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

The fear of which Cunningham speaks at the end of the poem suggests that being overwhelmed by alien and subversive emotion was also part of his distrust of faith-commitment. Although he was an "intellectual opponent of romanticism, he struggled in his poetry, as in his life, with an ineradicably romantic temperament" (Howe 190). In The Quest of the Opal, Cunningham speaks of the problem of relating reason to passion, and equates faith with passion:

It is true that in classical ethics the tightness of right reason is considered to be constantly imperiled by passion, against which one must be unremittingly and warily on guard. But the consequence of this position is to enforce an absolute dualism of reason and passion, unmanageable except, perhaps, by religious and ritual means. And when such means must be invoked they tend insensibly to take primacy over reason, until through the dualism of reason and passion they come ultimately to be identified with passion, and with a passion that now, under the pseudo-authority of its impersonal source, delivers the personality to the absolute dictates of passion: called God ... (CE 413).

The passage offers a reason for Cunningham's becoming "inured" to his religious past, as a way of protecting the self from the "absolute dictates of passion" that faith presented.

It is therefore understandable, given his wariness about the emotion in religious experience, that in Epigram 43, "In Whose Will Is Our Peace?" (1944; CP 49), he confesses his incapacity to experience the warmth of God's grace:

In whose will is our peace? Thou happiness,

Thou ghostly promise, to thee I confess

Neither in thine nor love's nor in that form

Disquiet hints at have I yet been warm;

And if I rest not till I rest in thee

Cold as thy grace, whose hand shall comfort me?

He rejects both Dante's affirmation of peace through acceptance of God's will and Augustine's assertion that our ultimate rest is in God. Fenced in by a protective independence, hardened to not letting the faith excite passion, he has successfully isolated himself from the "warmth" of grace. It is now "cold" grace. Because he has "inured" himself against it, grace cannot bring him comfort and benefit. Because he sees God as a threat to identity and to rational control in the self, God has become dangerous to the self. The answer to the final question seems to be either that there is no comfort available at all, or that the self alone is responsible for whatever comfort may come from human resources.

Nevertheless, he still recognizes that grace exists, and "Timor Dei," which closes The Judge is Fury (1947), expresses, as Timothy Steele notes, "a hunger for religious faith and a difficulty in believing" (CP [note] 164). Thus it calls attention back to the opening poem of that book, "The Phoenix" (1933-1946; CP 23), which similarly expresses Cunningham's recognition both of his rejection of belief and the difficulty of ridding himself of its influence. The poem has been read mainly as dealing with "the poet's unfulfilled desire to believe in the Resurrection" (Middleton viii), but the Phoenix in Christian tradition has come to stand for Christ, and thus for Christian faith itself (DBT 612). The poem says that neither the fatigued restlessness of which Augustine spoke, nor the fear of death itself has brought the speaker to the assurance of Christian faith. The imagery in the poem moves the Phoenix from the hot sands of Arabia to a northern setting: