of literature is to be sustained, it needs other
sustenance than this.”1 Years later, towards the end of his 1998 lecture “Language, Suffering,
and Silence” Geoffrey Hill tenders this remarkable aspiration: “I would seriously propose a
theology of language” (CCW 405). Such moments, found throughout Hill’s critical writings,
signal an abiding interest of the poet, and pose a range of difficulties for his critics. His
announcement in the later piece, for example, is notable for a number of reasons, including the
fact that he is neither a theologian nor a philosopher of religion, and because he is one of the
most prominent poets of the English language today. How is it, we may ask—as many have—
that a poet of this stature concerns himself overtly with so profound a theological matter in an era
when such an interest is admittedly thin among poets and literary critics alike?2 And [how is it],
referring to the ‘Menace’ essay, that Hill cares for the health of a ‘theological interpretation of
literature’? How do concerns of this kind relate to his larger body of critical reflection and to his
poetics?
Such questions prove difficult to answer, and Hill himself presents part of the problem.
Openly—some would say notoriously—Christian, Hill’s faith and interest in Christianity stand
alongside his equally passionate critique of the ills of the church and an agnostic outlook in
matters of orthodox belief and practice, evident most keenly in his poetry. How seriously, then,
does the poet-critic take the faith that presumably informs the basis upon which he ‘would
seriously propose a theology of language’? In addition, nowhere does Hill provide a systematic
treatment of a theology of language or of the relationship between religion and literature. Rather,
what we find in his critical writings is consistent but occasional reflection on these subjects.3 Of
course, the lack of a systematic treatment does not mean that Hill isn’t serious about the subject;
but it does underscore the difficulty of determining the exact shape of his theology of language
or theological view of literature, and of appreciating how Christian theology influences his poetic
vision. To be fair, Hill nowhere promises more of what he ultimately fails to deliver. Indeed, in

1
Hill, Geoffrey, Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp.
18−19. All citations from this collection will be included in parentheses as (CCW).
2
Does not Hill’s “seriously” in the above passage also nod toward gainsayers who would deny that such a proposal
is to be regarded as serious at all? So, D-W Williams: “Hill’s ‘seriously’ prefix does a certain amount of work to
locate his proposal in a context which assumes that it will not, or will no longer, be taken seriously,” 161; his ital.)]
3
In his essay “ ‘Perplexed Persistence’: The Criticism of Geoffrey Hill” Kenneth Haynes comments, “These
theological and philosophical strands in Hill’s criticism overlap and interact with each other, but I am not persuaded
that Hill offers either a philosophy or a theology of value in literature—or that this is something simply to be
regretted or applauded. … he himself proceeds more inductively and less systematically than we would ask of a
theorist”; in Piers Pennington and Matthew Sperling, eds., Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011),
p. 218.
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the passage from ‘Silence’ cited above he proffers only “a primary exercise” that “would
comprise a critical examination of the grounds for claiming …” (CCW 405): more a
prolegomenon than a program, in other words. [(We will return to the elements of this ‘exercise’
momentarily.)]
Still, despite the ambiguities in Hill’s own faith commitments and the absence of a fully-
developed theory of language that includes theological [reflection], even a cursory reading of the
index to his Critical Writings reveals a mind occupied with the ideas, attitudes, experiences, and
witness of Christians. From priests and artists to Christian theologians, apologists, and, most
keenly, poets and martyrs of the faith, Hill shows himself a scholar deeply engaged with
Christian thought and history, including the Bible (as the dozens of passages cited in the Index
also show). In this respect, his interest in theology and language makes sense as a feature of his
critical thought. But how prominent a feature is it? And again, how does it influence—or does it
influence—the shape of his larger body of reflection?
In what follows I will argue from an examination of his critical writings that Christian
theology forms an integral element in Geoffrey Hill’s poetics. This is not to say that theology or
a theological agenda govern the whole of his literary vision, but that his poetics are theologically
inflected in ways [and to a degree?] that to miss/neglect this influence would fail to understand
the fuller character of Hill’s vision.
To fill out in its entirety even so modest a claim as ‘theologically inflected’ and ‘an
integral element’ would require a comprehensive study of Hill’s critical writings that includes
every instance of his attention to theological thought and language. But such a procedure exceeds
the scope of this essay, and risks merely adding theology to his lengthy list of interests that
together inform his literary vision. Among these are intellectual and literary traditions, history,
moral philosophy, ethics, rhetoric, ‘intrinsic value,’ and a spate of recurrent preoccupations
including power, memory, love, sacrifice, etc. All of these bear familiar theological resonances,
but in Hill are not contemplated within a Christian theological rubric exclusively.
My own procedure focuses on a category that pervades Hill’s critical thought and does
have a privileged, we may even say paradigmatic place in his poetics: “contexture.” In the
following section I will review how contexture and ‘contextural’ reading figure in his poetics
generally. From there, as the heart of my thesis, I will describe how Hill gives specific
theological sense to the category. While resisting the claim that “Christian contextures,” so
called, denotes the whole of his literary-critical framework, I will argue further that Hill invests
the category of contexture with Christian theological [concepts] in his development of it,
specifically those of original sin, grace, kenosis, and silence [as both the unsaid and the
unsayable]. This move/practice? provides the basis for his critique—and disparagement—of
other theological approaches to literature (“Christianized aesthetics”), and demonstrates the more
promising, more theologically substantive approach he commends. In my conclusion I will
consider the advantages of that approach to theological readings of literature specifically as well
as to the literary-critical enterprise in general. In other words, what Hill commends by way of
providing “other sustenance” to theological critics—with contextural reading at its center—also
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offers [fresh] approaches to literary criticism. This will be my most radical suggestion: that
‘Christian contextures’ not only illuminates our understanding of Geoffrey Hill’s poetics but
corroborates theology’s contribution to literary scholarship as one among many conversation
partners with distinct insights to contribute. …

