Theology and Literature after Postmodernity 9780567251145, 9780567662064, 9780567304148

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Hospitable Conversations in Theology and Literature: Re-opening a Space to Be Human
Contested spaces
Theology and Literature after Postmodernity
Recovering the between: a space to be human
In memoriam
Part 1: Pedagogy
1. Religion, History, and Faithful Reading
Disciplinary contexts
Performing relation
2. Theology, Literature, and Prayer: A Pedagogical Suggestion
Humility in Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iob
Love in Dante’s Paradiso
Forgiveness in Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Conclusion
3. Bleak Liturgies: R. S. Thomas and ‘Changes Not to His Liking’
Part 2: Theological and Literary Reconstructions
4. Belief and Imagination
5. Literary Apologetics beyond Postmodernism: Duality and Death in Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling
6. Cusa: A Pre-modernPostmodern Reader of Shakespeare
Epoché and the exploration of limits
Nicholas of Cusa’s mystagogical science of praise
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: a Cusan reading
7. ‘The One Life within Us and Abroad’: Pathetic Fallacy Reconsidered
Ontological scandal
Transcendental realism
A universe tingling with anthropomorphic life
8. Love Among the Ruins: Hermeneutics of Theology and Literature in the University after the Twentieth Century
I. Conservative approaches to hermeneutics
II. Dialogical approaches to hermeneutics
III. Critical approaches to hermeneutics
IV. Radical approaches to hermeneutics
What remains? The future and hope that is the university
9. ‘Thrashing between Exoneration and Excoriation’: Creating Narratives in We Need to Talk About Kevin
10. The Shakespeare Music: Eliot and von Balthasar on Shakespeare’s ‘Romances’ and the ‘Ultra-dramatic’
Dramatizing the new catharsis of misericordia
Eliot’s reading of Shakespeare’s last plays
Balthasar’s reading of Shakespeare and the World Stage
Conclusion
11. Fictioning Things: Gift and Narrative
Childhood and narrative
Myth and fairy-tale
Fairy-tale and Christianity
Christianity and magic
12. Language, Reality and Desire in Augustine’s De Doctrina
Index

Citation preview

Theology and Literature after Postmodernity

T & T Clark Religion and the University Series Series editors William J. Abraham Gavin D’Costa Peter Hampson Zoë Lehmann Imfeld Editorial Advisory Board

James Arthur Celia Deane-Drummond Mike Higton Ian Linden Terence Merrigan Simon Oliver Tracey Rowland Frances Young

Oliver Crisp Eamon Duffy Jeffrey Keuss David McIlroy Francesca Murphy Andrew Pinsent Linda Woodhead

Volume 3: Theology and Literature after Postmodernity Religion and the University Series The Religion and the University Series aims to facilitate a creative and imaginative role for the Christian theological perspective within the university setting, working from the premise that religious culture can make a valuable contribution to wider university education. Contributions to this series are welcome and prospective editors and authors can gain further information at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ uk/series/religion-­and-­the-­university/ Theology and Literature after Postmodernity is the third volume in the series. It aims to deploy theology hospitably in a reconstructive approach to contemporary literary criticism. It seeks to validate and exemplify theological readings of literary texts as a creative exercise. It engages in a dialogue with interdisciplinary approaches to literature in which theology is alert and responsive to the challenges following postmodernism and postmodern literary criticism. It demonstrates the scope and interpretive power of theological readings across various texts and literary genres, and challenges the assumed dominance of (postmodern) literature when considering these two disciplines.

Theology and Literature after Postmodernity Edited by Zoë Lehmann Imfeld Peter Hampson and Alison Milbank Foreword by Stanley Hauerwas

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as T&T Clark 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson and Alison Milbank, 2015 Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson and Alison Milbank have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-0-567-25114-5 978-0-567-67205-6 978-0-567-30414-8 978-0-567-65495-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Theology and literature after postmodernity / edited by Zoë Lehmann Imfeld Peter Hampson, and Alison Milbank; foreword by Stanley Hauerwas. pages cm.—(Religion and the university series; Volume 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-567-25114-5 (hbk)—ISBN 978-0-567-65495-3 I(epub)—ISBN 978-0-567-30414-8 (edpf) 1. Theology in literature. 2. Postmodernism (Literature) 3. Criticism. 4. Religion and literature. I. Imfeld, Zoë Lehmann, editor. II. Hampson, Peter J., 1954- editor, author. III. Milbank,Alison, 1954- editor, author. PN49.T44455 2015 261.5’8—dc23 2014033353 Series: Religion and the University, volume 3 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents Foreword  Stanley Hauerwas Notes on Contributors Introduction Hospitable Conversations in Theology and Literature: Re-­opening a Space to Be Human  Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson, and Alison Milbank

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1

Part 1 Pedagogy   1 Religion, History, and Faithful Reading  Susannah Brietz Monta

15

  2 Theology, Literature, and Prayer: A Pedagogical Suggestion  Vittorio Montemaggi

35

  3 Bleak Liturgies: R. S. Thomas and ‘Changes Not to His Liking’  Hester Jones

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Part 2 Theological and Literary Reconstructions   4 Belief and Imagination  Graham Ward

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  5 Literary Apologetics beyond Postmodernism: Duality and Death in Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling  Alison Milbank

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  6 Cusa: A Pre-­modern Postmodern Reader of Shakespeare  Johannes Hoff and Peter Hampson

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  7 ‘The One Life within Us and Abroad’: Pathetic Fallacy Reconsidered  Gavin Hopps

137

  8 Love Among the Ruins: Hermeneutics of Theology and Literature in the University after the Twentieth Century  Jeffrey Keuss

163

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Contents

  9 ‘Thrashing between Exoneration and Excoriation’: Creating Narratives in We Need to Talk About Kevin  Zoë Lehmann Imfeld

179

10 The Shakespeare Music: Eliot and von Balthasar on Shakespeare’s ‘Romances’ and the ‘Ultra-­dramatic’  Aaron Riches

195

11 Fictioning Things: Gift and Narrative  John Milbank

215

12 Language, Reality and Desire in Augustine’s De Doctrina Rowan Williams

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Index

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Foreword Stanley Hauerwas Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

I am a theologian. That means I’m allegedly someone who ‘does theology’. In the very least it means I should want to do theology if I knew how to do it. But it is not at all clear we currently know what theology is or how it should be done. We are not sure how theology should be done because it is not at all clear we know what Christianity looks like. We desperately need imaginative portrayals that can force thoughts otherwise unavailable. These remarks are my way of indicating why this book, Theology and Literature after Postmodernity, is such a welcome intervention in the world of theology. It is so because the essays in this book defy disciplinary boundaries, helping us glimpse intimations of what Christianity might – or should – look like, as well as how theology should be done. Appeals to the imagination are often quite unimaginative. But the essays in this book plunge conventional assumptions about theology. They present and then challenge those pictures of Christianity that have held us captive. In calling these pictures into question these essays help us re-­imagine not only what it may mean to be Christian but also what it means to be human. This is a profoundly humanistic book. It is so because these writers recognize that Christianity creates a world at once beautiful and frightening. Although Theology and Literature after Postmodernity still must use the conjunction in the title, these essays do not reproduce that ‘and’. That ‘and’, after all, has been produced by the arbitrary disciplinary divides that constitute modern university curricula. This book has essays of theology written by literary scholars, and literary essays written by theologians. We should not be surprised that this is the case if, as these essays make clear, theology and literary criticism are not two isolated disciplines but rather they each represent efforts that aim to help us better say what is true. Finally, this is a book of immense significance for current discussions about the character of the university. Just as it is not at all clear what Christianity

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might look like, it is equally unclear what the university should look like. Without being overly polemical, these essays justify an alternative way of conceiving the university in a manner that defies contemporary standards. Theology and Literature after Postmodernity is a book of gentle generosity that packs a punch that hopefully will lead to its being read and appreciated widely.

Notes on Contributors Peter Hampson (editor and contributor) is a Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, Emeritus Professor, University of the West of England, and Adjunct Honorary Professor of Psychology, NUI Maynooth, Ireland. His publications include (with Peter Morris) Imagery and Consciousness (Academic Press, 1983) and Understanding Cognition (Blackwell, 1996), and two earlier volumes in the Religion and the University series (with editors Mervyn Davies, Oliver Crisp and Gavin D’Costa): Theology and Philosophy: Faith and Reason and Christianity and the Disciplines: The Transformation of the University (T&T Clark, 2012). His research interests include moral psychology and theological anthropology, religion and the public square, and theology and literature. Johannes Hoff is Professor of Systematic Theology at Heythrop College, London, and previously taught at the Universities of Wales and Tübingen. His research specializes on performativity and the return of apophatic theology in postmodernity, as well as in the similar upheaval periods of the Early Renaissance (fifteenth century) and Early Romanticism (eighteenth/nineteenth century). This research feeds into his collaboration with representatives of contemporary art. Recent publications include The Analogical Turn: Re-­thinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa (Eerdmans, 2013); and ‘Mystagogy Beyond Onto-­Theology: Looking back to Post-­ modernity with Nicholas of Cusa’. In: Arne Moritz (Ed.), A Companion to Nicholas of Cusa (Brill, 2014, forthcoming). Gavin Hopps is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Theology, and Director of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St Andrews. He is editor of Byron’s Ghosts: The Spectral, the Spiritual and the Supernatural (Liverpool University Press, 2013) and author of a monograph on the singer-­songwriter Morrissey, Morrissey: The Pageant of his Bleeding Heart (Continuum, 2009). He is currently working with Jane Stabler on a new six-­volume edition of Byron’s complete poetical works, and two monographs to be published by Routledge in the Longman Annotated English Poets series, one on the levity of Don Juan, and another entitled Romantic Enchantment: Fantasy, Theology and Affect.

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Hester Jones is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, and before this was a lecturer at the University of Liverpool. She completed her PhD, on treatments of friendship in the poetry of Pope and Swift, in 1993, and was a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1991 to 1994. She is currently completing a monograph, Deep Calls to Deep: Twentieth Century Poetry and Christian Belief, for the Liverpool University Press ‘Poetry’ series and has recently published articles in Literature and Theology, Symbolism and in other edited collections on poetry and Christianity. Jeffrey Keuss is Professor of Ministry, Theology and Culture and Director of the University Scholars Program at Seattle Pacific University. His research and writing on religion and contemporary culture includes The Sacred and The Profane: Contemporary Issues in Hermeneutics (Ashgate, 2003), Freedom of the Self: Kenosis, Cultural Identity and Mission at the Crossroads (Pickwick, 2010), Your Neighbor’s Hymnal: What Popular Music Teaches Us About Faith, Hope and Love (Cascade, 2011) and Blur: A New Paradigm for Understanding Youth Culture (Harper Collins, 2014). He is the North American Editor for Literature and Theology (Oxford University Press) and the co-­chair of the Paul Ricœur Section of the American Academy of Religion. Zoë Lehmann Imfeld (editor and contributor) is a Lecturer in Modern English Literature at the University of Bern. A student of both literature and theology she combined both of these disciplines in her doctoral thesis entitled ‘The Ghost of God: Theology in the Supernatural Stories of Arthur Machen, M. R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and Henry James’ (2014). The project was funded by the Marie Heim-Vögtlin Grant (SNF). She has published and presented on theological readings of Victorian literature, as well as the relationship between theology and the disciplines. Alison Milbank (editor and contributor) is Associate Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Nottingham, where she researches in post-Enlightenment literature, especially the Gothic and the aesthetics of the grotesque. She is the author of Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction (Palgrave MacMillan, 1992), Dante and the Victorians (Manchester University Press, 1998), Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (Continuum, 2007), and is working on a theological history of horror fiction. John Milbank is Research Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham, and Director of the Centre of Theology and

Notes on Contributors

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Philosophy. A selection of his books includes Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Blackwell, 1990), The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (Cascade Books, 2009), Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Blackwell, 2013) and with Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Ed. Creston Davis (MIT Press, 2009). Susannah Brietz Monta is the Glynn Family Honors Associate Professor of English and editor of Religion and Literature at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2005, paperback 2009) and co-­editor of Teaching Early Modern English Prose (MLA, 2010). She is completing a scholarly edition of Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune (1596), the first published response to Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for Manchester University Press. She has published articles on history plays, early modern women writers and patronesses, martyrology, hagiography, and devotional poetry and prose. Vittorio Montemaggi is Assistant Professor of Religion and Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also Concurrent Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology and Fellow of the Medieval Institute, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Notre Dame Institute of Advanced Study (Spring 2013). His publications include Dante’s ‘Commedia’: Theology as Poetry (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), co-­edited with Matthew Treherne. Aaron Riches is Lecturer in the Institutes of Philosophy ‘Edith Stein’ and Theology Lumen Gentium, at the General Seminary of Granada, Spain. He completed his doctorate at the University of Nottingham, as a member of the Centre of Philosophy and Theology. He is the author of Ecce Homo: On the Divine Unity of Christ (Eerdmans, 2015, forthcoming) and has published in various journals including Communio, Telos, and Modern Theology. Graham Ward is the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, and former Head of the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures at the University of Manchester. Among his books are Cities of God (Routledge, 2000), Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (CUP, 2004), True Religion (Blackwell, 2002), Christ and Culture (Blackwell, 2005), and The Politics of Discipleship (Baker Academic, 2009). Along with Michael Hoelzl, he is also the translator of two of Carl Schmitt’s works: Political Theology II (Polity, 2008) and Dictatorship (Polity, 2013). His latest book is entitled

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Unbelievable (I.B. Taurus, 2014) on the biopolitics of belief. Currently he is engaged in a three-­volume work entitled Ethical Life to be published by Oxford University Press. Rowan Williams, the Right Revd and Right Hon the Lord Williams of Oystermouth is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. From 2002 to 2012 he was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury. He is a Sitara-­e-Pakistan, Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Francis I and a life peer. Theologian, poet, bishop, and cultural commentator, his numerous books include Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (T & T Clark, 2000), Grace and Necessity: Essays on Art and Love (Continuum, 2006), Dostoevsky: Language Faith and Fiction (Continuum, 2010), and Faith in the Public Square (Bloomsbury, 2012). Recent publications include Resurrection (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2014), The Poems of Rowan Williams (Carcanet Press, 2014), and Being Christian (SPCK, 2014).

Introduction Hospitable Conversations in Theology and Literature: Re-­opening a Space to be Human Zoë Lehmann Imfeld

University of Bern, Switzerland

Peter Hampson

Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, UK

Alison Milbank

University of Nottingham, UK

Contested spaces An important contemporary debate concerns the role of religion in wider society.1 Religion’s public place has been challenged at times in the name of a hypothetical, neutral rationality. Bracketing the philosophically debatable dichotomies in play here, a counter claim is that a rational, enlightened, compassionate, and truly liberal society is not only one where multiple voices are, at best, tolerated or, at worst, aggressively contested, but is one in which genuine, truth-­seeking, meaningful conversations are conducted; vigorously, agonistically perhaps, but always respectfully and hospitably. Such conversations, however, need space, time, and freedom from fear to flourish; without these prerequisites they may be compromised or rendered difficult. There is, then, concern among many who see theology as performing a valuable contribution to that conversation, that unless the agora and piazza are reclaimed for such genuine debate, and secured from unhelpful intolerance See, for example, Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). For an early debate see Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).

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Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson, and Alison Milbank

and aggressive confrontation, serious questions of value, meaning, purpose, and the common good, issues vital for a flourishing democracy, may be increasingly side-­lined, and our public spaces left vulnerable to sequestration by the forces of capitalism, techno-­rationality, and consumerism.2 Some of this wider background informs Gavin D’Costa’s Theology in the Public Square,3 a book that specifically explores what he calls the ‘Babylonian captivity of theology’ in the modern university, and the possible need for faith-­ based institutions in which theology and other subjects can be studied in their full connectivity. It was this book that first suggested the series, Religion and the University, some seven years ago, a series concerned with the revitalization of religious culture through university education. The series further aims to demonstrate a creative and imaginative role for the Christian theological perspective within the university setting. Two volumes have been published thus far, Theology and Philosophy: Faith and Reason, which, as its title suggests, looks at ways in which theology and philosophy can mutually inform, and Christianity and the Disciplines: the Transformation of the University, whose title is also to some extent self-­explanatory, and which looks to the various possible relationships between theology and other disciplines in the modern academy.

Theology and Literature after Postmodernity Theology and Literature after Postmodernity is the third volume in the Religion and the University series. Its compilation was motivated by the series editors’

In continental Europe, related discussions have been conducted in a public sphere more accustomed to serious academic debate and less influenced maybe (?) by the ‘knock-­me-­down’ celebrity antics of new atheism. On 14th January 2004, for instance, there was a discussion between the then Cardinal Ratzinger and Jurgen Habermas at the Catholic Academy of Bavaria in Munich later published as Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2006). Both future Pope and ‘methodological atheist’ agreed that religious conviction and secular reason had much to offer each other, and sought to engage with the other’s world view, without belittling it or watering down their own. Conducted sensibly, an agonistic, but still hospitable debate on these issues is clearly possible. 3 Gavin D’Costa, Theology and the Public Square: Church, Academy and Nation (London: Wiley, 2005). See also Stanley Hauerwas, The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (New York: Wiley, 2007); Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy and the Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009). 2

Introduction

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desire to deepen and broaden the scope of the series, effectively opening it up for other disciplines to explore issues local and pertinent to their own scholarly interests and contexts. But it is also informed by the wish of Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson, and Alison Milbank, the current book editors, to facilitate a principled volume illustrating various aspects of the fruitful relationship between theology and literature. We also wanted to construct a book with colleagues who are alert and responsive to the recognition that postmodernity is, predictably no doubt, giving way to something else – but to what? We leave the question hanging and unanswered for now, save to say that we assumed this was an opportunity for a variety of voices to be heard in this local and potentially global debate, voices informed by pre-­modern as well as modern and late-­modern rationalities, and also well situated in the literary tradition, and for them to be heard in a hospitable manner. As it turns out, and to our great pleasure, we seem to have exceeded our expectations. We have ended up with a volume that not only shows yet again how literature and theology can be mutually enriching, but also how literature can provide a space in which diverse theological approaches can honestly and hospitably converse. These conversations allow both literature and theology as disciplines to respond to the inheritance of postmodernity in the spirit of reconstruction. The pluriform disciplines of the theology and literature are, of course, already long established as scholarly traditions in the academy, the church, and the wider culture, and hence already in fruitful dialogue. But this has not always been an easy relationship. At times, for instance, a certain disciplinary ‘one-­up-­ manship’ has arisen as theology attempts to trump or even baptize literature, while at the same time lacking literary nuance, or literature tries arbitrarily to depict the religious, maybe with insufficient respect for the theological, or critical theory blithely deconstructs both, sometimes with little respect for or lived appreciation of either. By contrast, ‘hospitality’, a key to understanding the present volume, requires not simply discursive space for different voices to be heard – the literary, the theological, the critical theoretical – but, in an arguably wiser post-­postmodern climate, implies space that permits ‘reconstruction’ beyond deconstruction, and where what is said is to be taken seriously and respectfully heeded. It is worth noting that Luke Bretherton has developed a sophisticated account of hospitality as a social and political practice rooted in Christian

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theology, which involves welcoming the vulnerable stranger to the table. This he sees as ‘central to shaping relations between the church and its neighbours’, and, he claims, has implications for disputes involving ‘moral diversity’ and value-laden issues.4 He is keen, however, to preserve a commitment to standards of worth, and to distinguish ‘hospitality’ from ‘tolerance’. Thus, while hospitality does not preclude tolerance it is not to be reduced to it. Hospitality, as Bretherton insists, thus entails more than a tolerant acquiescence or ‘mere acceptance of a stranger’s existence [. . .] [but also] a move actively to welcome those with least status’.5 In other words, applying this to the present case, we see the dialogue between theology and literature as a wide and welcoming one; we do not assume that the loudest, most powerful or most persuasive voices in such conversations are necessarily the ones to be most heeded; we do not preclude lively but respectful disagreements, even while all share ideas at the same table in the common search for understanding. There is, then, throughout this volume a genuine honouring of and commitment to the co-­operative, and a mutual search for meaning and truth. And this goes hand in hand with an appreciation of standards of worth. There can be better or worse arguments, better or worse or at least more comprehensive or coherent readings, deeper or more shallow reader engagements. Hospitable debate can and at times must be carried out agonistically, as a lively debate between friends, but never in a dismissive, cynical, or ad hominem fashion. Never, that is, if it is to be productive or Christian. Hence, Theology and Literature after Postmodernity aims to deploy theology hospitably in a reconstructive approach to contemporary literary criticism. It seeks to validate and exemplify theological readings of literary texts as a creative exercise. It engages in a dialogue with interdisciplinary approaches to literature in which theology is alert and responsive to the challenges following postmodernism and postmodern literary criticism. It demonstrates the scope and interpretive power of theological readings across various texts and literary genres, and challenges the assumed dominance of (postmodern) literature when considering these two disciplines. It is not strongly wedded to just one

Luke Bretherton, Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness amid Moral Diversity (London: Ashgate, 2009), p. 150. 5 Bretherton, Hospitality as Holiness, p. 148. 4

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theological stance either, though common and converging theological themes do at times emerge across quite different genres as we shall see. Moreover, there are situations in which literature clearly affords a common conversational space for the search for (potentially shared) religious meaning, starting from quite different theological suppositions, as the contributions by Graham Ward and Jeffrey Keuss demonstrate for instance. Additionally, the volume offers a broader academic perspective, drawing as it does from experience of institutions worldwide of both a secular and ecclesial variety; as such it speaks to a variety of audiences in a variety of educational settings. There are twelve chapters in all, divided into two sections. Part 1, comprising the first three chapters, refers explicitly to pedagogy and the university contexts in which we teach and research literature and theology. Susannah Monta explores the opportunity (and responsibility) to configure literary study in relation to, not in competition with, theology, in such a way that religion is not treated merely in a fideistic way; she offers useful models in which a variety of relationships can be examined. Hester Jones approaches related issues but from the setting and assumptions of a secular institution with particular reference to the concept of ‘depth’ in a sophisticated discussion of the poetry of R. S. Thomas, showing how this can serve as a common teaching focus in postmodern secular and theologically informed contexts. Vittorio Montemaggi looks at the role of prayer in theology and literature, in a fascinating study of texts from Gregory the Great, Dante, and Shakespeare, and how this (nowadays) unusual relationship might shape our perception of the value of teaching in the field. We wanted our book to be ‘dual facing’, and to be of use to staff and students in religious studies and theology, and literary criticism and literature; we are pleased that these as well as the remaining chapters permit this. In Part 2, the remaining nine chapters are loosely grouped together as ‘theological and literary reconstructions’. They offer new engagements between literature and theology often by the recovery of themes and concepts that have been lost or buried, yet they remain sensitive to the challenges of the late modern. As such, we believe these chapters provide a welcome, much needed, alternative to ontologically reductive critical approaches. Included in Part 2 are reprints of two seminal papers. In the opinion of the editors these deserve as wide an audience as possible as they have had a big influence on the field. One is ‘Fictioning Things’ by John Milbank (Religion and Literature, 2005), which

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offers a rich account of a theophanic, ‘enchanted’ world; the other is ‘Language, Reality and Desire in Augustine’s De Doctrina’ by Rowan Williams (Journal of Literature and Theology, 1989) on word, sign, and signification in Augustine, an essay that Jeffery McCurry recently described as being ‘After Derrida: An inflected interpreted performance’.6 Both already fit the aims of our volume and we are delighted to rehouse them. Milbank’s because it is a well-known tour de force celebrating many of themes that repeatedly arise in the present volume including poesis, participation, the theophanic, and the narrative power of literature as a whole. Williams’ chapter because, as McCurry notes: Williams writes Derrida’s theory of différance into Augustine’s theology of reading scripture and contemplating creation in order to make it new for today—and not new for the sake of novelty, but new for the sake of letting Augustine’s texts teach, interrogate, and console us in a time very different from his own.7

In other words, Williams uses postmodern critical techniques to recover and renew a pre-­modern understanding. He does this by treating De Doctrina as ‘a text whose meaning cannot and should not be passively received but rather which calls for the creative and constructive contribution of the reader in the production of meaning’.8 Both Milbank and Williams remind us of the co-­ creative power of literature, and the potentially participatory act of reading. We feel that the ten chapters written specifically for this volume are enriched by their understanding and utilization of the themes laid out by Milbank and Williams. A skilful marriage of literature and theology beyond postmodernity prevents premature closure but also protects against meaningless counterfeits and idolatry as it delivers us humbly into mystery. The editors set our contributors the brief to discuss a ‘wide variety of texts and genres’, and the brief was more than met, with chapters including Dante, Shakespeare, Gregory the Great, Nicholas of Cusa, Wordsworth, Ruskin, modernist novelists such as Graham Greene, postmodern writers like Lionel Shriver, and young-­adult literature. In the process, a telling range of human activities is covered. This is hardly surprising given the scope of theology, Jeffrey McCurry, ‘Towards a Poetics of Theological Creativity: Rowan Williams Reads Augustine’s de Doctrina after Derrida’, Modern Theology, 23.3 (2007), 415–433, p. 421. 7 McCurry, ‘Towards a Poetics’, pp. 418–419. 8 McCurry, ‘Towards a Poetics’, p. 418. 6

Introduction

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theological anthropology, and literature. But it is worth noting these and asking what they have in common, in general terms at least. So, we have teaching and learning, and prayer, but also imagination and its relationship with belief, and Graham Ward introduces evil as ‘imaginative privation’; Alison Milbank looks at issues underlying the communication of a religious perspective when deploying apologetics, in a reflection on death in contemporary fantastic literature; and Johannes Hoff and Peter Hampson reflect in a co-­authored piece on pre-­reflexive doxologically driven praise, a theme also explored by Vittorio Montemaggi in his chapter, and resonating with Aaron Riches’ chapter. Praise and prayer allow us to recognize the praiseworthy as good, true, and beautiful, and, in the case of literature, erotically engages the reader with the text. Forgiveness and the power of narrative reconstruction to co-­create being is contextualized in and through an otherwise stark novel of a school shooting discussed in Zoë Lehmann Imfeld’s chapter. The hermeneutics used for this reconstructive reading are further unpacked by Jeff Keuss, and, through readings of Shakespeare’s last plays, Aaron Riches explores the power of forgiveness to take us beyond death and tragedy into the ultra dramatic and the deeper mystery of redemption from death and error. This is both relevant and timely, and in marked contrast to the sublime postmodern alternative, which promotes a movement beyond tragedy in the form of nihilist absurdity. What do these ways of reading have in common? It is probably too obvious and revanchist to identify any single, high-­level, meta-­narrative beyond the simple Christian one that we are finite, created, but also teleological, grace-­dependent creatures in a flawed world, for whom questions of meaning, truth, relationship, and ultimacy in aiming at the good, true, and beautiful repeatedly surface. But, to go beyond this, it is useful to examine what, if anything, cross-­chapter comparisons reveal about re-­imagining the human condition. Intriguingly, this turns out to offer the possibility of becoming more fully human through a (frequently) pre-­reflexive doxological engagement with and relational participation in a theophanic world (see for example Montemaggi; Hoff and Hampson; Hopps; Alison Milbank; Ward); being vulnerable to damage and destruction through contingency or the embrace of ‘counterfeits’ yet open to narrative or ultra dramatic reconstruction (Lehmann Imfeld; Keuss; Riches); open to gift exchange, love, and eschatological hope

