The unexpected relationship between R. S. Thomas (1913–2000)¹ and Calvinistic Methodism is an unfinished story.² Both Tony Brown and M. Wynn Thomas have shown how R. S. Thomas’s imagination was drawn to Ann Griffiths of Dolwar Fach (1776–1805).³ She was both a ‘heroic’ Kierkegaardian figure and a Calvinistic Methodist at the same time. Brown argues that unlike other women, who are ‘explicitly seen [by R. S. Thomas] as threatening the balance of male selfhood’, Ann is an ‘authentic self ‘ achieving ‘spiritual insight’ whilst being ‘heroic and apart’.⁴ Much has also been written on the importance of Søren Kierkegaard’s (1813–55) philosophy in Thomas’s work.⁵ Perhaps, in Thomas’s oeuvre, one might say that Kierkegaard and Ann appear like parental figures, holding R. S. Thomas’s hands over the depths of seventy thousand fathoms.⁶

However, R. S. Thomas’s relationship with William Williams Pantycelyn (1717–91), that ‘Welsh hymnodist par excellence’, is untold.⁷ Pantycelyn, who was known as the Per Ganiedydd (the Pure Singer), was a Calvinistic Methodist poet who seemingly, according to R. S. Thomas, ‘heard Him [God] speak’ (CP, p. 43). Like that of Yeats, Pantycelyn’s is an ‘impenetrable mind’ (CP, p. 10), a figure whom Thomas does not presume to address. Nevertheless, Pantycelyn does briefly appear in The Minister (1953) and ‘Border Blues’ (1958), whilst his hymns echo throughout Thomas’s oeuvre. Whilst directly engaging with the figures of Ann and Kierkegaard, Thomas is also manifestly drawing on the work of Pantycelyn. Thomas’s poetic persona, whether subliminally or not, seems uncannily to imitate the Methodist pererin (pilgrim).⁸

Pantycelyn was the ‘third most important leader of the Welsh Methodist Revival’.⁹ Trained as a physician, he soon became a healer of ‘spiritual ailments’ when he felt the call to Christian ministry in 1740.¹⁰ It is important to note that Pantycelyn never actually left the Church: he was not a nonconformist or dissenter in that sense. However, both he and Thomas were Anglican clergymen who did not conform to the Established Church.¹¹ Although Thomas disliked Protestant ‘Nonconformity’ with its watering down of the Eucharist, its creeds and its art-castrating piety,¹² he said that:

I’m sort of Non-Conformist without agreeing with the Non-Conformist way of worship . . . I like the sort of freedom, their emphasis on the Bible as being the . . . direct word of God to the individual, that you don’t need a priest to come between you and God. I like their disassociation from the Establishment in England.¹³

On the whole, Pantycelyn’s ‘Nonconformity’ conforms to the description above: the emphasis on the individual, the centrality of the Word (the Bible) and the experiential dialogue which is possible between humanity and God. Although a powerful preacher, Seiat leader, organiser and catechiser, Pantycelyn’s hymns remain his primary legacy, for he published over 850 in Welsh and 120 in English.¹⁴ These hymns provided the Welsh with a means of articulating their religious experience. The language was vital to their successful reception: Carmarthenshire dialect mixed with the accompanying folk and ballad tunes appealed to the ordinary people, whilst the evangelical nature of the poetry articulated the personal, as well as the collective, revival experience in Wales (c.1735–90). Pantycelyn achieved national status which still resonates in Wales today as ‘Bread of Heaven’ continues to be sung in the Millennium Stadium during rugby internationals.¹⁵

Both Thomas and Pantycelyn were also poet/priest figures, whose dual occupations were unified in their presentation of imagined truth. Poetry, to them, was ‘how the communication of religious experience best operated’.¹⁶ Both poetry and religion use metaphor; for Thomas, religious language was a ‘deciduous language’¹⁷ that had multivalent meanings and could be renewed again and again.¹⁸ The ‘imaginative’ is the crux of the creative act itself for it connects religion and poetry.¹⁹ Thomas himself stated that:

The poet, by echoing the Primary Imagination, recreates. Through his work he forces those who read him to do the same, thus bringing them nearer the Primary Imagination themselves, and so, in a way, nearer to the actual being of God as displayed in action.²⁰

The role of the religious poet, according to Thomas, is imaginatively to present ‘the ultimate reality’.²¹ For Pantycelyn, ‘the ultimate reality’ was the gospel message which he had a duty to re-present. Pantycelyn’s hymns sought to ‘bring men nearer to God’ even at the cost of aesthetic merit, a philosophy wholly different to Thomas’s.²²

Pantycelyn’s hymnology made him a ‘national poet’, who ‘gave form to the . . . dreams and aspirations [of the Welsh]’, giving voice to and teaching the ‘people’.²³ Pantycelyn spoke and wrote his poetry in the two languages of Wales, something that Thomas never really achieved. However, both poets experienced what has been called an art-creating ‘tension of inbetweenness’.²⁴ For Pantycelyn, this was a spiritual ‘inbetweenness’, separating temporality and eternity, sin and righteousness, life and death, and especially, the division between him and his Saviour, that caused him to sing. For Thomas, it was, at least partly, the linguistic no-man’s land between Welsh and English that nurtured his poetic voice: ‘I complained once to Saunders [Lewis] about the tension of writing in one language and wanting to speak another and his reply was that out of such tensions art was born.’²⁵ Linguistic fragmentation reflected Thomas’s own crisis: there was ‘a painful awareness of his own strenuous existence between two cultures’, and therefore, two identities.²⁶ Thus M. Wynn Thomas suggests that: ‘[It was] this psychologically divided existence . . . that made Thomas not only a poet but a national poet.’²⁷ Whilst Pantycelyn’s hymns are sung in rugby matches, Thomas’s fractured identity produced a prophetic figure who became a kind of mouthpiece for the linguistically fractured nation.