Lastly, by way of introduction, my reading of Hill’s theologically-inflected contextural

methods will also direct attention to the main title of my essay: virtue and voice. As a theme
woven throughout [this study], the matter of “active virtue” in the form of ethical or moral
speech—“a noble vernacular” as one poem calls it (Triumph of Love LXX)—or, contrarily,
unethical speaking and “the tongue’s atrocities” (“History as Poetry” CP??) permeates Hill’s
criticism, as it does his poetry. As our examination of his notion of contexture will show, the
prospect and difficulty of virtuous speech also animates Hill’s theological reflection; and vice-
versa, as he appropriates Christian concepts to evaluate where and in what ways poetic and other
forms of speech approach or fail to achieve that quality. [Again, not exclusively, but significantly
…?] Here, too, we find Hill’s equally pervasive attention to form and technique as the arena in
which the prospects of virtuous speaking are negotiated. That focus, I will argue, figures
significantly in Hill’s complaint against contemporary theological approaches to literature, and
represents the corrective he commends and practices. …? [And for which the notion of
contexture serves as …]
[>> Here I will draw upon the work of David-Antoine Williams in his book Defending
Poetry and of Rowan Williams whose …?]

[Virtues of vigilance, attentiveness, as well as humility and integrity … ]

‘CONTEXTURE’ AS CRITICAL CONTEXT [method?]

[this before describing contexture??]

Underlying Hill’s use of contexture is a view that sees language as a site of vital moral
significance, and our utterances as forms of moral action that generate moral consequences. As
he states succinctly in ‘Menace’, “ ‘utterance’ and ‘act’ are not distinct entities”(p.11). For Hill,
the spoken or written word comprises a dynamic location as much as it does locution—a place,
that is, of action: a place where morals, values, beliefs, however ‘virtuous’ or ‘vile,’ are enacted
in and through the form of one’s speaking. “Language here is not ‘the outward sign’ of a moral
action,” he comments in reading one of Wordsworth’s poems; “it is the moral action.”4
To extend this to matters of form specifically, he states in an interview with John
Haffenden:

I would find it hard to disagree with the proposal that form is not only a technical
containment, but is possibly also an emotional and ethical containment. In the act of
refining technique one is not only refining emotion, one is also constantly defining and

4
Hill, Geoffrey, “ ‘Perplexed Persistence’: the Exemplary Failure of T. H. Green”, Lords of Limit, p.117.
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redefining one’s ethical and moral sensibility. One is constantly confronting and
assessing the various kinds of moral and immoral pressures of the world, but also these
things happen simultaneously in the act of self-critical decision.5

By ‘containment’ Hill does not mean something static or inert, but the form of the finished work
as we find it. Indeed, it is through the dynamic process of technical refinement, Hill argues, that
authors become aware of the influences exerting pressure upon their utterances, and feel
compelled to negotiate such influences in emotional and moral as well as technical terms, in acts
of ‘self-critical decision.’ (See Macdonald on ‘self-containment’ p. 194)
Furthermore, given his characterization of language as a place of moral import and
action, it does not surprise to find recurring throughout Hill’s criticism, as well as his poetry,
keen attention to the surface dynamics of linguistic performance. He often scrutinizes works as if
they were textual ‘landscapes,’ which manifest, and at times mask, deeper elements of human
nature and personal character, including the character of societies and their age as well as that of
the individual. As Hill attests elsewhere,

. . . I think these individual men and women who are ultimately solely responsible for
what they write and what they do as artists are very powerfully affected by contingent
circumstance.6

For ‘contingent circumstance’ we may also read ‘contexture,’ which includes the socio-
political circumstances of one’s age and culture, the current state of one’s language, one’s
personal experiences, and, as we shall see, one’s human nature—the pressures of such
‘contingencies’ finding their way into the very ‘texture’ of one’s speaking or writing as the place
of their convergence. The ‘text’ is itself a contexture in which these influences come to
expression in uttered forms. The category of contexture, then, provides a way for Hill to name
this convergence and also to frame his observations of the dynamic interplay of text, world and
personality.
Hill brings together many of these elements and develops his view further in his most
sustained treatment of contexture, his 1986 Clark Lectures at Cambridge, published as The
Enemy’s Country: Words, Contexture, and other Circumstances of Language.7 As he clarifies in
“A Note on the Title” introducing the book, he takes the subtitle from Hobbes, which, he
clarifies,

I take to signify the relation of word to word and the body of words to those
contingencies and accommodations marginally glossed among the ‘Lawes of Nature’ in
Leviathan: ‘covenants of mutuall trust’, ‘covenants extorted by feare’, ‘justice of manners
and justice of actions’, ‘submission to arbitrement’, etc. (p. xii).