8

Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson, and Alison Milbank

(John Milbank; Hoff and Hampson; Lehmann Imfeld; Montemaggi; Ward). Imaginative belief then becomes possible again in human transcendence in immanence, paradoxically uniting finitude and surplus, word and sign, and obviating the oscillation across the cultural aporia (Hoff and Hampson; Lehmann Imfeld; Hopps; Alison Milbank; John Milbank; Ward; Williams). A key notion here is the scope for participating again in an enchanted or theophanic cosmos that paradoxically allows us to hold our finitude and vulnerability, and potential for transcendence together. This idea, and its associated themes of being and becoming, emerges in various places, quintessentially in John Milbank’s work of course, but also in Johannes Hoff and Peter Hampson on beauty, and Vittorio Montemaggi on honest writing. It is especially apparent in Gavin Hopps’ account of why the pathetic fallacy need not be so fallacious after all, but, based on a lesser known, alternative reading proposed by Ruskin, may instead be a catachrestic attempt to figure the perception of a ‘foreign luminosity’ that is communicated by but mysteriously exceeds the created order. In such cases, the animistic envisioning of nature ceases to be a decorative or deceptive fancy and is more like a literary fashioning of icons. Being and becoming also figure in Zoë Lehmann Imfeld’s examination of the reconstruction of self and other through meaningful narrative, capably elaborated by Jeff Keuss in his discussion of hermeneutics. In the process we gain or deepen being when we aim at, and allow ourselves to be taken over by, the beautiful excess of reality in an open or ‘porous’ fashion, a fashion marked by gratitude and gift exchange. Or we diminish in being when we grasp at counterfeit gods, narcissistically or otherwise. The possibility of a mediated redemption and recovery is clearly indicated, however, with forgiveness and acceptance of vulnerability predicated on appreciation of our common, embodied humanity through a loving relationality and the power of narrative. Various chapters signal high degrees of awareness of the penultimacy and parodoxicality of human endeavour, though this does not end in the endless deferral of the postmodern but, as rooted in a docta ignorantia, a learned ignorance that accepts that ends in the apophatic where explanation and understanding, meaning and truth, finitude and infinity converge and are exceeded. Indeed two of the chapters are explicitly post-Derridean in this fashion, Hoff and Hampson’s on critical theory and Nicholas of Cusa, but most

Introduction

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notably the seminal chapter by Rowan Williams on word and sign in Augustine’s De Doctrina. Appreciation and celebration of paradoxicality as part of this, then, allows us to avoid false aporia between literalism and metaphor (Hopps talks of the ‘iconic’ as lying between these); false dichotomies of subject and object, nature and grace (John Milbank); imagination and world (Ward); time constrained, contingent and atemporal infinite (Hoff and Hampson), and so on. Paradox and apophatic penultimacy taken together signal a hospitable space ‘in the between’ where people can flourish.9

Recovering the between: a space to be human In traditional exitus-­reditus fashion we now return to the start to envision a public space of a different sort, a space demarcated by a re-­imagined human situated in a recovered, magical place. Standing at the edge of a landscape after postmodernism, this is a conceptual and emotional space marked not by a frantic oscillation from materiality to idealism, from the reductive infra human to the ungrounded, disenchanted, post human, or from the scientistic univocal to the social constructivist equivocal, but by a stable if at times mysterious ‘iconically charged’ between in which the whole human can re-­emerge. Here is a space that vitiates the clichéd division between subjective and objective, and which encourages a recovery of what Charles Taylor calls the ‘porous self’. We believe, supported by evidence from chapters in Theology and Literature after Postmodernity, that it is a space urgently in need of further triangulation, mapping, and cultivation for it to become the rich and fertile environment where further work can take place. Work that, we anticipate, will permit interdisciplinary discussion with academic colleagues in cognate disciplines to continue, increase our understanding and appreciation of the possibilities and pitfalls of postmodern, critical approaches, and aid the engaged and skilled reader. In fact such a process has already begun. Demonstrating further its heuristic value and productivity, Zoë Lehmann Imfeld has already creatively elaborated William Desmond’s metaxological description of the ‘in between’ has significantly informed our understanding of this hospitable space. See God and the Between (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2008).

9

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Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson, and Alison Milbank

the idea of this paradoxical yet ontologically welcoming space in her recent work.10 She shows not only how its patient indwelling permits us to deconstruct then reconstruct genres not yet fully explored theologically, in her case the nineteenth-­century ghost story, but also how literature in general allows for a productive and fruitful exploration of the suspended middle, the re-­humanized, re-­divinized between, free from reductions, oscillations, or aporia. It is a space that is open to participatory reader engagement, and which renders the familiar strange and the strange familiar (Hoff and Hampson; Ward; Williams). Which brings us to a hidden benefit we had not fully anticipated when we first planned our volume. Here we have a space not simply where literary critical and theological investigations can be conducted, but also one where new artistic products and works of literature can be born, dwell, and flourish. Why? Simply because each turn of the cultural wheel has typically spun off its distinctive literatures, indeed has been partly defined by them, not just in the case of the romantic movement, modernism and postmodernism, say, but also more recently meta-­modernism. The process continues. So, our recovered ‘iconic space’ is ready and waiting, like a new or newly conserved eco-­system, for fresh literary species to arrive. We started with a contested space; we leave the reader to imagine a welcoming space of future possibilities reclaimed by theology and literature. Art, as well as religion, it appears, can help to recover the public square. As editors we are grateful to our learned contributors for all their hard work and invaluable insights in helping realize this vision. Their scholarly expertise and compassionate understanding have allowed these vistas and many other fruitful ideas to emerge.

In memoriam During the closing stages of editing this volume, our Bristol colleague, and Religion and the University series editor, Mervyn Davies, died. Mervyn was a Newman scholar, a committed ecumenist, a skilled and much-­loved university Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, ‘The Ghost of God: Theology in the Supernatural Stories of Arthur Machen, M. R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and Henry James’ (PhD thesis, University of Bern, 2014).

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Introduction

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teacher, but overall one of the most hospitable friends and colleagues anyone could hope to have. Even while struggling with his illness, he was always the first to suggest a lunch, or to propose a meeting of his informal theology ‘book club’, and was animatedly discussing academic matters with one of us only a few days before his death. Friendship and scholarship went hand in hand for him. Mervyn was also a staunch supporter of our volume, resonated intuitively to many of its themes, and eagerly awaited its publication. We trust he would not have been disappointed with what we have produced. Our thoughts and prayers are for the repose of his soul, and with his family. While sad that he is not able to read it, we are privileged to be able to dedicate this volume to his memory. Requiescat in pace.

Part One

Pedagogy

1

Religion, History, and Faithful Reading Susannah Brietz Monta

University of Notre Dame, IN, USA

I began my career in two American public universities, where the United States’ constitutional separation of church and state meant sequestering religion as personal, not pertaining to public, or classroom, discourse. When I taught passages from the Qur’an in a medieval literature course, one of my students – a practising Muslim – tiptoed carefully: ‘some would say’, he would offer, or ‘usually it is taught that’. Never ‘I think’ or ‘I believe’: such statements violate the public classroom’s decorum. When I moved to the University of Notre Dame, a private, religiously affiliated institution, the separation of church and state no longer applied. In the first course I taught there, an honours humanities survey, I assigned books 10 and 11 of Augustine’s Confessions, in which Augustine reflects on time, memory, and eternity, and offers a dazzling phenomenology of mind. One student, a member of the university’s football team, responded enthusiastically, explaining to his somewhat befuddled colleagues that ‘Augustine thinks time is a distention of human consciousness’. (I note that distentio is the word Augustine uses.) My student stated that he’d worked hard to understand the text because ‘it answers a question I’ve always had’. Augustine mattered not only for the history of autobiography, or philosophy, or theology, but for his life; Augustine spoke to him now, addressing his concerns about time and eternity. My student’s position vis-à-vis the text was not studied neutrality but thoughtful receptivity. Contrast this student’s reading with a scene from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which the character Malvolio performs bad literary criticism. Malvolio happens upon a letter supposedly written by his employer, the Countess Olivia. Unbeknownst to him, the letter is a trick designed by Olivia’s serving woman Maria to gull Malvolio into performing ‘impossible passages of

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grossness’ (III.ii.64). Before finding the letter, Malvolio indulges in grandiose daydreams of the power that a marriage to Olivia would bring. The letter seemingly confirms his fantasies: ‘M.O.A.I. doth sway my life’ (II.5.106). Malvolio sees himself in these letters, but the reflection is imperfect; as he notes, ‘M’ begins his name, but the other letters do not follow in sequence.1 Still, our interpreter is not deterred: ‘yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my name’ (II.5.132–3). Malvolio’s self-­absorption rides roughshod over the text’s ambiguities. His is an error, partly, of positioning: the positioning of the reader above the text, here in nearly violent terms (‘crush this a little’). Is it possible to attend to literature’s implications for the here-­and-­now, as my student did, while avoiding the distortions of self-­absorbed textual ‘crushing’? And what might readers’ positionings reveal about the study of religion and literature in the contemporary academy? In this essay, I suggest that literary studies’ habit of placing religion at a safe historical remove from the one who reads has affected our relation to the material we study and, paradoxically, our ability to read historically, or at least to read as our predecessors typically did. I first offer a brief account of ways in which religion has been configured in relation to literary study, focusing especially on the methods of historicism that have dominated US literary study over the past few decades. I then return to Twelfth Night, a play whose characters use religious language to talk about relation itself. The play has much to teach us about relating to the texts we study in good faith, by allowing them their own integrity, but daring too to risk receptivity, to implicate ourselves in our readings.

Disciplinary contexts In the United States, the academic study of religion and literature was housed from the 1950s in programmes such as the Ph.D. in Theology and Literature at Much scholarly effort has been expended on these letters. For one reading, and a survey of others, see Peter J. Smith, ‘M.O.A.I. “What should that alphabetical position portend?”: An Answer to the Metamorphic Malvolio’, Renaissance Quarterly 51.4 (1998), pp.  1199–1244. Citations of Twelfth Night are to The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin, 2002).

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the University of Chicago’s Divinity School and a similar program within the University of Virginia’s Department of Religious Studies. Larry Bouchard explains the two very different rationales behind these programmes. The first was that of comparative cultural history: as a matter of historical fact, religious and literary histories intersected with one another, so that proper study of religion entailed literary study, and vice versa. The second was that of a literary phenomenology of religion.2 That is, even when modern literature has thrown off the religion of its past, it may, to quote Nathan Scott, ‘by the very radicality of its unbelief, awaken sensibilities of a contrary order’, and become ‘an instrument of religious recovery’.3 Such scholarship often disclosed literary texts’ religious dimensions – Christ figures, prodigal son narratives – in order to elaborate Christian ideas. This scholarship’s theology was robust, its interpretations sophisticated. Yet it was accused of subordinating imaginative texts’ literary features to its theological and apologetic aims. In a later generation, scholarship continued in this vein but met a counter-­ current. Theologians such as David Jasper and John Caputo put theology into contact with literary theory, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy. This work tended to use literary theory as a solvent on reified dogma, opening theology to lively, speculative forms of writing. The sense of the ‘literary’ became either broadened or diffuse, depending upon one’s point of view; close readings were traded for theological and philosophical discussions focused by literary texts, including biblical literature. There is considerable precedent for such an approach; Kierkegaard’s excursus on the near-­sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling is but one prominent example. Neither approach made many inroads into the US academy’s language and literature departments, the primary settings for literary study. The relative impermeability of mainstream literary studies to religion and literature scholarship stems from a long-­standing, if now weakening, assumption that secularity was tantamount to objectivity, and that objectivity in literary study is both possible and desirable. Gerald Graff argues that American literary studies valued secularity and objectivity from the start of its institutional Larry Bouchard, ‘Religion and Literature: Four Theses’, Religion and Literature 41.2 (2009), pp. 12–20. 3 Nathan Scott, ‘Literature: Religious Dimensions of Western Literature’, in ed. Mircea Eliade Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), p. 5477; cited in Bouchard, p. 12. 2

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life.4 In 1883, at the first meeting of the Modern Language Association, the dominant American association for literary study, H.C.G. Brandt claimed that ‘a scientific basis dignifies our profession’.5 At Harvard in 1876, the philologist Francis James Child introduced a course on Shakespeare’s plays and another on four major British writers: Chaucer, Milton, Dryden – and Francis Bacon.6 Bacon presumably lent the prestige of scientific empiricism to literary study. The preference for objectivity and secularity has ideological, even religious, roots. As Tracy Fessenden has argued, efforts to elevate particular forms of Protestant identity drove the gradual secularization of the American public sphere.7 Propriety and public decorum seemed to require separating religious enthusiasms from intellectual pursuit. Until fairly recently, what Ken Jackson and others have called ‘Whiggish’ secularity has governed, often silently, literary study in the American academy.8 This paradigm’s dominance exacts a price: Lori Branch maintains that the privileging of objectivity and secularism’s supposed neutrality cuts short literary studies’ own insights about the contingent, constructed nature of language. If we took those insights to their logical conclusions, Branch argues, we would acknowledge that the use of language always requires belief, in acts of interpretation, in the construction of meaning, and in relation to others.9 Within the American academy, there have always been scholars who have studied literature in relation to historical manifestations of religion – Donne’s devotional lyrics alongside Calvinist teachings about grace and election, for example. Yet the latter part of the twentieth century was, notoriously, not a fruitful time for the study of religion and literature within mainstream literature departments. The dominance of a hermeneutics of suspicion – whereby religion masks ideologies of oppression – meant that religion was most often read as fundamentally about something else: power, economic

Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 5 Quoted in Graff, Professing Literature, p. 68. 6 McMurtry, quoted in Graff, Professing Literature, p. 66. 7 Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 8 Jackson, ‘Transcendence Hunting’, Religion and Literature 41.2 (2009), pp. 169–177. 9 Branch, ‘The Rituals of Our Re-Secularization: Literature between Faith and Knowledge’, essay forthcoming in Religion and Literature. 4

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substructures, gendered hierarchies, etc.10 John Cox has argued that the hermeneutics of suspicion occluded the fact that for many early modern authors, including Shakespeare, suspicion and scepticism were in the service of and derived from, not opposed to, faith.11 At its founding, a leading organization of 1990s vintage, the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, asserted a focus on race, gender, class, and sexuality. Note what is missing (remarkably for a group studying the Reformation era): religion. In 1991, Debora Shuger wrote that religion was not simply about politics but also about matters of the soul (often in relation to, but not reducible to, politics), and that we do early modern people a disservice not to read their religious discourses in earnest, as if they knew what they were talking about. The shock waves were palpable.12 In the 1990s, a shift began, one presaging a broadening and deepening of literary scholars’ engagements with religion. Witness the ‘turn’ to religion in continental philosophy and literary theory, entailing a study of the Pauline epistles for their implications for contemporary ethics, or the reinvigorated study of historical forms of religion in fields that long distanced themselves from traditional religion, such as English Romanticism.13 This is not to say that literary studies has moved closer to theology necessarily. As recent articles in Religion and Literature witness, there is an ongoing tension in religion and literature scholarship between historical studies of religion and literature in culturally ­specific manifestations and the more speculative mode of reading literature for the ways it helps us think theology and reflect on ultimate things, ultimate questions.14 For that speculative work to gain credence in literature and language departments, it must do its historical homework. And that

See for instance Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 3rd edn. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), influential on both sides of the Atlantic. 11 Cox, ‘Introduction’, Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007). 12 Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1991). 13 See for instance Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History, and National Identity, 1778–1829 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), and Lori Branch’s chapter on Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets in Rituals of Spontaneity (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006). 14 On religion-­and-­literature scholarship as speculative theology, see William Franke, ‘Beyond the Limits of Reason Alone: A Critical Approach to the Religious Inspiration of Literature’, Religion and Literature 41.2 (2009), pp. 69–78. 10

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homework need not be anti- or a-­theological. The Gospel of John’s vertiginous opening asserts that the Word has come in words particular to a certain place and culture; the opening of Luke 2 locates the incarnation in place, time, and circumstance. The Bible’s revelations are mediated by the genres, grammars, and vocabularies of specific cultures. Thus in Genesis 3, famously, two Hebrew words offer a play on ‘cunning’ (‘arum) – the characteristic of the snake – and ‘naked’ (‘arumim): Adam and Eve think they will gain cunning by eating the fruit, but instead realize only their nakedness. The assumption that time-­bound histories, languages, and literatures may disclose ultimate things also undergirds Christianity’s exemplary imperative: Christians are to be to each other, in space, language, time, and body, witnesses of the God we seek. Careful historical contextualization may thus be deeply theological. It also adds ballast to speculative readings’ tendency to drift towards vague abstractions that, as Susan Felch tactfully writes, ‘do little to cultivate literary sensibilities’.15 Historical scholarship has moral dimensions as well. When I teach the details of Reformation culture, theology, and poetry, what I teach ultimately, I hope, is humility. We see our own intellectual limitations and cultural horizons by engaging another’s world as fully as possible. Yet there is potential danger in separating too firmly other worlds from our own. As a doctoral student in literature, when I expressed an interest in early modern religion, I was advised to go to the history department for training. Religion was to be studied as a feature (if an unfortunate one) of the past; its relation to literary study was to be mediated through history. Indeed, literary studies has often used historicism as a shield against religion’s ultimate claims. I distinguish ‘historicism’ from the practice of writing historically informed literary criticism. Barbara Newman notes that ‘historicizing’ seeks ‘less to understand the past than to loosen its hold on the present’.16 As Jaroslav Pelikan remarked years ago, ‘historicism’ may be understood as the use of history to relativize tradition. While many would invoke the term’s Nietzschean legacy, Pelikan’s work highlights the historicizing at work in the Reformation era, as

Susan Felch, ‘Cautionary Tales and Crisscrossing Paths’, Religion and Literature 41.2 (2009), p. 104. Barbara Newman, ‘Coming Out of the (Sacristy) Closet’, Religion and Literature 42.1–2 (2010), p. 282.

15

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Christian groups fought to relativize and discredit those parts of inherited tradition they found erroneous. On Pelikan’s account scholarly historicism extends that Reformation legacy.17 It is entirely possible to write history deeply sympathetic to the religious subjects one studies. Leading scholars have done so in ways that engage, implicitly or explicitly, their own faith commitments; their work proves that the commitments of the one who studies do not necessarily impede rigorous study of the past.18 But literary studies’ use of historicism to isolate, relativize, or confine religion often proceeds from a stance of critical superiority, or at the least of pseudo-­objective distance or separation from the literature under study. At the conclusion of his hagiographic biography of John Donne, Izaak Walton hopes one day to see Donne ‘reanimated’.19 What do we reanimate when we attend to religion as something more than a historical feature of a particular culture? James Simpson notes the impasse at the end of pure historicism: a historicism that attempts to understand religious texts from the past exclusively in their own terms risks a necessarily imperfect repetition of a past world we can (according to historicism’s own procedures) never fully understand. Yet an enthusiastic, zealous presentism worries him more: it may devalue the distinctness of the literature we study in favour of current identities and agendas, or, a fortiori, the merely narcissistic study of ourselves. For Simpson, the assumption that past and present are continuous with respect to religious belief, practice, and culture risks reanimating the past’s destructive religious passions. Simpson proposes the Enlightenment museum as a model for the study of religion: a space in which religion is presented through artifacts distanced from passions past and present.20 Yet in sealing off religion and literature from the present, we may calcify the literary past into mere antiquarianism, and of course the temporal continuity of living tradition is never simply repetition. The imposition of a sacrosanct distance between the Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); discussed also in Newman, ‘Coming Out of the (Sacristy) Closet’. 18 See as one example Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1994); for a gentle criticism of Duffy, see Kieckhefer, ‘Today’s Shocks, Yesterday’s Conventions’, Religion and Literature 42.1–2 (2010), pp. 259–262. 19 Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert . . . (London, 1670), p. 81. 20 James Simpson, ‘ “Not Just a Museum”? Not so Fast’, Religion and Literature 42.1–2 (2010), pp. 141–162. 17

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religious past and the (museum-­like?) academy may belie as well why many scholars and, importantly, students read: to learn, to be moved, to grow. Literary study’s ineluctable presentism ought to be neither an excuse for scholarly laziness nor a source of embarrassment. Robin Kirkpatrick considers the implications of such presentism for the reader’s position relative to the text.21 I value historical scholarship more than Kirkpatrick seems to do when he terms such work ‘second-­order discourse’. But Kirkpatrick does not argue for inward-­turning scholarship or mere personalism: he takes seriously Dante’s insistence in De Vulgari Eloquentia that ‘it is more human to be understood than to understand’, because ‘our very selves are . . . founded upon our linguistic interdependencies, and so not at all upon some personal capture of a truth’ (think of Malvolio’s crushing).22 Few scholars have any desire to reanimate C. S. Lewis’s smug statement that Christians have an advantage when interpreting texts such as Paradise Lost.23 But one may argue, as Kirkpatrick implies, that a Christian perspective may enrich the academy without resorting to – indeed, truly, only by avoiding – claims of cultural superiority. In his powerful account of a theology of reading, Alan Jacobs argues that the Christian scholar should read charitably – with a full, respectful engagement of literary work – and exercise the responsibility of discernment.24 If Christians were to take seriously his call, we would be unable to adopt a disengaged position of supposedly secular (and implicitly superior?) objectivity as we read, study, and teach. Similarly, Kirkpatrick insists that what a robust Christian faith ought to contribute to scholarship is not rigidity or an attitude of superior conviction but ‘a confident humility’ before ‘an inconceivable All’, and ‘a willingness to acknowledge – and a refusal to violate – strangers as they emerge from the future as well as the past’.25 Underlying these discussions is the question of the place of personal commitments in humanistic study. Nathan Scott was an ordained Anglican minister and made no bones about the fact. But by the time I got to graduate school, the not-­always-­unspoken message was that those with religious

23 24 25 21 22

Kirkpatrick, ‘The “I” in Question’, Religion and Literature 44.2 (2012), pp. 116–125. Kirkpatrick, ‘The ‘I’ in Question’, p. 117. C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (Atlantic Publishers, 2005), p. 62. Alan Jacobs, A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001). Kirkpatrick, ‘The “I” in Question’, p. 121.

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commitments had best keep quiet about it. Even as other forms of neutrality were called into question for scholarship on gender, race, class, or sexuality, it remained a desideratum for scholarship on religion. May a humanistic scholar deploy the full range of her commitments and beliefs – may she be fully human – without slipping into apologia, or blurring scholarship with devotional writing, or reviving old antagonisms and exclusions as Simpson (not unreasonably) fears, or undermining her own credibility? My field evinces both cautionary tales (sectarian passions fuelled Reformation studies’ scholarly battles for decades) and full engagement without smugness (see the work of Debora Shuger and John Cox, among others). A recent issue of Religion and Literature edited by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Jonathan Juilfs boasts examples of work informed and shaped by ‘acknowledged convictions’ (including agnosticism and atheism). This issue of Religion and Literature explores ‘how to realize or even just handle the language of belief in modern scholarship responsibly’, how ‘modern continuities of religious practice’ cast ‘unexpected light (cognitive, intellectual, or spiritual) . . . upon historical sources or problems’.26 Thus in that issue, Daniel Boyarin uses painstaking philology to challenge scholarly myths that block Christian-Jewish understanding.27 Fatemeh Keshavarz applauds these efforts to complicate the opposition between ‘historically contextualized’ and ‘faith-­based’ readings, pointing out that for the Sufi mystics she studies, such an opposition would have been nonsensical.28 In my field, there are parallels. When early modern people read devotional lyric, they did so not only to appreciate verbal wit, or to wrestle intellectually with difficult doctrines, but also to assist their devotion, think theology in applied, subjective, worded form, and voice their prayers. Theology understood narrowly as intellectual propositions to which one does or does not assent has always been visible within early modern literary studies, my sliver of the academy. Literary scholars readily engage with theology as

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, introduction to ‘ “Something Fearful”: Medievalist Scholars on the Religious Turn’, Religion and Literature 42.1–2 (2010), p. 6. 27 Daniel Boyarin, ‘Nostalgia for Christianity: Getting Medieval Again’, Religion and Literature 42.1–2 (2010), pp. 49–76. 28 Fatemeh Keshavarz, ‘Faith in the Academy: A Visit to “Where Fearful Things Are” ’, Religion and Literature 44.3 (2012), pp. 153–163. 26

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propositional content – as in the many studies attempting to link Donne’s Holy Sonnets or Shakespeare’s plays to one confessional position or another. This understanding of religion translates well into disembodied intellectualism. But of course the reduction of religious belief to propositional statements is an impoverishment. Scholars have been comparatively reluctant to think about the theological dimensions of form; or of reading communities past, present, and continuous; or of canon, genre, and living traditions; or, most fundamentally, of the position we take relative to the literary text. For work in literary studies to engage fully and richly with theology, it must breathe large, not limit itself, for example, to the careful elucidation of literary and religious communities in 1580s Oxfordshire – valuable as such painstaking work is – but to consider also the theological dimensions inherent in models of community, language, canon, genre, and scholarly positioning. That positioning may be the most powerful way of bringing a Christian perspective into literary study: neither to occlude the text with your own self – Malvolio’s crushing – nor to give over all judgement; neither to appropriate the text for modern agendas nor seal it off from any claim on the reader, so that the ‘I’ who reads never risks change in herself even as she subjects the text to her interpretation. Insofar as such an approach yields humane, responsive, imaginatively capacious readings, it may be one that both Christians and nonChristians can endorse.

