Theopoetics is both a contemporary discipline and a practice of writing about embodied experience reminiscent of medieval and early modern vernacular theology that includes poets and theologians and that features a variety of discourses and approaches to rethinking and reimagining traditional ideas and constructs that have shaped and continue to influence our understanding of ourselves, our world, and the universe at large, especially religious beliefs. Together yet separately, through debate, dialogue, and individual pursuit, practitioners and scholars of theopoetry have set about interrogating traditional theological questions and metaphysical concepts in light of contemporary science, while others have turned to poetry as a unique and privileged mode for articulating religious experience – personal, embodied experience of a very particular kind – experience that transcends religion as such: transporting engagement with mystery that may but need not be understood as divine; that may but need not correspond to any fixed ideas about divinity; enchantment and elevation without the elements of traditional devotion (praise, worship, belief, etc.)

A field shaped by process philosophy and postmodern theology, contemporary theopoetics centers on the relational and the processual in both creative activity and the human-divine encounter. Inspired by contemporary theopoetic approaches to the phenomenology of creative and spiritual experience, this panel examines early modern devotional self-shaping and divine encounter. The papers it brings together attend to embodied religious experience and divine making understood as the humanizing or materializing of the divine and/or the divinizing or de-materializing of the human. The panel asks how contemporary theopoetic ideas, methods, and approaches might enable a more nuanced understanding of early modern religious phenomena and cultural forms. What might a theopoetic lens offer the study of early modern religious, creative, and cultural expression?

A panel on prayer, contemplation, and the lyric across linguistic traditions, “Early Modern Theopoetic: Divine Encounter” investigates devotional literature as a constructed site of negotiation between the self and the divine, the immanent and the transcendent. The first paper on the Spanish mystic and poet St. John of the Cross examines his verse, revealing how he approached encountering the divine through the creation – via the imaginative embodiment of non-human creatures. The second paper on the devout Christian and Neoplatonic poet Michelangelo Buonarroti examines the phenomenon of sacred eroticism as a means of engaging the divine in the famous Florentine artist’s spiritual verse. The third paper on metaphysical poet George Herbert’s The Temple examines the phenomenon of divine encounter through spatial engagement. The final paper on prayers in the fifteenth-century Fifteen Odes examines affective devotion as a participatory mode of divine engagement that aims at making God present.

As theopoetics is a new and emerging field, there is no body of existing scholarship on theopoetic approaches to Renaissance and early modern religious life and cultural production. This panels aims to advance the conversation by engaging with the work of emerging scholars. It will do so by interrogating the relationship between devotional creativity and spiritual self-shaping. Participants will be invited to address such questions as: Did early moderns view matter and spirit as mutually shaping phenomena? What does it mean to understand humans and the divine in terms of process and not just substance or identity? Does this shape how we understand early modern piety, devotional literature, and conceptions of the sacred?

This panel complements the CLCS Renaissance and Early Modern guaranteed panel “Early Modern Theopoetics: Devotional Creativity,” which examines devotional creativity and pious affect aimed at experiences of healing, wholeness, and spiritual transformation. The first paper in that panel considers Thomas Treaherne’s theopoetic practice of psalm paraphrasing as an instance of transformative devotional creativity aimed at healing the soul. The second paper reflects the relationship between health and devotion in John Donne and reveals the devotional text (his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasion) to be an instrument of self-undoing and self-making. The third and fourth contributions come from scholars of early modern literature who are also practicing poets, one a theopoet specifically. Through analysis of Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasion, the third paper demonstrates how wholeness was pursued by cultivating a relationship to the divine through connecting with fellow humans. The final paper on Teresa of Avila, mystic writers, and weeping examines devotional tears as transformative inhabitable phenomena.

This panel will take the form of four thirteen-minute paper presentations followed by a discussion.