Here, Hill conflates etymology with ‘contingencies and accommodations’ that influence, and
inevitably serve to constitute and shape human relations within a given society. The ‘relation of
word to word’ that we find within and between texts, including also the history of words as they

5
Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 87.
6
Interview with Carl Philips, “Geoffrey Hill: The Art of Poetry LXXX”, Paris Review 42/154 (Spring 2000), p. 279.
7
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
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are used across epochs and cultures, is not distinct from but remains a product of these same
pressures.
He elaborates this understanding of contexture in his second lecture, taking his cue once
more from Hobbes. He writes, “Even the most unequivocal utterance is affected by the
circumstantial and contingent matter implicated in our discourse . . . . ‘Contexture’ here [in
Hobbes] is close to ‘circumstance’, understood as ‘the totality of surrounding things’”.8 Of
course, for Hill the very notion of ‘unequivocal utterance’ is suspect, precisely because human
authors are neither immune to the complex influences of their circumstances nor, he will insist in
one of his most explicitly theological moves, to the ‘infection’ of their inherent nature.
In this same essay, Hill specifies further the kinds of difficulties that a critical attention to
contexture both surfaces and seeks to address. “My concern,” he writes,

. . . is with language, judgement, and circumstance, not only the ways in which
judgement is conveyed through language but also the difficulty of clearing the terms of
judgement amid the mass of circumstance, the pressures of contingency. (p. 31)

The effort to ‘clear the terms of judgement’ in the face of ‘pressures of contingency’ in turn
directs attention not only to the authors and texts under immediate inspection, but bears
implications for the entire critical enterprise as well.9 How is it that anyone, whether as author or
author’s critic, can ‘sift,’ ‘refine’ and ‘tune’ one’s utterances in order to deliver ‘rectified’
speech (Hill’s terms), given “the always exhausting, at times mortifying and ignominious,
struggle with language” (p.34)? Once again, language emerges as the site in which such
negotiations (‘negotium’, in Hill’s parlance) occur, calling for a level of scrutiny and
attentiveness to words and form that enables clarity of judgment “amid the mass of
circumstance” and its “acoustical din”.10
The posture for the writer who undertakes this enterprise, Hill insists, and which also
aligns the writer with the effort to achieve virtuous speech, is one of resistance.
“[A] poet’s words and rhythms are not his utterance so much as his resistance” he writes in
“Unhappy Circumstances” re. Dryden, hence the poet “must resist the pressure of circumstances”
CCW 179). And again, that pressure and the site of resistance extends to the poet’s very medium:
“the poet is necessarily engaged in a competitive negotium: he is competing with the strengths
and resistances and enticements of the English language” (CCW 182), leading Hill to conclude
that “there is yet another oxymoron embedded in the inmost texture of English writing: the
viciousness of virtue when virtue is not called forth to action in the negotium of language itself”
(CCW 183).
[See also his commentary on Wordsworth’s Ode: the break [in the “time-signature” “is a
resistance proclaimed. If language is more than a vehicle for the transmission of axioms and
concepts, rhythm is correspondingly more than a physiological motor. It is capable of registering,
mimetically, deep shocks of recognition” (“Redeeming the Time, CCW 91; “Wordsworth
transfigures a fractured world,” 92; “a diremption between perception and utterance, energy and
effect,” 100; “the secondary imagination, the formal creative faculty, must awaken the minds of
men to their lost heritage, not of possession but of perception,” 101; re. Hopkins’ method of

8
“The Tartar’s Bow and the Bow of Ulysses”, ibid., p.25.
9
As Hill points out in “Menace”, “Language, the element in which a poet works, is also the medium through which
judgments upon his work are made,” ibid., p. 2.
10
“What Devil Has Got into John Ransom?”, ibid., p. 129.
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‘sprung rhythm’: “Crudely stated, the difference is between being ‘in stride’ and ‘out of’ stride,”
102; “Against all this [decadence] Hopkins’s poetry established a dogged resistance. Both
ethically and rhythmically, his vocation was to redeem the time,” 108).]
MORE ON RESISTANCE: “we are bound to recognize the way in which the formal creative or
critical judgement and the inchoate force of circumstance become awkwardly implicated or stand
in irreducible confrontation. ‘Meaning’ itself either strives to accommodate or strives to free
itself from and accommodation which it feels as curb and compromise upon the integrity of
utterance” (CCW 188).
“one cannot unperplex a philosophy of language from an aesthetic of style, and aesthetic of style
from the unhappy circumstances” (CCW 183)
[NB How does ‘pitch’ vs. tone demarcate resistant speech rather than acquiescence to the
pressures of circumstance?]
From “The Tartar’s Bow”:
Hobbes on ‘contexture’: “ ‘Contexture’ [for Hobbes] is close to ‘circumstance’ understood as
‘the totality of surrounding things’” (CCW 195);
“Extrinsic and intrinsic ‘contexture’ are related but the nature and extent of that relationship
are indeterminate” (CCW 196); see “intrinsic perplexities” (CCW 196)
>> Re. Skelton’s Magnyfycence: “The rectitude of such verse is manifested in its capacity
to measure up to the demands of active vice and to the authority of active virtue …” (CCW
197)
“it is not inevitable that words rebel against all attempts at better distinction, even when rebellion
and loss of distinction are the matter of their contemplation” (CCW 201).
From “Caveats”: “embodied in the contexture of style itself” (CCW 208)
“In the ‘activity’ of the poem [Donne’s “To Sir Henry Wotton”], however, we are convinced that
the nature of the moral life is an integrated process …” (CCW 217)
“Meta-poetry” (Donne, e.g.): “the most ‘immersed’ of crafts or ‘knowledges’ while resisting the
cynical fatalism that may accompany the ‘logical’ liberation of the mind. Meta-poetry is
immersed in the knowledge that it is so immersed” (CCW 224)
Re. same poem of Donne’s: “… is to enact virtue’s struggle to clear and maintain its own
meaning amid the commonplace approximations, the common practice of men” (CCW 224)
See also Kenneth Haynes “Perplexed Resistance” in Geoffrey Hill and His Contexts, pp.
231ff.

