Love's Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life [Hardcover]

Scott Cairns (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2007

Scott Cairns is convinced that "the words of the mystics sacramentally partake of the Word Himself, and as such are inexhaustible, generative powers." These selections are unified in their common claim that Love is the most compelling name of God, and also the most apt attribute of the Holy One in Whom we live and move and have our being. In that spirit, Cairns offers Love's Immensity as "a mere taste of the bountiful feast that awaits any who would pursue a life of faith and prayer, equipped with both the holy scriptures and the holy tradition that surrounds them."

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Cairns's warm, calm, personal tones win him respect in many quarters, but his core audience comes from his subject matter: the mysteries, consolations and consequences of Christian belief. . . Cairns seeks compassionate ways to apply the lessons of theologians or of Christ to his own life; one does not need to be Christian, or even religious, to profit from what he finds." -- Publishers Weekly

"Scott Cairns is one of the best poets alive." -- Annie Dillard

"Scott Cairns is perhaps the most important and promising religious poet of his generation." -- Prairie Schooner

"Cairns's warm, calm, personal tones win him respect in many quarters, but his core audience comes from his subject matter: the mysteries, consolations and consequences of Christian belief. . . Cairns seeks compassionate ways to apply the lessons of theologians or of Christ to his own life; one does not need to be Christian, or even religious, to profit from what he finds." -- Publishers Weekly

"Scott Cairns is one of the best poets alive." -- Annie Dillard

"Scott Cairns is perhaps the most important and promising religious poet of his generation." -- Praire Schooner

From the Inside Flap

The Holy One pours out

upon those who love

the vision of the truth a power that enables

them to see the image -

and this power is Himself. -from "Illumination," by Saint Macrina the Younger Scott Cairns is convinced that "the words of the mystics sacramentally partake of the Word Himself, and as such are inexhaustible, generative powers." These selections are unified in their common claim that Love is the most compelling name of God, and also the most apt attribute of the Holy One in Whom we live and move and have our being. In that spirit, Cairns offers Love's Immensity as "a mere taste of the bountiful feast that awaits any who would pursue a life of faith and prayer, equipped with both the holy scriptures and the holy tradition that surrounds them."

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 142 pages
• Publisher: Paraclete Press (MA) (May 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557255253
• ISBN-13: 978-1557255259
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #143,066 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #45 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Literature & Fiction > Poetry

More About the Author

Scott Cairns is the author of six collections of poetry, The Theology of Doubt, The Translation of Babel, Figures for the Ghost, Recovered Body, Philokalia, and most recently Compass of Affection: Poems New & Selected. With W. Scott Olsen, he co-edited The Sacred Place, a collection of prose and verse celebrating the intersections of landscape and ideas of the holy. He wrote the libretto for The Martyrdom of Saint Polycarp, an oratorio composed by JAC Redford. His poetry and essays have been included in Best Spiritual Writing, Best American Spiritual Writing, The Pushcart Prize XXVI, Upholding Mystery (Oxford, 1997), The Best of Prairie Schooner, and Shadow & Light, among other anthologies. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, The New Republic, Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, Spiritus, Tiferet, Western Humanities Review, and many other journals. He has taught American literature, poetry writing, and poetics courses at Westminster College, University of North Texas, Old Dominion University, and at University of Missouri, where he is currently Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing. In 1993, he founded the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry; he served as its series editor from 1993 through 2006. In 2007, his spiritual memoir, Short Trip to the Edge, was published by HarperSanFrancisco and his translations and adaptations, Love's Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life, was published by Paraclete Press. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and was named the Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair in English at the University of Missouri in 2009.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lovely and Helpful., August 20, 2008

By 

Slowdown (Eugene, Oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love's Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life (Hardcover)

If you are looking for a book of "poems" that will stand out independently as works of "art," then I would say that this is not your book. If you want a representative anthology of writings from the mystics that will give you all the right information (and there's nothing wrong with that), then look elsewhere.

However, this is a lovely and very useful collection. These are poetic studies of writings from primarily the Christian mystical tradition--and with an Orthodox sensibility. They are also prayers themselves. Cairns uses poetry both to resurrect the poetry of the originals and to think them anew by rethinking, remaking them.

In the mystical tradition, there is a practice of reading as prayer, and Cairns is writing in this tradition. When one reads these poems, one is focusing not only on the poems themselves, but also on the leading in the poems, and one is looking toward where the leading is leading. One is trying to take direction from this poetry. The point is to make spiritual friends of these writers, to participate in their movement toward God. Beauty and art and intelligence are part of this, but they are what they are only as they lead one further into God.

