In his 2008 essay to accompany a fifteen-CD box set of Seamus Heaney reading his own poetry, Irish poet Peter Sirr remarked that Heaney’s imagination is ‘to an extraordinary extent nourished by ritual’ and is ‘always reaching for a sacral framework’.1 Heaney picked out these phrases as especially resonant when he wrote to Sirr to commend him on the essay.2 They struck him ‘as a remembrance’, he said – a truth only tacitly known, perhaps, that is brought suddenly to the fore.3 The context of Sirr’s remark was Heaney striving in ‘The Tollund Man’ to come to an imaginative and moral apprehension of ritualised slaughter in the ‘man-killing parishes’ of Denmark’s remote past and Northern Ireland of his own time. If the configurations of sacredness that Heaney inherited through his Catholic upbringing were no longer readily available to him, could he not still see the world, especially human life, as imbued with the sacred?

In the aftermath of the Enlightenment, at least among the ‘cultured despisers’ of religion, the sacred was held to be a category that belonged to religious discourse alone. In essence, this is what ‘disenchantment’ meant – a secular, demystifying re-reading of the world. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century new thematisations of the sacred began to emerge, even among writers with no religious commitment, though many of them acknowledged a debt to monotheistic religious culture. The most conspicuous starting point of this development might be Émile Durkheim’s response to the outrageous abuse of Alfred Dreyfus in his 1898 essay ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’. Even for a secular intellectual, there may be something about being human that sets a person apart, much as it has always done in the great religions. ‘The human person’, Durkheim writes, ‘whose definition serves as the touchstone according to which good must be distinguished from evil, is considered as sacred, in what one might call the ritual sense of the word’.4 He continues:
It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have given to their Gods. It is conceived as being invested with that mysterious property which creates an empty space around holy objects, which keeps them away from profane contacts … Whoever makes an attempt on a man’s life, on a man’s liberty, on a man’s honour inspires us with a feeling of horror in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned.

Strains of this same sense of sacredness are apparent in the work of many twentieth-century thinkers, people as diverse as William James, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek. Perhaps the most fruitful opening out of the concept during that time, however, was in the field of hermeneutics. For Hans-Georg Gadamer in particular, there is a sacral element in artistic creation, as it discloses the transcendental, raises ordinary reality ‘into its truth’,5 and transforms the observer. ‘A work of art always has something sacred about it’, he says; ‘Ultimately every work of art has something about it that protests against profanation’.6 And this holds for poetry most of all. Gadamer insists on ‘the essential priority of poetry with respect to the other arts’.7 All human understanding is linguistically mediated – even the visual and plastic arts are dependent on language. Poetry, however, is a special kind of language; due to its ‘forgetfulness’ of the formal elements that govern language, it is able to reach beyond the strict instrumentality of everyday speech and access deeper, existential truths, truths about being human and being in the world. It is, Gadamer says, ‘the highest fulfillment of that revealing which is the achievement of speech’.

Poetry as revelation. It is more than incidental that poetry has been an
essential mode of transmitting the message in scripture-based religions. More than incidental too that, in a notable instance of the ‘interdisciplinary turn’ in contemporary academic culture, theology has come to pay ever closer attention to poetry, seeing it as offering insights not conveyed by grand ontological or epistemic systems. Poetry is not theology, of course, nor is it prayer; but there are clear affinities between the disposition of the poet – and indeed the reader of poetry – and the attitude of prayerfulness to be found in many religious traditions. In particular, both share a sense of attentiveness – attentiveness especially to the depth, the mystery and the strangeness behind the ostensible meaning of things in the world. And this attentiveness is not a matter of strenuous effort but rather of quiet receptivity. It’s about knowing how to look at the world in a certain way – about letting the world speak, letting it disclose itself. Simone Weil, for whom attention was the very substance of both love of God and love of neighbour, insisted that attention entailed ‘suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object’.9 She added:
Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains.
Inscribed on the backrest of a bench on the Seamus Heaney Walk in the Devil’s Glen, Co. Wicklow is a couplet written by the poet himself which resonates well with Weil’s sense of prayerful attention: ‘Walker, pause now and sit. Be quiet here. / Inhale the breath of life in a breath of air.’