Where do diligence and attention figure in this quest for virtuous speech? D-A Williams ties
these virtues to Hill’s Memorizing/memorializing (see pp. 183-4)]

Where does silence figure in a theology of language, silence as both the unspoken as well as the
unsayable? (See D-A Williams pp. 193-5)

We notice something else in Hill’s concern with judgment, negotium, and resistance that
is vital to his notion of contexture, and which begins to indicate some of the theological impulse
we find in his writing. On one hand, contexture marks the convergence of forces that press upon
and affect the very forms of our utterances. On another hand, it also opens up consideration of
the character of these forces, which may, and often do impair judgment and cloud attempts to
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speak clearly and with “rectitude of judgement.”11 Hill’s belief that language, like human nature,
is fallen and infected with human sinfulness, is well-attested. So he writes in one of his more
overtly confessional moments:

I can at least reconfirm my own conviction that the “terrible original calamity” [from
Newman’s Apologia] in the contexture of human life constantly implicates, and is
implicated by, the textures of our uttered thought . . . .12

Accepting Hill’s depiction of this interplay between text and ‘fallen’ contexture, how does this
conviction find its way into a ‘theological’ poetics?13 As we turn to consider how Hill, and how
we, might fit his notion of contexture—with all of the valences he gives it—to a distinctively
Christian way of reading [and theology of language], his estimation of language as ‘fallen’
figures prominently.
[See also his comments on “intelligence” (vs. ‘intellect’) in the Paris Review interview:
“troth-plight”; etc. (p. 278)]
[What specific effects does language’s fallenness cause? Or conversely, what virtues
accumulate around the effort to recognize and resist this condition? Truth-telling vs. falsifying;
plain-speaking vs. equivocation

GEOFFREY HILL’S ‘CHRISTIAN’ CONTEXTURES

In order to get some purchase on this component of language’s fallenness in Hill’s

thought and to illustrate his method of ‘contextural’ reading in this light, we turn to just a few
moments in his criticism, as space permits. The first, cited above, occurs in his seminal essay
“Poetry as ‘Menace’ and ‘Atonement’,” in which he develops the thesis that “the technical
perfecting of a poem is an act of atonement, in the radical etymological sense – an act of at-one-
ment, a setting at one, a bringing into concord, a reconciling, a uniting in harmony . . .”(p. 2).
The ‘menace’ of poetry, Hill clarifies, which calls for such acts of ‘atonement’, includes a
range of potential hazards, all of which appear in ‘the density of the medium’. One menace has
to do with “the high claims of poetry itself”(p.5): claims that set poetry above our human
condition and above the “empirical guilt” attending that condition. In contrast to such claims,
Hill argues that literature is complicit in our guilt as manifestation of our nature. For this reason,
he asserts, “The arts which use language are the most impure of arts”(p.2). For those sensitive to
this condition, literature serves not only as “a medium through which we convey our awareness,
or indeed conviction, of an inveterate human condition of guilt or anxiety” but, more
substantially, as a formal demonstration of “the empirical guilty conscience” whereby one is
“possessed by a sense of language itself as a manifestation of empirical guilt”(pp.6-7). In a
similar vein, the ‘menace’ has also to do with human pride. Accordingly, Hill writes, “there is a
sense in which the modern artist is called upon to atone for his own illiberal pride and a sense in
which he is engaged in vicarious expiation for the pride of the culture which itself rejects him”(p.
4).