Performing relation It’s dangerous in this context to turn to a literary text. No single reading can match the liveliness of classrooms and scholarship dedicated to studying literary texts’ historical particularities and theological dimensions. Aware of this, and perhaps a bit foolhardy, I turn to Twelfth Night, a play taught regularly in American surveys of British literature for many reasons, not least that the Norton anthology includes the play, alongside King Lear, as its selection from Shakespearean drama. Twelfth Night’s characters do not talk extensively about religion, but they use religious language to characterize what they do talk about. This fact has prompted studies of religion in the play, such as Donna Hamilton’s detailed reconstruction of the religious politics of England’s court

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at the time of the play’s first recorded performance (early 1602); she finds in the drama’s religious language intricate allusions to contemporary affairs.29 While I admire and have learned from this scholarship, there are other ways of thinking about religion in and with the play, enriched by but not limited to its historical moment. The play’s characters use the word ‘faith’ some twenty-­one times.30 Their invocations of ‘faith’ invoke questions of one’s relation to others and their lived realities, as well as to theatrical fictions. The play’s habit of thinking about relation through the language of ‘faith’ is illuminated by sixteenth-­century thought about faith and theatre. It rewards historical homework. But the play also invites us to implicate ourselves in its reflections on relation. Recently Richard McCoy argued that Shakespeare’s plays secularize the language of faith so as to emphasize both the theatre’s illusory nature and its persistent power.31 McCoy posits a narrow, modern conception of religious faith as intellectual certainty, unshakeable conviction. McCoy contrasts that form of faith with the much more modest, often compromised faith Shakespeare invites in his imperfect theatrical illusions. Yet as Keshavarz argues, despite literary scholars’ commitment to the malleability of human thoughts, culture, and feelings, ‘many of us are still bound to a reading of [faith] which assumes an inherent and ontological conflict with change’ and, I would add, with doubt.32 The academic fear of faith presumes faith’s rigidity, its potentially toxic certainties. But that is not the understanding of faith that Shakespeare nor many late medieval and Reformation Christian writers typically propose. A more nuanced – and historically accurate – view would see faith as changing, living, doubting, and responsive. Shakespeare’s sense of mixed faith in the theatre, a faith encompassing belief, doubt, and the struggle to believe, may not be secularizing. It is rather quite in line with much discourse about religious faith.

Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1992). 30 Roughly half of those usages are oaths: ‘i’ faith’ is one of Aguecheek’s favourite expressions. But the recurrence of the oath may be significant, sensitizing the audience’s ears to the word. 31 Richard McCoy, Introduction, Faith in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 32 Keshavarz, ‘Faith in the Academy’, pp. 154–155; Sufism would lose ‘half of its major figures if we were to take out those who questioned every principle of their faith and practice . . . to many Sufis, faith was alive only if it remained vulnerable to death like all organic life forms’. 29

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In the Gospel of Mark, chapter 9, appears a story about a healing. A man asks Jesus to help his child who is possessed by a spirit. Jesus replies that everything is possible for those who believe. The father offers a poignant response: ‘I believe! Help thou my unbelief ’. This mix of faith with doubt, belief with unbelief, recurs in pastoral conceptions of faith in the period. In Elizabethan England’s dominant Protestant soteriology, faith is a gift from God; saving faith does not waver, it does not doubt. Yet pastoral theology, written for a minister’s practical use, posits a model of faith in which belief and unbelief coexist.33 In the Geneva Bible, the dominant biblical translation prior to the 1611 King James version, the gloss to Mark 9 highlights this mixed faith. The gloss defines ‘unbelief ’ as ‘the feblenes, and imperfection of my faith’. Such ‘imperfection’ may imply intellectual doubt or simply a lack of confidence that the Bible’s redemptive promises apply to one personally. Calvin famously insisted that those who have faith must be assured of their salvation. Yet he acknowledges that faith is inevitably flawed: ‘Surely, while we teach that faith ought to be certain and assured, we cannot imagine any certainty that is not tinged with doubt, or any assurance that is not assailed by some anxiety. On the other hand, we say that believers are in perpetual conflict with their own unbelief. Far, indeed, are we from putting their consciences in any peaceful repose, undisturbed by any tumult at all.’34 Mark 9:24 is ubiquitous in early modern pastoral theology; writers from the Calvinist William Perkins to the conformist Richard Hooker to the nonconformist Richard Baxter reflect upon the verse to offer the standard Reformation assurance that, in Perkins’s words, ‘they are but unreasonable men, that say they have long beleeved in Christe without anie doubting of their salvation’.35 Faith is not rigid, unshakeable conviction, but mixed with doubt and shot through with longing; thus Baxter writes that ‘no Petition seemeth

I discuss this model of faith at greater length in ‘ “It is requir’d you do awake your faith”: Belief in Shakespeare’s Theatre’, in eds. Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson Religion and Drama in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 115–138. 34 Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), p. 561. 35 William Perkins, A Treatise Tending unto a Declaration Whether a Man be in the Estate of Damnation (1590), pp.  266–267; Richard Hooker, A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certaintie and Perpetuitie of Faith in the Elect (1587); Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxerianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), pp.  127–128. See also Shuger’s discussion of Hooker’s sermon in ‘Faith and Assurance’, A Companion to Richard Hooker (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2008), pp. 221–250. 33

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more necessary to me than Lord, increase our Faith: I Believe, help thou my unbeliefe’.36 It may seem perverse to discuss Twelfth Night in the context of religious faith, for in the sixteenth century, true faith was often contrasted with theatricality. In discussing ‘Idols of the Theatre’ Francis Bacon complains about systems of belief that are ‘but so many stage-plays’, based simply on tradition and credulity.37 As its title makes clear, Twelfth Night invokes carnival and festivity, and sixteenth-­century anti-­theatricalists commonly linked carnival with theatrical excesses. Stephen Gosson complains that ‘Maygames, Stageplaies, & such like, can not be suffred among Christians without Apostacy, because they were suckt from the Devilles teate, to Nurse up Idolatrie’.38 For Gosson and other anti-­theatricalists, the stage operates as McCoy imagines religious faith to do: as total absorption, complete conviction. The stage is dangerous because audiences lose any sense of distance between themselves and its fictions. Gosson writes that theatre’s dazzling of eye and ear carries us ‘beyond our selves’.39 Shakespeare’s metadramatic habit of puncturing his own illusions may offer a different model of audience engagement, one in which belief in theatre is mixed with discerning distance and doubt. The ‘faith’ Twelfth Night endorses is a dramatic faith: it demands respect for, belief in, and reaction to others, in all of their weaknesses and potentialities. As with religious faith, dramatic faith is always imperfect, but perhaps that is the appropriate model for faith this side of eternity. As Jeffrey Knapp, Paul Whitfield White, and others have shown, reformers and Catholics alike used the stage to defend faith.40 In addition to such historical studies, we might also consider ways that contemporary thought about faith undergirds dramatic practice, or reflect upon the theological dimensions implicit in dramatic form. Twelfth Night is full of anti-­theatrical language. Yet the play also invites a mixed faith in theatre, acknowledging the

Reliquiae, p. 128. Bacon, Novum Organum, trans. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denan Heath, in The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. III (Boston: Taggard and Thompson, 1863) p. 78. 38 Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), B8r. 39 Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions, F3v. 40 Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Paul White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 36 37

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potential for abuse (as in Malvolio’s imprisonment) as well as growth (as in Orsino’s development). The faith the play asks us to have in theatre is, to use Jacobs’s language, founded in charity – in its modelling of charitable responses to others – and in discernment – through staging the characters’ many failures to perform charity. We are asked to have faith in theatre’s illusions, but the play never demands the total absorption Gosson attributes to the stage. The play’s model of theatrical faith does not absorb, erase, or crush the self so much as it seeks to bring the self into charitable relation. The play offers many forms of false faith. In Orsino’s first lines, his obsessive gastronomical metaphors never fail to appal my students; those lines tell us quickly that he is interested not in Olivia but in himself-­in-­love. As Michael Schoenfeldt has taught modern would-­be Freudians, in the early modern period the physical locus of the psychological self was not the genitalia but the gastrointestinal tract.41 Orsino’s repeated references to digestive processes suggest a form of neurotic self-­obsession. Thus Orsino takes his companion’s question about hunting – an invitation to conversation, and to an activity requiring that he move out, both outdoors and outside himself – and turns it inward. Yes, he will hunt the ‘hart’, he says: his own heart (I.1.18). The story of Diana and Acteon, of the hunter pursued and felled by his own hounds, is encompassed within Orsino. He is hunter and hunted; his own ‘desires, like fell and cruel hounds’ pursue him (I.1.23). His interpretive practice imprisons all mythologies within the self. Only Viola, in her guise as Cesario, will induce him to unclasp ‘the book even of [his] secret soul’ (I.4.14). In a pivotal scene in which Cesario tells Orsino how well he knows the love that women can bear to men, we see the impact of this relationship.42 As Cesario tells Orsino the story of his ‘sister’s’ passionate love for a man, the Duke responds to the moving fiction. The Duke’s question – ‘But died thy sister of her love, my boy?’ (II.4.119) – represents his first interest in another’s story, in the sufferings of someone other than himself.

Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 42 Paul Dean notes that Viola’s ‘vocation’ is to bring Orsino and Olivia ‘from illusion to reality’ in ‘ “Comfortable Doctrine”: Twelfth Night and the Trinity’, The Review of English Studies, 52.208 (2001), pp.  500–515; I characterize ‘reality’ as ‘relation’, something Dean addresses through Trinitarian theology. 41

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If the Duke suffers from self-­centred isolation, Viola is improvisatory. Her ability to react to people around her, to engage in wordplay that does not turn back upon her own thoughts (as with the Duke’s play on heart/hart), makes witty expansion her habitual language. In repartee with the wise fool Feste, she holds her own. Her soliloquy praising Feste stresses the importance of his timing, responsiveness, and spontaneity, a performer’s most important qualities. By the play’s end, the Duke arguably becomes a little like her. In the final scene, she and Sebastian piece together their family history: they are fraternal twins, their identities crystallized for other characters only in each other’s presence. And the Duke begins to improvise: ‘I shall have share in this most happy wrack’ (V.1.261). He imitates Viola’s plucky response to the wrack or shipwreck she suffered just before the play opens: he reacts to the scene before him and seizes the opportunity for reciprocal love. At the play’s beginning, his self-­absorption prompts his tautological characterization of imagination: ‘So full of shapes is fancy/That it alone is high fantastical’ (I.1.14–15). By his last line, he admits someone else into his fancy: Viola will be his ‘fancy’s queen’ (V.1.381). His insistence that he must see Cesario as Viola, in her woman’s clothes, might also be read as his newfound faith in performance: what she is is what she performs; his fancy alone cannot work transformation. (Perhaps a narcissist like Orsino required an androgyne like Viola/Cesario as an intermediary step towards reciprocal love.) Like Orsino, Olivia starts the play in isolation: she lives ‘like a cloistress’ (I.1.29). Feste’s catechism teaches her a new faith, one based both on scripted dialogue (a ‘catechism’) and a measure of trickery. His catechizing of Olivia, that ‘good madonna’ (he ‘catechize(s)’, I.5.58), emphasizes that excessive mourning for a soul in heaven is foolish, a sentiment indebted to Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and in line with moralists of the day. Like Erasmus’s book, the play insists that folly ministers to our frailties. Feste has been away from Illyria and Olivia, an absence to be understood broadly: while he is away, festivity, too, goes missing (he enters with a ‘good lenten answer’ (I.5.8) and proceeds to ‘good fooling’ (I.5.30). Olivia’s anger at his absence quickly cools after his catechizing begins to ‘mend’ her (I.5.70), bringing her out of mourning and into the play’s festive world. For most of my students, Olivia is more appealing than Orsino, at least in the play’s first half; she quickly develops into an improvisatory, reactive

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character who takes advantage of situations before her, self-­aware enough to realize that by falling in love at first sight she behaves somewhat ridiculously: ‘Even so quickly may one catch the plague?’ (I.5.284). She is, as her name implies, another sort of twin for Viola, a figure who takes on some of her characteristics, making her an apt match for Viola’s biological twin. And indeed Sebastian is a good match for her: he too goes along with the play’s madness, its dreamlike and illusive qualities, trusting as his sister does that all will work out in the end: ‘There’s something in’t/That is deceivable. But here the lady comes’ (IV.3.20–21). When Olivia asks for ‘the full assurance of your faith’ (IV.3.26), he readily concurs. The subplot (on the gulling of Malvolio) contains the play’s most infamous use of religious language. Maria, chafing from Malvolio’s scolding, calls Malvolio ‘a kind of Puritan’ (II.3.130); Puritans are often mocked in early modern plays for their supposed anti-­theatricalism.43 Yet Maria quickly backs away from her statement, specifying that his problem is not Puritanism but vanity: ‘it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him’ (II.3.140– 141). In his narcissism he gives bad performances: he ‘cons state without book and utters it by great swarths’ (II.3.137–138), playing the role of one above his station. His character is opposed to the play’s energy not because of Puritanism, nor because he criticizes Sir Toby Belch’s drinking – though he certainly does that – but because he assumes a self-­absorbed superiority over others.44 The play represents his narcissism as false faith; thus when Maria announces his approach in his new costume, wearing yellow and cross-­gartered, she claims that ‘Yond gull Malvolio is turned heathen, a very renegado; for there is no Christian that means to be saved by believing rightly can ever believe such impossible passages of grossness’ (III.2.63–66). Malvolio’s ‘faith’ has led him to misread. In his enactment of the directions in a love letter supposedly written by Olivia (but in fact authored by Maria) he obeys ‘every point’, ‘like a pedant that keeps a school i’ th’ church’ (III.2.71, 69–70); he thereby becomes the butt

Kristen Poole, ‘Saints Alive! Falstaff, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging of Puritanism’, Shakespeare Quarterly 46:1 (1995), pp. 47–75. 44 This includes publicly rebuking Olivia for his supposed mistreatment. Malvolio is not wrong, as David Schalkwyk shows, to believe that a servant–master relationship could foster love, but Malvolio exempts himself from the mutual care that should characterize such relationships (‘Love and Service in Twelfth Night and the Sonnets’, Shakespeare Quarterly 56:1, 2005, pp. 76–100). 43

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of religiously tinged ridicule. Malvolio’s false faith in his own value and prospects renders him vulnerable. When Olivia asks Maria and the others to look after him, they treat him as if he were possessed – an extension of the joke that also plays on the anti-­theatricality of writers like Samuel Harsnett, in whose work false possessions and exorcisms are played for theatrical trickery.45 Laughing at the ridiculously clad Malvolio, Fabian remarks, ‘If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction’ (III.4.121–122). Malvolio becomes the improbable fiction that anti-­theatricalists condemned precisely by refusing to engage with others in carnivalesque play. The language of anti-­theatricalism recurs in Malvolio’s refusal to go along with his false exorcism, a refusal my students are prone to endorse at that point; here is a performance that has gone too far. The play acknowledges that anti-­theatricalists have a point – as in Malvolio’s imprisonment scene, theatre may harm – but asks for an affirmation of faith in the stage despite its shortcomings. Similarly, Viola’s first soliloquy both uses anti-­theatrical language and reaffirms acting itself. Viola first distinguishes between outside and inside. Her performance of gender is but a ‘dream’ (II.2.26), and her statement that she is the one Olivia loves – ‘I am the man’ (II.2.25) – is frequently played for laughs. Viola then invokes the accusation that theatrical cross-­ dressing causes erotic confusion: ‘Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness/ Wherein the pregnant enemy does much’ (II.2.27–28). But after elucidating the sufferings that cross-­dressing and misdirected eros may cause, she turns to a performative sense of self: she first voices her dilemma through her assumed role – ‘as I am man,/My state is desperate for my master’s love’ (II.2.36–37) – and then through her supposedly true identity; ‘as I am woman, (now alas the day!) What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe’ (II.2.38–39). From this awareness that performance may compete with reality and cause pain, Viola turns to time – carnival time, the play’s time – to unravel the situation: ‘O Time, thou must untangle this, not I;/ It is too hard a knot for me t’untie’ (II.2.40–41). Her final turn is comic and trusting; she will continue to play. The soliloquy moves from an anti-­theatrical puncturing of theatrical illusion as wicked

While the work post-­dates the play, its tactics do not; Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London, 1603).

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‘disguise’ to a sense of performance as having a competing power of its own, to trust in the play’s time to right things. Yet the solution Viola’s soliloquy offers, like the play’s defence of theatre, remains tinged by melancholy. For a comedy, Twelfth Night contains an alarming number of references to death. Even the curate tells time in a morbid manner: two hours’ passing means he’s travelled two hours closer to his grave (V.1.159–60). Meditation on death was a common spiritual practice, a familiar way to enliven faith. Perhaps there is an analogous function for the play’s invocations of death and suffering. They are real, they cannot be avoided; ‘the rain it raineth every day’ (V.1.385), Feste sings, and it is no accident that the Fool in King Lear sings a snatch of the same song (III.2.76–79). But in Twelfth Night’s melancholic comedy, mentions of death and suffering tend to move characters to invest in, have faith in, the play’s carnival, even as compromised, as melancholy, as it sometimes can be: ‘come kiss me, sweet and twenty, Youth’s a stuff will not endure’ (II.3.49–50).46 Here we have a mixed faith in theatre, to be sure, but, to adapt Stephen Greenblatt, that mixed, melancholy faith is better than anything the world’s Malvolios have to offer.47 The play’s final line substitutes for the melancholic refrain ‘For the rain it raineth every day’ an invitation to relation despite the rain: ‘we’ll strive to please you every day’ (V.1.401). In my experience, students usually accept the play’s invitation to engage with characters as they are – Orsino’s self-­absorption, Toby Belch’s outrageous drunkenness, Feste’s melancholy carnival. ‘Faith’ in the play does not signify unshakeable belief in intellectual propositions; the word is typically used to gauge the quality of interactions with others. False faith is self-­absorption; trusting, charitable faith in dramatic and carnival time is mixed with a discerning awareness of theatre’s shortcomings, a gentle incredulity about its illusions. The play invites us to reflect about what ‘faith’ might mean and to bring to bear characterizations of ‘faith’ at the play’s and our moments in time.

On the play’s instructional use of mortality, see Lisa Marciano, ‘The Serious Comedy of Twelfth Night: Dark Didacticism in Illyria’, Renaiscence 56.1 (2003), pp. 3–19. 47 See Greenblatt’s introduction in The Norton Shakespeare. I concur with those who argue for a more comic (if still melancholic) Twelfth Night than has been common in recent scholarship. For a sensible defence of Twelfth Night’s balance between Feste’s rain and the Duke’s ‘golden time’, see Nancy Lindheim, ‘Rethinking Sexuality and Class in Twelfth Night’, University of Toronto Quarterly 76.2 (2007), pp. 679–713. 46

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The politics of late sixteenth-­century Protestant quarrels, fascinating as they are, do not exhaust the play’s religious dimensions, which extend to the stance the play asks us to adopt towards its own fiction. Insofar as the play asks us to invest in its illusions, we are encouraged to respond charitably to its imperfect characters, and to sympathize with those left out of the play’s resolution (Antonio, whose longing for Sebastian remains unsatisfied; the mistreated Malvolio, who threatens revenge). Such ‘faith’ might serve as one model for Christian approaches to literary study. Literary-­historical scholarship – concerning Puritanism, or anti-­ theatrical discourses, or the meanings of ‘faith’ in Shakespeare’s culture – is of crucial importance if we are to avoid an Orsino-­like narcissism. There are no excuses for lazy ignorance. But historical knowledge ought to enhance, not obviate, the play’s claims on us, by highlighting its gentle defence of theatre as a means for moving outside oneself, as a call to a sensitive reading that, much like Viola, risks the self in full interaction. One must participate in play – in improvization, in response to others’ cues – to escape isolating self-­delusion, or readings that crush all into the self, as well as an isolating historicism, where historicism protects against self-improvement. If in the play faith is always imperfect, at best a partial knowledge in search of fullness, it is also a respectable correlate to a charitable, discerning, self-­implicating humanistic study.

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Theology, Literature, and Prayer A Pedagogical Suggestion1 Vittorio Montemaggi

University of Notre Dame, IN, USA

My aim in this essay is to reflect on the relationship between theology, literature, and prayer: to reflect, that is, on how these modes of thinking, of writing, and of being might be mutually illuminating. But my aim is not to offer a general definition of the relationship between theology, literature, and prayer. It is rather the simpler one of offering, through comparative reading of three relatively short texts, a suggestion concerning the value that reflecting on such a relationship might have, especially in terms of its implications for our understanding of the dynamics of ‘Theology and Literature’ in the classroom. The three texts are: the last paragraph of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iob, lines 88–138 of Canto 20 of Dante’s Paradiso, and the Epilogue of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I should make it clear at the outset that in offering a comparative reading of these three passages I will be interested more in the dynamics of the

The present essay is born out of my courses at the University of Notre Dame on ‘Between Religion and Literature: Meaning, Vulnerability and Human Existence’ and ‘Religion and Literature: In the Light of Job’, and writing it would not have been possible without the wisdom received from my students. A first version of the essay was prepared for the Systematic Theology Seminar at King’s College London, and its current form is indebted to comments received from Susannah Ticciati and the seminar’s participants. It is also indebted to comments received from Christian Coppa, Peter Hampson, Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, Alison Milbank, John Milbank, and Susannah Monta. In the present essay I omit direct bibliographical reference so as to communicate more directly, as if in the context of classroom reading of primary texts. For bibliography, broader discussion and further acknowledgements, see my ‘Love, Forgiveness and Meaning: On the Relationship Between Theological and Literary Reflection’, Religion and Literature 41.2 (2009), pp.  79–86; ‘Dante and Gregory the Great’, in eds. Claire Honess and Matthew Treherne, Reviewing Dante’s Theology vol. 1 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013); ‘Forgiveness, Prayer and the Meaning of Poetry’, Literature Compass 11.2 (2014), pp.  138–147; see also Robin Kirkpatrick and Vittorio Montemaggi, ‘Theology and Literature: Reflections on Dante and Shakespeare’, in eds. Mervyn Davies, Oliver D. Crisp, Gavin D’Costa, and Peter Hampson, Christianity and the Disciplines: The Transformation of the University (London: Continuum, 2012).

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passages themselves than in overall interpretation of the works of which they are part (though of course some of this will be implied). Moreover, I do not intend to suggest that there necessarily is a direct and traceable influence between the three texts at hand. My focus will rather be on the ways in which, taken together, the passages might in both theological and literary terms illuminate each other, and in doing so offer us fruitful grounds for thinking about the relationship between theology, literature, and prayer, and about how this relationship might shape our perception of the value of teaching in the field of ‘Theology and Literature’. My choice of the three particular texts stems primarily from the value that I have experienced them to have in the classroom, both in themselves and in relation to each other. I am inspired to bring them together because of what I have learned from my students their impact can be on appreciating the importance of combining theological and literary reflection. My students have taught me this not simply with their particular interpretive insights, but also by the human depth with which they have responded to the intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual questions raised by these texts, and by their ability to live their relationship with these texts as a profound form of human encounter.

Humility in Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iob Gregory the Great’s Moralia is one of the most important and influential texts in the Western Middle Ages. Indeed, as both theologian and pope, Gregory’s influence throughout the Middle Ages was vast. It is important to emphasize this, because despite his great influence throughout the Middle Ages, and despite his continued influence in monastic and spiritual contexts today, Gregory remains a relatively underexplored figure in academic theological debates. Hence, renewed interest in Gregory’s writings is overdue. This is especially so, perhaps, given the ways in which contemporary theology is calling for a renewed sense of the variety of forms in which theological thought might conduct itself. This demands a renewed sense of the importance of conceiving of theology as a discipline that is not academic in a restricted sense but which, even in its academic manifestations, might provide the context for explorations of truth by addressing the broad and rich complexity of human personhood and community.

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The passage of the Moralia I would like to focus on comes at the end of Book 35, the last in the work. Gregory’s purpose throughout, as stated in the letter to Leander of Seville, which prefaces the work, has been to focus not so much on a historical or literal exposition of the text, but on its interpretation as a text that can be edifying for its readers in contemplative and especially moral terms, the two dimensions – the contemplative and the moral – always going hand in hand in Gregory’s works. The work was begun while Gregory was papal representative in Constantinople, at the request of the brothers from his Roman monastery who were with him and of Leander himself, and was then completed early in Gregory’s pontificate. The work as a whole is consciously written in the form of direct address to the community who had requested it. The end reads: Now that I have finished this work, I see that I must return to myself. For our mind is much fragmented and scattered beyond itself, even when it tries to speak rightly. While we think of words and how to bring them out, those very words diminish the soul’s integrity by plundering it from inside. So I must return from the forum of speech to the senate house of the heart, to call together the thoughts of the mind for a kind of council to deliberate how best I may watch over myself, to see to it that in my heart I speak no heedless evil nor speak poorly any good. For the good is well spoken when the speaker seeks with his words to please only the one from whom he has received the good he has. And indeed even if I do not find for sure that I have spoken any evil, still I will not claim that I have spoken no evil at all. But if I have received some good from God and spoken it, I freely admit that I have spoken it less well than I should (through my own fault, to be sure). For when I turn inward to myself, pushing aside the leafy verbiage, pushing aside the branching arguments, and examine my intentions at the very root, I know it really was my intention to please God, but some little appetite for the praise of men crept in, I know not how, and intruded on my simple desire to please God. And when later, too much later, I realize this, I find that I have in fact done other than what I know I set out to do. It is often thus, that when we begin with good intentions in the eyes of God, a secret tagalong yen for the praise of our fellow men comes along, taking hold of our intentions from the side of the road. We take food, for example, out of necessity, but while we are eating, a gluttonous spirit creeps in and we begin to take delight in the eating for its own sake; so often it happens that what began as nourishment to protect our health ends by becoming a pretext for our pleasures. We must

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admit therefore that our intention, which seeks to please God alone, is sometimes treacherously accompanied by a less-­righteous intention that seeks to please other men by exploiting the gifts of God. But if we are examined strictly by God in these matters, what refuge will remain in the midst of all this? For we see that our evil is always evil pure and simple, but the good that we think we have cannot be really good, pure and simple. But I think it worthwhile for me to reveal unhesitatingly here to the ears of my brothers everything I secretly revile in myself. As commentator, I have not hidden what I felt, and as confessor, I have not hidden what I suffer. In my commentary I reveal the gifts of God, and in my confession I uncover my wounds. In this vast human race there are always little ones who need to be instructed by my words, and there are always great ones who can take pity on my weakness once they know of it: thus with commentary and confession I offer my help to some of my brethren (as much as I can), and I seek the help of others. To the first I speak to explain what they should do, to the others I open my heart to admit what they should forgive. I have not withheld medicine from the ones, but I have not hidden my wounds and lacerations from the others. So I ask that whoever reads this should pour out the consolation of prayer before the strict judge for me, so that he may wash away with tears every sordid thing he finds in me. When I balance the power of my commentary and the power of prayer, I see that my reader will have more than paid me back if for what he hears from me, he offers his tears for me.2

Having ended his exposition, Gregory turns inwards towards himself in examination, as a way to then open himself outwards again in confession. He turns inwards because he recognizes that when in the process of speaking, of communicating, of addressing an audience, one is so focused on one’s words that one runs the risk of forgetting one’s true self. As Gregory says, one wishes through one’s words to please and praise God, for it is only from God that any good in one’s words ultimately derives; yet inevitably one ends up also seeking the praise of human beings. Humility gives in to pride. Gregory thus opens himself outwards again towards his readers: to confess his vulnerability, to confess to the wound of pride to which his attempt to speak truthfully has led him. He ends by asking readers to cleanse him with Translation by James O’Donnell, as found in http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/gregory. html [accessed 25 March 2014]. Published with permission. The same website also provides the Latin original.