What, then, is Calvinistic Methodism? First, it is important to note that it was an experiential form of religion, a way of life, rather than the Presbyterian denomination founded in 1811 (officially formed in 1823).²⁸ It was a product of the Evangelical Awakening in England and Wales (c.1730) with its main theological roots stretching all the way back to the European Reformation with its new, or rather re-discovered, New Testament Christianity whose beliefs were based on the three solae (principles – from Latin, sola, literally meaning ‘alone’): scripture over tradition (Sola Sciptura), faith over works (sola fide) and grace over merit (sola gratia).²⁹ Historians of Methodism have recently emphasised the importance of European events in its formation, such as the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which resulted in ‘The easing of religious tensions . . . [that] created space for alternative strains of popular spirituality to develop, pieties that tended to be more individualistic and experiential, stressing the cultivation of an inward religion of the heart.’³⁰ In Britain, one could hardly say that there was an ‘easing of religious tensions’. However, like in Europe, towards the end of the seventeenth century, there seems to have been an inward, experiential turn when it came to popular spiritualties.³¹

‘Experiential religion’ is a term that is usually associated with mysticism, which, in its original form, implied a ‘personal experience of God and reflection upon it’³² – the concept (long attributed, erroneously, to Thomas Aquinas) of cognitio dei experimentalis (‘experiential knowledge of God’).³³ This experience is not only cerebral but involves the heart. Calvinistic Methodist theology was a:

Theology for the heart, giving expression to a mainline Calvinism within an experimental and practical framework. It drew heavily and heartily on earlier Puritanism, and yet shared unashamedly the individual pietism of contemporary (Arminian) Methodism. As such it confessed a biblical authority for matters of faith and conduct, and a Trinitarian, Protestant and evangelical faith.³⁴

This ‘personal experience of God’ had its crux in an individual evangelical conversion experience:

‘Methodism’ was a term that came to be applied to people who had experienced in an individual sense the salvation from sin to be found in Christ. Usually this would be brought about through a Gospel preaching that was attended with much of the divine presence, bringing an awareness of spiritual and eternal realities. This involved personal accountability and guilt for sin, the realization of an eternal dimension to existence and destiny, an amazement at God’s provision of forgiveness, reconciliation and acceptance to the believer in Jesus Christ.³⁵

Early Welsh ‘Methodists’ were different from their English counterparts because they were generally Calvinistic in theology.³⁶ John Calvin (1509–64) emphasised the Sovereignty of God, Divine Predestination and Election of the Saints in the theology of Redemption.³⁷ This differs from Wesleyan Methodism which, theologically, tended towards being ‘Arminian’,³⁸ stressing humanity’s free will in accepting or rejecting salvation – which also meant that an individual could fall from grace. ‘Individual experience’ and ‘personal accountability’ were fundamental in Calvinistic Methodist soteriology – the twin emphasis on God’s grace and personal experience was ‘nothing less than New Testament Christianity’ for Pantycelyn.³⁹ Pantycelyn had himself experienced an evangelical conversion, the result of which is alluded to in his monumental semi-autobiographical work, Theomemphus (1764):

Dedwyddwch ddaeth o’r diwedd, y fath ddedwyddwch yw
Nas cair mewn un creadur ag sydd tan nefoedd Duw;
Maddeuant rhad o bechod, pob rhyw bechodau ‘nghyd,
Rhai ffiaidd, mwya’ aflan a glywad yn y byd.40
 
[Bliss came at last to Theo, its nature all sublime,
Not found in earthly creatures, nor in the realms of time;41
For sin a full forgiveness, for sins of deepest dye,42
A pardon freely given, by God who cannot lie.43]

For the Calvinistic Methodist, these subjective feelings of ‘Bliss’ were produced by apprehending biblical truths such as forgiveness of sin and the atoning nature of Christ’s blood. Pantycelyn experienced this himself around 1738 after hearing Howel Harris preach in Talgarth graveyard.⁴⁴

A conversion experience, like Pantycelyn’s, marked a crucial point in the Methodist concept of pilgrimage.⁴⁵ After the Reformation, Protestant authors adopted the idea of Catholic pilgrimage and adapted it into Bible-based spiritual narratives whereby a Christian could be catechised doctrinally and encouraged spiritually.⁴⁶ Puritanism contributed to and developed this corpus of work by using allegorical settings to reflect Christian experience.⁴⁷ Perhaps the most famous and influential Puritan work that engaged with pilgrimage was John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) which established the pilgrim as the ultimate Puritan motif.⁴⁸ It did not take long for Stephen Hughes (1622–88), the ‘Apostle of Carmarthenshire’, to translate Bunyan’s work into Welsh as Taith neu Siwrnai y Pererin (1688). Pantycelyn inherited Bunyan’s pilgrim and realised that he could adapt the moral and interior characteristics of earlier pilgrim works within a Welsh context. Pantycelyn’s earlier hymns stylistically mirror the metaphysical pilgrimage:

Pe gwel’swn i cyn myn’d i’m taith
Mor ddyfned yw ffordd Duw a’i waith,
Anobeithiaswn yn y man
Gyfodi o ddistryw byth i’r lan.
 
Ond pan y’m galwyd, fel Abraham,
Gwnes ufuddhau heb wybod pa’m;
Gan geisio gwel’d dyeithr DDUW,
Ond ffaelu ei ffeindio yn fy myw.49
 
[If I had seen before I had begun
How deep God’s way, his law, his work is done,
Complete despair and anguish I’d have felt
No hope of reaching that shore of being content.
 
But when He called me, like Abraham of old,
I heard his voice and did what I was told.
I sought to see that stranger I called God,
I could not find him at home, within or abroad.50]

The pilgrim-figure here realises that he cannot save himself or better his condition without grace. This is identical to the distressed pilgrim at the beginning of The Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and, as he read, he wept, and trembled; and, not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, “What shall I do?”‘⁵¹ The law’s condemnation, in Pantycelyn’s hymn, triggers off a quest to find or see God. Like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, he goes via the cross before travelling on to the heavenly Canaan.

All of Pantycelyn’s hymns about life’s pilgrimage are linked to, or derive from, the ideas explored in his book-length poem Theomemphus. The poem is an extended sequence of quatrains which sees the transformation of ‘Theomison’ (literally, ‘hater-of-God’) into ‘Theomemphus’ (‘seeker-after-God’), with the rest of the work documenting his pilgrimage and experiential dealings with God. The poem portrays an ‘everyman’ Christian, an individual to whom the reader might relate. Once converted, or ‘regenerated’, Theomemphus becomes the typical Methodist pilgrim who seeks after that direct, personal, redemptive engagement with God, but who is only able to find such an experience by God’s grace.⁵² That typical pilgrim seems to be reincarnated in much of Thomas’s poetry in a somewhat different guise.