11
“Menace”, ibid., p. 10.
12
Hill, Geoffrey, “Language, Suffering, and Silence”, Literary Imagination I.2 (1999), p.249.
13
It is interesting to note that this same dynamic presents a distinctive theological problem in its own right, and in
this respect calls for distinctive theological reflection. [See The Word Made Strange …??]
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With respect to all such hazards, Hill lays stress on this: “that we encounter both the
‘menace’ and the atoning power of poetry within the ‘indefinite extent’ of language itself” (p.
11). It is toward the contexture of the uttered word that he wants to redirect the attention of
critics generally, and the attention of theological interpreters in particular. As he reaches in this
latter direction, he highlights Barth’s view of sin as the ‘specific gravity of human nature’,
concluding: “it is at the heart of this ‘heaviness’ that poetry must do its atoning work, this
heaviness which is simultaneously the ‘density’ of language and the ‘specific gravity of human
nature’”(p. 15). The poet’s “shocking encounter with ‘empirical guilt’,” then, regards this
encounter with one’s nature as more than “a manageable hypothesis”; rather, Hill continues, the
poet comprehends the “irredeemable error in the very substance and texture of his craft and
pride,” and here alone negotiates the singular hope that “his selfhood may be made at-one with
itself” (p.17).
[Is this all a true account of language? There are other theories to describe the ‘fallenness
of language,’ as for the fallenness of humanity, or to re-inscribe the problem in other terms, such
as the recalcitrance of language, or the ….? With Hill, however, we find one applying a
theological concept to a familiar condition [a theological principle to a practical problem of
giving an account …]. His account finds its source in his faith commitments, but one could also
say inversely that his faith commitments find their confirmation in an account that explains the
phenomenon of language’s [ ?]. The question before us is whether Hill’s theological account
contributes to the critical enterprise …]
How, then, can poetry address this condition productively, indeed, we may say,
redemptively? As I read Hill in this essay and elsewhere, his short response is ‘with humility’.
But, again, the humility called for extends beyond merely adopting an attitude of contrition
towards, or ‘acknowledgement’ of, one’s empirical guilt, or shame (a topic he goes on to discuss
towards the conclusion of ‘Menace’). It is a humility that finds its way into ‘the textures of our
uttered thought’ as an integral element of a work’s contexture. In his little-read piece “Poetics
and the Kenotic Hymn,” for example, he develops the theme of “poetic kenosis,” which he bases
in Karl Barth’s commentary on human powerlessness in I Corinthians.14 Once more drawing a
contrast with what he calls “Christian aesthetics,” disparaged here as “scarcely to be
distinguished from a ‘surrogate post-Christian religion of artistic gratification’,” he finds in Barth
“the best negative ground on which a rectified Christian poetics might be established” (ibid.,
Hill’s italics). The positive expression of the kenotic he instances in the humility of Tyndale’s
translation of Philippians 2:5-11 and the poetry of George Herbert. Hill concludes:

If, as it must be, character is something other than personality, each true act of expression
is the making of a character, kenotically conceived: an affirmation of selfhood which,
even in the instant of expression, is self-forgetting. (ibid., p. 197)

He finds a similar humility in Jonson’s Sejanus, examined in the Lords of Limit essays, where the
“heavy antitheses” of the line structure create qualifications that “worry the verse into dogs-teeth
of virtuous self-mistrust.”15 For Hill, such seeming paradoxes as ‘virtuous self-mistrust’ and an
‘affirmation of selfhood which is self-forgetting’, lie precisely at the heart of authentic speaking.
When woven into the texture of one’s utterances they manifest a positive expression of virtuous
speech, as well as a constructive element in a ‘rectified Christian poetics’.

14
Op. cit., p. 196.
15
“’The World’s Proportion’: Jonson’s Dramatic Poetry in Sejanus and Catiline”, Lords of Limit, pp. 52-3.
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In all, Hill envisages a larger scene of writing, or speaking, cast in the shadows of our
fallen condition as a dominant ‘circumstance and contingency’ affecting the contextures of our
utterances. He gives this conviction a near epic scope in the Haffenden interview, where he
avers:

. . . I think there’s a real sense in which every fine and moving poem bears witness to this
lost kingdom of innocence and original justice. In handling the English language the poet
makes an act of recognition that etymology is history. The history of the creation and the
debasement of words is a paradigm of the loss of the kingdom of innocence and original
justice.16

That heritage of loss, manifest in the history of words themselves, generates an inevitable
condition for the writer, as Hill also concludes in “Our Word Is Our Bond”: “the language a
writer uses and the writer who uses the language are inextricably involved and implicated” in
this human ‘heaviness’ or ‘debasement’; “the dyer’s hand,” he continues, steeped in etymology if
nothing else, is by that commonplace craftsmanlike immersion an infected hand”.17 Hence,
merely to ‘celebrate verbal mastery’ oversimplifies, ignores, and ultimately expunges this crucial
component in our literary appraisals, which is what provokes Hill to enter his ‘major caveat
against a theological view of literature’ in the ‘Menace’ essay, when pursued in such terms.
This is not to say, Hill is in earnest to qualify, that the quest for “rhetorical mastery”18 or
technical perfection have no proper place in the ambitions of the poet or in the critic’s estimation
of a poem’s worth. To expand on his commendation of poets such as Jonson and Herbert, and
approach the matter from a slightly different aspect, we find him urging in his Tanner Lectures
“Rhetorics of Value”:

For the poem to engage justly with our imperfection, so much the more must the poem
approach the nature of its own perfection. . . . the great poem moves us to assent as much
by the integrity of its final imperfection as by the amazing grace of its detailed
perfection.19