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their tears, in such a way that the value of prayer might surpass the value of Gregory’s commentary itself. One might be tempted to read a passage such as this one simply according to rhetorical convention, whereby words such as those used by Gregory at the end of his Moralia are seen not so much as a genuine expression of personal character as a conventional expression aimed at garnering towards the text the good will of the reader. I do not think this would be a fair reading of Gregory, and I would rather give him the benefit of the doubt. But be that as it may, what I would like for our present purposes is for us to take Gregory’s words seriously. For whatever their author’s intention, the words as we have them present us with quite an extraordinary theological perspective, which is well worth considering in some detail. Such perspective is compellingly embodied in the very final sentence of the work. In one swift stroke, Gregory is ready to allow the value of his text to be surpassed by that of its readers’ prayers, as if literally to allow the work’s thirty-­ five books to drown into the tears shed by readers in prayer for Gregory’s moral shortcomings. The readers’ tears thus, in a very real sense, are said to complete the work, which has just come to an end. It is in the tears that readers might come to shed for Gregory in the light of his commentary, that the commentary itself finds its ultimate fulfilment. A commentary that had set off with the stated purpose of being morally edifying thus ends with a compelling statement by the commentator himself that he is himself in need of edification. A statement that is made all the more compelling if we consider that many a time throughout the commentary itself Gregory had pointed out how those at greater risk of being defiled by pride are those who attempt to speak about truth3; those who, like Gregory himself in writing the commentary, aim to show others where truth might be found. What are we to make of all this? In approaching this question, it might be helpful to address first the notion of dependence: the dependence of human beings on God and on each other. For at the heart of the final paragraph of Gregory’s Moralia is the idea that individual human beings are totally dependent on God. As Gregory says, any good one might perform is from God: insofar as one is able to say anything Book 18 stands out in this respect.

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good in speaking about God, one is participating in nothing other than the divine truth about which one is attempting to speak. One is inevitably constantly failing, however. Goodness can never be fully perfect in human beings, who are thus in constant need of recognizing their wounds before God. We have here, we might say, a strongly ethical take on apophaticism, whereby humility becomes the governing virtue of any truthful theological discourse. Take humility away, Gregory’s words suggest, and any theological worth one’s words might have is undermined by pride; take humility away, and any theological worth one’s words might have is undermined by forestalling the possibility for author and reader to meet in open recognition of the need for forgiveness. In this respect, it is interesting to note that while Gregory strongly claims that there will be readers who might through prayer cleanse his moral shortcomings, there will be others for whom his commentary will be a medicine able to heal the wounds of sin, despite the moral shortcomings of his words. We are thus presented with the picture of a mutually supportive community, whereby all help and are helped in the measure they are capable and require. It is by enlivening the picture of such a community that Gregory chooses to end his commentary on Job. I think it would be difficult to overestimate the theological importance of this move. It is as if Gregory wishes to instantiate in the community created by the writing and reading of his text those very truths concerning love and compassion as ways of life towards which, argues Gregory, the book of Job can point us. One could perhaps say that in this respect Gregory’s text is sacramental in character, effecting what it signifies. Be that as it may, what we seem to have here is a compelling statement of just how dependent we are not only on God but also on each other; or, rather, of just how dependent we are on God in and through each other. We are thus presented with a picture of theological enquiry whereby the truthfulness of theological discourse is assessed not only by its conceptual accuracy but by its moral character or spirit; by the way in which it is able to invite others to recognize that ultimately divine truth – the very truth which for Gregory is embodied in the book of Job and in Scripture more generally – is not something we merely speak about but rather something we live in, and something we live in all the more truthfully if we are ready to recognize our faults and pray for the forgiveness of the faults of others.

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The implications of this kind of theological perspective are far reaching. We will consider below how this kind of perspective might be related to, or embodied in, contemporary theological practice within the university. But for the moment, to reflect further on the implications of the kind of theological perspective opened up by the end of Gregory’s Moralia, let us turn to the second of our three texts.

Love in Dante’s Paradiso In each of the heavens he traverses in the Paradiso, Dante meets a different group of blessed human beings. This is not because different groups of blessed human beings inhabit different heavens (for they are all eternally at one with the light-­love-­joy that is the Empyrean and that is the life of God), but because it has been decreed so by divine will, as a way of making manifest to Dante (in ways that a mortal can understand), different aspects of divine truth, of the relationship between divine truth and human existence. Our passage is taken from the episode of the Heaven of Jupiter, where Dante meets the just, who present themselves to him in spectacular formation in the image of an Eagle, symbolizing at one and the same time justice, love, mystical union with God, and poetry. Two features of the Eagle capture Dante’s attention. The first is that while the Eagle is composed by a multitude of persons, it speaks to Dante in the singular. As Dante puts it, it says ‘I’ and ‘mine’ instead of ‘we’ and ‘ours’.4 We shall return to the significance of this. The second is the Eagle’s eye, an organ able to stare directly into the Sun without being blinded, and thus taken as symbolic of mystical vision. The eye of the Eagle is composed of six people. At the centre, corresponding to the pupil, is King David, supreme singer of the Holy Spirit, as Dante puts it (20.37–42). Around David, forming the eyebrow, are the Emperor Trajan, Hezekiah King of Judah, the Emperor Constantine, William II King of Sicily, and the Trojan Ripheus, a minor character from Virgil’s Aeneid. As our passage makes clear, it is the presence, in the eye of the Eagle, of Trajan and Ripheus that most puzzles Dante. Indeed, in the canto preceding the Paradiso 19.1–12.

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one from which our passage is taken, a question had been voiced, which, we are told, had long troubled the pilgrim: how can it be that some human beings cannot reach salvation simply because they live in times and places without direct contact with Christian teaching? To which the Eagle’s response was that while it is indeed true that no one can be saved without faith in Christ, this is not the same thing as saying that only those who explicitly profess Christian belief will be saved; for in fact after the final judgement many who on earth live with no direct contact with Christian teaching will be eternally rich, whereas many who on earth explicitly profess Christian belief will be poor (19.22–111). Despite having received this answer to his question by the Eagle, when Dante sees two pagan souls forming part of the eye of the Eagle in Canto 20, he is led forcefully to wonder how this may be (79–84). The passage I would now like to turn to is the beginning of the Eagle’s response to Dante’s renewed question, and gives among other things further details concerning the salvation of Trajan, who according to a popular medieval legend was able to achieve salvation thanks to the prayers of Gregory the Great. The Commedia had in fact already referred to this legend in the episode of the terrace of pride in the Purgatorio (10.70–96). On this terrace Dante finds marble carvings crafted directly by God showing three paradigmatic examples of humility, the virtue through which pride is purified: the Annunciation, King David dancing before the Ark, and Emperor Trajan administering justice by interrupting a military campaign to make sure justice is granted to a widow whose son had been murdered. (As the legend has it, it is in seeing a similar carving on Trajan’s Column in Rome that Gregory, deeply moved by Trajan’s actions, prays for his salvation). In Paradiso 20, in the Eagle’s response to Dante’s doubt concerning the presence of pagans of Heaven, we then find:   ‘I see that you, because I say these things, believe they’re so and yet cannot see why, so these are hidden even though believed.   You act like someone who may know quite well the name but not the essence of a thing, unless by demonstration made to see.   Regnum celorum will submit to force assailed by warmth of love or living hope, which overcome the claims of God’s own will,

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  not in the manner that men beat down men but win because will wishes to be won and, won, wins all with all its own good will.   The first life and the fifth that mark this brow cause you to wonder. You’re amazed to see the realm of angels painted with these lights.   They left their bodies, contra your belief, as Christian souls, not Gentiles, firm in faith that His feet paced to past or coming pain.   Trajan from Hell – from where, to exercise good will no soul returns – came back to bone, this mercy granted him for living hope.   For living hope committed all its powers in prayer to God to raise him up once more, so that he could, in will, be made to move.   The glorious soul that we’re now speaking of, returning even briefly to his flesh, believed in Him whose power could bring him aid,   and, so believing, blazed forth in such fires of love in truth that he, on second death, was fit to make his way to this great game.   The other, by that grace which drops like dew – its source so deep that no created eye can ever penetrate the primal wave –   set all its love, down there, on righteousness. God, therefore, opened Ripheus’s eyes, grace upon grace, to when we’d be redeemed.   In that redemption, he believed. And so he did not suffer any pagan stench, but stood as a reproof to those who strayed.   Those three pure donne from the right-­hand wheel which you saw once were his as baptism, a thousand years before baptizing came.   Predestination! How remote your root from all those faces that, in looking up, cannot in toto see the primal cause!   And so you mortals, in your judgements show restraint. For even we who look on God

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do not yet know who all the chosen are.   Yet this deficiency for us is sweet. For in this good our own good finds its goal, that what God wills we likewise seek in will.’5

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Following Gregory’s prayers, Trajan is brought back to life from Hell and is granted salvation on account of his belief in ‘Him whose power could bring him aid’ (once again we find an emphasis on dependence). Commentators have often been embarrassed by Dante’s references to the legend surrounding Trajan’s salvation. Compared with the overall sophistication and complexity of Dante’s treatment of theological questions, his references to the legend concerning Trajan’s salvation can appear to have more the character of popular superstition than that of theological rigour. And yet, it is possible to suggest, I think, that it is precisely through reference to such popular legend that Dante presents us with theological perspectives of great richness and complexity. One way to focus in on such richness and complexity might be first of all to note the recurrence of ‘living hope’, in line 95 and in lines 108 and 109. The living hope embodied in Gregory’s prayers for Trajan is the same living hope that earlier in the passage is said to be able to conquer divine will and thereby partake in nothing other than the unfolding of divine will itself. Indeed, lines 94–99 are, in theological terms, some of the richest lines of the whole poem. Coming together in these breathtakingly deep yet concise lines, made possible in part by the masterful use of poetic rhythm, is Dante’s belief in the perfect union between the community of the blessed and God, and Dante’s belief in love as the nature of that union; that love which is God himself and which, as the last line of the Commedia famously puts it, moves the Sun and other stars. The syntax of the lines allows Regnum celorum and God’s own will to be synonymous, and both are defined in terms of love that conquers not by imposing violence but by suffering it in the goodness inherent in suffering the demands of love itself and living hope. And it is precisely as such an instance of ‘living hope’ that Gregory’s prayers are presented to us when the term recurs in lines 108 and 109. Gregory’s prayers thus come to partake in the unfolding of divine will and of the love in which this is perfectly at one with the community of the blessed. Translation by Robin Kirkpatrick, as found in Dante Alighieri, Paradiso – The Divine Comedy, vol. 3, trans. Robin Kirkpatrick (London: Penguin, 2006–2007). Published with permission.

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It is important at this point to note explicitly that while for Dante ‘warmth of love’ and ‘living hope’ can conquer the love that is divine truth itself, this does not entail a change in divine will itself. Indeed, as stated in our passage, this conquering is what divine will itself wills. Moreover, as far as prayer is concerned, it had been stated earlier in the Canto as well as earlier in the Commedia that prayer may never effect a change in the will of God (Purgatorio 6.28–48; Paradiso 20.49–54). What prayer can do, through the intensity of love, is have a bearing on the spatiotemporal unfolding of what divine will decrees. It is in such perspective that Gregory’s prayers for Trajan ought to be understood. It is not that Gregory’s prayers change divine will with respect to the question of Trajan’s salvation. It is rather that Gregory’s prayers are the particular way in which divine will is fulfilled with respect to Trajan’s salvation. What we are presented with in our passage, then, through the reference to Gregory’s prayers, is a rather extraordinary picture of the way in which prayer might come to partake in the unfolding of the love in which divine and human existence are perfectly at one. But what are we to make of this? What are the implications of all this in relation to the perspectives opened up by our reading of the end of Gregory’s own Moralia? One way of approaching these questions is to read Dante’s text as providing, like Gregory’s, a compelling statement of just how dependent we are not only on God but also on each other, or as phrased earlier, on God in and through each other. Read in this light, Dante’s text provides us with a theological development of the kind of perspective with which the Moralia ends. The kind of community Gregory’s text wishes to enliven explicitly through its request for readers’ prayers becomes, in Dante’s text, the very expression of divine truth itself. It is through the help of Gregory’s prayers that Trajan has the opportunity of believing in the divine power that can bring him to participate in the ‘great game’ of the love on which everything that is depends. In such love all human beings are perfectly at one: indeed, as mentioned earlier, it is as one that the blessed forming the Eagle of the Heaven of Jupiter speak. What we would seem to be missing in Dante’s text as compared to Gregory’s is some explicit recognition of the vulnerability of theological discourse, a recognition of the kind that brings Gregory in contrition to confess to his wound of pride. And yet, if we look more closely, we can find in this respect something quite extraordinary in lines 106–107, which tell us of how Trajan

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came back to life from Hell, ‘from where, to exercise / good will no soul returns’. For one way of reading these lines is to see them as calling into question the theological coherence of Dante’s whole poem. Gregory’s prayers and Trajan’s salvation do nothing less than call into question the apparently rigorous structures on which Dante’s portrayal of the afterlife depends; they destabilize any rigid categories that the human mind might construct so as to understand the workings of grace. The same can be said for the Eagle’s pronouncement in lines 133–138 about the impossibility for the blessed, let alone mortals, to scrutinize divine judgements. Dante’s poem might present us with a spectacular vision of the circles of Hell, the terraces of Purgatory, and the heavens of Paradise; but ultimately it cannot claim for the kind of vision presented by Dante to offer a framework that can comprehensively contain understanding of divine will. Human beings might think that the tripartite framework provided by elaborate doctrines of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise might help in understanding the relationship between human beings and God, but as with all human statements concerning the divine, these frameworks also ought to be governed by an overarching apophaticism, and a sense of the ultimate mystery in which all truths reside. Indeed, as Dante learns in the Heaven of Jupiter, in recognition of this mystery even explicit profession of Christian belief itself cannot be confidently asserted as an absolute category by which to understand the workings of grace: non-Christians too are granted the possibility of salvation. Dante’s preferred name for the mystery in which all truths reside is love. The reference to Gregory’s prayers in Paradiso 20 is, I think, consciously intended by Dante to be a manifestation of the ways in which full recognition of the mystery of our dependence on God, and on each other in and through God, can ultimately and fruitfully destabilize any unwarranted degree of confidence in our particular, provisional, and necessarily vulnerable conceptual articulations concerning the divine. To argue this point fully would lead us beyond the scope of the present essay. I simply wish to note here that Dante, like Gregory, would seem to associate the destabilizing effect of the recognition of the value of prayer with a move from pride to humility. It is not a coincidence that it is in the context of the examples of humility on the terrace of pride that we have the first reference in the Commedia to the salvation of Trajan; and that it is precisely after this episode in the poem that Dante too, like Gregory,

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confesses his pride, his desire for the praise of human beings (Purgatorio 11.118–20; 13.133–138). And I do not think it is a coincidence that the final mention we have of Gregory in the Commedia is of Gregory laughing at himself for having made a theological mistake (concerning the angelic hierarchies) (Paradiso 28.130–135). Unlike Gregory, Dante does not openly pray for the prayers of his readers. But he does point his readers to the limitations of, and to the possibility of mistakes in, his own poem. And he also points us to his awareness of his pride in his theological utterances. While Dante does not explicitly ask his readers to pray, it might be plausible to suggest, in the light of what has been said so far, that prayer is indeed one of the responses the Commedia wants to invite us into. Prayer, in this sense, is understood as that contemplative mode of being whereby, precisely in recognition of the limitation of our conceptual articulations concerning the divine, we might come to recognize our very existence to depend on love, or (as phrased above) on God and on other human beings in and through God. By speaking of how, in the intensity of love, the living hope of Gregory’s prayers undermines the basic structure of the understanding of the relationship between human beings and God presented in the Commedia, Dante is arguably wishing to shock us into prayer. He shocks us beyond the embarrassment often felt by critics at the reference to the legend surrounding Trajan’s salvation, into an understanding of the divine in which belief in something like Trajan’s coming back to life is not associated with superstition but linked to a prayerful sense of wonder. At which point, as with belief in things such as Creation, Incarnation, Transfiguration, and Resurrection, our confidence is not primarily in our own powers but on the mystery in which those powers and all life have their origin, and in which, as love, all life can fully come to participate. All this may also be restated in specific reference to Dante’s Commedia as a literary text. Here, this prayerful sense of wonder might be associated not only with the dynamics of Dante’s theology but with the literary dynamics of the text as which such theology is embodied. For the legend surrounding Trajan’s salvation not only raises questions concerning the relationship between belief and superstition but, as inserted within Dante’s poem, also sharpens questions concerning the relationship between truth and fiction – concerning the measure in which we should assess the truthfulness of Dante’s poem by the

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extent to which that which it describes can be taken as factually true. There is debate among Dante scholars as to the extent to which Dante wishes his text to be read as fact or fiction.6 As Christian Moevs points out, however, to pose the question in these terms is already to miss the point. For if the divine truth Dante wishes to speak of in the Commedia is ultimately beyond all representation, and definable as a mystery for which Dante’s preferred name is love, then it might be more appropriate to assess the truthfulness of his poem in terms of the way in which it can bring its readers closer to that love. In this respect, the kind of wonder that the Commedia aims to generate as theology through reference to Gregory’s prayers, it also aims to generate as literature through the story of a journey ultimately aiming to transcend its status as representation so as to invite our own stories into the transformation of which it speaks. Once again, the implications of this kind of perspective are far reaching, especially for our understanding of possible interdisciplinary intersections between theology and literature. What would be the conditions necessary for providing an academic context whereby it might be possible fully to engage with a text that in both theological and literary terms, one through the other, aims to invite its readers, in prayer, into the process of divinization of which it speaks? Such a question might be brought into sharper focus by turning to our third text. This will also allow us to return to, and bring into sharper focus, the question of forgiveness as opened up by Gregory’s request for prayers at the end of his Moralia.

Forgiveness in Shakespeare’s The Tempest The Tempest is, after Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale, the last of the extraordinary Romances written by Shakespeare at the end of his career. The play opens with the shipwreck of a ship travelling from Tunis to Naples on board of which are Alonso King of Naples, Sebastian his brother, and Ferdinand See Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s ‘Comedy’ (New York: Oxford University Press/ AAR, 2005), especially pp. 3–14 and 169–185.

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his son, Antonio Duke of Milan, Gonzalo his counsellor, and others. On the mysterious island on which the ship is shipwrecked live Prospero – rightful Duke of Milan who had been banished by his brother Antonio with the help of Alonso – and Miranda, Prospero’s daughter. Also on the island are Ariel (a spirit in Prospero’s service), and Caliban (a native of the island enslaved by Prospero). The shipwreck of the Neapolitan ship is caused by the tempest that gives the play its name, and which is conjured by Prospero’s magic powers. Prospero uses these throughout the play to control nature, human beings, and the supra-­ natural, so as to guarantee a perfect union between Miranda and Ferdinand, and to bring about a final reconciliation. Thereby, notwithstanding the plot devised by Caliban and two of Alonso’s servants to kill Prospero, and the plot devised by Antonio and Sebastian to kill Alonso, Prospero forgives those who had wronged him, and Alonso recognizes the rightful union between Miranda and Ferdinand and thus between Naples (of which Miranda will be Queen) and Milan (to which Prospero is restored as rightful Duke). Moreover, Ariel is granted the freedom he so desires, and Prospero, taking responsibility for Caliban, suggests he too is forgiven. Before the reconciliation on which the main action of the play ends, however, Prospero renounces the magic powers through which he is able to bring it about (5.1.33–57). And, at the very end of the play, he addresses the audience with the words which will be the next focus of our attention: Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint. Now ‘tis true I must be here confined by you Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got, And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;

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And my ending is despair Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so, that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free.7

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With these words, the actions of the audience are brought into the sphere of meaning of the play itself. It is towards the audience’s applause that the play has been tending all along. Shakespeare’s text too, like Gregory’s, is seeking the praise of human beings. And it is only the applause and praise of the audience that can grant Prospero the unfolding of events he desires. But this is not all. The audience’s praise and applause is identified with prayer, without which, Prospero says, his ending is despair. Prayer can relieve him from despair, he further specifies, because it can pierce Mercy itself, or God, and free all faults. Finally, in the final couplet of the play, it is further clarified with a striking allusion to the Lord’s Prayer that the audience’s praise and applause will be efficacious only if, in these, the audience prays for the forgiveness of Prospero’s faults in recognition of their own need for forgiveness. So, whereas the main action of the play ends with Prospero’s granting forgiveness to others, the play as a whole ends with Prospero’s recognition of his own need for forgiveness; forgiveness that can be granted if prayed for and applauded by the audience in recognition of their own need for forgiveness. In other words, there is a shift on Prospero’s part from the question ‘How can I forgive?’ to the question ‘How can I be forgiven?’ And there is a shift required of us in the audience from the questions ‘How can Prospero forgive?’ and ‘How can Prospero be forgiven?’, to ‘How can I be forgiven?’ All this resounds clearly with strong theological overtones. Yet there is little in the play that calls for an explicitly theological reading. This is not to say that such a reading would necessarily be inappropriate. But it is to say that, in interpreting the play, questions concerning the adoption of explicit theological frameworks are not necessarily of primary importance. The allusion to the Lord’s Prayer in the Epilogue, for example, arguably serves both the purpose of Text from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, gen. eds., Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). By permission of Oxford University Press.

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inviting particular theological interpretations of the play, and the purpose of inviting interpretations of the play whereby recognition of certain truths concerning the human condition takes priority over the specific possibilities of articulating a particular theological understanding of them. This fruitful interpretive ambiguity might be linked to the embodied experience of the theatre. One of the effects of the Epilogue of The Tempest is its blurring the distinction between stage and world. What we do as an audience is presented as inextricable from the meaning and unfolding of the events presented on stage. The play’s purpose, as the Epilogue puts it, is simply to please us. But, as the Epilogue also suggests, for such pleasure fully to be that to which the play has been tending, it cannot be a pleasure whereby we remain detached, independent, from the generation of the play’s own meaning. It has to be a pleasure that is able to lead us to see that our enjoyment of the play is ultimately inseparable from a mutual recognition of the need of forgiveness. As the play manifests itself as dependent on us, so we are asked to recognize that we might in our turn be dependent for forgiveness on something other than ourselves. ‘As you from crimes would pardoned be, / let your indulgence set me free’. It is only on these grounds that through our applause we might properly express our wish – our prayer – for Prospero to leave the island, thus literally determining how the play actually ends. Having abandoned his God-­like powers, Prospero presents himself to us as he is in himself: vulnerable, with a strength that is most faint. And in this returning to his true nature he recognizes himself no longer to be in a position of control, but in one of dependence, of dependence on Mercy itself in and through the audience. It is this dependence alone that can grant him the forgiveness he needs; if, that is, the audience are ready to recognize their own dependence on the same Mercy. This is not the only way in which the Epilogue of The Tempest blurs the distinction between stage and world in the embodied experience of the theatre. In reminding us that the play’s sole purpose is that of entertaining, Prospero’s words foreground the fact that they belong to a world of illusion, or of dream, as Prospero himself famously suggests earlier in the play (4.1.146–163): a world of dream created in the first instance by Shakespeare, but at every performance recreated by the actors on stage, and in the light of the Epilogue at every performance also recreated by the audience’s response.

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At the same time, in self-­consciously presenting itself as dream, the play points to a truth transcending that of its status as theatrical representation; a truth in which stage and world are revealed as sharing in the same sphere of meaning. Indeed, who is speaking to us in the Epilogue: Prospero, the actor playing the part, or Shakespeare? As Prospero humbly rejects his powers and presents himself to us as he truly is, thereby pointing to a mutual recognition of the need for forgiveness as the grounds for the final unfolding of the play’s action, so, in presenting itself to us as play through the vulnerable voice not only of Prospero but also of the actor playing the part and of playwright, the play points to Mercy and forgiveness as the truth in which alone there can be any meaning for the play itself; if, that is, we in the audience are willing in humility to recognize the possibility of this. Insofar as The Tempest might be said to be a play about forgiveness, it is so not only because it represents forgiveness on stage, but because it also calls the audience to enact forgiveness through prayer in its response to the play itself; and because it presents forgiveness as the ultimate condition for (its) meaning. Again, we are presented with a set of questions that have far-­reaching implications. What might it mean for us to see forgiveness as ultimate condition for meaning, not only in connection with The Tempest but also more broadly? What might it mean, or what might it take, for us to create the conditions within which meaning could unfold in forgiveness even in an academic context? These questions lead us towards a comparison between the three texts we have been considering.