William V. Davis notes that the major theme that unifies R. S. Thomas’s work is also a ‘pilgrimage’ or a ‘theological journey’.⁵³ Thomas himself said in his autobiographical work, Neb (‘No-One’), that:

Life is a pilgrimage, and if we have not succeeded in coming a little nearer to the truth, if we do not have a better comprehension of the nature of God before reaching the end of the journey, why was it that we started on the journey at all?⁵⁴

As such, the purpose of life is to comprehend the ‘nature of God’; the meaning is in the pilgrimage itself. Thomas seems to be drawing on an amalgam of Calvinistic and Kierkegaardian ideas in the creation of his own poetical pilgrim. Pantycelyn’s Welsh motif of pilgrimage established a tradition that sought after a personal interlocution with a ‘felt’ God, whilst Kierkegaard’s three-staged ‘stadia of life’ – ‘the aesthetic’, ‘the ethical’ and ‘the religious’⁵⁵ – emphasised the journey of self toward a passionate, subjective involvement in faith.⁵⁶ This ‘inward activity of discovering the truth for oneself ‘,⁵⁷ meant that religious experience was relational and participatory which, generally speaking, conformed to Pantycelyn’s outlook.⁵⁸

Both Pantycelyn and Thomas can be imagined as being engaged in a poetic agon (contest). Both poets speak of a personal quest for a cognitio dei experimentalis – a God that can be both known and felt. They each use pilgrim personas to distance and ventriloquise themselves and yet the poems, in both oeuvres, are written directly out of their own spiritual quests. Their pilgrims travel through literal topographies before turning within; while Pantycelyn’s speaker addresses his sin, Thomas’s speakers’ search for self slowly evolves into a quest for the deus absconditus. This article will now examine the beginning and end of their spiritual journeys. Pantycelyn first appears as an iconic figure in the work of Thomas: his portrait becomes an object of modification and reflection, hanging in a gallery of religious experientialists as Pantycelyn’s portrait would have done on Welsh domestic walls. He is a Calvinistic Methodist figure whose position and status Thomas appears to envy as he looks back at a lost Wales.⁵⁹ An agon develops between, in Bloomian terms, the strong precursor poet (Pantycelyn) and the contemporary poet (Thomas), who may be imagined as seeking to banish Pantycelyn in order to clear imaginative space for himself.⁶⁰ The agon continues as Thomas’s poetry takes a more scientific path – and yet even this has been foreshadowed in the work of his precursor. An extended reading of Thomas’s poetry reveals how he never really lets go of Pantycelyn, whose haunting presence remains identifiable throughout Thomas’s oeuvre.

O, but God is in the throat of a bird;
Ann heard Him speak, and Pantycelyn.
God is in the sound of the white water
Falling at Cynfal. God is in the flowers
Sprung at the feet of Olwen, and Melangell
Felt His heart beating in the wild hare.
Wales in fact is His peculiar home,
Our fathers knew Him. (CP, p. 43)

Some of the old ones got sentimental,
Singing Pantycelyn; but we soon drowned them;
It’s funny, these new tunes are easy to learn. (PS, p. 10)

We are not English . . . Ni bydd diwedd
Byth ar sŵn y delyn aur.
Though the strings are broken, and time sets
The barbed wire in their place,
The tune endures (CP, p. 72)

Did I see religion,
its hand in the machine’s,
trying to smile as the grip
tightened? (EA, p. 51)

Fel pe aem heibio’r lleuad i’r ehangder tenau, mawr
I’r seren uwcha’ welem oddi yma ar y llawr;
Haul, lloer, a sêr, planedau fyth yn disgleirio fry,
Ac awyr faith ymhellach fyddai yno i’n golwg ni. (GDC, p. 46)
 
[If past the moon we travell’d, through the ethereal space,
To the remotest planet which from this earth we trace,
Sun, moon and stars and planets still in the distance shine,
And wide air yet more distant which no eye can define.109]

‘R un peth i’r Iah tragwyddol sy â’r gallu yn ei law,
I roddi bod mewn munud (a ddywedo fe a ddaw)
I ugain mil o fydoedd sy’n cerdded yn eu rhod,
Neu i un o’r tywod mana’ a welodd neb erio’d. (GDC, p. 47)
 
[The same to Jah eternal, with His all-powerful hand
To give birth in a moment (His word is a command)
To twenty-thousand planets that tread the distant sky,
As to create the smallest sand seen by mortal eye.111]

O! gariad heb ei gymar! gras yn ymgrymu ‘lawr,
Er crëu sêr difesur, cofleidio llwch y llawr!
Yn marw tros blant Adda ag eto oedd yn byw
Yn wrthryfelwyr eon ymlaen yn erbyn Duw. (GDC, p. 54)
 
[O love without its equal, what condescending grace,
That He who stars created yet should earth’s dust embrace,
To die for Adam’s children who still defied the rod,
And lived in bold rebellion against th’ Almighty God.113]

Chwi sêr, sy heibio ei gilydd yn ‘hedeg fel y wawr,
Mewn funud fach yn saethu goleuni o’r nen i lawr,
Cyhoeddwch trwy holl natur, yn llawen nid yn drist,
Mai’r hwn rodd bod ich gynta’ a elwid Iesu Grist. (GDC, p. 56)
 
[Ye stars each other passing, expanding as the dawn,
That in a moment shooting light from the heaven’s down,
Proclaim throughout all nature, and joyfully proclaim
Him who first gave you being and Jesus Christ His name.115]

O’er those gloomy hills of darkness
Look, my soul, be still and gaze;
All the promises do travail
With a glorious day of grace.
         Blessed Jubil, &c.
Let thy glorious morning dawn.
 
Kingdoms wide that sit in darkness,
Let them have the glorious light,
And from Eastern coast to Western
May the morning chase the night,
          And Redemption, &c.
Freely purchas’d, win the day.
 
May the glorious days approaching,
From eternal darkness dawn,
And the everlasting Gospel
Spread abroad Thy holy Name.
       Thousand years, &c.
Soon appear, make no delay.
 
. . . May thy sceptre, &c.
Sway the enlightened world around. (GWP, p. 428)

                  See her
           at the dance, round
and round, hand
           in hand, weaving
invisible threads. (WA, p. 50)

     see my beauty
in the angles between
stars, in the equations
of my kingdom. (LS, p. 17)

now, leaning far out
over an immense depth, letting
your name go and waiting,
somewhere between faith and doubt,
for the echoes of its arrival. (F, p. 32)

I have waited for him
       under the tree of science,
and he has not come (CLP, p. 56)

I know there is nothing in me
but cells and chromosomes
waiting to beget chromosomes
and cells. (F, p. 22)

                    What matter
for grief? The stars are as dew
in its world, punctuating
an unending story. It is the spirit
level which, if love cannot
disturb, neither can evil. (CLP, p. 52)

And his coming testified
to not by one star
arrested temporality
over a Judaic manger,
but by constellations innumerable
as dew upon surfaces
he has passed over time
and again, taking to himself
the first-born of the imagination
but without the age-old requirement of blood. (CLP, p. 101)

‘If you were so clever
as to invent me, come down
now so that I may believe.’ (CLP, p. 92)

I have seen the figure
on our human tree, burned
into it by thought’s lightning
and it writhed as I looked. (CLP, p. 104)

I stare up into the darkness
of his countenance, knowing it
a reflection of the three days and nights
at the back of love’s looking-
glass (CLP, p. 104)

