Negative Capability and the Call of the Preacher

The famous Romantic poet John Keats once said that what made the truly great poet great was something he referred to as a "negative capability." The poetic genius, he said, can negate his or her own personality in order to enter imaginatively into the reality of the other. This "negative capability" allows the poet to "[be] in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason." In other words: because the poet has the imaginative capacity to negate his own personality, he can accept the paradoxes and conflicts necessary to great art without giving in to the rational impulse to resolve the tensions. According to Keats, the poet that offers us the best example of negative capability is Shakespeare, who could take "as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen," and feel no personal need to resolve the tension between the two.

Negative capability is one of those nebulous terms that most students of English literature will run into if they study it long enough. It was negative capability, Keats suggested, that allowed the poet to transcend himself and express true beauty in his work.

And I've been wondering these days if a certain kind of "negative capability" shouldn't also be a quality of preachers, too. Sometimes preachers are lauded for preaching from "where they're at," for preaching from the heart, for displaying a certain kind of personal vulnerability from the pulpit. And I get that; and in my own preaching, too, I strive for personal authenticity. But I also remember that St. Paul commended the Thessalonian church because when they received the preached Word, they accepted it "not as the word of men, but as what it really is, the word of God." From what Paul says there (and elsewhere), the ultimate goal of preaching is the human response to the living Word of God, and emphatically not to the personalized words of the preacher.

As I struggle to figure out what that means for me as a preacher, that's when I remember Keat's negative capability.

Because when the preacher can negate his or her own personality in order to enter imaginatively into the reality of the divine other, as it is revealed in the Word she preaches-- when the preacher can "be" in the uncertainties and paradoxes of that Word without giving in to the rational impulse to personally resolve the tension she feels there-- when the preacher can exercise the imaginative capacity to negate herself in the very words she speaks-- when her preaching has this "negative capability"-- that's when she'll discover the living Word is truly speaking in her, and with her, and through her.

And that's when her gospel will come to her hearers, as Paul says, not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.