Conclusion At the end of The Tempest, Shakespeare seems to want to invite us into a kind of community not altogether different from that into which we are invited by Gregory at the end of his Moralia, and by Dante’s reference to Gregory’s prayers for Trajan in his Paradiso. Shakespeare’s text, like Gregory’s, presents to us our prayers as its fulfilment; fulfilment that can only be hoped for in the light of a truth transcending author, text, reader, playwright, play, actor, audience, and the distinction between dream and reality: that Mercy, or love, which in Dante’s

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Paradiso is said to be, precisely insofar as it can pierced by prayer, the very essence of the communion between God and human beings. At the same time, we would seem to have moved, with The Tempest, quite far from Gregory’s text: we have moved from a commentary on Scripture aimed at the spiritual edification of its readers, to a play with little explicit theological content whose sole purpose is that of entertaining its audience. And yet, at the heart of both works is an invitation to realize that any meaning they might have depends on the possibility of their enlivening in us recognition of a truth that as human beings we all share: that of forgiveness as the grounds for genuine communication and communion. Both texts, moreover, choose to speak of the possibility of such communication and communion through reference to prayer, which is thus presented as that mode of being which – whether offered as devotional practice or theatrical applause – might bring us, through love, closer to each other and to the mystery in which we have our being. Between these two texts – and perhaps somehow providing a bridge across the differences between them – is Dante’s Commedia, a text that both presents us with a theological exploration of the relationship between human beings and God, and invites us to recognize how such exploration might bring us, in speaking of a truth transcending representation, to transcend easy distinctions between truth and literary fiction. In Dante’s text, prayer is explicitly presented as a manifestation of the divine truth of which the text speaks, and as a way in which human beings can come to partake in that truth. In Dante’s text, moreover, this movement towards God is also explicitly tied to the enjoyment of a literarily crafted story. Even granted the above comparisons, however, what are we to make of all this? What might be the value of this kind of exercise? One suggestion is that the variety of ways in which we see prayer foregrounded in the three texts might invite us to recognize more sharply the potential importance of reflection on prayer as a way genuinely to reflect on the nature of truth. Here ‘truth’ is intended not simply as referring to the relation between a set of ideas and reality but as something that grounds the meaningfulness of ideas, as well as the possibility of any genuine exchange of thought, and as something that can never be individually grasped but that is always in its very essence communal. Another possibility is that bringing these very different texts together might

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sharpen our sense and appreciation of the hospitable and broad space needed to bring to bear more general theological reflection upon our understanding of the complexity of human culture and existence. In this respect, we have seen how theological understanding and the experience of enjoyment of literary art might be mutually enriching. Yet another response is that the nature of the similarities between these texts might sharpen our sense of the humility required in undertaking theological reflection: humility whereby priority is given not to our own conceptual articulations concerning the divine but to the living experience of recognizing ourselves dependent on each other in all that we do, be it commenting on Scripture or watching a play. None of these responses are mutually exclusive. Or to phrase all this differently: the texts by Gregory, Dante, and Shakespeare taken into consideration might, if read together, help enliven in us recognition of the intellectual value of modes of existence whereby we might be ready constantly to be surprised by discovery of our limitations with respect to truth, and whereby we might be ready to enjoy the truth of our dependence, and the discoveries to which open recognition of such truth might lead. And all this, in turn, can shed light on what is at stake in bringing ‘Theology and Literature’ into our university classrooms. Seen in the light of the example provided by Gregory, Dante, and Shakespeare, the study of this particular interdisciplinary field reveals itself to have profound potential for awakening us to our dependence on each other and, through such recognition, awakening us in turn to those truthful dimensions, such as love, humility, and forgiveness, in which alone our interdependence can genuinely be grounded and lived out. As such, the example provided by Gregory, Dante, and Shakespeare invites us compellingly to bring prayerfulness into the classroom: ‘prayerfulness’ understood as a mode of engaging with theology, literature, and each other that recognizes that such engagements are fully meaningful only if contextualized within a living relationship with a truth that ultimately transcends any text and any of us. Some in our class will prefer calling such truth ‘God’, others ‘love’ or ‘Mercy’, some no particular name at all. Some will like thinking of such truth explicitly as divine, others will not. Some will prefer associating it with the explicit articulation of theological ideas, others to devotion, yet others with the experience of community to which we are led by literary enjoyment. Yet, by allowing us to bring together texts as different as

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Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iob, Dante’s Commedia, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the study of ‘Theology and Literature’ allows us to become ever closer to each other and thus also to become ever most truly ourselves. It can, moreover, awaken us and our students (and ourselves as students) ever more deeply to our need of being constantly transformed in this way. There is, arguably, no more important kind of educational journey than this, even in our contemporary universities.

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Bleak Liturgies R. S. Thomas and ‘Changes Not to His Liking’ Hester Jones

University of Bristol, UK

Following the recent award of the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection to Michael Symmons Roberts’s book, Drysalter, Jeanette Winterson, chair of the judges, remarked, ‘We need to be able to talk of matters of faith and the soul, and how the soul intersects with the heart. What Symmons Roberts does is difficult but necessary now – it addresses a fissure in the human psyche, how we deal with faith and secularism; how we find a life.’1 The ‘difficulty’ Winterson observes in speaking of matters of faith has been felt for many years in academic English studies, though important work in this area has continued to be produced in various quarters, among them, the journal Literature and Theology and associated conferences, and in other periodicals dedicated to the intersection between Christianity and culture, or more broadly, culture and religious studies. These areas have often, though, been oriented predominantly towards theological consideration, and less frequently arise from a literary perspective. Indeed, in my own experience of teaching students for over twenty-­five years, inviting discussion and consideration of matters of faith in this context can provoke defensive reactions, in which either ignorance of belief or hostility to confessional positions are expressed. The risk of this situation is that faith is accepted as a matter for discussion only if it is safely removed from the realm of what is acceptable in imaginative terms – if it becomes, in other words, understood as something arcane and inert, that can be grasped and then relegated like the bone of a now-­extinct animal. But it is Jeanette Winterson is quoted from http://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/forward-­prizes-­for-­ poetry/forward-­prizes-2013/

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surely not possible or desirable to distinguish between an academic belief and a subjective confessional position. Postmodernity, indeed, has gradually made it once again more possible, and even, as Winterson put it, ‘necessary’, to speak of matters of faith, and to see these – no less than issues of gender, sexuality, or cultural identity – as properly occupying the public and literary sphere. Moreover, as Amy Hungerford has convincingly argued, post-1960s American literature has found ways to bring together ‘doctrine and pluralism, belief and meaninglessness’. Indeed, she suggests, belief without meaning becomes both a way to maintain religious belief rather than critique its institutions and a way to buttress the authority of the literature that seeks to imagine such belief. Belief without content becomes [. . .] a hedge against the inevitable fact of pluralism.2

Hungerford’s analysis of such writing is elegant and persuasive. What she identifies in American literature perhaps shares some common ground with the existence of ‘believing without belonging’ that the British sociologist Grace Davie identified in British culture in the late 1990s.3 And, as Jean Ellen Petrolle has remarked, while it is hard to define exactly what is meant by the ‘postmodern’, it is easier to establish that it is, at least, ‘associated with the depthless, the insubstantial, the spiritually exhausted’. Yet, while the term reveals or perhaps derives from a ‘loss of ontological certainty – experienced as a diminishing faith in the realness and relevance of the body, everyday private experience, community, and the earth, as well as a diminishing faith in the trustworthiness of language and story to convey meaning’, nonetheless, Petrolle suggests, postmodern allegory ‘labours diligently to resurrect these aspects of experience as sites of the real and sources of value’.4 In a curiously similar way, Terry Eagleton’s recent, trenchant defence of Christian doctrine, against the (as he sees it) ignorant and prejudiced assaults of the new atheism, finds in orthodox teaching a recognition of ‘uncertainty’: ‘Whatever else one might think of the doctrine of Creation,’ Eagleton writes, ‘it is at least a salve for humanist arrogance. The world for Aquinas is not our possession, to be moulded and Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. xxi. 3 Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 4 Jean Ellen Petrolle, Religion without Belief: Contemporary Allegory and the Search for Postmodern Faith (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), pp. 3, 6. 2

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manipulated how we please, but a gift which incarnates an unknowable otherness, one whose material density and autonomy must be respected.’5 Here, as for Petrolle and for Hungerford, the possibility of reconciling the particular language of religious revelation with the postmodern loss of certainty is asserted, in contradiction of the polarity otherwise created between secular pluralism and doctrinal belief. Belief and the loss of certainty, then, coexist in postmodernism and particularly perhaps in literature since 1960. Furthermore, this coexistence can be placed within a further theological context, that of the changing understandings of kenosis, the central Christian idea that God gives up absolute transcendence within the incarnation and above all on the cross. Laurens ten Kate has explored this context, and identified two distinct understandings of kenosis, one emphasizing the infinite distance of God from humanity, and one stressing the possible proximity, which the emptying of God’s infinite power makes possible. Using Derrida’s account of negative theology in Sauf le nom, Kate suggests that these two apparently irreconcilable understandings can be harmonized. On the one hand, kenosis imagines a divine withdrawal from human relation, inevitable if God is understood as transcendent, and leading to a distance or a void between God and man. On the other hand, kenosis cannot but be understood also through the invocation of a relationship that is immanent, and in which the name of God inscribes a presence. Following Derrida, Kate posits a dynamic relational economy, in which kenosis ‘is always high and low’, ‘withdrawal and incarnation’. Thus ‘ “this name of a bottomless collapse” is at the same time the name of an intimate event’.6 In this chapter, I want to suggest that this literary coexistence of meaninglessness and belief, as Hungerford identifies it, the inscription of a ‘bottomless collapse’ that is also the place of relationship between human and God, is indeed a frequent aspect of postmodern writing, and one, in fact, that

Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 79. Laurens ten Kate, ‘Econokenosis: Three Meanings of Kenosis in “Post-­Modern” Thought: On Derrida, with Reference to Vattimo and Barth’, in ed. Onno Zijlstra, Letting Go: Rethinking Kenosis (Bern, Switzerlnd: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 285–310 (pp. 300, 302). See Jacques Derrida, Sauf le Nom (Post-Scriptum), first published 1993; published in English as On the Name, trans. I. McLeod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).

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engages the postmodern reader, whether believing or not. Furthermore, I suggest that one recurrent motif or trope by which this particular coexistence of transcendence and collapse is expressed, is by means of the symbol of depth, an image that is powerfully meaningful and also seems to evade understanding in a contemporary postmodern context. The focus of discussion in this chapter will be the Anglican poet R. S. Thomas, the hundredth anniversary of whose birth was marked in 2013. Like his predecessor, the poet George Herbert, whose work remained closely significant for Thomas, Anglican faith provided a ground bass and anchor for Thomas, and often seems a stumbling block for non-Christian readers and academics, an alignment that seems destined to confine Thomas to a solely confessional audience. Yet this was also a matter with which Thomas wrestled throughout his life. Indeed, in the later period of his writing in particular, his work often seeks to find a means of accommodating belief and meaninglessness, side by side, or indeed at the same time. Kenosis, imagining a God who empties himself into creation and even into the bleakness of meaninglessness, often assumes a central focus in this work. Alongside this question of the extent to which writing about Christian faith and experience may communicate with an increasingly non-­believing or secularized culture, runs another question, that of Welsh identity, culture, and language, and the extent to which Thomas could embrace this cultural hinterland, often represented in stark terms, as a poet writing in English and immersed in a tradition of English poetry. Increasingly his work became identified with efforts to express a nationalist affiliation, but Thomas remained aware that this movement risked a sidelining or diminishing of his significance among many readers for whom Welsh identity was of little interest or apparent importance. Amidst this dilemma, Thomas makes use, as I have begun to suggest, of the symbol that has recently come into greater theological currency, that of the deep. Catherine Keller’s recent, ‘postmodern’ study Face of the Deep7 attempts with exciting consequences to redeem an idea of depth from the sloppy vagueness often accompanying it. Its ‘process theology’ is informed, among a number of sources, by the thought of Gilles Deleuze, particularly his Difference Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003).

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and Repetition (originally published in French in 1968) and its response to an understanding of the ‘modern world’ as ‘one of simulacra’, arising from the ‘failure of representation’ and the ‘loss of identities’.8 For Deleuze, depth ‘as the (ultimate and original) heterogeneous dimension is the matrix of all extensity’; meanwhile it is also ‘the intensity of being’.9 Keller finds these apparently contradictory qualities evoked in the depths of imaginative writing: ‘The Melvillian vortex’, for example, ‘expresses and generates a surface of turbulent depth.’ It evokes ‘not a monodimensional depth but the chaoid Deleuzian heterogeneity of the pro/found, the pre-­foundational’.10 Keller sees in Melville’s text a depth that exists not in dichotomous opposition with surface but rather as something ‘death-­drenched’; as something not ‘breaking through’ the face of phenomena but rather a ‘nothingsomething breaking as every finitude, every wave of becoming’. It is characterized by an ‘infinite complexity’ that exceeds our understanding; often, we respond to its elusiveness with ‘fear and blankness’, or a desire to override and destroy its unfathomable darkness and brilliance. But Keller sees depth emerging through the ‘wave-­break of transformation’, at the liminal point of turning.11 A desire for foreground (one that articulates a similar concept of depth), can also be observed within much of R. S. Thomas’s writing. Furthermore, he makes use of this term, albeit in a reticent and occasional way, as one among a number of strategies to bring together apparent polarities in his culture and audience: those between faith and the secular, and between English and Welsh culture, to name but two. Working with an idea of depth allows Thomas, like a number of contemporary poets, to go some way towards rehabilitating the sacred within a predominantly secularized context, without losing touch with the something other present in ideas of the divine. As Keller’s work implies, the idea of depth, in a postmodern and academized context, enables such a conversation to continue between sacred and profane, intimate and other. In this chapter I shall explore how Thomas makes use of this idea of depth and the deep, so as both to acknowledge and even to redress the fissure Jeanette Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 1994, reprinted 2004), p. xvii. 9 Difference and Repetition, pp. 288, 290. See also, Walter Blissett, The Long Conversation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 76. 10 Keller, Face of the Deep, p. 146. 11 Keller, Face of the Deep, p. 154. 8

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Winterson refers to. I shall focus on Thomas’s later and less often considered, but very rewarding, work and show how this probes the distinctions between prose and poetry, life and art, as well as between secular and sacred. I begin by suggesting that ideas of depth can be observed particularly well in Thomas’s engagement with the question of liturgical language and its changes through history. Liturgical reform becomes a vexed issue in the last decades of the twentieth century and, while touching on theological and ecclesiastical questions not in themselves of much interest to a wider field, it raises nonetheless broader and substantial issues that are of concern in the postmodern academy. In the decades running up to his death in 2000, R. S. Thomas grew increasingly preoccupied with the movement within the Anglican Church, particularly in the 1980s onwards, engaged in the modernizing of its liturgy. This movement would in the end lead to Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer being replaced in most Anglican churches, first with the ill-­fated Alternative Service Book, produced in 1980 by the Liturgical Commission, and then by Common Worship, currently in use. Such radical modernizing in Anglican practice ran concurrently with attempts in the Catholic Church, after Vatican II, to bring the liturgy and worship of that Church up to date. Such efforts to modernize the Churches, particularly in the language of its services, were keenly regretted by those for whom Anglican liturgy was uniquely valuable as a cultural jewel and bridge, linking seamlessly with the Reformation Church, and thus perhaps also with that age of English cultural and imperial glory. It is not uncommon for cultural figures in this period, some without wanting to affiliate themselves in any confessional sense with established religion, to give voice to their strong distaste for such adaptations of and revisions to long-­loved cultural artefacts. The poet Stevie Smith, for example, whose writing about Christianity and on Christian themes is quite plentiful – sometimes warm, but often critical – expresses her distaste for such linguistic and liturgical changes in both prose and poetry. In 1972, for instance, in the poem ‘How do you see’ (included in Scorpion and Other Poems [1972]), she writes: ‘Oh Christianity, Christianity, / That has grown kinder now, as in the political world / The colonial system grows kinder before it vanishes, are you vanishing?’12 Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James McGibbon (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975), p. 521.

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For Stevie Smith as for many, changes to Anglican liturgy that sought to respond to and absorb changes in wider society, signalled a falling off of power that, while expressive in one sense of divine kenosis, also seemed to herald decline and even, as Smith suggests, disappearance. But R. S. Thomas, while partly identifying himself with those uneasy with such change, on account of the loss of much-­prized cultural and aesthetic beauty, was also alert to the problems such loyalty posed for himself, a priest working in the Church in Wales. In such a place and at this particular time, English language and its culture increasingly epitomized the oppression of a master-­race; yet as a poet educated in English language and literature, it was also his ‘mother-­tongue’. In his prose autobiography, Neb, Thomas wrote (referring to himself often in the third person), with some nuance: There were changes in the Church that were not to his liking [. . .] a commission on the liturgy had been busy considering changes to the services and retranslating the Scriptures. Since Welsh was for him a second language, RS did not feel that he was qualified to assess these new versions. But it was a different matter where English was concerned. For good or ill, this was his mother-­tongue and the language he had to write his poetry in. He wasn’t content at all. He therefore clung to the King James Bible and to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, considering the language of both to be indescribably superior, and, as far as he could judge, that was the case with the Welsh ones, too.13

Here, the now elderly poet-­priest partly mocks his own preference for the older version, using the comically petulant ‘He wasn’t content at all’ (a remark that might provoke the question whether a prayer book is designed to lead to ‘contentment’). Indeed, the exaggerated verb ‘clung’, grammatically out on a limb in the sentence, portrays the speaker-­survivor adrift from the wreck of religion, isolated by his archaic and contradictory preferences. In this way, then, Thomas exerts a cultural judgement and preference in relation to religious language, but at the same time recognizes that such preference must in the end be understood as secondary, a somewhat self-­indulgent luxury, distracting from the more important business of trying to make a connection with God. R. S. Thomas, Autobiographies, trans. Jason Walford Davies (London: Orion, 1997), pp. 88–89. Neb was first published in Welsh in 1992 and translated into English in 1995.

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In short, the language Thomas cherishes is also understood as a source of division and conflict rather than a means of glory. This complex attitude to the question of liturgical revision is broadly in line with and epitomizing of a broader understanding of language’s relation to religious truth that can be seen expressed in Thomas’s earlier writing. Indeed, the 1966 essay ‘A Frame for Poetry’, a kind of manifesto, articulates very similar tensions to those Thomas worked through in later poetic collections. Thomas, it must be acknowledged, works amidst a culture in which, in his words, ‘secularism and abstractionism’ predominate, and both of these tendencies lead to some reluctance to see the divine as existing within and revealed through our perception of the embodied, physical world – a difficulty indicated by a reference to T. S. Eliot’s often-­quoted lines from Four Quartets, ‘human kind / Cannot bear very much reality’. Thomas argues in this early essay that, in fact, Christianity is intrinsically and uniquely bound up with the physical world, in all its bodily mess and (sometimes) ugliness; and he uses this reminder to defend his sense of poetic and priestly vocations as thus quite similar, since both engage with the world as it is found by the senses, and both discover meaning, at various levels, within those revealed and sometimes awkwardly embodied realms. Such rounded meaning, Thomas argues, is resisted by a contemporary mechanistic culture that flattens, evacuates, and damagingly limits the ‘deep’ and the ‘common’ substance that has hitherto animated poetry.14 In seeking to find a way forward for poetic language amidst this contemporary contretemps, Thomas looks to the American poet and critic Allen Tate, alluding to his 1951 essay ‘The Symbolic Imagination: The Mirrors of Dante’ several times.15 Tate follows the lead of the English poet Charles Williams, who alongside T. S. Eliot had publicized the symbolic imagination of Dante within English mid-­century culture, and in particular had made current Dantean imaginative symbolism, as he understood it. And particular to this symbolism was what Tate called a symbolic rather than angelic imagination, by which latter word he means a direct, not mediated, understanding of essential truth. Tate argues, that is, that the contemporary Catholic imagination has

R. S. Thomas, ‘A Frame for Poetry’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 March 1966, p. 169. Allen Tate, Essays of Four Decades (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1968), pp. 424–446.

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become ‘angelic’ in its spurning of material and natural forms and images; Dante, by contrast, and those artists seeking to follow and rehabilitate his imagination, look to the ‘common’ forms of life. For ‘[n]ature offers to the symbolic poet clearly denotable objects in depth and in the round’. Tate concludes by affirming that Dante’s greatness is found in his work’s dramatic, worldly character: [I]t sees, not only with but through the natural world, to what may lie beyond it. Its humility is witnessed by its modesty. It never begins at the top; it carries the bottom along with it, however high it may climb.16

For all the emphasis often placed on R. S. Thomas’s apophatic vision, his perception of God as having emptied himself so fully as to be apparently absent from the world, I would suggest that, even later in his career, Thomas’s vision also had much in common with Tate’s, with Charles Williams’s, and with Dante’s. Like them, his vision works ‘bottom up’, as it were, keenly alert to the dangers of an angelic or rejecting aesthetic. Despite the tipping of the critical cap to Eliot, that poet’s imagery of ascent (often embodied in the metaphor of the stairway) risked leading the poet/priest astray, and of not ‘carrying the bottom with it’, in Tate’s words. Such an anxiety about angelic or rejecting vision contributes to the ambivalent attitude to liturgy revision mentioned earlier, since to be angelic is to make a fetish of language and to pay inadequate attention to the unprepossessing, inconvenient otherness of the Christian God. Secondly, and in consequence, Thomas also indicates his loyalty to Tate and Dante in his recurrent absorption with the metaphor of the mirror, central in Dante’s poem as Tate demonstrates. In his use of mirrors, either directly or indirectly through related sea metaphors, and in particular by means of a series of complex contrasts between the surfaces offered by mirrors and the expanses made possible by windows, Thomas seeks to convey the depth and roundedness of which poetic language is capable at its best, a depth in which – additionally – he suggests that the divine is to be found. In such a way, his symbolic, rather than angelic, imaginary is demonstrated. Such depth is also, in Thomas’s mind, importantly linked with changes to language and Tate, Essays, p. 446.

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liturgy that acknowledge human growth through and within time. These may not seem desirable, perhaps, but they are necessary, and it is the duty of the poet and the priest to work through the consequences for poetry and for religious language. They contribute to the depth within which the divine makes its dwelling, and within which its divine nature may also be dispersed. Thomas is in fact awake to the dangers present in seeking the divine in those gestures towards removal of the self or aspiration towards something higher than it, often associated with the narcissistic ego. This leads to some paradoxical imaginative situations where the divine is felt to be more present within images of monstrous and natural growth (for example, mushrooms, or gaping fish) than in more conventional symbols (the stair, the rose garden), since those latter situations provoke an awareness of inhibiting self-­ consciousness. Yet at the same time, Thomas signals a desire, sometimes an achieved experience, for these two to meet, and it is often by means of the word ‘deep’ or the idea of depth, along with its generating of fear and horror, so particular to Thomas’s religious imagination, that this encounter becomes imaginatively possible. At points, this opposition between internal and external is expressed in broader and more philosophical terms, as man holding barely at a remove from the façade of polish, a barbaric world of violence and conflict. In Neb Thomas writes: To a thinking person, there are two aspects to the sea, the external and the internal. Or, if you like, it is both a mirror and a window. In the mirror, is to be seen all the beauty and glory of the creation; the colours and the images of the clouds, with the birds going past on their eternal journey. But on using it is as a window, an endless war is to be seen, one creature mercilessly and continuously devouring another. Under the deceptively innocent surface there are thousands of horrors, as if they were the creator’s failed experiments. And through the seaweed, as if through a forest, the seals and cormorants and mackerel hunt like rapacious wolves. What kind of God created such a world? [. . .] Face to face with a mystery as awful as this, how can anyone be absolutely certain one way or the other? That was Job’s problem, mute before his God. That was Blake’s question, How do you know?17

Thomas, Autobiographies, p. 78.

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There are echoes too in this questioning of the earlier poet Keats’s lines: ‘I saw too far / Into an eternal fierce destruction’, in the verse letter he writes to J. H. Reynolds.18 But in the act of ‘seeing too far’, of perceiving the ‘awful’ failures and the wracking ugliness in the depths of existence, and being struck ‘dumb’ like the prophet Job as he sees them, the poet also more fully glimpses the ‘mystery’ of God’s spiritual presence in the world. In this passage also the mirror of metaphor, or poetic truth, presents a delightful image of heavenly glory; but it is reversed, and it is safely disengaged from the observer: the migrating birds are merely ‘going past’, and their journey, though an image of the eternal cycles of life, is also lacking the painful particularity of the momentary. Within the equally alluring tangle of the poetic mind, however, fears and passions are revealed, hungry for recognition. St Paul’s famous verse in Corinthians, ‘now we see as in a glass darkly, but then we shall see face to face’, is thus disturbingly distorted. Indeed, as Thomas’s spiritual understanding grows and deepens in the later decades, this familiar biblical verse undergoes a transformation: God becomes known as ‘the faceless / negative of himself we dare not expose’.19 The faces of things, though seductive, recede (in a word often used at this stage), and through and in such recession, such a kenotic, emptying of creation, God – who is both frustratingly elusive and horrifying, because potentially consuming – may at points be known. In this sense, Thomas’s path reflects or follows that of Yeats – a poetic father-­ figure also to be rejected in favour of more gritty figures, Sanders Lewis among them; but the first line of Yeats’s ‘Byzantium’, ‘The unpurged images of day recede’, sets the tone for this phase.20 So as Allen Tate was offering a polarity between an ‘angelic’ and a ‘symbolic’ vision, and strongly supporting the latter, so too R. S. Thomas can be seen to present these two approaches as existing in tension with one another, with, as I shall suggest, the idea of depth offering a bridge between both. Something like this can be seen in operation in some of Thomas’s prose works, as well as in the poetic. For example, the short essay ‘Dau Gapel (Two chapels)’, actually published before Tate’s essay but understandable in similar terms, describes John Keats, The Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 244. R. S. Thomas, ‘The Echoes Return Slow’, Collected Later Poems: 1988–2000 (Highgreen, UK: Bloodaxe, 2004), p. 68. 20 W. B. Yeats, ‘Byzantium’, The Collected Poems, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1950), p. 280. 18 19

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two kinds of spirituality, embodied in, on the one hand, ‘the Chapel of the Spirit’ and, on the other, ‘the chapel of the soul’. In the former, the speaker ‘has a vision’, though one that he claims he will not even try to put into words, it is so delightfully ineffable. Within it, however, ‘everything is a fountain welling up endlessly from immortal God; past and present become one, within this ecstatic mingling’. In the second chapel, that of the soul: the only sounds to break the silence were the thin, complaining voice of the stream and the constant drip of moisture from the trees. If the wind gasped once, it immediately fell silent, as if afraid of its own voice [. . .] there was no sign of life at all.21

Yet the chapel is used, by those who travel to it, ‘each along his own particular path on his frisky pony, sunk in long and deep meditation’. This chapel Thomas identifies as being particularly Welsh, and suggests he actually prefers it to the other: ‘Because I am only human? Because of the weakness of the flesh? I don’t know.’ Yet he sees this expression of spiritual journeying, ‘down-­to-­earth’ as it is, as suited to the ‘soil and dirt and peat’ of Welsh existence, from which emerged souls that were ‘strong and deep’.22 As has been recognized, there are tendencies in Thomas towards a romanticized and certainly essentialist account of Welsh identity; here, clearly, there is an expressed preference for the ‘symbolic’ as opposed to the ‘angelic’ spirituality, and an implication that the former is also cognate with Welsh identity, as well as being perhaps closer to Christian kenotic revelation (expressed in the descending rain rather than the welling fountain, and in a single gasp of wind, followed by fear-­induced silence, rather than through the murmurs of many soft voices). When the Welsh soul finds transcendence, then, it is ‘sunk’ in meditation, rather than soaring aloft in ecstasy; it encounters depth at best rather than rising to sublimity. And indeed, such an identification of Welsh spirituality remains in touch with the caricature to which Thomas, only partly humorously, refers in his essay, ‘Anglo-Welsh literature’ – the caricature of Wales as a ‘land of coal-­mines’, mired by the technological colonization of the English and, in reaction, sunk in nostalgia for an imagined earlier purity.23 In writing in such terms, Thomas of course runs R. S. Thomas, Selected Prose, ed. Sandra Anstey (Bridgend, UK: Poetry Wales Press, 1983), p. 45. Thomas, Selected Prose, pp. 45, 46–47. Thomas, Selected Prose, p. 53.