Notes

1. The quotation in the title of this article is taken from The Minister, in R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems 1945–1990 (London: J.M. Dent, 1993), pp. 42–55: p. 43. References to Collected Poems hereafter CP. [^{^}]
2. Jason Walford Davies has explored Thomas’s debts to the Welsh literary tradition but does not engage with Pantycelyn in any depth. See Jason Walford Davies, Gororau’r Iaith: R. S. Thomas a’r Traddodiad Llenyddol Cymraeg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 78, 199–200, 319. [^{^}]
3. M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010), p. 334 and Tony Brown, ‘Eve’s Ruse: Identity and Gender in the Poetry of R. S. Thomas’, English, 49/195 (2000), 229–50. [^{^}]
4. Brown, ‘Eve’s Ruse’, 243, 245 and 246. [^{^}]
5. See especially Rowan Williams, ‘Suspending the ethical: R. S. Thomas and Kierkegaard’, in Damian Walford Davies (ed.), Echoes to the Amen, Essays after R. S. Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 206–19 and William V. Davis, R. S. Thomas: Poetry and Theology (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007), pp. 123–42. [^{^}]
6. In R. S. Thomas’s ‘A Grave Unvisited’, Kierkegaard holds the speaker’s hand: ‘Hand and hand like a child / With its father’ (CP, p. 183). See also Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love: Some Christian Reflections in the Form of Discourses, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), p. 334. The notion of seventy thousand fathoms is one of Kierkegaard’s most frequently used metaphors – ‘out in the Sea of Thought, out in “70,000 fathoms deep”‘ – suggesting the danger in terms of humanity’s relationship with God. Thomas’s work reflects the Kierkegaardian idea that God can never fully be known except with fear and trembling. This concept was developed by theologians such as Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) whose formula, mysterium tremendum et fascinans, is mentioned by Thomas in his introduction to R. S. Thomas (ed.), The Penguin Book of Religious Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), pp. 7–11: p. 9. [^{^}]
7. Justin Wintle, Furious Interiors: Wales, R. S. Thomas and God (London: Harper, 1996), p. 78. Pantycelyn was the farmhouse near Llandovery where William Williams was based throughout most of his life. Its name became synonymous with the hymn-writer. [^{^}]
8. In Welsh, ‘pilgrimage’ is pererindod and a ‘pilgrim’ is pererin. The word ‘pilgrimage’ derives, via the French pèlerinage, from the Latin peregrinus, ‘foreign’, and per ager, ‘going through the fields’ – it is the action described rather than the goal. See Ian Reader, Pilgrimage: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 20. [^{^}]
9. D. Ben Rees, ‘Aspects of the Early Years of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism’, Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymdeithas Hanes y Methodistiaid Calfinaidd, 29–30 (2005–6), 5–24: 10. [^{^}]
10. Eifion Evans, Bread of Heaven (Bridgend: Bryntirion, 2010), pp. 18–21. [^{^}]
11. It is interesting to compare Pantycelyn’s and Thomas’s unorthodox careers in the Church. Pantycelyn was never actually ordained a priest because of his ‘absenting himself on several Lord’s days and not performing divine service in the said parish’. According to Thomas Charles, ‘He [Pantycelyn] used to relate with much humour how he was summoned to the Bishop’s court to answer charges of nineteen sins, of all of which he was guilty. Such things as failing to make the sign of the cross when baptizing, failing to read some parts of the service and so on . . . He never received full ordination, his bishop refusing to ordain him because of his irregularity in preaching in all places, not merely the churches of his parishes.’ Pantycelyn was ordained deacon by the bishop of St David’s in August 1740 and licensed ‘to perform the office of curate’ at Llanwrtyd and Llanddewi Abergwesyn, two parishes in Breconshire. See John Morgan Jones and William Morgan, The Calvinistic Methodist Fathers of Wales, vol. 1, trans. John Aaron (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2008), p. 227 and Evans, Bread of Heaven, pp. 26–36. [^{^}]
12. ‘Protestantism – the adroit castrator / Of art; the bitter negation / Of song and dance and the heart’s innocent joy’: from The Minister (CP, p. 54). [^{^}]
13. ‘R. S. Thomas Talks to J. B. Lethbridge’, Anglo-Welsh Review, 74 (1983), 36–56: 47–8. [^{^}]
14. Seiat: this was the Methodist Experience Meeting where Christians gathered and shared their spiritual experiences under the careful eye of a Seiat leader, who would be a more experienced Christian. Dr Alethius in Pantycelyn’s Theomemphus is such a character and Pantycelyn himself was well known for being a very good leader in the various Seiat meetings. The emphasis in these meetings was always on personal spiritual experiences. See Eifion Evans, Fire in the Thatch (Bridgend: Evangelical Press of Wales, 1996), chapter 7. [^{^}]
15. E. Wyn James, ‘The evolution of the Welsh hymn’, in Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes (eds), Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 230–68: p. 245. Pantycelyn’s three major collections are Caniadau y Rhai sydd ar y Môr o Wydr . . . i Frenin y Saint (‘The Songs of Those who are on the Sea of Glass . . . to the Saints’ King’) (1762); Ffarwel Weledig, Groesaw Anweledig Bethau (‘Farewell Visible, Welcome Invisible Things’) (1763–9); and Gloria in Excelsis: Neu Hymnau o Fawl i Dduw a’r Oen (‘Gloria in Excelsis: Or Hymns of Praise to God and the Lamb’) (1771–2). [^{^}]
16. Thomas (ed.), Penguin Book of Religious Verse, p. 9. [^{^}]
17. ‘Postscript’, in R. S. Thomas, H’m (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 22. [^{^}]
18. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 55: ‘Many of the central doctrines of traditional Christianity can be grammatically expressed only in the form of metaphor.’ [^{^}]
19. Vimala Herman, ‘Negativity and Language in the Poetry of R. S. Thomas’, ELH, 45/4 (1978), 710–31: 712. [^{^}]
20. Thomas (ed.), Penguin Book of Religious Verse, p. 8. Thomas’s formulation here recalls the discourse of the English Romantic poets, whose work influenced him. [^{^}]
21. Thomas (ed.), Penguin Book of Religious Verse, p. 9. [^{^}]
22. Kathryn Jenkins, ‘Williams Pantycelyn’, in Branwen Jarvis (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature Volume IV, c.1700–1800 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), p. 257: ‘The pragmatic and spiritual concerns about the condition of the Methodist cause were of far greater importance to Williams than the literary or aesthetic merit of his work.’ [^{^}]