The meaning of the line “integrity of its final imperfection” and the reasons why this would
“move us to assent” is difficult to pin down, although in it we hear an echo of ‘Menace’ in so far
as integrity of utterance is linked to recognition of the “irredeemable error in the very substance
and texture of [one’s] craft and pride.” It echoes also what Hill surmises about Herbert’s art in
the ‘Kenotic Hymn’ piece, a poetry which is “simultaneously characterized by power and
powerlessness, magisterial in its rhetorical command . . ., and yet recurrently and finally self-
humbling” (p. 197).
In that vein, the difference between this view of ‘perfecting’ a work and Hill’s censuring
of a ‘Christianized aesthetics’ that ‘celebrates verbal mastery’ falls on the stressed premise “to
engage justly with our imperfection.” Given his assessment of the imperfection, the impurity of
the medium, the ‘density’ of language infected with the ‘specific gravity of human nature’, the

16
Viewpoints, p. 88.
17
Lords of Limit, p. 153.
18
See “Menace”, p. 3.
19
Hill, Geoffrey, “Rhetorics of Value”, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Oxford, March 6-7,
2000, p. 269 (Available at http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/Hill_01.pdf.).
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aim ‘to engage justly’ obliges the poet or author or speaker to comprehend the goal of verbal
mastery as an endeavor towards self-disclosure of a kind that bears witness to these conditions,
and not as something that stands the poet or the poem at a remove from one’s own complicity in
them. As Hill states in “What Devil Has Got Into John Ransom?,” “the double consequence of a
poet’s involvement with language is complicity and revelation”(op. cit., p. 130)—complicity by
virtue of the condition of an ‘infected’ medium, revelation by way of disclosing that condition,
as one’s own as well as that of the language one uses. Similarly, in “Our Word Is Our Bond” he
extols the poet who is “winningly in command of his own perplexity and weakness,”20 and in his
Paris Review interview makes the commendation: “I have come to see that the closest
approximation of truth requires that the shortcomings of the self shall be admitted into the most
intimate textures of the work” (p. 284).
Seen in this light, ‘contexture’, then, accumulates a new, or renewed, energy in the
direction of a theology of language, and with this, further basis for a Christian poetics as Hill
would construe it. The locus for this energy is the text itself, as that formal place where the
presence of elements articulated by certain doctrinal commitments, in this case original sin,
emerge in the very craft and style of the work. In this respect, as a place of moral enactment the
text or utterance can also be a site of theological enactment, whether consciously or not on the
part of the author. Unlike a ‘Christianized aesthetic’ that extrapolates theological significances in
broad thematic terms, Hill’s contextural reading situates his theological interests in the
composition of a work, pressing issues of language and formal considerations towards ways of
reading that discover theological import there.
At this point we still may wonder, ‘Is this all there is for language? In regard to literature
specifically, is there no greater promise for works of the literary imagination than to confirm our
fallenness—even in their perfecting still testifying only to imperfection? As adamant as Hill is
about the ‘lost’ condition of language, necessarily so given humanity’s own state, he nonetheless
maintains the possibility, indeed the potency, demonstrated in “the amazing grace of [a work’s]
detailed perfection”. And here, too, he presses a theological point. When he explicitly considers
“undertaking a theology of language” in “Language, Suffering, and Silence,” he turns to the
operation of grace through the work as “one of a number of possible points of departure,”
proposing that “the abrupt, unlooked-for semantic recognition [be] understood as corresponding
to an act of mercy or grace;” and further, that it would include the claim that “the shock of
semantic recognition must be also a shock of ethical recognition; and that this is the action of
grace in one of its minor, but far from trivial keys.”21

[Elaborate this passage: of note in these proposals is the striking connection Hill draws
between one effect of poetic statement—an “abrupt, unlooked-for semantic recognition”—and
“the action of grace.” When he further explains that such a “shock of recognition must be also a
shock of ethical recognition,” which together constitutes a “type” of grace, we find ourselves
perched over a vast field of potential areas of inquiry. These may include epistemology
(“grounds for claiming,” “semantic recognition”), ethics, aesthetics (regarding an art that
‘shocks’ as a function of its meaning), and religion, as well as all of the issues implicated in the
category “theology of language.” That Hill proceeds here only by way of self-limiting suggestion
does not relieve the pressures that accumulate around this first part of his proposed ‘exercise’.
20
Lords of Limit, 145.
21
“Language, Suffering, and Silence”, pp. 253, 254.
 11

Part (b) of the exercise considers a more manageable claim, though one wonders how and
in what ways the ‘requirement’ that contemporary art and literature ‘memorialize’ and
‘memorize’ the dead helps to constitute a theology of language, and for whom. Although such a
claim differs from the first in that it regards the ethical aims of the artist more directly than the
effects of the art, it similarly raises more questions than it answers by way of offering a clear
direction for those who would take up Hill’s proposal. Ever the provocateur, Hill may rest
satisfied at having instigated the conundrum. But since he announces a ‘serious’ proposal, we
shall take him seriously and seek to unpack his meaning here, beginning with the context of this
essay, and then expanding our scope to the larger corpus of his critical writings.