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the risk of seeming to subscribe to such a limited view of the country and its culture. Yet, at the same time, Thomas seeks to differentiate Welsh culture and spirituality, and by so doing to support it. In looking, therefore, to images of sunkenness and depth, in place, perhaps, of Wordsworthian transports or Eliotian moments in the rose garden, he treads a fine line between crude national stereotyping and a more invigorating and distinctive recreation of a culture, one that keeps in touch with the culture of origin, English, but also finds a place of safety from and renewal of, that culture. In a later (1968) essay ‘The Mountains’, a very similar opposition can again be seen in play. The essay begins with a stark series of images of obstruction and denial: Some days you can’t see them. The eye bumps into black cloud, low down. Nearer there is the sound of water, tumbling from wet heights. [. . .] And the small column picks its way earthward with its broken burden. He fell on the slippery rocks, and lay soaking and starving, while his companions went back to the inn. A sheep’s cry falls like a stone.24

There are no soaring ascents here but reiterated descents (‘tumbling’,‘earthward’, ‘fell’, ‘falls’) and, in the second paragraph of the essay, images of the imprisoning rain: ‘sometimes great rods of it, like the bars of a prison, though shining silver against the darkness of the far slope’. And with the reference to shining silver, the imagination is transformed, and a visionary moment glimpsed as ‘hundreds of windows reflect the sun as it goes down’. Nonetheless, in chief: This is to know a mountain; to inch one’s way up it from ledge to ledge; to break one’s nails on its surface. To feel for handholds, for footholds, face pressed to its stone cheek. The long look of the traverse, the scrutiny of each fissure. And the thought that it has all been done before is of no help. There is the huge tug of gravity, the desire of the bone for the ground, with the dogged spirit hauling the flesh upward. Rare flowers tremble, waver, just out of reach. From the summit the voices fall, a careless garland. A girl stands with her back to the drop. A slim figure, she leads the mountain by a rope. It will not try to master her again?25

Thomas, Selected Prose, pp. 97–106 (p. 97). Thomas, Selected Prose, p. 98.

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A Dantean, Beatrice-­like figure, perhaps, but one offering not a smile but a sight of her back only; and in the slippage between the girl and the mountain (also gendered female) that he seeks to ascend but cannot ‘master’, Thomas turns to other focuses of desire: the ‘lakes! A hundred of them, blue windows ventilating the land. But no fish in them; no birds feeding at the brim. Barren and cold and deep: terrible wounds the water has filled but not healed.’ Fantasies of vain escapism or, perhaps, reminders of perennial hurt and distance within the self, contained but not integrated, yet nonetheless these elements of the landscape are as capable of God as the soaring peaks, which lure the self away from the present. This, Thomas realizes, is the ‘shadow’ of the self, found in ‘places the sun never reaches’: ‘toss a stone in the darkness; it goes on falling’. A little further on, and the narrator reflects, ‘who lives in the dripping house under the falls?’ and answers, ‘silent people’. Likewise, ‘the fish open their mouths silently in the deep pool’ and: still the inmates do not speak, scared now by the unusual silence. This is the house the stranger comes to; knocking on the door at night. No, not knocking, but a presence, there in the dark, making them open. He glides in, nebulous as moonlight.26

The language and vision seem hardly that of a religious sensibility and yet the essay shifts in focus: ‘to live near mountains is to be in touch with Eden, with lost childhood.’ As this reminder unfolds, the overwhelming ‘mountains’ become ‘the hill’, ‘keeping its perennial freshness’, ‘the bright hill under the black cloud’. The ‘mountain rises dark under the moon’, but as ‘hills’ they give and renew and restore.27 When Thomas comes to write a further work of autobiography, the mainly poetic The Echoes Return Slow in 1988, the hazards of poetic language acquiring either too much weight, or not enough, are again raised. Indeed, they are given additional urgency by the changes that Thomas observed within the Church and that he describes with dark humour as driving him into retirement. Such a topic, indeed, is rarely far from his thoughts, and this late collection certainly does not deviate from the tried-and-tested areas probed and deployed throughout the previous thirty and more years of writing – in this sense, they Thomas, Selected Prose, p. 101. Thomas, Selected Prose, p. 105.

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are indeed ‘echoes’, in which the same questions, objections, difficulties – ‘unpurged images’, in short – once again ‘return’, and then again recede. The poems thus become, in their repetitive enactments, kinds of liturgy – a shared work, shiftingly formed through this restless interaction, in which Thomas moves between reiterating accepted and familiar forms of Christian revelation (at the risk, as he recognizes, of merely repeating these empty formulas) and giving voice to the new ground revealed by fear, doubt, and a sense of emptiness and unworthiness. He attains a language, in other words, cognate to the silent depths imagined with such relish and vigour in the earlier ‘Mountains’ essay. In one of Thomas’s longer poems, ‘Bleak Liturgies’, from the 1992 collection Mass for Hard Times, these preoccupations with liturgy and the timeless yet also transient nature of revision (‘Revision was in the air’, as he puts it), with a God found in the deep recesses of the self and in the receding of established faith, all move to the forefront. By way of providing context for that poem, I will indicate some moments from Echoes, where a preoccupation with liturgical language’s capacity for entering the depths of God and of the self are probed with increasing power and intensity. Growth through childhood is framed in Echoes as a ‘falling’ in which the one, known, maternal, shining face, becomes many ‘faces’ merely, lacking meaning or encounter, and threatened too by lurking fears: cockroaches in corners and submarines in shadows. Often in the sequence, the poems explore this dichotomy between wispy faces ‘at the air’s window’, and fearful spaces, within stanzas, whose sinewy elegance and suppleness echo the grace of W. H. Auden’s quatrain poems and tease out the violence and hunger beneath the surface of aesthetic beauty. From the beginning, culture and learning are conceived as Babel, a tower of hubris. In contrast, rural parishioners are described with a self-­consciously haughty judiciousness as recessive: ‘Small-­minded / I will not say; there were depths / in some of them I shrank back / from.’28 Here a tension is found between a kind of social satire redolent of Larkin at his nastier, and words like ‘depths’ and ‘wells’, implying the presence of spiritual integrity from which the speaker recoils and which the poem applauds. In contrast to such powerful symbols, Thomas deploys his flimsy word ‘God’, enclosed like the R. S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems, p. 60.

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speaker in safely inverted commas. It falls, however, like a stone into this other dimension, beyond the speaker’s and the world’s grasp, however much he strives for control with modestly qualifying gestures towards conversational and verbal precision: ‘I will not say’, ‘for all I know’. The priest waits for the ‘unbarring’ of the soul at death, a moment of confession or intimacy, perhaps; he ‘blows’ on the ashes of faith but in return only a ‘draught / out of their empty places / came whistling’. Chilling, evocative of Lear’s last scene, perhaps (‘undo this button’), and the speaker’s shroud of protective language, words of ‘light and love’, are – perhaps paradoxically – understood to be ‘angelic’ in their retreat from the draught. As the sequence progresses, the sea assumes an increasingly central role. Thomas’s writing repeatedly probes and ironically reverses accepted and conventional religious truths, and the eternal nature of the sea is one such. The sea in Echoes is an everyday presence, full of change rather than permanence and hints of eternity: ‘But the sea revises itself over and over. When he arose in the morning or looked at it at night, it was always at a new version of it.’ There’s dark, self-­mocking irony here, even an echo of the God of Psalm 139 known in the wings of the morning. The supporter of Cranmer’s English recognizes that ‘revision’ is embedded in creation, even, ‘in the air’, and his own, human resistance to it, is under siege: the sea is ‘at a new version of it’. The phrase acknowledges that this process is comparable to the creative process at which the speaker too applies himself. Revision, in other words, is at the centre of creation: it is as unavoidable and everyday as sunrise and nightfall. But it is of course also something that poetry seeks to head off, and correspondingly, Thomas’s language becomes clunky and contemporary, vague in the reference to ‘it’. (Is ‘it’ arising in a new way, as if mimicking the sun-­like poet, or is it a new version of itself?) The sea and its infinite changes wrong-­ foot the speaker, who flees from the discomfort of finding the sea both the same and different. Later in the sequence, a further passage again scrutinizes the dangers of using language that has become too familiar and formalized accurately to describe the divine. And, once more, the sea is the focus for this reflection: The sea at his window was a shallow sea; a thin counterpane over a buried cantref. There were deeper fathoms to plumb, ‘les delires des grandes profoundeurs,’ in which he was under compulsion to give away whatever

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assurances he possessed. He was too insignificant for it to be a kind of dark night of the soul.29

In this characteristically throw-­away, even awkward passage, Thomas draws recurrent contrasts between the simplicity and homeliness of the sea, ‘always at hand’ as an earlier description put it, like the comfort of a decorative ‘counterpane’, both containing and slickly covering, and the sense of something more elusive and more threatening, that is also a part of God. Once again, his metaphor (the containing counterpane) has diminished and domesticated the sea’s turbulent extensiveness, and by association, God’s depth; even the definite article, ‘the sea’, excessively limits it, as the move to the indefinite ‘a’ recognizes, seeing this perhaps as a version of ‘the sea’. Other less ‘shallow’ and dislocating words then open up the field; first the ‘buried cantref ’ – an unfamiliar Welsh word referring to a gathering of social units – then the ‘deeper fathoms’. Thomas is skating on thin ice, here, on the edge of pretension, and this is perhaps acknowledged with the third and perhaps most elliptical and showy allusion, to ‘les delires des grandes profondeurs’. This is in fact a quotation from John Berryman’s poem ‘Homage to Mistress Bradstreet’, stanza 33, where the line ‘Unbraced / in delirium of the grand depths’ is annotated with the explanation, ‘Delires des grandes profondeurs described by Cousteau and others; a euphoria, sometimes fatal, in which the hallucinated diver offers passing fish his line, helmet, anything.’30 Thomas picks up on this comical shedding of parts, and contrasts the action with the metaphysical grandeur of the French abstractions. Plumbing the depths of God in poetry can get the poet into the deep water of pretension, can lead him into an ecstasy of self-­ giving up, an intoxicated relating of the self to other poetic travellers through the depths. But at the same time, in embracing then acknowledging the pretension, the speaker kenotically divests himself of poetic airs, shallow as they may be, and so draws closer to the God known within the depths of dispossession. Depth thus becomes, in this sequence, a pointer, a reality with some substance to it, seeming to offer something of the divine, yet also containing its own ambushing dangers. Once again, Thomas yearns in part for

Thomas, Collected Later Poems, p. 70. John Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, ed. Charles Thornbury (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 141 and note p. 148.

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language that will reassure and steady the seeker after truth; but at the same time, he recognizes the ease with which this reassurance can become a superficial, almost mechanical, prop. Similar movements around depth that bring it into relation to the question of liturgical language can be seen in the poem ‘Bleak Liturgies’, which opens with a combative and also self-­evidently grandiose question, ‘Shall we revise the language?’31 Within the poem’s opening three-­line stanzas, the speaker expresses a sense of rage and regret at what he sees as an ‘emaciated’ church, impoverished now by the age of technology as once by superstition. Liturgical revision was earlier attributed by Thomas, as indicated, to an external ‘commission’; here, hunger for verbal changes is also understood to arise from a ‘hole in faith’. Language is seen as standing in for substantial belief, and so becoming a kind of idol. Indeed, as the poem proceeds, liturgical language is placed in contrast with liturgical action, epitomized in the eucharist, something understood to be at one time a source of healing where words divided. Stark and irascible questions punctuate this poem, as if to express such verbal disunity and fracture; indeed, the poem forms a kind of litany, bleak in the sense of the speaker’s regrets and dark experiences, as he lists the areas in which church life has, in his view, been undermined by science and the accelerated speed of life, which exist in tension with an underlying order provided by reiterated quatrains. However, at several points, the invective relents, and openness to something other emerges; understanding seems to dawn: ‘These thoughts / flew in and out of windows / he had not bothered to look through.’ A further turn in the poem comes surprisingly, in the unexpected reference to ‘our marriage’ (and one remembers that the volume was dedicated ‘To the memory of my wife M. E. Eldridge 1909–1991’). Previously, the first person plural pronoun has referred to the voice of the church, as in the first line, ‘Shall we revise the language?’ and ‘We devise / an idiom more compatible with / the furniture departments of our churches.’ But surprisingly, the pronoun recurs in a more personal context: organ’s whirlwind follows upon the still, small voice R. S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems, p. 183.

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of conviction, and he is not in it. Our marriage was contracted in front of a green altar in technology’s childhood, and light entered through the plain glass of the wood’s window as quietly as a shepherd moving among his flock.32

While thoughts ‘flew in and out’, now something – one could say something sacramental – irrevocably happens within the reference to ‘our marriage’: ‘light entered / through the plain glass / of the wood’s window’. Simplicity, care, a pastoral ease and beauty are remembered amidst the emptiness of grief; yet the poem does not end here, but reiterates its present darkness, figured through contemporary, distasteful ‘mutations’ of faith. The last section, as the first, reverts to three-­line stanzas, but where the first used five, the last uses six. Again it fires off a further question relating to the trivial literalism of merely linguistic changes which seems to be merely more of the same complaint: ‘His defences are in depth, then?’, pursuing the analogy of a battle against Christ, in which God is under attack from all sides: ‘we have captured position / after position, and his white flag / is a star receding from us / at light’s speed’. Much debt to George Herbert here, surely, of whose poems Thomas edited a collection (the poem ‘Redemption’, ending with the image of the cross, is in the background); also a distant gesture, perhaps, to the poet’s departed wife and perhaps to Milton’s beautiful sonnet on his wife’s death; it is as if the image of surrender expressed through the white flag and the receding light, resolves the question of divine absence without warning, so yielding, in the additional sixth verse, the moment in which a relationship with God is momentarily imagined: ‘his body hanging upon the crossed tree / of man, as though he were man too’.33 Here, once again, the moment of a ‘bottomless collapse’ becomes also the occasion of an ‘intimate event’. What we observe is a process in which the hostility to liturgical modernization that has earlier driven the poet-­speaker into an unwanted Thomas, Collected Later Poems, p. 185. Thomas, Collected Later Poems, p. 187.

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retirement is again expressed, but now also moderated by a determination not to retreat into the angelic realm of unpurged images. The poem seeks to encounter the divine amidst a world that is both abstracted and ugly; it draws on familiar ways of looking at and seeing the divine, only to revise and renew them, as the sea revises and renews itself; something thus acquires in its repetitive embodiment the movement of liturgy. The moments of divine revelation that draw in this way on familiar religious symbols – the beautiful light entering like a shepherd, for example – are reminiscent of moments in contemporary writing, for example Philip Larkin’s ‘Arundel Tomb’, that express nostalgia for Anglicanism; but Thomas refuses to retreat and recede in that way, preferring instead to create a sense of revelation enfolded within the larger, more desecrated, even crucified, vision of the poem – not breaking through the face of phenomena but breaking as every wave of becoming, intimate with (and intimately within) otherness.

Part Two

Theological and Literary Reconstructions

4

Belief and Imagination1 Graham Ward

Christ Church, University of Oxford, UK

In John 12.27–30 we find the following event. Jesus is praying publicly: ‘Father, glorify thy name’. Then came a voice from heaven saying, ‘I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again’. The people therefore that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered; others said, ‘An angel spoke to him’. Jesus answered and said, ‘This voice came not for me, but for your sakes’.

It is well known that one of the major themes in John’s gospel concerns believing and its relationship to seeing. Recall the culminating scene of the resurrection account, where Thomas doubts and Christ appears to him telling him to touch the nail prints in his hands and spear wound in his side. ‘Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and believe” ’ (John 20.29). What is interesting in the earlier passage is the way the same occurrence can constitute different forms of believing and seeing with respect to the invisible and the visible – and that is what I wish to examine in this essay. One group perceives thunder and believes the phenomenon to be a natural one. Another group perceives something (perhaps the same thunder) but believes it is an angel speaking to Jesus alone (for presumably they themselves hear only a disturbance). And finally Jesus and the Johannine narrator hear the voice of God – a voice that, on Jesus’s statement, was available for all to hear since it was a voice for others, not himself. It is not a difference in interpretation that separates the three understandings of what had occurred, rather it is a difference in perception; a

This essay began as a lecture given to the Department of Theology at the University of St. Andrews, UK.

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difference in the quality of perception and belief-­informed intentionality. There is an alleged hierarchy in this quality; with Jesus and whoever heard the voice of God perceiving more truly than those who believed an angel had spoken or that it had thundered. And this quality of perception I would relate to the imagination; for it is how something is imaged for us, imagined, that governs what is perceived and understood. Of course the imagination can play false: as Shakespeare reminds us, at night how often does a bush become a bear. We might say, after Kant, that imagination is an operation between perception and understanding. Perception and understanding are not isolated events, as Kant held, they are woven into a narrative of believing and into exercises of the imagination that have a history. On the one hand, a group have heard a rumbling in the sky before and the sign has signified thunder; on the other, a group believe in angels speaking (even perhaps, experienced angels speaking) and their perception of this event calls forth an imagined reconstruction: ‘An angel spoke to him.’ A third group believe God speaks (even perhaps have heard God speak) and so are able to perceive and imagine the invisible become visible, the eternal temporal, and the ineffable one condescend to use a human tongue. Each response to what has been received is an act of belief and imagination – though only one is theologically sound, because it perceives aright; it discerns the operations of God in the world. Nearly all of my work has dealt with the borderlands of literature, philosophy, and theology. Certain key ideas hold the three disciplines together, few more so than the act of believing (as it relates to and distinguishes itself from the act of faith) and the exercise of the imagination. You cannot be a theologian, just as you cannot be a contemporary cosmologist, without imagination. For the work involves searching out and wrestling to understand that which both transcends and enfolds this world. It involves alternative ways of seeing that imagination makes possible and metaphors translate. It involves what Coleridge termed the ‘suspension of disbelief ’; a suspension that I take as opening up the possibilities not only for new ways of believing (what he termed ‘poetic faith’) but new modes of entrustment to what is true. In that way, exploring the divine is always an exploration into the imagination (as Coleridge understood it) or that store of images that the imagination stirs into patterns and narratives (what Augustine termed the ‘memory’). In this chapter, I want

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to examine this interconnection between believing, imagination, and the theological as it manifests itself in the novels of Graham Greene. There are two reasons I have chosen a novelist to work with, and there is a further reason I have chosen Graham Greene. My first reason for taking the novel as the object of my analysis is that reading is a conditioned practice. The cultural field is composed of a series of complex practices and relations: theatre going, movie watching, gallery visits, poetry reading, concert attendance, etc. I view these practices and the relations they establish in Foucauldian terms as ‘technologies’. It’s a gross, instrumental word but it describes practices of subjectification and governance. Famously, Foucault examined these ‘technologies’, their history and operation, such as confession in the church, as informing the soul and writing upon the body.2 They were instruments of power and purveyors of ideology. Certain understandings of the self and its relation to the world were produced through the habit of engaging in such practices. What I am suggesting therefore is that various cultural practices can also be examined as ‘technologies’ that fashion human beings, by acting upon them both psychologically and somatically – where soul and body are not viewed as a binary opposition, a ghost in a machine, but as co-­extensive. Much contemporary neuroscience and the turn to affectivity have confirmed the profound interrelation between the mind (individual and collective) and the body (also collective bodies like social corporations). But while it is certainly possible to examine these cultural technologies – through phenomenologies of listening to music or viewing a painting – the reading of a novel provides us with a certain set of focused conditions. We do not have to handle what we might see as the ‘incidentals’ or ‘externalities’ of visiting a gallery or watching a performance – the lighting, the heating, the price of the entry ticket, interactions with other people around us, etc. The novel is a long and sustained operation upon the imagination; it has a bounded materiality (the object of the book and the concrete detail of the text). It is easier then to submit the novel’s performance upon and within the reader to an analysis because certain conditions for its working are controlled. Good reading performances can be held accountable to the details of the language. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self; A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).

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As to the second reason, the novelist like God creates worlds full of people and objects, creatures and landscapes. Unlike God these novelistic worlds are fashioned out of the worlds we know. Greene made a number of trips to Brighton, walking its streets, mapping the location of various buildings, surveying the insides of hotels, visiting the race-­course and the Downs, before and whilst he was working on Brighton Rock. Novelists do not create ex nihilo. These worlds are exercises of imaginative transformation. That is, taking what is perceived and configuring a new presentation of what is meaningful. And, if they are to be successful exercises of imaginative transformation, they have to be believable – they have to persuade, even seduce, the receptive reader. The art of good novel writing is to arouse belief by awakening the imagination of whoever reads it. Sometimes the suspension of disbelief collapses: as when the lesbian newspaper reporter, Ms. Warren, last seen missing the Istanbul express in Vienna, suddenly turns up in Subotica just in time to save the not so naïve chorus girl, Coral. But Stamboul Train is an early work and Greene was still learning his craft. Believing (and disbelieving) then is only made possible in the presence (or absence) of a number of other mental and emotional judgements, about what is plausible, for example. The novel creates an imaginary world that has to be believable and continually calls upon further acts of belief if it is to accomplish its ends. The author has a plot, a direction in which the action is heading, and the characters are caught up in the webs spun by his or her providential pen. Again, there are analogues here with the operation of divine providence in a history orientated towards a final end. All this, of course, has been explored by literary theorists like Frank Kermode and George Steiner,3 and I am not wishing to rehearse their examinations of the relationship between the literary and the theological. Although, if I get theological for a moment, I do wish to affirm an analogy between creation as God’s own writing (through the Logos) and the author’s act of creation. And with certain writers who are conscious themselves of this analogy, Greene would be one of them, the literary can open on to questions that are theological. The compromised priest, Father Rivas, in The Honorary Consul, for example, having kidnapped the said consul who is a See as most pertinent here: Frank Kermode, Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); and George Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).

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friend of the narrator, Doctor Eduardo Plarr, states: ‘He is not in our hands, Eduardo. He is in the hands of the governments. In the hands of God too, of course. I do not forget my own claptrap, you notice, but I have never yet seen any sign that He interferes with our wars and our politics.’4 But the novel’s plot raises quite explicitly whether God does not in fact shape human ends beyond human willing. Both the composition of the world by God and the composition of a world by the novelist are acts of persuasion. What I wish to focus on is what I will call the structure of belief that governs the working of a novel and its relationship with being able to imagine. For if we cannot imagine the world we are being offered as readers then we cannot enter into that structure of believing. Imagination is the porthole into participation. This is what I personally find with most science fiction – I cannot imagine the worlds some of these authors are generating and so disbelief cannot attain that necessary suspension. I will return to what I mean about the structure of belief in a moment, having only hinted that ‘believing’ is not a psychic act in isolation from a number of other acts (such as calculating plausibility). I choose the novels of Graham Greene because he consciously works with the question ‘what makes a belief believable?’ He shows the operation of believing in a number of different contexts which not only distinguish different types of believing but also different structures in which belief operates (including religious belief). Furthermore, he points to how belief is inseparable from being able to imagine, and how both imagination and belief are governed by a participatory desire. Put another way, I would argue that the Catholic novel (Greene), or the Jewish novel (by Philip Roth, for example), or the Protestant novel (by John Updike and more recently Cormac McCarthy) are imaginary investigations into believing. They demonstrate that the novel, often seen as associated with the rise of secularism and the decline of religious belief, refigures the act of believing – is a mode of art concerned with the transposition of belief or the changing structures of believing. First some general observations. From at least Kant onwards imagination has been seen as the forecourt of thinking and reasoning. The faculty of the imagination for Kant created the synthetic a priori whereby intuitions were associated with concepts; such intuitions, Kant deduced, were blind until Graham Greene, The Honorary Consul (London: Vintage Books, 2004), p. 30.

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they passed through the categories of the understanding and became thinkable.5 If, with Romanticism, imagination was viewed as a higher faculty still, predominantly instrumental reasoning has held sway in modernity – leading, theologically, to the project of demythologization in Bultmann,6 and, philosophically, the linguistic turn that viewed language as the limits of our world. But what I wish to suggest is that language is not the limits of our world and imagination is a form of thinking and inseparable from any act of reasoning. We can approach the imagination as a faculty of the soul, an aspect of what St Augustine called ‘memoria’. Out of the plethora of perceptions that arise from being immersed in the world, or qualia, the mind constructs images and consciousness generates mental maps. These mental maps or patterns have the potential to hook up to memories of cognate or associated images and create anticipations of what will follow. The faculty of the imagination treats not the manifold as such but a plotting of images that relates past to present and future. In this way we construct the worlds we occupy and that preoccupy us. I do not imply by the use of ‘construct’ here either that there is no real world out there or that human beings continually live out fanciful scenarios. Perceptions arise because there is a real world of objects out there and the scenarios we construct are not mere fantasies. We are social animals so the worlds we construct are shared worlds. We may, and probably do, continually modify the patterns we make in association with other human beings engaged in the same activity. Our world-­making is always in negotiation with other world-­making; we are continually undergoing a form of persuasion that this is the true, the real, the way things are. If we remain unpersuaded, we experience anxiety and we become hesitant and undecided. The mental patterns do not form or form only incoherently. Take Maurice’s experience following the bomb blast that Sarah believes has killed him, in Greene’s The End of the Affair. Their love affair has been intense and recripocal, but following the bomb incident Sarah leaves his flat and has no more contact with him until a chance meeting two years later. The pattern Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1986), pp. 8–40. 6 Rudolf Bultmann, ‘New Testament and Mythology’ in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Hans-Werner Bartsch, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (London: SPCK, 1972), pp. 1–44. 5

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of Maurice’s worldview falls apart, and his hopes that Sarah will ring or write turn to despair. He cannot make sense of her behaviour, especially because the last thing she says to him as she leaves Maurice’s bomb-­torn home is, ‘You needn’t be so scared . . . love doesn’t end.’7 The agitations of reason propose various solutions such as Sarah having abandoned him for another lover. And so Maurice eventually engages Parkis, the private detective, who reports on Sarah’s movements. These reports then trigger another set of imaginative recreations that attempt to explain Sarah’s behaviour. All the fermentation of these surmises evaporate when Maurice steals Sarah’s diary. It is exactly the point where the mental patterns cannot cohere, when the plotting of images dissolves into the random and chaotic, that the activities of the imagination are most intense: conjuring scenarios of meaning from the pieces left in what one famous song described as ‘the windmills of the mind’. The reason for Maurice’s existential despair is in fact his inability to believe the truth of Sarah’s words to him. Believing what she said would not have minimized the pain of their separation, the end of the affair, but it would have brought him the realization of how profoundly Sarah loved him; and how shallow, until the break up, was his own loving in comparison. What this imaginative activity of mapping and plotting reveals, and many of Greene’s novels helps to narrativize, is at least a fourfold set of interrelated observations. First, a profound operation of poiesis is associated with all consciousness. Even, possibly especially, in sleep this poetic activity continues to spin chains of images into weirdly evolving plots. Imagination is rooted into our need to ‘make sense’, to produce coherent patterns that are either faithful to or modify the past and anticipate future trajectories. Literature is a self-­conscious appropriation of that ongoing activity. It is an intensification of the fabricating processes of the mind itself. Of course when we are treating ‘mind’ we are concerned with human cognitive capacities and activities that are increasingly being explored by neuroscience. This is a very modern conception of individual consciousness with its philosophical roots in Descartes and Kant, but theologically I wish to argue for a larger conception of mind along the lines of Augustine and the Cappodocian fathers, where mind is related to soul – that which animates and is animated by the body; that Grahame Greene, The End of the Affair (London: Vintage Books, 2004), p. 73.