23. James, ‘The evolution of the Welsh hymn’, p. 229; M. Wynn Thomas, R. S. Thomas: Serial Obsessive (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), p. 57 and R. S. Thomas, ‘Some Contemporary Scottish Writing’, Wales, 6/3 (1946), 98–103: 102–3. [^{^}]
24. Christopher Morgan, R. S. Thomas: Identity, Environment and Deity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 4. [^{^}]
25. Ned Thomas and John Barnie, ‘Probings: An Interview with R. S. Thomas’, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, 80 (1990), 28–52: 35. [^{^}]
26. Morgan, R. S. Thomas: Identity, Environment and Deity, p. 4. [^{^}]
27. Thomas, Serial Obsessive, p. 57. It is important to note that R. S. Thomas was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature; this is another indicator of his ‘national’ status. [^{^}]
28. D. M. Lloyd Jones, The Puritans: Their Origins and Successors (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1987), p. 195. [^{^}]
29. The evangelicalism of Calvinistic Methodism fits within David Bebbington’s four defining characteristics of evangelical Christianity: conversionism, activism, Biblicism and crucicentrism. See David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989; repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992), p. 3. However, as Joel R. Beeke notes, Bebbington is mistaken in arguing that ‘evangelicalism first took form in the 1730s’: see Joel R. Beeke, ‘Evangelicalism and the Dutch Further Reformation’, in Michael A. G. Haykin and Kenneth J. Stewart (eds), The Emergence of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities (Nottingham: Apollos, 2008), pp. 146–70: p. 147. For a very good overview of the evolution of Protestantism in Wales see Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit, chapter 1. [^{^}]
30. David Ceri Jones, Boyd Stanley Schlenther and Eryn Mant White (eds), The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales 1735–1811 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), p. 1. [^{^}]
31. See again Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit, chapter 1, for a discussion of the pluralistic nature of British Protestantism. [^{^}]
32. ‘Mystical Theology’, in Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright and J. I. Packer (eds), New Dictionary of Theology (Leicester and Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 1988), p. 448 and Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 7 (London: Longman and Todd, 1971), p. 15. [^{^}]
33. For the provenance of this phrase, see Brian Patrick McGuire (trans.), Jean Gerson: Early Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), pp. xv and 352. The relevant notion in Aquinas’s work is to be found in the Summa Theologiae, II.2, quaestio 97, art. 2 arg. 2, in his ‘refutation of the premise that “it is not a sin to tempt God”‘ (Peter Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 5). Here, as Schäfer explains, Aquinas ‘distinguishes between two forms of knowledge of God’s goodness (bonitas) or will (voluntas), one speculative (speculativa) and the other affective or experiential (affectiva seu experimentalis) . . . [I]t is only through this affective-experiential way that [a believer is] allowed, according to Aquinas, to prove God’s will and taste his sweetness.’ For the passage under discussion here, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (Benziger Bros. Edition, 1947) Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, pp. 3666–7, www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.pdf, accessed 22 June 2017; for the Latin version, see ‘Sancti Thomae de Aquino Summa Theologiae Secunda Pars Secundae Partis a Quaestione XCII ad Quaestionem C’, Corpus Thomisticum, www.corpusthomisticum.org/sth3092.html, accessed 22 June 2017. [^{^}]
34. Eifion Evans, ‘Calvinistic Methodism’, in Ferguson, Wright and Packer (eds), New Dictionary of Theology, pp. 124–5. [^{^}]
35. Evans, Bread of Heaven, p. 38. [^{^}]
36. The Englishman George Whitefield (1714–70) was the most famous exception. He was closely associated with the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists. [^{^}]
37. Divine Predestination: the belief that God had ‘elected’ individuals, a particular people, for eternal salvation. [^{^}]
38. This branch of theology follows the writings of Jacobinus Arminius (1560–1609), the Latinised name of the Dutch theologian Jakob Hermanszoon. [^{^}]
39. Eifion Evans, Pursued by God: A Selective Translation with Notes of the Welsh Religious Classic Theomemphus by William Williams Pantycelyn (Bridgend: Evangelical Press of Wales, 1996), p. 9. [^{^}]
40. Gomer Morgan Roberts (ed.), Gweithiau William Williams Pantycelyn, vol. 1 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1964), p. 253 and – for the translation given in the main text above – Evans, Pursued by God, p. 96. Evans’s selective translation has sought faithfully to capture Pantycelyn’s meaning rather than being a complete translation. References to Roberts (ed.), Gweithiau William Williams Pantycelyn, vol. 1 hereafter GWWP. [^{^}]
41. Or ‘Not found in earthly creatures, nor under God’s heaven’ (my translation). [^{^}]
42. Or ‘By grace, a full forgiveness, for every sin that be’ (my translation). [^{^}]
43. Or ‘Most odious, most dirty sins ever known on earth’ (my translation). [^{^}]
44. John Morgan Jones and William Morgan (eds), Y Tadau Methodistaidd, vol. 1 (Swansea: Lewis Evans, 1895), pp. 149–50. [^{^}]
45. There was an established literary tradition around pilgrimage long before Pantycelyn. Arguably a biblical motif, medieval texts such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c.1380) and Langland’s Piers Plowman (c.1370–90) established the three types of Roman Catholic pilgrimages – ‘place’, ‘moral’ and ‘interior’ pilgrimages. [^{^}]
46. See Joseph Alleine’s A Sure Guide to Heaven (Welsh editions appeared in 1693 and 1723). Henry Walker’s Spirituall Experiences, of Sundry Beleevers (1653) documents how important the conversion narrative or ‘conversion journey’ was. Notice the experiential language used: ‘That Christian beleeves strongest, that hath Experience to backe his faith, and that Saint speakes sweetest and homest, that speakes experimentally; for that which cometh from one spirituall heart, reacheth another spirituall heart. Experience is like steel to an edged tool, or like salt to fresh meat, it seasons brain-knowledge, and settles a shaking, unsetled soule . . . heart-knowledge is both necessary and precious to sincere soules.’ Quoted in Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 75. [^{^}]
