COLD GRACE: CHRISTIAN FAITH AND STOICISM IN THE POETRY OF J. V. CUNNINGHAM

In another poem, Cunningham invokes the doctrine of sin and notes the problem left by the rejection of the traditional Christian remedy for it. Exploring the Stoic difficulty described above (the possibility that the "Self-knower" within may not be equal to the task of self-understanding and moral correction), Cunningham notes in "To My Daimon" (1943; CP 34) that the Self-knower may be in fact an "accomplice in despair" rather than a perfect moral guide. Confronted by the limitations of such selfanalysis, the speaker is tempted by "chapeled prayer" where "Warm grace wells from despair," but turns from that comfort in to the stark awareness that he knows himself "within" "the sinner and the sin" - that is, when his own rational analysis has revealed his moral failure, he prefers to confront and deal with it without appeal to divine grace.

Cunningham also explores the cost of abandoning Christian faith in "Monday Morning" (1965; CP 91), which describes the unbeliever's world as "a January world, / An after Christmas waiting. For what?" The title of the poem suggests that Cunningham may be alerting us to the "Monday Morning" aftermath of unbelief - the post-Christian viewpoint that results from rejection of the faith such as in Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning," in which "There is / No resonance in the universe," and in which the faithless are left only with the banal hedonistic alternative of buying "something extra today" and of cluttering up "house and life." In a poem more clearly in his own voice, poem 8 in To What Strangers, What Welcome (1963; CP 79), Cunningham hints at the presence of nostalgia for the lost faith in these lines:

And is there there in the last shadow,

There in the final privacies

Of unaccosted grace, - is there,

Gracing the tedium to death,

An intimation?

"Unaccosted" implies "unaccepted," or "ungreeted," as in fact grace has been, and yet one senses that amid the "tedium" of post-Christian life there is a nostalgic glimmer of a level of being left unrealized but possible.

Two other poems evoking the theme of faith are less negative in implication. Epigram 37 (1944; CP 47) in The Judge is Fury speaks of faith as the essential method not only of theologian and scientist, each of whom must "risk his faith" in order to "prove the commonplace" "or confirm the "inductive leap," but also of the lover, who must, likewise, "in good faith affiance / Love and his trades" in order to discover "sincerity as lover." Cunningham thus playfully but profoundly expresses the nature of faith, which, as Paul Tillich writes, requires risk and courage:

This element of uncertainty in faith cannot be removed, it must be accepted. And the element in faith which accepts this is courage. Faith includes an element of immediate awareness which gives certainty and an element of uncertainty. To accept this is courage. In the courageous standing of uncertainty, faith shows most visibly its dynamic character (Dynamics 16).

The poem thus manifests on Cunningham's part a continuing awareness of the dimensions and dynamics of faith that Tillich describes.