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which communes or has the capacity to commune with God. It is the source of intellection but profoundly related to a theological anthropology that focuses on human beings created in the image of God. We are makers of images because we in the image of. And in being actively engaged in a world created by God, the imagination as that capacity for image-­making works analogically: ferreting out and fabricating relations between things – the mental patterns that ‘make’ sense of our experience of the world and responding to the Logos through whom all things were made; the Logos who in and as Christ, David Bentley Hart reminds us, ‘is a persuasion, a form’.8 Theologically we might even say that the imagination is that receptive capacity of the soul that responds to a world so created and creation as divine gift. In fact, Hart goes on to speak of ‘God’s life [a]s . . . rhetoric’.9 The work of the imagination expands the soul in a movement that participates in what a number of Greek Fathers called theopoiesis, a divine metapoetic activity of the Spirit, in which its own poiesis participates. Of course Coleridge reminds us of this theologoumenon when he writes of the imagination being an echo in the finite of the infinite I am. This does not mean that the imagination cannot conceive of evil entities – the planned deceptions and self-delusions that the Bible sometimes calls ‘the imaginations of their hearts’. But Greene is interesting here for the way he understands evil as imaginative privation. Pinky, in Brighton Rock, the evil Peter Pan who accepts his own damnation and tries to force the wife whom he detests so much to join him in that condition, is a man without imagination. ‘The imagination hadn’t awoken’, Greene writes. ‘That was his strength. He couldn’t see through other people’s eyes, or feel with their nerves.’10 And it is that inability to see that locks Pinky in a delusion about his own abilities to be the leader of the gang that leads to his own destruction. Of course, Pinky fantasises: about staying at the five-­star Cosmopolitian hotel in Brighton like the London gang leader Mr. Colleoni. But for Greene such fantasies, which we as readers recognize from the beginning, are clichés, without real persuasive force and have no purchase on reality. They are as impotent as Pinky himself – insubstantial daydreams. Such fantasies only feed despair; and David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetic of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003) p. 147. 9 Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 186. 10 Grahame Greene, Brighton Rock (London: Vintage Books, 2004), p. 47. 8

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despair for Greene is the greatest sin (the rejection of faith, hope, and, ultimately, love; and the elevation of pride). In The Power and the Glory, when the whisky priest encounters a devout woman in prison who is bitterly disappointed in him, Greene has the priest observe, ‘Hate was just failure of imagination.’11 Perhaps, again like Coleridge, we need to distinguish between fantasy (or fancy, as he called it), which is a much lower mental capacity, and the spiritual operation, even discipline, of imagination. Fantasy is not self-­transcending. It is a form of self-­idolatry for it begins and ends with projection; the screening of a narrative in which the ego is always in the centre of plot and frame. Such fantasies, like evil and sin, have no ontological weight – they are acts of decreation or non-­being. If sense is made in our imaginations, as the patterns and maps are fabricated, then knowledge is inseparable from a certain ‘seeing as’ or ‘perceiving as’ (for imagination is not always concerned with sight as Augustine confessed). The narrative of Jesus’ baptism, with which we began, has an analogue in Brighton Rock. Pinkie, terrified he is going to be betrayed by one of his inner circle, Spicer, is in conversation with his faithful friend, Dallow: ‘He said to Dallow. “You got to watch the place [Spicer’s in hiding]. I don’t trust him a yard. I can see him looking out there, waiting for something, and seeing her [Ida, the blousy blond who believes (correctly) that Pinkie has murdered Hale].” ’ Dallow replies: ‘He would not be such a fool.’ ‘He’s drunk. He says he’s in Hell.’ Dallow laughed. ‘Hell. That’s good.’ ‘You’re a fool, Dallow.’ ‘I don’t believe in what my eyes don’t see.’ ‘They don’t see much then,’ the Boy said.12

Observe that interplay between ‘trust’, ‘fool’, ‘Hell’, ‘good’ and seeing. It is because of the relationship between knowledge and ‘seeing as’ that imagination is always linked to ‘belief ’. And both operations are both perceptions and participations. In many of Greene’s novels the governing question is not what is known but what is believed; though frequently, the truth is out to a certain Grahame Greene, The Power and the Glory (London: Vintage Books, 2004), p. 129. Greene, Brighton Rock, p. 231.

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extent by the end of the novel: we know Sarah loved Maurice; we know Harry Lime (in The Third Man) has faked his own death and is the villain, not the hero. Greene frequently treats the antitheses between states of deception and acts of faith, seeing and seeing-­as, trust and suspicion, betrayal and faithfulness, confidence and incredulity, and the calculus of probability-­improbability that accords with witnessing and evidence. These antitheses and this calculus establish a structure of believing. It is not simply that his characters enact scenarios in which these states and this calculus are exemplified; the very act of writing literature itself, the implicit contract between the novelist and his readers, creates a space for the performance and reflection upon the performance of such themes. The world, for Greene, and the fictional world for Greene’s characters and Greene’s readers, is a laboratory where belief is created and tested. One of the technical ways he employs to examine this testing is the story within a story. In The Confidential Agent, a novel written after Brighton Rock and before The Power and the Glory, the protagonist D, a man who ‘carried what were called credentials, but credence no longer meant belief ’,13 lands in Dover with the mission to secure coal to help with the civil war in his own country from the wealthy colliery owner Benditch. Only an agent from the opposition has also been sent for the same reason; an agent who is hunting D down. Caught in the middle is a girl, Rose, daughter of Benditch who befriends D. On the way to meeting Rose, D is intercepted, shot at and pursued by one Currie who is well known to Rose. On meeting, D gives Rose an account of the chase. Rose enters a space where her believing has to be reconfigured. ‘ “How could they shoot at you in the street – here? What about the police, the noise, the neighbours?” . . . “I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it. Don’t you see that if things like that happened life would be quite different? One would have to begin over again” . . . “Prove it. Prove it,” she said fiercely.’ D manages to dig the bullet out of the wall. ‘ “Oh, God,” she said suddenly, “it’s true”. ’14 The ‘Oh God’ may seem like a throwaway expletive – Rose professes no religious conviction and D in a moment reflecting upon the misery in the world and how if ‘you believed in God, you could also believe that it [the world] had been saved from

Grahame Greene, The Confidential Agent (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 9 Greene, The Confidential Agent, p. 59.

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much misery’ concludes with ‘he hadn’t that particular faith.’15 But the ‘Oh God’ is employed both colloquially and expressively. It correlates with Rose’s recognition that certain forms of seeing-­as demand radical transformation of one’s understanding of life. Certain forms of seeing-­as can take on the quality and power of epiphanies. This small story within a story, like the reflective mirror in the background of Renaissance paintings of Dutch interiors, is a parable of the operative technology of the novel itself with respect to the reader. There is something almost pathological about Greene’s need to put himself and his readers out on an imaginative limb and persuade them to believe. He chose, for example, to set a story in countries he had never visited – like the Balkan states for Stamboul Train – or visited very briefly for research purposes – like Trier, the setting for The Name of Action, or Sweden, the setting for England Made Me, or Mexico for The Power and the Glory. There is a recklessness here, as if approaching an aesthetic suicide or kenosis; daring himself to make something believable when the odds for doing so are very remote. He is forcing his imagination to work with very little material, pushing it wilfully into the incredible, problematic, and the improbable; into worlds that are dark, grotesque, and warped with irony. In this way each novel can be viewed as an act of faith. Like the Russian roulette he used to play whilst a student at Oxford, he risks everything and asks his readers to risk everything, testing the possibilities for redemption. Particularly in the Catholic novels, this act of imaginative daring, poetic faith if you like, correlates with the acts of faithlessness that are transformed into acts of faith; transformations that the reader is being persuaded are possible. The slum child, Rose in Brighton Rock, brought to the point where she will be persuaded by Pinkie to commit suicide and join in, as a Catholic, hell is transfigured in the closing pages into an English Theresa of Liseaux. The priest in the confessional Rose enters finally asks her, ‘Pray for me, my child’, to which she answers, ‘Yes, oh yes’.16 Sarah’s harrowing and adulterous love, in The End of the Affair, works the miracles of healing a sick child, removing the ugly blemish on the face of the evangelical atheist Mr. Smyth and bringing Maurice and her husband Henry together in a new awakening of mutual dependence.

Greene, The Confidential Agent, p. 118. Greene, Brighton Rock, p. 269.

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Greene composes his novels on the edge of the incredulous, seeking out new terrain where what is visible and reasonable and familiar meets what is invisible, miraculous and Unheimlich. The literary act of persuading, of taking the reader on an imaginative journey that requires the suspension of disbelief, ends in the tense possibility of welcoming what is strange and highly dangerous: an act of faith. The narratives deliver the reader to the portal of a potential conversion. This journey is captured brilliantly in the ending of The Power and the Glory where a fugitive priest knocks at the door of a Catholic family in a southern Mexican city. A boy opens the door, a boy who until the point of the whisky priest’s death had been a sceptic.   ‘If you let me come in,’ the man said with an odd frightened smile, and suddenly lowering his voice he said to the boy, ‘I am a priest’   ‘You?’ the boy exclaimed.   ‘Yes,’ he said gently. ‘My name is Father —’ But the boy had already swung the door open and put his lips to his hand before the other could give himself a name.17

A fierce, turbulent, and exhausting eros frequently drives these imaginative ventures. ‘The sexual instinct and the creative instinct live and die together,’ the novelist Doctor Saavedra observes in The Honorary Consul18 and the impotent Pinkie, who can only destroy, has no imagination. Desire shakes the imagination from its lazy slumbering in fantasy; the worlds of the self-­evident and certain flake and splinter, and doubt, conjecture and surmise overpower knowledge. Bunyan’s Giant Despair prepares to pounce. It is in this way that the question ‘What makes a belief believable?’ becomes urgent and existential, to characters, to Greene himself, and to his readers. If, at the start, the object of this eros (which can have the hues of love or hate) is a man or a woman, we are quickly plunged into much darker depths that leave the human being far behind. It is at this point that another category enters the structure of believing that imagination and desire composes: the mythological. As the French thinker Georges Sorel, at the opening of the twentieth century, has taught us: myth includes images and narratives of heroes, ideals to

Greene, The Power and the Glory, p. 220. Greene, The Honorary Consul, p. 149.

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die for, revolutions, missions for utopian kingdoms of eternal peace, homogeneities (national or ethnic), Gnostic battles between good and evil, apocalyptic struggles between civilizations, and perhaps most terrifying and fascinating of all: war, conquest, expansion or, its obverse, holocaust and infinite, inconceivable suffering.19 As a recent commentator distils it: for Sorel ‘myth arises from peoples’ need for faith and vivid objects of the imagination in order to commit themselves to great collective causes potentially involving personal sacrifice’.20 For Sorel myth was a historical force that framed action – inspiring it and giving it a meaning and often a telos beyond the arbitrary or pragmatic. As such ‘[a] myth cannot be refuted since it is, at bottom, identical to the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement’.21 Critics of Greene have frequently pointed to the Manichean cosmology that frames his imaginative worlds. Again a set of binaries gives this cosmology shape: Hell and Heaven, good and evil, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, peace and war, destruction and creation, the saint, the martyr and the sinner. But the cosmology is rooted in a distinctly Catholic imaginary prior to its sanitization at Vatican II, and it is not nearly as Gnostic as the critics believe. Gnosticism is without humour; and there is always a redemptive rictus that appears on the face of death for Greene. As Doctor Plarr puts it, in The Honorary Consul: ‘Perhaps the dark side of God has a sense of humour.’22 The God of the ironic has a very Biblical heritage. In Metaphysics Aristotle observes that ‘myth is composed of wonder’ (982b), and wonder, I would add, is always looking wide-­eyed towards a transcendent horizon and into the invisible. The operation of the imagination, which opens up and continually handles the question of belief, culminates in the mythological whose power ‘cannot be refuted’ – at least by a rational argument. Myth is the cold-­glass frame within which ‘poetic faith’ flourishes. In the language of Clifford Geertz it is both a ‘model of ’ and a ‘model for’ reality23; in the language of Mircea Eliade it concerns ‘paradigms for

Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 20 Christopher Flood, ‘Myth and Ideology’ in Thinking Through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 186–187. 21 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 29. 22 Greene, The Honorary Consul, p. 234. 23 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: HarperCollins, 1973), pp. 93–95. 19

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all significant human acts’.24 Myth’s persuasive power lies in its credibility, and Greene plays with the credo and the credible such that his mythic world is glimpsed and then fades out. In The Honorary Consul Colonel Perez observes:   ‘[E]arly this morning there was a small bomb . . . and it was set to go off at midnight when the church was empty. If it had exploded, though, it might have destroyed the miraculous cross – and that would have been real news . . . Perhaps it may become news in any case. There are rumours already that Our Lady herself got down off her altar and defused the bomb with her own hands and the Archbishop has visited the scene . . . I was telling the doctor about our new miracle, Ruben.’   ‘You may laugh, colonel, but the bomb did not go off.’   ‘You see, doctor, Ruben half believes.’25

Within the political framework of the novel, the power of the terrorist bomb to manipulate the minds of the people is trumped by the power of the supernatural. Both power ploys are acts of the persuasion-­to-­believe; both power ploys are aimed at manifesting sovereignty. What is foregrounded here in Greene’s description of the Virgin’s supposed act of diffusing the bomb is the way myth is inseparable from the politics of persuasion that both issues from and solicits the power of conviction. The power of conviction will trigger any number of acts to follow. And Greene’s storytelling is itself implicated within this politics. If I had space I would develop Sorel’s analysis of myth in Réflexions sur la violence (as a significant political category) in terms of Greene’s fascination with politics (leftwing, rightwing, and centre). It would proceed along lines opened recently by Lawrence Grossberg’s work on ideology and affect and Sianne Ngai’s analyses of literary tone and the politics of ‘artfully fabricated feelings’.26 Grossberg makes us aware of exactly how the convictions of myth make refutation difficult, and so uncovers the secret power of the political: Affect is the missing term in an adequate understanding of ideology, for it offers the possibility of a ‘psychology of belief ’ which would explain how and

Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 18. The Honorary Consul, pp. 143–144. 26 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 49. 24 25

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why ideologies are sometimes, and only sometimes, effective. . . . It is an affective investment in particular ideological sites (which may be libidinal or nonlibidinal) that explains the power of the articulation which bonds particular representations and realities. It is the affective investment which enables ideological relations to be internalized and, consequently, naturalized.27

This is the ultimate trajectory of the examination I have been undertaking here: the intimate relation between believing, imagination, desire, affective investment, and myth that operate, finally, politically. And practices of piety, for me, are fundamentally political. I observed at the beginning that Jesus was speaking publicly, and whatever the range of responses from the crowd, the registered effects of his prayer were public. Furthermore, to acknowledge that ‘God spoke’ is the definitive political act – the appeal to a transcendent and all-­embracing sovereignty.

Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 83.

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Literary Apologetics beyond Postmodernism Duality and Death in Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling Alison Milbank

University of Nottingham, UK

It is now over twenty years since MacIntyre’s Gifford lectures, in which he argued that: Such reformers as those who propose some version of a great books curriculum ignore the fundamental character of our present disagreements and conflicts, presupposing possibilities of agreement of a kind that do not at present exist. What then is possible? The answer is: the university as a place of constrained disagreement, of imposed participation in conflict, in which a central responsibility of higher education would be to initiate students into conflict.1

The vision of Lord Gifford and the authors of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica depended upon a shared understanding of truth, knowledge, and rational progress. MacIntyre claimed that although the conception of the modern university is based on this assumption, it is unsustainable and in fact does not exist in reality. A rival and non-­ commensurable mode of rationality has grown up, with its roots in the nineteenth century, in the writings of Nietzsche, represented latterly by the genealogical method of Michel Foucault, in which such truth of which the encyclopaedists speak is a concept occluding a will to power. The task of

Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1990), pp. 230–231.

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the genealogist is to find strategies of subversion and insight so as to unmask these universal claims to morality, reason and knowledge.2 We are now in a period in which the genealogical method of Foucault has become institutionalized in the education system, so that British school children will study Gothic literature in order to reveal strategies of feminist resistance and subversion, while post-­colonial, disability and queer theory are now academic fields with jobs, journals, and power structures of their own. MacIntyre already saw such a development in the career of Foucault himself and in the fact that Nietzsche’s denial of any truth-­as-such in favour of truth-­ from-one-­or-other-­point-of-­view can be read and accommodated as a universal nonperspectival theory of truth.3 The discipline of religion and literature grew up through the ‘great books’ period, in which the idea of a communal intellectual community still held sway and in which imagination formed a unifying concept, speaking to theological and humanist understandings of the nature of the human person.4 Deeply influenced by liberal Protestantism, especially by Bonhoeffer’s ‘religionless Christianity’ in which culture is the site of meaning, courses in American universities in particular, tended to privilege twentieth-­century literary texts which staged debates about the nature of evil or the lack of transcendent meaning such as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.5 Another favourite area of study in Britain was the drama of faith and doubt in Victorian society, which even reached the University of Cambridge theology prelims examination. In America during the later part of the twentieth century, and coterminous with the rise of Foucault and deconstruction in academic study, there developed a turn to more explicitly Christian writers such as Flannery O’Connor and the Oxford Inklings group, which included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. No liberal arts college with a religious foundation was without its ‘Tolkien professor’ and C. S Lewis, in life shunned by American evangelicalism as a notorious wine-­bibber, became the patron saint of religion and literature programmes. G. K. Chesterton rapidly became a Catholic equivalent to Lewis MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, pp. 39–40. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, p. 36. 4 For an account of this history, see The Oxford Handbook to English Literature and Theology, ed. David Jasper and Elisabeth Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 35–54. 5 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Reginald Fuller and Frank Clark, Enlarged edn (London: SCM, 1971), pp. 280–282. 2 3

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and his critique of nihilism in The Man Who Was Thursday and strong defence of orthodoxy are now attractive to evangelical college courses. It is no accident that such writers have become central to the curriculum at the time of the rise of the genealogical mode of rationality, because their work is intentionally apologetic in character and fits well with a turn to the perspectival. Similarly, apologetics as a theological enterprise has itself changed in character. As belief in a common idea of reason comes under question, so too does the project of proving the existence of God in the manner of eighteenth-­ century natural theology. There is no neutral prior foundation for truth to which to appeal and so one of the most powerful ways to do apologetics is through the power and persuasive beauty of narrative.6 C. S. Lewis does write directly about Christianity in The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce but in each case he finds a way to defamiliarize conventional expectations, so that a devil describes the difficulties of temptation, while the outskirts of heaven are more solid and real than hell.7 More characteristic of Lewis and Tolkien, however, despite the latter’s own purgatorial allegory in Leaf by Niggle, is the creation of other worlds in fantasy or science fiction. Each writer is careful to keep open the relation with our world in some way, whether by the parallel reality of Narnia in Lewis, or by Tolkien’s Middle-­earth being our own planet at some very early historical period. Although doubly fictional in being works of the imagination about a world that is itself non-­real, these fantasies have become central to the lives of many of their readers in such a way that the text begins to read them, and to take on the status of myth. By myth here I mean a story within which its readers live and through which they think and interpret experience – their episteme. The reason for this strong readerly affect is partly due to the amount of detail needed to describe a different world but chiefly the metaphysics that underpins such a project. In order to create an alternative fictional world, it is not enough to write beautifully and persuasively: the world described has to have coherence and teleology. It has to make sense as a way of viewing the whole of reality in

For an example of this new apologetics as well as accounts of the history of apologetics, see Imaginative Apologetics: In the Catholic Tradition, ed. Andrew Davison (Norwich, UK: SCM, 2012). 7 C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (London: Collins, 2012; first published 1946); C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters: Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil (London: Collins, 2012; first published 1956). 6

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order for the narrative to work. In that way, fantasy writing moves beyond the purely postmodern, although the world that is fictionally created may itself bear all the features of a late-­capitalist mode of postmodernity. Tolkien’s metaphysics, as I have argued elsewhere, are Thomist, in that being is itself a good thing, in which all creatures and objects in the novel participate.8 Thomist also is the sense of human and natural contingency, which gives the piercing atmosphere of melancholy that contrasts with the intuition of being and gives dynamism and tension to the story. It is embodied in the elves, who are in thrall to the beauty of Middle-­earth and as immortal beings suffer the agony of its transience. For the reader to experience this tension may be only to give a secondary belief to the reality of such a universe, but it has been proposed, and not as one option in a competing marketplace of philosophical perspectives, but as the way the world actually is. In MacIntyre’s analysis of modes of rationality, there is a third option to the encyclopaedic and genealogical: that represented by Thomism, which was revived in the Roman Catholic Church in the later nineteenth century, following the encyclical Aeterni Patris in 1879, as a way of addressing modern thought theologically and holistically.9 In light of his interest in virtue ethics, MacIntyre stresses the craft nature of this mode of rationality, whereby the person seeks to find the skills that are adequate to understand the object of knowledge before him or her. This object is in kinship with the subject as sharing in being, but is independent. Knowledge in this model is a reaching out to become one with the object: it is knowledge as participation and union. Tolkien expresses this epistemology – or rather ontology – in his inclusion of the category ‘things’ in the indices to The Lord of the Rings.10 He thereby indicates that the world of objects has its own presence and participation in being, and, of course, its own histories. To become a good practitioner of the moral and intellectual virtues in Thomas Aquinas, it is necessary to relive the story so far, in order to understand how to shape action in the present and future; there is a narrative element,

Alison Milbank, Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (London: T & T Clark/Continuum, 2007), pp. 18–21. 9 MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, pp. 71–73. 10 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King (London: HarperCollins, 1993; first published 1955), pp. 1133–1137. 8

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which is called tradition. MacIntyre takes the poet Dante as his exemplar of someone who embodies the Thomistic virtues in stories that are themselves made intelligible only by being embedded in the fantastic fiction of his Commedia, which is itself embedded in the Christian scriptural narrative.11 While the element of storytelling and skill might seem to allow a postmodern character to such a practice, the Commedia’s claims to universality and authority preclude such a reading. And yet MacIntyre argues that Dante does not just assert his authority but actually contains within his poem a critique of the very will-­to-power that Nietzsche claimed to discern in Dante’s writing.12 Nietzsche condemned Dante for placing Frederick II in the Infernal circle of the heretics. Following Thomas, Dante views the roots of intellectual blindness such as Frederick’s in moral error, ‘with the misdirection of the intellect by the will and the corruption of the will by the sin of pride, both that pride which is an inordinate desire to be superior and that pride which is an inclination to contempt for God’.13 Where for Nietzsche the individual will was a mistake, concealing the impersonal will-­to-power, the Thomist has the resources in his own system to offer a genealogical account of the will-­to-power as itself a fiction, disguising the corruption of the will. Thomas thus can unmask Nietzsche. If one accepts MacIntyre’s account of three different construals of truth, this suggests a new model for apologetics in the form of literary contest and conflict. There is indeed incommensurability between a theological and a Nietzschean account of truth and to converse must involve conflict. The way forward, however, is first, to inhabit and understand an opposing system in its own terms, so as to be able to critique it from within its particular articulation of knowledge; and second, to ‘explain in precise and detailed terms what it is about the opposing view which engenders just those particular limitations, defects and errors, and also what it is about that view which must deprive it of the resources required for understanding, overcoming, and correcting them’.14 For MacIntyre, Thomas’s own dialectical method, which itself mediates between Augustinianism and Aristotelianism, already performs such a 13 14 11 12

MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, pp. 80–81. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, p. 145. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, p. 147. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, p. 146.

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procedure. In the first parts of each question and article, Thomas puts forward as strongly as possible the objections to his own theses that could be derived from his opponents. Although MacIntyre assumes philosophy as the subject, his Dante examples suggest that literature too may perform a similar mode of enquiry through conflict. And indeed, so limited is any kind of real debate in the intellectual and political world, and so lacking in the school curriculum, that opening the prospect of different points of view is itself a necessary role for university education. Without such debate the university is itself vulnerable to the threat of instrumentalism and a skills-­based learning devoid of the language of virtue. Moreover, a recent book by Andrew Tate and Arthur Bradley suggests that the novel since the 9/11 attacks on the United States has begun to engage in metaphysical debate quite openly, following in the footsteps of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett: ‘in a very literal sense, it seems that we can now begin to speak of something called the ‘New Atheist Novel’, which carries the attack on religious belief into fiction in order to demonstrate the power of a new ‘mythos’ – a creation mythology that aestheticizes evolution.15 Following in Bradley and Tate’s footsteps, I shall open an agonistic conversation by examining one of their new atheist writers, Philip Pullman, the author of the critically acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy, which is Nietzschean in so far as it embodies a deliberate attempt to preach the death of God. To critique it I shall employ another fantasy writer, J. K. Rowling, the author of the more populist Harry Potter novels. Stylistically, Pullman’s is the richer and more literary material, but I hope to demonstrate that Rowling’s offers a more substantive and successful anthropology and metaphysics, which can reveal the limitations of Pullman’s heretical project. Rowling’s series can so act, I shall argue, because it rests upon a religious basis, in which death is taken more seriously and dreaded – ‘the last enemy’ – but reveals a meaning beyond itself.16 In the rewriting of the myth of the Fall from the book of Genesis in Pullman’s Northern Lights/The Golden Compass there is the same assumption that death Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11 [New Directions in Religion and Literature series] (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 10–11. 16 These words form part of the inscription on the tomb of Harry’s parents, taken from 1 Corinthians 15: 26, see J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 268. 15

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follows upon the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: ‘dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return’ (Genesis 3: 19 AV). Yet in Lyra’s world, dust is not equated with the usual physical stuff of the earth, but with some other substance, which their science has only begun to discern, similar to dark matter. Lord Asriel informs his daughter: ‘[S]omewhere out there is the origin of all the Dust, all the death, the sin, the misery, the destructiveness in the world. Human beings can’t see anything without wanting to destroy it, Lyra. That’s original sin. And I’m going to destroy it. Death is going to die.’17 Despite attributing dust to the Fall, Asriel’s response is not repentance but a Promethean gesture of refusal and an attempt by force to trace the source of sin’s and death’s effect – dust – and destroy it. His last words are ambiguous: is he criticizing the Magisterium for seeking to destroy knowledge? Or is he rather referring to his own quest to destroy Dust? His name, Asriel is an anagram of Israel, the name given to Jacob after his wrestling with the angel: ‘he who prevails with God’ in Genesis 32: 28. But it is also akin to Azrael, the angel of death, and although it appears that he seeks to remove death, his first act after the conversation with Lyra is to kill her friend Roger in order to have enough energy to open a window between his and another world. At the end of the first volume of Pullman’s trilogy, therefore, Lord Asriel appears as a highly ambiguous over-­reacher, whose aim is power, knowledge, and the removal of death itself. And yet, the second volume, The Subtle Knife, offers a decidedly unfallen interpretation of death, which is actually beneficent. The witch Serafina Pekkala comes to rescue another witch from being tortured by the Church by enacting the role of their witch-­goddess of death, YambeAkka, and killing her quickly. ‘She became visible at once, and stepped forward smiling happily, because Yambe-Akka was merry and light-­hearted and her visits were gifts of joy.’18 Here death is purely positive and yet the witches will ally with Lord Asriel when he shows how the Magisterium burns witches, kills and maims. This double attitude to death becomes even more problematic in the final volume, The Amber Spyglass. The central chapters are taken up with a journey to the land of the dead as a result of a dream encounter between Lyra and

Philip Pullman, Northern Lights (London: Scholastic, 1995), p. 377. Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (London: Scholastic, 1997), p. 41.