47. Spiritual autobiographical testimonies were so common around the 1650s that John Beadle wrote a ‘recipe for spiritual autobiography’ which often used the image of a spiritual traveller. See John Beadle, The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1656) and Robert Bell, ‘Metamorphoses of Spiritual Autobiography’, ELH, 44/1 (1977), 108–26. [^{^}]
48. Evans, Bread of Heaven, p. 47. [^{^}]
49. William Williams Pantycelyn, ‘Hymn I’, in N. Cynhafal Jones (ed.), Gweithiau Williams Pantycelyn, vol. 2 (Newport, Monmouthshire: W. Jones, 1891), p. 6. References to Gweithiau Williams Pantycelyn hereafter GWP. [^{^}]
50. My translation. [^{^}]
51. For Bunyan’s work I have used the facsimile of the 1678 first edition. See John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come under the Similitude of a Dream as Originally Published by John Bunyan Being a Facsimile Reproduction of The First Edition (London: Elliot Stock, 1878). [^{^}]
52. Ten of Pantycelyn’s hymns begin with the word ‘Pererin’ or pilgrim whilst over half of the hymns mention some aspect of spiritual pilgrimage. [^{^}]
53. Davis, R. S. Thomas: Poetry and Theology, p. x. [^{^}]
54. ‘No-One’, in R. S. Thomas, Autobiographies, ed. and trans. Jason Walford Davies (London: Dent, 1997), pp. 25–109: p. 106. [^{^}]
55. Patrick Gardiner, Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 44–5. [^{^}]
56. See Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (London: Collins, 1961), p. 163 and Charles E. Moore (ed.), Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard (New York: Plough, 2002), p. xxviii. Individualism and ‘personal accountability’ are reflected in Kierkegaard’s philosophy which, glossed with his own Lutheran convictions, expressed similar ideas to Pantycelyn’s Methodism. Thomas started collecting Kierkegaard’s works in university and he began to identify with the philosopher’s experiences of a God that is absolutely different. Kierkegaard emphasised the importance of ‘first-hand faith’: one must ‘hear God’s voice as an individual’. Also, for a very helpful overview, see R. C. Sproul, The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts that Shaped Our World (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000), p. 156. [^{^}]
57. A. Dru (ed. and trans.), The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 533 and William C. Davis, ‘Kierkegaard on the Transformation of the Individual in Conversion’, Religious Studies, 28/2 (1992), 145–63: 145. [^{^}]
58. Lloyd Jones, The Puritans, p. 196. On Pantycelyn: ‘[There was] a great desire for a knowledge of God – a direct knowledge of God: not to believe things about God – they had already got that – but the desire to know God. “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3).’ [^{^}]
59. Glyn Tegai Hughes, Williams Pantycelyn (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1983), p. iv: ‘The only more or less contemporary likeness of Williams is a rough sketch drawn from memory by an amateur, some years after his death. This sketch was used by the publisher Mackenzie as the basis for a portrait in Kilsby Jones’s edition of the works. Larger prints were made of it and at one time they adorned many homes in Wales’ (my emphasis). For the sketch and its idealised version see Evans, Bread of Heaven, plates 10 and 11. [^{^}]
60. R. S. Thomas’s relation to Pantycelyn may be viewed through the lens of Harold Bloom’s theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’, which posits that the influence of dominant precursor poets inspires a sense of anxiety in living poets. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). [^{^}]
61. CP, p. 43. [^{^}]
62. ‘The Big Preachers’, in R. S. Thomas, Uncollected Poems, ed. Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2013), p. 120. References to Uncollected Poems hereafter UP. [^{^}]
63. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (ed. and trans.), Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 6 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), pp. 77–8: ‘Through my writings I hope to achieve the following: to leave behind me so accurate a characterisation of Christianity and its relationships in the world that an enthusiastic, noble-minded young person will be able to find in it a map of relationships as accurate as any topographical map from the most famous institutes’ (1848). [^{^}]
64. The reference to ‘Cynfal’ in The Minister (CP, p. 43) is to Cynfal Fawr, the famous home of Morgan Llwyd. This is another figure of the early ‘dissenting’ tradition to which, perhaps, Thomas found himself drawn. Llwyd was a profound believer in the indwelling God. See M. Wynn Thomas, Morgan Llwyd (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1984), p. 72, who notes: ‘Morgan Llwyd would have agreed with Kierkegaard that the great danger is of the reader coming to religious books as a theatre-goer goes to a theatre, in order to listen passively to the actor. Like Kierkegaard he constructed his books so as to circumvent this danger: in them the author is a prompter, it is the reader who is the actor and the audience is God.’ [^{^}]
65. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 203–30. [^{^}]
66. Wintle, Furious Interiors, p. 78. [^{^}]
67. Jason Walford Davies, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas, Autobiographies, pp. ix–xxxv: p. xvii. [^{^}]
68. Thomas, ‘No-One’, p. 77. [^{^}]
69. R. S. Thomas, Welsh Airs (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1987), p. 38. Hereafter WA. [^{^}]
70. The context for such language is 1957, when Parliament passed a Bill that would result in the drowning of Capel Celyn in 1965 in order to create a reservoir that would provide water for the city of Liverpool. [^{^}]
71. See Acts 27:39–44 and Kierkegaard, Works of Love, p. 334. [^{^}]
72. R. S. Thomas, Poetry for Supper (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964), pp. 9–12. Hereafter PS. [^{^}]
73. See Thomas, ‘Reservoirs’ (CP, p. 194). [^{^}]
74. M. Wynn Thomas, “‘Keeping his pen clean”: R. S. Thomas and Wales’, in William V. Davis (ed.), Miraculous Simplicity: Essays on R. S. Thomas (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993), pp. 61–79: p. 62. [^{^}]
75. R. S. Thomas, Laboratories of the Spirit (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 29. Hereafter LS. Interestingly, Thomas is using a biblical simile in ‘Ann Griffith’. Both Pantycelyn and Griffiths draw on the biblical image of the ‘heart’s well’. In the preface to Theomemphus, Pantycelyn notes that the work ‘issued from my spirit like water from a spring or like a web from the spider’s body’ (my translation; see also Evans, Pursued by God, p. 57). This suggests that Thomas had probably read Theomemphus. For Griffiths’s deployment of this biblical image, see Letters IV and VI, and Hymns II and XXX: H. A. Hodges (trans.), ‘Letters of Ann Griffiths’, Gwefan Ann Griffiths Website, Cardiff University, www.anngriffiths.cardiff.ac.uk/letters.html, accessed 12 July 2017 and H. A. Hodges (trans.), ‘Hymns of Ann Griffiths’, Gwefan Ann Griffiths Website, Cardiff University, www.anngriffiths.cardiff. ac.uk/hymns.html, accessed 28 June 2017. [^{^}]
