The poetical imagination is one thing, and the biblical imagination, inevitably, something else; side by side, they struggle to co-exist. To attempt in literature to become God was first for Rimbaud to allow himself the luxuriant incoherence of a mind incapable of being superseded by any other in the universe. Christ, in successfully sabotaging death, freed it from the limits of a definition; but for Rimbaud the very word ‘definition’ was what, in saintliness, argued against God. Thus, in the very act of imagining, this poet, residing always in the infinite possibilities of things, felt swell the sonority of his greatest thoughts. If Rimbaud was the ‘master of silence’, then Christ, undoubtedly, was the master of wounds. Rimbaud, in orienting his hopes towards what, in the imagination, couldn’t be reached by theology, maintained throughout his poetic life an unequalled viewpoint of what new worlds poets, without God’s simultaneous knowledge of eternity, might eventually set foot on. But this has nothing to do with what medieval scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham understood about God’s foreknowledge in advance of man, no, for Rimbaud, uninterested in reconciling divine foreknowledge with the freedom of future human action, sought simply one thing: to escape a world tainted by contingency and evil, to play his part in the play of existence in which all other ‘actors’ would react to the new morality caused by his actions. Feeling as bereft as a gynaecologist who failed to predict the miscarriage of Christ, or worse, the Christian gravedigger who was forced to then bury the body, Rimbaud felt stripped quickly of all of the attributes of his early naive childhood notions of the world, faith and the church, learning quickly the all too obvious truth that the gods of western theism were almost definitely not the ones most sought after by the imagination of poets still daring to call themselves ‘seers’.

If Cioran was correct, and that Shakespeare and Hölderlin had indeed bypassed Christianity, what pagan mythologies were left for a poet like Rimbaud? Hölderlin yielded only to the seduction of a polytheist attitude, not faith, and thus attempted to rewrite the myths of his own gods. Rimbaud was not content only to be Rimbaud when writing, and this was an impenetrable misnomer, his one integral weakness; he never knew just what to revert himself back into. And having no memory of these other lives he so passionately wished he lived, Rimbaud was left only with an infinite nostalgia for a time when he could never have lived. Thus, this poet had no choice but to seek out other satisfactions, something akin to using his imagination as a womb, a pre-establishing vacuum in which all got sucked; for everything disinterested him, even God, and therefore, the only answer was to attempt to become him, that or take a short cut to him by humanizing his absolute perfection, and/or by exhausting the infinite possibilities of his imagination by thinking for him. But a poet like Rimbaud sought only the fleshlessness of the synecdoche, the half-empty vessel of the récit, that and every displacement in language in which his allegiance to the anti-genre prevented him from completing a final thought; in effect he realized that, in never overcoming the biblical imagination or the inhuman healing-points in death, his quest for ‘progress’ would demand of him that he function only amid the artificiality of the geography of anyone both in view of, and apart from, the abyss.

Mallarmé wrote of the ‘unpossessed’, those that bore ‘no author’s name’, and whose work could only be described as a ‘Hymn’, even if, in Rimbaud’s case, it was a churchless one. It was important that Rimbaud got past the early stage of his atheism, for in the same way that Voltaire claimed that readers of Descartes ended up becoming atheists because of their search for his God, Rimbaud and his own quest for God left and still leaves a lot of his readers with a distinct sense of theology having been belligerently undermined by a pagan theory of the world which, according to traditional deists, wouldn’t have needed God to have existed to create it in the first place. That said, if Pascal was right and that deism was as far removed from Christianity as indeed atheism was, then the charge of atheist could certainly not be directed towards Rimbaud, and not have contributed to his impetus that led him to write, in the pseudo-religious poem ‘The Seven-year-old Poets’, that ‘He loved not God; but the men he saw in the lurid evenings, coming back dark, in smocks…’, or those pathetic beings in church:

…humbled like beaten dogs,

The Poor offer up to God, the Lord and Master,

Their ridiculous and stubborn oremuses.

(‘Poor People in Church’)

 Before the ‘disordering of the senses’ Rimbaud was helpless only to watch Jesus ‘dreaming up there’, and thus, tired of sifting through the same human motives, the same poetical themes, the poet went in search of the ‘formula’ to change existence, and God, or both. But first though he would become a heretic of style, knowing that he had too much talent for the church, that which requires none. A submission to any one idea is not to tolerate it, but merely to remain in perpetual temptation to it, hence Christianity; and while the face of Christ continued to itch beneath many of Rimbaud’s most potent masks, he knew that if he was to reach his imaginative apogee, then he would have to remove every mask until only Adam’s face remained. Talent or genius are too unaccommodating for true faith and, once in contact with the temporality of the ego, inevitably erode, but in appearances, only then to resurface finally beneath the death-mask.