This book is not for everyone. It requires one to slow way down, to participate in re-blazing the paths these writers blazed. It also requires, I believe, a familiarity with Christian tradition and its history, and certainly an openness to its spirituality--and all of these are growing rarer. In addition, of course, one must also be open to Cairns's own specific poetic--he has very a bodied intellect and a dialogical style, full of voice and its pauses, direct addresses, questions.

If you're prepared for his giving, there is quite a current of receiving to step into here. If not, there are other trails, but none of them are especially easy to climb onto.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pause, listen and rest the presence of these poems, February 12, 2009

By 

A. Doug Floyd "pilgrim" (Louisville, TN United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Love's Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life (Hardcover)

Love's Immensity - Mystics on the Endless Life
by Scott Cairns

We are but dim reflections of a love so true, a light so pure, a life so alive. Created in the image of God, we still carry the haunting beauty of his touch despite our falling and failing. Reading Scott Cairns' new volume of poetry, "Love's Immensity," I am reminded of the hope of restored glory that shines from our "gleaming Liberator Jesus Christ."

Drawing from the writings of early Church Fathers, desert monastics and Medieval mystics, Cairns weaves a wondrous cord of images and words that capture the beauty of our creation and restoration through God's transforming presence. Translating always offers challenges for the reader and the writer. Are we reading the translator or the original writer? How does a translator capture ideas that are not translatable?

Cairns addresses some of this complexing challenge by addressing the challenge of translating "nous," a word common in early church and Eastern Orthodox writings. This multi-layered idea is not easily translated. When we interpret "nous" as mind or heart, we tend to rob the word of nuanced implications by reducing the meaning to our deficient and disconnected understanding of mind and body.

So Cairns writes, "There is one word .. that I have decided for the most part not to translate at all, hoping that we might acquire a renewed sense of the word itself, and hoping that we might dodge the diminishments of its uniformly unsatisfactory translation." Since "nous" and "noetic prayer" are fundamental ideas in many ancient writings, it worthwhile to try and penetrate some of what the New Testament and early church writers meant when they used this word.

Cairns attempts to open the richness of the word by explaining it as follows:

It is the center of the human person, where mind and and matter meet most profoundly, and where the human person is mystically united to others and God. I have written elsewhere that an "individual does not a person make." Personhood--if the Image of God is relevant here--is revealed in relationship, and the nous is the faculty that enables and performs just such a relationship. (xiv)

That succinct explanation conveys the richness and the beauty of this word. It is a hint of the beauty that is to come as Cairns begins to unfold the prayers and teachings of our forebears. Again and again I am drawn to his phrasing that brings alive the beauty of these writers that has often been hidden in the dusty translations of scholarship. Capturing the provocative spirit of Athanasius, he uses words like "dim occasions," "slow senses" and "beloved numbskulls" to address the slow and struggling people of God.

In spite of our blindness, God makes a way for us to see. So we hear Athanasius proclaim, "As we had turned from cosmos--the beauty above, light-laden--and sought Him in the muck among created things, the God in His great love took to Himself an earthen body." God comes to meet in the midst of slow and dim senses. He comes to restore the true icons of God, "our faces."

Reading Cairns' new book is not a rush to the finish. Rather it is a stroll in the garden of heavenly delights. For in these short prayers and poems and sermons, we encounter presence: the presence of these great saints who went before us, the presence of Scott Cairns in his lovely words of translation and another Presence. This book could help some to slow down, listen, wait and behold God's love.

I think this little treasure is a helpful prayer book that might give us words to express the longings of our heart. Words like this prayer from St. Basil, "Pierce our souls with love, so that--attending to You always, being lighted by You, and glimpsing You, O unapproachable, everlasting LIght--we may offer confession and speak our joyful thanks to You."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A joy to read!, May 15, 2011

By 

Gaist Byron Jack "akroatis" (Cyprus) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Love's Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life (Hardcover)

This is a collection of writings from both Eastern and Western Church Fathers and Christian mystics. What I think makes it so special and very pleasant to read, is the fact that Scott Cairns renders the writings into colloquial English, at the same time managing to preserve the dignity of the original. This has the effect of immediacy, bringing the saint's message in each case into direct contact with our current condition as modern readers, as if we're listening to the words of a wise and friendly contemporary. An excellent collection, and a joy to add to my library!