76. Brown, ‘Eve’s Ruse’, 245–6. [^{^}]
77. Brown, ‘Eve’s Ruse’, 245–6. [^{^}]
78. This effigy, based on contemporary descriptions, is in the Ann Griffiths Memorial Chapel (opened in July 1904) at Dolanog, a village near her home. For a reproduction, see ‘Ann Griffiths (1776–1805)’, Gwefan Ann Griffiths Website, Cardiff University, www.anngriffiths.cardiff.ac.uk/, accessed 22 June 2017. [^{^}]
79. My translation: Dechreu Canu, dechreu canmol Beginning to sing, beginning to praise Ymhen myrdd o oesoedd maith, At the end of a myriad of vast ages. Y bydd pawb o’r gwaredigion, Everyone, yes, all the ransomed, R’ ochr draw ar ben eu taith; having finished their journey, now, on the other side; Ni bydd diwedd Without ending Byth ar sŵn y delyn aur. Is the sound of the golden harp. [^{^}]
80. My translation. [^{^}]
81. The psalm itself is about longing for Zion in the foreign lands of Babylon. There is a ‘hiraeth’ when the Psalmist notes: ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song / in a foreign land?’ [^{^}]
82. Serena Davies, ‘Harpo and Dalí: Surreal Double Act’, Telegraph, 26 May 2007, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3665391/Harpo-and-Dali-a-surreal-double-act.html, accessed 13 October 2016. Thomas must have known about Salvador Dalí’s gift to Harpo Marx. In 1937, ‘Dalí sent Harpo a Christmas present: a harp with barbed wire for strings and spoons for tuning knobs, wrapped in cellophane. Harpo was delighted and sent Dalí a photograph of himself sitting at the harp with bandaged fingers as if he’d been playing it and cutting himself on the wire.’ [^{^}]
83. See R. S. Thomas to Raymond Garlick, 19 February 1952, in Jason Walford Davies (ed.), R. S. Thomas: Letters to Raymond Garlick (Llandysul: Gomer, 2009), p. 8: ‘I would like to boast that no one loves the old things of Wales more than I do, and yet there is something fearful in thinking “ni bydd diwedd byth ar sŵn y delyn aur”‘ (see n. 79 above for my translation of this quotation). [^{^}]
84. These mythological birds are mentioned in the Mabinogi. They give life through their singing. [^{^}]
85. ‘Mediations’, in LS, p. 17. [^{^}]
86. Thomas (ed.), Penguin Book of Religious Verse, p. 9. [^{^}]
87. Thomas and Barnie, ‘Probings’, 36–9. [^{^}]
88. Thomas, ‘Unity’, in Sandra Anstey (ed.), R. S. Thomas: Selected Prose (Bridgend: Seren, 1995), pp. 143–58: pp. 147–8. [^{^}]
89. John Pikoulis, ‘“The curious stars”: R. S. Thomas and the scientific revolution’, in Damian Walford Davies (ed.), Echoes to the Amen: Essays after R. S. Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 76–111: p. 96. [^{^}]
90. Davis, R. S. Thomas: Poetry and Theology, pp. 111–21. [^{^}]
91. The ghost of Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology (German in 1954, English in 1977) haunts R.S.’s treatment of the machine. Heidegger talks about the essence of technology. There is a difference between the concept of bringing-forth (poeisis) and challenging-forth (modern technology based on exact science). See Ned Thomas, ‘R. S. Thomas: The Question about Technology’, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, 92 (1992), 54–60. [^{^}]
92. R. S. Thomas, Experimenting with an Amen (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 51. Hereafter EA. [^{^}]
93. R. S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988–2000 (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2004), p. 184. Hereafter CLP. [^{^}]
94. Davis, R. S. Thomas: Poetry and Theology, p. 119. [^{^}]
95. Thomas and Barnie, ‘Probings’, 36–9. [^{^}]
96. John Barnie, ‘Review of R. S. Thomas’s Later Poems 1972–1982’, Poetry Wales, 18/4 (1983), 90–1. [^{^}]
97. II Samuel 12. [^{^}]
98. I. T. Ramsey, Religion and Science (London: SPCK, 1964), pp. 42–3. [^{^}]
99. Ramsey, Religion and Science, p. 43. [^{^}]
100. William Willams, Golwg ar Deyrnas Crist, in GWWP, pp. 1–191. All further references to Golwg ar Deyrnas Crist (hereafter GDC) are from this edition; unless otherwise stated, translations given in the main text are from William Williams, A View of the Kingdom of Christ; or, Christ Is All and In All. A POEM by way of exposition of Col. iii. 11; 1 Cor, xv. 25, trans. Robert Jones (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1878). Robert Jones actually based his translation on Pantycelyn’s second edition which appeared in 1764. [^{^}]
101. Evans, Bread of Heaven, p. 136. [^{^}]
102. Mathematical distances are noted as well as detailed biological facts. Pantycelyn’s footnotes either address or are taken from such works as William Derham’s Astro-Theology (1714), Richard Blackmore’s Creation (1715) and James Hervey’s Meditations and Contemplations (1748). [^{^}]
103. William Williams, Aurora Borealis: NEU, Y GOLEUNI yn y Gogledd, fel arwydd o Lwyddiant yr EFENGYL yn y Dyddiau Diweddaf, (Neu, Shekinah’r Mil Blynyddoedd:) Mewn dull o Lythyr oddi wrth ERMENEUS y Lladmerydd, at AGRUPNUS y Gwyliedydd, in Garfield H. Hughes (ed.), Gweithiau William Williams Pantycelyn, vol. 2 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967), pp. 161–79. The title of the work translates as ‘Aurora Borealis: or the LIGHT in the North, as a sign of the Success of the GOSPEL in the Last Days, (or, The Shekinah of the Thousand Years:) in the form of a Letter from ERMENEUS the Interpreter, to AGRUPNUS the Watchman’ (my translation). [^{^}]
104. The Northern Lights appeared throughout southern Britain throughout the early 1770s. [^{^}]
105. Patrick Crotty, ‘Extraordinary man of the bald Welsh hills: the Iago Prytherch poems’, in Walford Davies (ed.), Echoes to the Amen, pp. 13–43 and Pikoulis, ‘“The curious stars”‘, pp. 76–111. [^{^}]
106. GDC, p. 50; my translation. [^{^}]
107. See Pensée 206 in W. F. Trotter (trans.), Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), p. 61. Very revealingly, in Thomas’s own copy of the Pensées, now at the R. S. Thomas Centre in Bangor, he has crossed out ‘frightens’ and written ‘appals’ in pencil. [^{^}]
108. ‘Shadows’, in R. S. Thomas, Frequencies (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 25. References to Frequencies hereafter F. [^{^}]
109. Williams, A View of the Kingdom of Christ, p. 47. [^{^}]
110. Williams, A View of the Kingdom of Christ, p. 47; GDC, p. 46. [^{^}]
111. Williams, A View of the Kingdom of Christ, p. 48. [^{^}]
112. GDC, pp. 30–2; my translation. [^{^}]