When Rimbaud wrote in A Season in Hell, ‘Ah! I am so forsaken that I could dedicate to any divine image that came along all my urges towards perfection’, he unconsciously picked at the too-tangled entrails of polytheism, and indirectly asked the following question: If God is not the only creator, if even he is lost amid the vastness of the universe, then what options, outside of choosing a species to represent him, did he have? Aquinas said that it didn’t matter, for all that man can know about God is what God wishes to reveal to us; yet even if this is true, and that there is no ontological or necessary link between God and a universe he was not the only one to create, what kind of faith or desire can exist in man, if he has not one sole divine image to direct his desire towards? Rimbaud, by desiring what could not be located in his imagination, outside the ready-made archetypes of religion, understood one thing: that if even God was time-bound in Christ, then what chance did the seer have of ever escaping the confines of time and space? And even if his imagination or visions enabled him to escape them, what images would he find there? Spinoza said God can never assume the characteristics of a person, which not only ruled out Christ, but also an ingenious pretender like Rimbaud, so that when he admitted, ‘I do not think that I have embarked for a wedding, celebrating with Jesus Christ for a father-in-law’, this poet realized all too brutally the contrast between the vision that attempts to assume God, and the limitations of the imagination that cannot stop interrupting man’s own religious thought about God.Put simply: the imagination is not God for one reason, and one reason only: it cannot maintain the stream of images that are forever coextensive with the divine image; hence the need of a poet like Rimbaud to continuously assume a counter-stance, as he took on and off a variety of unsuitable masks for the job, masks which will never, outside of anthropomorphism, select the correct finite face of God to be re-identified as Christ.

When we consider the imagination, we have always asked what it is, not necessarily what it is not. Yet each variation, undoubtedly, without the other cannot exist. So, the only question for a poet like Rimbaud to ask was ‘which one came first, God or the imagination?’ Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, outlined succinctly the dilemma of man attempting to know the unknowable, showing us that to break free of the epistemological prison of the mind, to think beyond the mind is still to be using it. To disbelieve in anything beyond the mind is not only to refuse to admit that a world independent of our perceptions can be known, but is also to counteract this limitation by not believing in anything that the mind doesn’t allow us to. The metaphysical answers fuelled by man’s inability to find questions for them, are what made up the fuse that lit the very first star and will never be found in language. The incommensurability between a species’ search for truth and the truth that doesn’t require a species searching for it are, without doubt, what first thawed gods from ice on far-off planets. Planets which, by Rimbaud’s imagination, were always in the process of being vetted as potential new ones on which to one day exist on. Indeed, this poet understood that to reduce the universe, or even one galaxy to the criteria of human truth, amounts to reducing it to a mere cosmological product of either God’s consciousness or man’s. If to the former, then this was what undoubtedly allowed God to foresee, sustain, and ultimately control phenomena, while if to the latter? A reduction to only human limitation. The outcome of which would be that either the human race accepts its most rationalist version of truth and starts living in accordance with it, or alternatively starts yearning for either a lost Platonic paradise, or a newer religious one to replace all cognitive truths with.If there is not one unmediated truth anywhere in the universe, then all that man has is himself: the sole survivor with no other choice but to pick through the epistemological wreckage of the reality left by the loftiest ideas of science, philosophy, and religion. In light of this realization then, Rimbaud’s poetical imagination set itself one central task: to invent a previously unimagined race of superbeings capable of writing the bibles, philosophical texts, codices, laws, and parables that would, at least for the duration of his own imagination, replace the ones mankind had been hitherto living by. With this in mind, it seems obvious to say that the biblical imagination (that which forced each character of the bible to live out their lives amid a kind of unshakeable determinism, a place of metaphor and devitalized fear) was only what, for Rimbaud, helped reduce the imagination to an unforeseeable pause in the production of itself, and thus in the same way that God deprived himself of his place in our world to create Christ, Rimbaud himself effaced his own being to allow his writing to appear. By effacing his own being and inducing his own apprenticeship in the purification of God within himself, this poet held little interest ultimately in separating the necessary truths of God from those contingent ones made powerful enough to believe in by historical facts, such as say Christ’s death on the cross. Rimbaud’s poetical imagination sought simply to suspend the wretchedness of Pascalian man, long enough to allow him to attempt to translate in poems the semantic acceleration of Christ’s own subterranean words to God from the tomb. If you took a sample of the lung tissue of Christ from the tomb and placed it under a microscope, it would reveal only the damage of an organ that wanted to breath the greatest intake of air since the world began; no ‘type’ of imagination, whether poetical or biblical, will tell us that. The resurrection interrupted the biblical imagination, just as Rimbaud, in his failure to emancipate himself from his own imagination, interrupted ours.

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This essay is an excerpt from The Carbonized Earth, a study on Arthur Rimbaud followed by Perfect Little Monster, a play in three acts), by Paul Stubbs, available now from Black Herald Press.

Paul Stubbs is the author of several poetry collections (The Theological Museum, The Icon Maker, The End of the Trial of Man, and The Lost Songs of Gravity), two long poems (Ex Nihilo and Flesh) and books of poetical and philosophical essays (among others The Return to Silence, on Rimbaud, Simone Weil, Cioran, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Yves Bonnefoy). Visions de l’outremonde, a selection of poems translated into French, was published by Hochroth-Paris in 2019, and another bilingual collection, An Anatomy of the Icon, was released in 2022. Poems and essays have appeared in a variety of books, magazines and anthologies. With Blandine Longre, Stubbs has translated texts by Victor Segalen, Arthur Rimbaud, Jos Roy, Pierre Cendors and Ernest Delahaye. He has also coedited the bilingual literary magazine The Black Herald. Forthcoming as a bilingual book, The Acceptance of Loss, an essay on Jack Kerouac (2025), and Beast: The Lost Chronicles (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). Website: https://poetpstubbs.wixsite.com/paulstubbs Twitter: @PRStubbs1