Such a proposal signals to his readers that, for all of its debasement and potential
‘menace’, Hill nowhere abandons language or the prospective “struggle for a noble vernacular”,
as his persona calls it in The Triumph of Love (Section LXX). Language is fallen, he admits,
“But also splendid. Fallen and noble.”22—and in this way a possible vehicle for the ‘action of
grace’.
What concerns him, and those who may subscribe to his view of ‘infected’ contextures, is
the question his persona in Triumph goes on to ask in this same section: “But where is it?” [this
‘struggle for a noble vernacular’]:
Does it stop, in our case,
with Dryden, or, perhaps,
Milton’s political sonnets? – the cherished stock
hacked into ransom and ruin; the voices
of distinction, far back, indistinct.
Still, I’m convinced that shaping,
voicing, are types of civic action.

We, of course, also want to ask, “What is it? What is a ‘noble vernacular’ characterized by
‘voices of distinction’, and what does it look like to struggle for it?” In terms of ‘Christian’
contextures, from Hill’s treatment of language it would include the struggle for personal integrity
in one’s utterances, which recognizes a summons to atonement and gives expression to our
human condition in various forms. At the same time, Hill makes room for other ‘voices of
distinction’ that bear theological import in his contextural readings, instances that appear
throughout his criticism. [VIRTUE = ??]
Looking once more at “Language, Suffering, and Silence,” for example, in this piece Hill
examines the lines from an African-American spiritual, “They crucified my Lord . . ./ And he
never said a mumbalin’ word”. Of that refrain ‘an he never said a mumbalin’ word’, Hill
comments: “It is a phrase, a cadence, which intersects with direct meanings obliquely, yet
cogently, in a way that I find entirely characteristic of significant poetic statement”(p. 243). This
same quality of ‘intersecting with direct meanings obliquely, yet cogently,’ marks a quality of
significant theological statement for Hill as well. He continues:

22
Paris Review interview, p. 297.
 12

Even doctrinal poetry is finally made meaningful, is finally made to be

understood, by something other than the doctrine. . . . As I perceive it, that “something
other” is a gift of techné, which itself becomes something other in the process of making
the gift. (pp. 243–4)

Hill describes this gift-giving further as “the imagination’s kneading process, the theme
identifying itself with and in the language; the language identifying itself with and in the theme”
(ibid.).
This sounds like the familiar adage ‘form is content, content form’, and it does rehearse a
comparable emphasis. Still, within the context of literary-theological interpretation, Hill brings to
the fore fresh considerations for the application of such a principle. For Hill, form, style,
prosody, techné—all of the elements of literary construction that give body to a work’s
contexture, and which also constitute much of the ‘stuff’ of literary criticism—bear theological
significance in their own right. In short, Hill underscores the fact that ‘serious’ theological work
is being done in the craft of the artist, as is the case, we may add, with Christian literary scholars
when focusing attention here. Furthermore, as obvious as it may seem to insist that the literary-
critical projects of Christian scholars require a theology of language, which offers an account of
this medium’s fallenness as well as its potential nobility, less obvious are the methods and
critical practices needed to explore works of the imagination along these lines. Hill’s
development of contexture as both a conceptual and a practical focus provides a model in this
respect, giving as it does full weight to the dynamics of composition by which literature performs
its most unique and compelling activity.
 13

Notes on Contexture and Contextural Reading

Theologically inflected …
Does Hill put contexture to theological use, appropriating it esp. for his critique of Christian (i.e.,
‘Christianized’) aesthetics, or does he theologize the very notion in such a way that it takes on a
theological character in general?

Contextures brings into focus and intensity Hill’s poetics and so his theo-poetics: style and faith,
faith and style (see Preface); kneading process in “Silence”, etc.

What we get from a study of Hill’s contextural methods are the sinews of a theology of language, what it
consists of, and exists for …

… But contextural reading provides not only observation; it involves recognition and remonstration as
well. To observe that various pressures impede upon the writing process from one’s personal and societal
context, as well as the medium of language itself, calls for acceptance of this condition and resistance to
it. Hill’s word for this resistance is diligence, an attentiveness to language and the dangers (‘menace’)
inherent in its use …
… ‘dark and disputed matter’ of this medium … negotium …
>> How the prominence of ambiguities, esp. those inherent in language itself so often staged by
Hill in his poetry (see MacDonald p. 193-95, etc.) figures in a theology of language or Christian
poetics???
>> ‘Rectitude’, ‘rectified’, …
>> also recognition, attention bestowed on others (memorializing the dead) as resistance in the
form of a refusal to forget, to trivialize, to disregard … a practice that permeates his verse! (“The tongue’s
atrocities. Poetry/ Unearths from among the speechless dead …”; “I write for the dead”; etc.); see
interview with Carl Phillips, 298.
>> “deep shocks of recognition” in “Redeeming the Time”
>> coupled with a self-forgetting humility that accepts one’s own fallenness as well as that of the
language one uses (see “Menace” and “Poetics of Kenosis”)

Virtue? >> integrity, from humility, resistance, ‘graceless perfection’, …

From “Contextures” paper:

As the word ‘contexture’ itself indicates, my own search for critical models and methods of Christian
reading focuses on matters of form as one site where theological interests converge significantly with
literary-critical interests.