113. Williams, A View of the Kingdom of Christ, p. 57. [^{^}]
114. John 8:12. [^{^}]
115. Williams, A View of the Kingdom of Christ, p. 58. [^{^}]
116. Genesis 2:7: ‘And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’ Williams, A View of the Kingdom of Christ, p. 55. [^{^}]
117. William Derham, Astro-Theology or a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God from a Survey of the Heavens (London: W. Innys, 1715), pp. 23–4. Derham muses on Sirius and the ‘enormous’ space that surrounds it. As an aside, it is believed that Derham produced the earliest, relatively accurate estimate of the speed of sound. [^{^}]
118. John Wesley mentions a sighting of the Aurora in Northampton, in his journal entry for 23 October 1769: ‘This evening there was such an Aurora Borealis as I never saw before: the colours, both the white, the flame colour, and the scarlet, were so exceedingly strong and beautiful. But they were awful too; so that abundance of people were frightened into many good resolutions.’ See Price Livingstone Parker (ed.), The Journals of John Wesley (Chicago: Moody Press, 1951), p. 333. [^{^}]
119. Williams, Aurora Borealis, p. 164. [^{^}]
120. Evans, Bread of Heaven, p. 232. [^{^}]
121. In 1750, Charles Wesley published his Hymns Occasioned by the Earthquake, March 8, 1750. This collection was re-issued in 1756 following the Great Earthquake of Lisbon in 1755. On 14 July 1748, George Whitefield had preached a powerful sermon on the Great Eclipse. Pantycelyn himself in Caniadau Duwiol (1762) includes a song ‘About the Earthquake that happened in many great lands in 1755 and 1756’. See Evans, Bread of Heaven, pp. 232–8. [^{^}]
122. Howel Harris’s diary entry for 16 May 1746. Quoted in Evans, Bread of Heaven, p. 237. [^{^}]
123. Williams, Aurora Borealis, pp. 177, 179. [^{^}]
124. Isaiah 9:2, John 8:12 and 12:46. [^{^}]
125. In the preface to Theomemphus, Pantycelyn notes that (GWWP, p. 193): ‘Fe redodd y llyfr hwn allan o’m hysbryd fel dwfr o ffynnon, neu we’r pryf copyn o’i fol ei hun’ (‘issued from my spirit like water from a spring or like a web from the spider’s body’). For translation see Evans, Pursued by God, p. 57. [^{^}]
126. It is possible that R. S. Thomas is recalling the image in the American Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’. See Jonathan Edwards, Sermons and Discourses, 1739–1742, ed. Harry S. Stout, WJE Online, vol. 22, p. 411, http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aHR0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWFsZS5lZHUvY 2dpLWJpbi9uZXdwaGl sby9nZXRvYmplY3QucGw/Yy4yMTo0Ny 53amVv, accessed 17 October 2016: ‘The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.’ Thomas may have come across Edwards’s image in Robert Lowell’s poem ‘Mr Edwards and the Spider’: see Robert Lowell, The Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), p. 59. Thomas became familiar with Lowell’s work in the 1960s through his contact with Critical Quarterly. See also Edwards’s essay ‘Of Insects’ (c.1719– 21): ‘Of Insects and Spiders: Scientific Writings by Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758)’, A Puritan’s Mind, www.apuritansmind.com/puritan-favorites/jonathan-edwards/scientificwritings/of-insects/, accessed 17 October 2016. [^{^}]
127. See Hymn CCCCXI (GWP, p. 194): ‘Gwyn a gwridog yw fy Arglwydd, / Gwyn a gwridog yw ei wedd’ (‘White and ruddy is my Lord / White and ruddy is His visage’; my translation). [^{^}]
128. Perhaps R. S. Thomas is recalling Robert Frost’s ‘Desert Places’. See Edward Connery Lathem (ed.), The Collected Poems of Robert Frost (London: Vintage, 2013), p. 296: ‘They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars – on stars where no human race / I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.’ The scary image surely fits the kind of state of mind – the possibility that there is no God out there – that one finds in R.S. in this period. [^{^}]
129. Hebrews 11:1. [^{^}]
130. This nautical image re-appears in many of Griffiths’s hymns. In Hymn VI, the wise figure of Christ is the pilot of her soul: ‘Er cryfed ydyw’r stormydd / Ac ymchwydd tonnau’r môr, / Doethineb ydyw’r peilat, / A’i enw’n gadarn Iôr’ (‘Though strong may be the tempests / And swellings of the sea, / Yet Wisdom is the pilot; A mighty Lord is he’). In Hymn XIII, Christ is the sinner’s friend as well as the same pilot: ‘Dyma ei beilat ar y môr’ (‘Here’s their pilot on the deep’). For Griffiths’s hymns and translations, see (respectively): E. Wyn James (ed.), ‘Emynau’, Gwefan Ann Griffiths Website, Cardiff University, www.anngriffiths. cardiff.ac.uk/emynau.html, accessed 22 June 2017, and Hodges (trans.), ‘Hymns of Ann Griffiths’. For the sculpture of Ann Griffiths see n. 78 above. [^{^}]
131. The allusion is to Jacob wrestling with the theophany, or the Angel of the Lord, at Penuel (Genesis 32:30). [^{^}]
132. Hymn XIII: see James (ed.), ‘Emynau’; for the translation, see Hodges (trans.), ‘Hymns of Ann Griffiths’. This is a reference to Zechariah 1:8 which describes a vision that the prophet has of Christ standing amongst the myrtle trees. [^{^}]
133. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (London: Penguin, 1992 [1843]), p. 1. [^{^}]
134. CLP, p. 119. [^{^}]
135. Pikoulis, ‘“The curious stars”‘, p. 107. [^{^}]
136. Hebrews 9:22. [^{^}]
137. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). [^{^}]
138. Marion, God Without Being, p. 108. [^{^}]
139. See ‘Ann’, in T. H. Parry-Williams, Myfyrdodau (Aberystwyth: Gomer, 1957), p. 50: ‘Ymhen blynyddoedd lawer wedyn mi geisiais fynegi mewn cân seml fy eiddigedd wrth rai fel hi, a allai dynnu yn “rhaffau’r addewidion” mor hyderus a chanu “caniadau Seion” mor eneiniedig.’ My translation: ‘After many years, I attempted to express in a simple song my envy towards people like her, who could claim God’s promises (or draw on the ropes of his promises) with such confidence and sing Zion’s praises with unction.’ [^{^}]
140. See Bobi Jones, ‘R. S. Thomas a’r Genedl’, Barddas, 199 (1993), 18–19: ‘Ann Griffiths oedd cydwybod R. S. Thomas, y bwgan a gododd ef ym Manafon ymlaen drwy Eglwys Fach [sic] i Lŷn; sef cynrychiolydd traddodiad cyfriniol pur wahanol i’r un a arddelai ef ei hun . . . Cenfigennu a wna ef tuag at ei llwyddiant i ddal ei chwrs yn gyson er gwaethaf stormydd.’ My translation: ‘Ann Griffiths was R.S.’s conscience, the spirit he brought forth in Manafon through to Eglwys Fach before reaching Llŷn; she represented a mystical tradition which was totally different to the one R.S professed . . . He envied her success in keeping to her course even in the worst of storms.’ [^{^}]
141. Brown, ‘Eve’s Ruse’, 248 (my emphasis). [^{^}]

Acknowledgements