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This issue of Studies opens with eight previously unpublished letters from Seamus Heaney to a close friend, Peter Steele SJ, priest, fellow-poet, and fellow-academic. They are remarkable for their warmth, intimacy, and good humour. They are also striking on account of the sense they give of Heaney’s attentiveness to the rhythms, the rituals, and the structures of sacredness that governed the life of his friend. Steele’s poems based on Catholic liturgy, his homilies, his meditations on the Stations of the Cross – all of these were enough to make Heaney grieve ‘for the youth in me and the celebrant with his altar boys away back there in the first aisle of the world’. What he responded to most in Steele, however, was his character, ‘his steady, learned, merry, moral self’. It was this ‘braiding of faith and intellect’ that made Heaney see him as ‘like a spiritual director to me’.
The letters published here, as well as another set of still unpublished letters between the two men, were discovered by Steele’s Jesuit confrere and friend Gerald O’Collins SJ in repositories in Melbourne, Australia, where Steele lived most of his life. The discovery was too late to be brought to the attention of Christopher Reid for possible inclusion in the 2023 volume The Letters of Seamus Heaney. I am deeply grateful to Fr O’Collins for editing the letters and making them available to us. Also to the estate of Seamus Heaney for granting us permission to publish them, and especially to Catherine Heaney, through whose good offices the permission was obtained. In ‘“Ave, pater, atque vale”: The Heaney–Steele Letters’, Eugene O’Brien takes a close look at the eight letters. He notes that they corroborate what we already know about Heaney: his warmth and his wit as well as his dedication to language and his conviction of the significance of art and poetry – the taproot, O’Brien says, of his friendship and connection with Steele. What is apparent here too, though, is Heaney’s sense of the ‘confluence of religion and poetry, both of which are devoted to very specific incarnations of language that may touch or signify aspects of the transcendent not available to ordinary language’.
Catriona Clutterbuck, in her essay on Heaney’s final volume of poetry, Human Chain, explores his reckoning with what he terms ‘poetry’s call to seek beyond yet stay on course, to open up yet hold the line’ – to traverse the distance between the intimately felt world of human experience and the unknown future that may hold a promise of transcendence. In ‘“Crosshatched” Connectivity, Vulnerability and Creative Renewal in Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain’, Clutterbuck notes Heaney’s final image of a kite, symbolic of human hope, that rises higher until the string breaks and it takes off. ‘Though it may become “lost” in the blue of unconfirmable possibility,’ she remarks, ‘such hope is never lost to the inner eye of human beings’ sense of the imminent extraordinary within our immanent, fallen lives.’
In ‘A Lavish Talent for Friendship: Heaney the Letter Writer’, a review article on The Letters of Seamus Heaney, Patrick Crotty notes the empathy, courtesy, and indeed humour that characterises Heaney’s voluminous correspondence, the scale of which, he says, is ‘old-world – indeed almost Victorian’. He further considers Heaney’s negotiation of fame and privacy, his relations with other poets, and his discretion in talking about religion and current affairs.
Concluding the set of essays on Heaney is Thomas O’Grady’s ‘Seamus Heaney’s Second Life’. He ruminates on the poet’s ‘afterlife’ in this world – the life after passing away, in which, citing W. H. Auden on Yeats, he ‘became his admirers’. Paying specific attention to ‘The Harvest Bow’, from Field Work, O’Grady judges that Heaney passes the tests of greatness that Auden set for Yeats. ‘The Harvest Bow’, he says ‘epitomised for me the capacity of Heaney’s full body of work to make, as Auden’s counsel puts it, “personal excitement socially available”’.
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This issue of Studies includes a small number of contributions unrelated to the core theme of Heaney and the sacred. The first of these, however, also concerns the sacred and serves the good purpose of problematising sacredness itself. In ‘The Priest as Sacred Figure: Reflections on Violence, Religion, and the Holy in Twentieth-Century Ireland’, Liam Kelly OFM brings the insights of René Girard regarding violence as the ‘heart and secret soul’ of the sacred to bear on the Irish experience of priestly violence. The fallacy that he identifies at the base of this phenomenon is the conflation of the sacred and the holy. Irish priests in the recent past were effectively managers of society’s sacred economy, but those days are gone now, leaving them free ‘to bear witness to the holy, now that their service to the sacred is ended’.
Terry O’Reilly, a renowned scholar of the Spanish Golden Age, particularly of its literature and spirituality, died last year after suffering for a number of years from motor neurone disease. In ‘Terence O’Reilly: A Scholarly Life’, his son Tom describes his academic contributions, mostly during his decades as professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University College Cork. Most noteworthy was Terry’s rigorous study of early Jesuit history and of the patristic and medieval influences on the spiritual culture of St Ignatius of Loyola.
In ‘Rescuing the Common Good from Integralism’, Patrick O’Riordan SJ addresses the rise (or indeed the return) of Catholic integralism, the belief that the state ought to recognise the spiritual authority of the Church and aim to promote the common good as defined by its moral teachings; also that civil laws should be in harmony with Catholic doctrine. This stance, O’Riordan argues, entails a radical misunderstanding of what the Church means by the common good, especially as that doctrine was elaborated at the Second Vatican Council and in the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI.
Another contribution to this issue is Declan O’Keeffe’s account, in ‘Dublin City Walls and Defences, c. 1170–c. 1317’, of the development of the city of Dublin in late medieval times, with the merging of two settlements and the subsequent erection of defensive structures. Also featured here are the work of two Irish poets, Mary O’Donnell (who also reviews Peter Sirr’s The Swerve in this issue) and Liam Aungier.

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Just before this issue of Studies went to press we received the sad news that Fr Gerald O’Collins SJ died, after a brief stay in hospital, on 22 August. I would like to extend my condolences to his friends, his family, and his fellow- Jesuits in Australia. I remain deeply grateful to him for pursuing the matter of having Studies publish Seamus Heaney’s letters to Peter Steele SJ. Also for his warmth and graciousness in all our correspondence. May he rest in peace.