ABSTRACT
Religion is something like an organism accepting food, assimilating and transforming it into its own ongoing life. The acceptance, with natural piety, of every mode of knowledge, experience and language on its own terms and conditions, getting the maximum out of each, is a condition of understanding, and of attaining, richer and fuller religious insight. Religious insight is hospitable to all the modes of knowledge and experience, gathers them into itself and transfigures them. Now much religious poetry is dramatic, or in respect of transparency is like drama. Its basic concern is with what transcends poetry, with what is transcendent in more than one sense. The religious meaning of a religious poem points to what is beyond human experience altogether. There is a limit to reading the Bible as literature, if this implies that the aim of reading religious poetry is simply to enjoy the aesthetic experience of it as art.