Virtue lies in one’s attentiveness to the contextural nature of our utterances, which demand recognition
as well as …

Is he raising the prospect of a theology of language as a peculiarly modern/postmodern problem?

 14

What are Hill’s sources for his views (about contexture, theology of language)? Or is this his own
invention?
Other models?

What specific Christian theological concepts does Hill draw on and apply? Fall, kenosis, only?

How valid is Hill’s concept of contexture as a model for reading? Does his critique of ‘Christianized
aesthetics’ provide an important correction, and his own proposal a viable alternative? Is his proposal
aimed at this correction only, or does it apply to other approaches in addition to ‘theological
approaches’?
>> Is his contribution to theological approaches also a contribution to other or all literary
approaches? If adopted by Christian literary critics, how might Hill’s insights help these critics to make a
contribution not only to Hill studies but to literary studies in general?
>> e.g., the ‘turn to religion’ risks shallow or thin treatment with critics who do not understand
or appreciate the nuances of religious/theological readings and the concepts and insights which inform
them …

he explicitly mentions his interest in such a project at various places in his critical writings. One
place is his 1998 lecture and suggests “a primary exercise to be undertaken for its
establishment,” which, he elaborates,

would comprise a critical examination of the grounds for claiming (a) that the shock
of semantic recognition must be also a shock of ethical recognition; and that this is
the action of grace in one of its minor, but far from trivial types; (b) that the art and
literature of the late twentieth century require a memorializing, a memorizing, of the
dead. (CCW 405).

The first part of this exercise echoes his earlier comment in the same lecture, that one possible
“point of departure” for undertaking a theology of language would include “the abrupt,
unlooked-for semantic recognition understood as corresponding to an act of mercy or grace”
(CCW 404).
In addition to the fact that one of the most prominent English-speaking poets of the 20th-
21st centuries brings a theology of language to the fore in his own critical thought, of note in
these proposals is the striking connection Hill draws between one effect of poetic statement—an
“abrupt, unlooked-for semantic recognition”—and “the action of grace.” When he further
explains that such a “shock of recognition must be also a shock of ethical recognition,” which
together constitutes a “type” of grace, we find ourselves perched over a vast field of potential
areas of inquiry. These may include epistemology (“grounds for claiming,” “semantic
recognition”), ethics, aesthetics (regarding an art that ‘shocks’ as a function of its meaning), and
religion, as well as all of the issues implicated in the category “theology of language.” That Hill
 15

proceeds here only by way of self-limiting suggestion does not relieve the pressures that
accumulate around this first part of his proposed ‘exercise’.
Part (b) of the exercise considers a more manageable claim, though one wonders how and
in what ways the ‘requirement’ that contemporary art and literature ‘memorialize’ and
‘memorize’ the dead helps to constitute a theology of language, and for whom. Although such a
claim differs from the first in that it regards the ethical aims of the artist more directly than the
effects of the art, it similarly raises more questions than it answers by way of offering a clear
direction for those who would take up Hill’s proposal. Ever the provocateur, Hill may rest
satisfied at having instigated the conundrum. But since he announces a ‘serious’ proposal, we
shall take him seriously and seek to unpack his meaning here, beginning with the context of this
essay, and then expanding our scope to the larger corpus of his critical writings.

Theology of Language: may develop from two starting points, from that which seeks to bring the
categories and resources of theological reflection to the study of language, and that which seeks
to elaborate the theological implications present within the medium itself (see Paul Kahn’s
approach to political theology). The latter represents the direction and shape of Geoffrey Hill’s
theological reading of literature . . .

Re. theology of language: Hill’s proposal joins him to a millennia-long discourse; so what
significance today?

KEY QUESTIONS:
What do we mean by a theology of language?
>> Does it designate a particular critical stance towards language, one informed by
theological interests and categories? [so, merely perspectival?]
>> Does it designate a body of knowledge
>> Are there theologies of language in the same way as there are various philosophies of
language?

What contribution does a theology of language or theological approaches to literature make to

literary studies? No longer regarded as the “queen of the sciences,” do theology and a theology
of language nonetheless have a place in the court?
>> Does it [govern] a body of material known as ‘theological/religious language’ only, or
does it engage material of any variety (such as other approaches to literature)?

Is there resistance to the inclusion of theology or a theology of language to literary-critical theory

and poetics, and if so, why or on what grounds?
 16

[In my concluding comments I will then consider our own contexture: that of literary
studies in general as well as theological approaches to literature. Broadly, what do Hill’s
methods contribute to models of reading? Does his correction of ‘Christianized aesthetics’
[How valid is Hill’s concept of contexture as a model for reading? Does his critique of
‘Christianized aesthetics’ provide an important correction, and his own proposal a viable alternative? Is
his proposal aimed at this correction only, or does it apply to other approaches in addition to
‘theological approaches’?
>> Is his contribution to theological approaches also a contribution to other or all literary
approaches? If adopted by Christian literary critics, how might Hill’s insights help these critics to make a
contribution not only to Hill studies but to literary studies in general?
>> e.g., the ‘turn to religion’ risks shallow or thin treatment with critics who do not understand
or appreciate the nuances of religious/theological readings and the concepts and insights which inform
them … ]