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Roger, Lord Asriel’s victim at Svalbard. The descent of Homer’s hero, Odysseus, to Hades forms the central intertext for this terrifying part of the novel, in which a part of the self, the animal daemon, must be left behind, in contrast to other examples of literary katabasis in Homer himself, Virgil, Ovid, and Dante.19 The place of the dead is the dreary waiting-­hall of the Odyssey, from which perspective the dead Achilles prefers even servanthood on earth to this dark monotony.20 Elements from Dante’s Inferno, such as the harpies who pursue the wasters of their substance in the wood of the suicides, add a terror to this half-­life. This afterlife is far from the dynamic ecstasies of Dante’s Paradiso, where body and soul will be united and achieve their full expression. In Dante’s poem the bleeding trees and harpies are the effect of a hatred and rejection of physical life in all its joys and sorrows. What Pullman does by a sleight of hand is apply Dante’s infernal vision to the afterlife as a whole, and elide Christian hell and pagan Hades with Christian heaven. His hatred of Christian eschatology lies in that faith’s belief in a final judgement, and yet there will be an element of judgement remaining in his own cosmos after Will and Lyra have opened a space in the world of the dead from which the dead may escape. They make a bargain with the harpies that each dead person arriving will have to tell a true story of their experience on earth in order to be guided by the harpies to the way out. Otherwise, presumably, there the dead stay. This is actually no different from Dante’s system, since it is not for a particular act that the damned are confined in hell but for habits of untruth that prevent any vision of the good. They have lost ‘the good of intellect’ whereby they can understand and interpret their own experience aright.21 Each infernal encounter therefore is with a monstrous egoist, who is locked in his or her own self-­justifying narrative. In contrast to this, the Christian souls Dante meets in Purgatorio are learning to tell true stories, and to begin to reconnect with the social and ecclesial body. A young Christian martyr is brought forward to renounce her life of solitary prayer, ‘while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and Homer, Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray, 2 vols (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), Book 11, Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, 1–6, trans. H. R. Fairclough, revised edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), Aeneid Book 6 and Dante, Inferno, trans. and ed. Charles Singleton, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 20 Homer, Odyssey, Book 11: 556–558. 21 Dante, Inferno 3: 18. 19

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we never knew’ as if the experiential joy of life were impossible for the non-­materialist.22 Lyra and Will discover that the world of the dead is the creation of the Almighty, an angel who sought like Milton’s Satan to claim self-­origination and divine authority. Again we see an ambivalence: is he a Gnostic demiurge or a Blakean Urizen bringing order and limitation to infinity, in which case there is a fallen and tragic character to all created material? Or is he merely an angel who claims things that are quite untrue? Since the world of the dead has a real existence and is not a figment of the imagination, it is the former that must be correct, and yet the novel wishes to affirm the sensual, material world as wholly benign. And this benignity extends to death: without the imposition of the eternal waiting-­room, death is wholly positive. As the erstwhile martyr declaims: ‘[E]ven if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.’23 Her words are verified by the experience of the imprisoned souls on liberation, such as Roger who ‘laughed in surprise as he found himself turning into the night, the starlight, the air . . . and then he was gone, leaving behind him such a vivid little burst of happiness that Will was reminded of the bubbles in a glass of champagne’.24 It is noticeable that Pullman’s prose, which can be so precise and evocative in its description of the gaunt fierceness of the arctic or the humid lushness of Mrs Coulter’s Himalayan redoubt, here becomes diffuse and sentimental in employing the clichés of the commercial greeting card. Particles can end up in rather less picturesque places than dewy starlight. There is here also a complete failure to embrace the materialist consequences of a denial of the transcendent. The actual bodies of the dead are already corpses and becoming part of the ecology of the material world, so why the need for a further dissolution except as a means of smuggling in a non-­materialist subjectivity? Wordsworth’s pantheist vision in the 1799 lyric ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ is much more robustly Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London: Scholastic, 2000), p. 286. Pullman, The Amber Spyglass, p. 287. 24 Pullman, The Amber Spyglass, p. 325. 22 23

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physical as the dead person is ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees’. It is therefore consciousness itself that is to be released from the land of the dead. Pullman cites with approval the attempt to go beyond Daniel Dennett’s reductionism of consciousness by Max Velman but even in this more moderate form, consciousness has no non-­material reality and is still an aspect of brain activity.25 Without the whole body, therefore, it is unclear what it is that can be released from the land of the dead at all. The word the martyr uses to describe their release is ‘oblivion’, a beautiful word derived from the Latin verb for forgetting. It is thus exquisitely balanced between conscious loss of memory and complete unconsciousness, which is the way it is used by D. H. Lawrence in the poems about death he wrote when his own demise was imminent. He too employs the classical mythos of the journey by boat to the underworld, and evokes a reality akin to Pullman’s world of the dead: Pity, oh pity the poor dead that are only ousted from life And crowd there on the grey mud beaches of the margins gaunt and horrible waiting, waiting till at last the ancient boatman with the common barge shall take them abroad, towards the great goal of oblivion.26

For Lawrence too, oblivion is ambiguous; it is ‘pure, pure peace’ indeed but he immediately adds ‘but can it be that also it is procreation?’27 His is the journey of the mystery cults, in which an embrace of death in all its finality is the way to some kind of rebirth, like that of the phoenix. However heterodox his theology, Lawrence wants to embrace a supernatural reality. Pullman, however, refuses the transcendent and also the acceptance of death that makes rebirth a possibility. He does not even embrace the panpsychism of the Stoics with its positive construal of the Logos. For he wishes to save consciousness without the body, and so we learn from the ghost of Lee Scoresby that ‘there’ll be all the time in the world to drift along the wind and find the atoms that used to be Hester, and my mother in the badlands, and my sweethearts – all my

See Philip Pullman’s remarks in The Observer, July 7, 2002 on Max Velman’s Understanding Consciousness (London: Routledge, 2002). 26 D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems, Phoenix Edition, 3 vols (London: Heinemann, 1957), 3, p. 179. 27 Lawrence, Complete Poems, 3, p. 181. 25

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sweethearts.’28 Pullman seeks to reconcile a Swedenborgian conception of eternal reunion with a materialist conception of consciousness. Yet without a brain, who or what is doing the thinking? And even if one were to accept a sentient mode of matter at the level of particles, how could this consciousness be stable in personal identity? Surely the atoms would now be something else? Of course, the trilogy already has another mode of materiality; dust, which is matter that has become conscious. The plot depends on a complete reordering of interpretation, from an initial negativity to positive valence for this material and for the consciousness of matter. Yet how the dust relates to ordinary matter is puzzling. The angel Balthamos tells Will that ‘Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself. Matter loves matter. It seeks to know more about itself, and Dust is formed.’29 The word ‘loves’ expresses intentionality, so that it seems as if consciousness pervades all matter, which makes it difficult to discriminate Dust particles or sraf from ordinary matter. Why should angels be envious of the physicality of humans since they too share a form of matter, have eyes that can be gouged, can transform into animals, enjoy sexual relations, and even eat Kendal mint cake? With such a refusal of pure atheism, and with such an anthropomorphism of matter, death is almost an impossibility. This is assumed by the somewhat casual way in which deaths occur and affect characters only briefly, as for example, Lyra’s move into the new world immediately after the death of her dear friend Roger, and Will’s swift response to the witch who murders his father at the point of their reunion. In that sense, Lord Asriel’s claim to destroy it is fulfilled. Mrs Coulter indeed, fears the nullity of death: ‘I can’t bear the thought of oblivion. . . Sooner anything than that. I used to think pain would be worse – to be tortured forever I thought that must be worse. But as long as you were conscious, it would be better, wouldn’t it? Better than feeling nothing, just going into the dark, everything going out forever and ever.’30 Her earlier remark about giving the Almighty ‘the gift of death’ is thus wholly disingenuous for she here abhors the idea of non-­being.31 She overcomes this in order to destroy Metatron for altruistic reasons to do with her daughter Lyra’s safety in 30 31 28 29

Pullman, Amber Spyglass, p. 344. Pullman, Amber Spyglass, pp. 31–32. Pullman, Amber Spyglass, p. 341. Pullman, Amber Spyglass, p. 294.

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the future. Since, however, destroying Metatron means plunging with him into the abyss, which is an explosive rupture in space/time, Lyra’s mother and father fall into true nothingness, unlike everyone else. And yet here too there is an ambiguity, since when moving round the edge of this same abyss, leading the ghosts from the world of the dead, Lyra is terrified at the thought of falling in: ‘[Y]our poor ghost would go on falling and falling into an infinite gulf, with no one to help [. . .] forever conscious and forever falling.’32 So every time death is a possibility in Pullman’s fictional world, something is said or done that prevents pure annihilation. Moreover, in a multiverse, every act produces other worlds in which a different choice was made. Will may have ‘snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed’ other possible actions when he makes a decision but the narrator earlier muses ‘perhaps in another world, another Will had not seen the window in Sunderland Avenue [. . .] and in another world another Pantalaimon had persuaded another Lyra not to stay in the retiring room, and another Lord Asriel had been poisoned, and another Roger had survived’.33 Thus, somewhere, in another universe, Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter still live on and do not fall at all. The other enemy figure who ‘dies’ in the novel apart from Metatron is God, the Almighty, who has been reduced to a somewhat pathetic figure, ‘the Ancient of Days’, mumbling randomly to himself in a crystal litter. Using the knife to let him out, Will and Lyra accidentally precipitate his demise, so that his particles separate and he blows away in the wind with a sigh of relief. There is none of the transgressive force of Nietzsche’s conception of the death of God here: God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?34

Pullman, Amber Spyglass, p. 321. Pullman, The Subtle Knife, p. 11. 34 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science with a Prelude in Rhyme and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1974), section 125, p. 181. 32 33

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There is no such trauma in The Amber Spyglass, just as there is no real eschatological battle in the mode of Paradise Lost. God may be dead but the Magisterium still goes on and the Oxford of Lyra’s world remains the same. The Almighty had not been an active reality in Lyra’s earlier life, just as Will grew up in his parallel Oxford without any religious authority. Only Mary Malone has earlier left the faith of her upbringing and the religious life for atheism. Humans do indeed take on the divine role in their quest for knowledge and experience, which attracts dust and intensifies such an operation. But they do so without the Madman’s guilt. In contrast to the Nietzschean mastery of death in Pullman, J. K. Rowling’s series of stories about the young Harry Potter are shadowed by death and by guilt from the very beginning, and this despite their younger implied audience. The child Harry learns that his mother died in order to protect her infant son at the end of the first volume, and is thereafter marked by duality and self-­questioning unlike Lyra and Will, who have the single-­minded thumos of Homeric epic, and very little guilt or that more pagan emotion of shame. Lyra does express sorrow when explaining to her daemon why she must travel to see Roger in the land of the dead, but up to that point has shown no guilt. Even her remorse is somewhat single-­minded. Pullman establishes a complex model of subjectivity, involving the animal daemon, a person and a death figure of whom the individual is not aware until the point of death but is a friendly and passive companion. There is also the ghost who lives on in the land of the dead. Mary Malone suggests an analogy with St Paul’s tripartite self of soul, spirit, and body.35 Unlike St Paul’s dynamic and conflicted subject, however, the Dark Materials humans are remarkably unitary. The device of the animal daemon is not employed effectively to allow a depth of characterization. The animal Panatalaimon, for example, may urge caution occasionally to Lyra but is mostly an amiable intensification of the self, akin to an imaginary friend. Daemons may be urged at the end of the trilogy to guide their people as a form of conscience but they are too consensual during the narrative to act dynamically. Mrs Coulter is the most conflicted character but the behaviour of her sadistic golden monkey is an indicator of the true feelings she hides under a deceptive exterior rather than an index of duality. This is in complete Pullman, Amber Spyglass, p. 392.

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contrast to the dialectic between self and emanation in Blake’s mythological dramas, which are one of Pullman’s principal inspirations. Lyra may have the voice and something of the appearance of Joan Aiken’s urchin heroine, Dido Twite, but she is more of a little princess, easily gaining the loyalty and patronage of every adult of importance in the novel. Where Lyra is brought up in the wealth and glamour of an Oxford college, and is the daughter of two of the most important people in her world, Harry is a mistreated orphan growing up in declassé Privet Drive, Little Whinging. He may acquire his own glamour in the discovery of wizard parentage, but very soon the onset of privilege is shadowed by danger and responsibility. At first, Harry’s sense of remorse may be for infringing rules and letting people down: ‘[Harry’s] insides were still burning with guilt [. . .] after all Mr and Mrs Weasley had done for him over the summer.’36 But as events unfold, Harry has more on his conscience, including the death of his beloved godfather, Sirius Black, who in some ways is an equivalent to Lord Asriel, being aristocratic, yet anti-­authoritarian, misunderstood, imprisoned (in his case wholly unfairly), and with considerable intellect. But where every aspect of Asriel is protected from blame, either by the behaviour of the Magisterium or by a supposed distaste for power, Rowling’s character is negatively affected by his years of imprisonment, and despite his sincere love of Harry, he deteriorates physically and mentally. Stylistically, character in Rowling is richer and denser. Sirius’s death is partly due to Harry being deceived by a false vision of Sirius as captured and being tortured, although it is by falling through the Veil while duelling with his cousin Bellatrix that Sirius meets his death, and his mistreatment of the house-­elf Kreacher is also a factor. The Veil is a literalizing of the metaphorical phrase for the afterlife, ‘beyond the veil’, and all dead wizards pass through it, though not usually in bodily form as does Sirius Black. Harry, being so shadowed by death, can hear the dead whispering behind the veil, which his friends cannot. Deaths are appalling in the Harry Potter stories in a way that they are not in Pullman. Harry relives his mother’s death quite often and is traumatized by the killing of his godfather and his own role in it. In the form of the scar on his forehead caused by Voldemort’s curse when he was a baby, he is signed with J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 99.

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death itself. The scar marks the moment of Harry’s mother’s sacrificial interference between Voldemort and her child, as well as the point of connection with his would-­be murderer. Harry’s link to death and the psychic damage it has caused him is what makes him highly vulnerable to the soul-­sucking Dementors, another feature that Rowling shares with Pullman, who includes a race of spectres, derived partly from William Blake’s Gothic mythology, whose origin is a kind of active negativity or mini black hole effect. Where Pullman’s spectres feed only on adults as having a stronger consciousness, the Dementors are omnivorous, and Rowling, indeed, credits children with dark and painful subjectivity. Behind both conceptions lie the hooded dark riders of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings who, in a living death, sniff life and fear and wound psychically as well as physically. Frodo will never fully recover from the wound they inflict on Weathertop. Harry will learn more about death in every volume, such as the fact that the ghosts of Hogwarts are those who have refused to fully accept death and live on in a liminal state, unable to wean themselves from their earthly lives, whereas other people ‘go on’. Despite the conceit of magic as a form of education, so that children can through their wands and subjective will alter the physical world, there is no mastery of death. The most Harry can do is gaze into the mirror of Erised, which shows him his deepest desires. Harry’s longing is to see his dead relations, standing as if alive and waving at him rather than the sporting glory his friend Ron envisages for himself. For this reason Dumbledore calls Harry ‘pure in heart’, evoking the beatitudes in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God’ (Matthew 5: 8).37 Harry is saved from the Dementors by developing the mental strength to summon a patronus, which takes the form of his father’s animagus beast, a stag. Where, however, reunion with the dead is assumed in His Dark Materials, despite its metaphysical inconsistency, it is not so easy for Harry Potter. There is a resurrection stone, one of the deathly hallows, which allows him briefly to call up the dead, and he does so in order to give him courage to meet his own death. Necessarily, however, the friends and family presences disappear when the stone slips from his hand as he faces Voldemort to die. Moreover, where J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 42.

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Lyra has the patronage and support of witch, bear, Gyptians, scholars and finally her own parents who give up their quest for power and knowledge to die to save her, Harry has to learn that the substitute father he most trusted, headmaster Albus Dumbledore, whom he saw as his saviour and ally, has actually bred him up to die. With a piece of Voldemort’s own soul locked within him, Harry is a horcrux, a sort of fetish in which Voldemort puts parts of his soul in order to escape death. Only through the death of Harry will the evil Voldemort be destroyed: ‘how neat, how elegant, not to waste any more lives, but to give the dangerous task to the boy who had already been marked for slaughter, and whose death would not be a calamity, but another blow against Voldemort’.38 It might seem, therefore, that the Harry Potter stories are even more Nietzschean than His Dark Materials, since the element of disillusion is so extreme. Harry’s whole life is revealed to be nothing more than a journey to certain death. This is a much more adult sequence than early volumes might suggest, and Harry’s duality is highly problematic and more productive than Pullman’s pet-­like daemons. He embraces it and goes to face his nemesis with no scapegoat complex, as Hermione had earlier suggested was his weakness, but with a dancing love of life he had never felt before. The nearest analogy to Harry Potter is Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, whose origin is in one, absurd interpretation of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac in the philosopher’s Fear and Trembling.39 There Abraham himself entertains a paradoxical impossibility – that God will provide, even while Abraham carries on the process of sacrificing his beloved son as that same God has commanded. Dumbledore is the more Abrahamic figure, in sending Harry to die yet guessing, against all the rules of magic (which here play the role of the Kierkegaardian ethical), that the love and self-­sacrifice of Harry’s mother entered his own blood when he took Harry’s to rebuild his body, so that ‘his body keeps her sacrifice alive, and while that enchantment survives, so do you and so does Voldemort’s one last hope for himself ’.40

Rowling, Deathly Hallows, p. 555. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, trans. Edna and Howard Hong, Writings of Kierkegaard 6 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 50. 40 Rowling, Deathly Hallows, p. 568. 38 39

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Harry’s mother’s ‘enchantment’ here is no spell other than self-­giving love, which proves to be the deeper, stronger magic. It is this that makes her son put aside his wand to present himself, defenceless, before Voldemort. Love therefore is stronger in the end than death; it can forgive, and thus alter both past and future. After ‘dying’ Harry finds himself in a great white dome, a mystical version of King’s Cross Station, where he encounters Dumbledore, and despite everything loves him still. There Dumbledore begs Harry’s forgiveness and reveals the errors of his youth and his desire for ultimate power through the possession of the Deathly Hallows: ‘Master of Death! Was I better, ultimately, than Voldemort?’41 Only Harry can be the true master of death, not because he makes death disappear, or subsume it into life, as does Pullman’s fiction, but because his valuing of love precludes the will-­to-power. ‘He accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying’, as Dumbledore opines.42 After the peace of the King’s Cross vision, Harry is sent back to the horror of the battle, and the sight of the corpses of his friends, as he must face and defeat Voldemort again. He tries to show Voldemort that his version of events is not correct, and that love did have a role in his own restoration, in Dumbledore’s choosing of death for himself by Snape, and in Snape’s own actions, which were to be faithful to his love for Harry’s mother, Lily. Voldemort just laughs. He is only truly shocked when Harry offers him a way out: ‘ “It’s your one last chance [. . .] it’s all you’ve got left . . . I’ve seen what you’ll be otherwise . . . be a man . . . try . . . try for some remorse” ’.43 Nietzsche could only see forgiveness as a weakness, but here it is a strength that offers the possibility of change and true mastery of self. But Voldemort rejects this chance and is killed by his own rebounding curse. The Harry Potter series is in the tradition of Tolkien and Lewis, who offer fictions in which a moral realism undergirds an imaginary universe. The series also follows the earlier fantasies in offering a world in which Christianity and transcendence are made ‘good to think’ rather than explicitly preached. In offering a reality with deeper layers of experience and meaning, the stories open the religious sense of connectivity with the theological virtues of love, Rowling, Deathly Hallows, p. 571. Rowling, Deathly Hallows, p. 577. Rowling, Deathly Hallows, p. 594.

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hope, and faith as supernatural realities. Rowling follows Tolkien in particular by presenting a world shadowed by transience and death but with the same tough delight in the goodness of the material stuff of the world. The Harry Potter series is one giant act of defamiliarization, whereby our own ordinary world is literally enchanted, and in which to go deeper is to see more beauty, more energy and delight in the real. In the end the enchantment of Pullman’s world is seduction rather than realism: its metaphysical substructure is not strong enough to lean on, and its seeming air of radicalism more conformist. For daemons take on a fixed identity at puberty, when humans just begin to change and develop, and Pullman’s heroine enters the halls of a far less democratic society than Hogwarts. Oxford academic life is as glamourized as Mrs Coulter. More serious, however, is the glamourizing of death. For Harry Potter it is a mystery: we are never shown what lies beyond the veil, although, appropriately, there is some suggestion of boarding a train! For Pullman it is ultimate freedom and power, as well as wish-­fulfilment and reunion: an actual vol-­de-mort, or flight from death’s reality. Harry Potter reveals this flight from death as itself part of the will-­to-power. Pullman’s novel does wish to offer a vision of virtuous life in cheerfulness, and not harming others. Yet the genealogical method by its very nature can offer no substantive communal project: no common good or shared understanding of the true or the beautiful. It may have a utopian element – liberation from enthralment in false and imprisoning structures of thought and authority – but that very liberatory gesture or resistance is itself the good. We leave Lyra at the point of puberty and the onset of consciousness that attracts dust, but lacking the agonizing shameful self-­consciousness of Harry and his friends, and Harry’s duality. It is out of this acute self-­questioning that the search for the good begins, as Socrates taught long ago, and for whom the daemon was a true other self, and a mode of self-­examination.44 And through his advocacy of Diotima’s wisdom at the Symposium, we learn that the daemon Love is similarly double: ugly and beautiful, needy and sharing in the good of wisdom but it is this awkward tension that creates the longing for heavenly beauty and all good.45 Plato, Socrates’ Defence (Apology), The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntingdon Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 17. 45 Plato, The Symposium, Collected Dialogues, p. 555. 44

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So, in the end, Harry Potter reveals a lack of true duality in the subjectivity of Pullman’s imaginary universe, as well as a flight from the implications of materialism that is an actual vol-­de-mort. Death is the great leveller that here reduces the critically acclaimed author to its danse macabre despite all his stratagems to avoid it. Judged by Foucauldian criteria, it is His Dark Materials that appears the more conventional and ideological text, whereas the Harry Potter series wears its own unmasking on its sleeve, as it were. In the end, Harry Potter must lay down his magic as power, to allow real enchantment to work. Similarly, the critic as religious apologist may enter the misty relativism of postmodernity in order – in a very different sense from that intended by JeanFrançois Lyotard – ‘to wage a war on totality; let us be witness to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honour of the name’.46 Fantasy writing may seek to present a wholly material universe or, like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a world in which gods wane and grow with the strength of human belief in their existence. Necessarily, however, such work must leave postmodern equivocation behind and commit to metaphysics, thus allowing a space for theological contestation but equally an opening onto mystery. As we have seen, paradoxically, the more death is allowed its full horror and menace, the more it ceases to be a totality but an opening out. As Albus Dumbledore told the young Harry, ‘to the well-­organized mind, death is but the next great adventure’.47

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 81–82. 47 Rowling, Philosopher’s Stone, p. 297. 46

6

Cusa A Pre-­modern Postmodern Reader of Shakespeare Johannes Hoff

Heythrop College, University of London, UK

Peter Hampson

Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, UK

Referring to a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’, Jorge Luis Borges mentions an entry on animal categorization noting that animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tamed, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way look like flies.1

Michel Foucault’s subsequent use in The Order of Things of this exotic, perplexing quotation, seemingly indicative of a ‘wild’ and possibly even immature way of thinking, helps us appreciate the significance of critical theory for literary textual hermeneutics.2 Critical theory offers to put such apparently strange taxonomies ‘on an equal footing’ with the more familiar. It challenges us to find technical and ethical ways to render the other as familiar, however strange it first seems, and the familiar as strange, however rational it first appears. Such late-­modern sensitivity to the hidden coherence of cultural-­linguistic narratives chimes with the wisdom-­grounded rationality of pre-­modern Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions: 1937–1952, trans. Ruth L. Simms (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1966), p. 108. 2 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), XVI. 1

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traditions such as those based on Aristotle and Aquinas: sapientis est ordinare.3 The wise person is like an artist finding order where common people perceive only chaos. But the pre-­modern search for wisdom also had a teleological end point. It provided guidance toward the spiritual, ethical, and theoretical destination of the universe, where the beautiful, the true, and the good coincide. By contrast, the hermeneutic of post-­structuralist philosophers, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, deviated from this orientation. It was neither designed to trace the ‘universal end of everything’ (finem universalem omnium), nor to reveal what makes meaningful the hidden order of linguistic or cultural texts. Instead it uncovered the fragility and elusiveness of our attempts to make sense of the world. To understand this ‘postmodern’ turn it helps to see it as part of an historically unprecedented upheaval: the undeniable fact that globalized societies must cope with the ‘Neue Unübersichtlichkeit’4 (new complexity and confusion) of a multicultural and pluralist world, without taking refuge in a dogmatic or fundamentalist attitude that rejects the language games of ‘the Other’, and undermines our ability to live in peace with our neighbour. Charles Taylor further illuminates this in his essay The Politics of Recognition. He contrasts two competing dynamics in this process: the politics of universalism and the politics of difference, the former deriving from the recognition of universal equality, the latter from notions of the irreducible particularity of persons and social groups. Both trajectories emerge after the Enlightenment, but collide and combine in postmodernity. Their merger sheds light on the impasse of our postmodern celebration of differences: it seems to exclude the celebration of differences that make a significant difference. Yet authentic acts of admiration and praise for the achievements of human creativity are naturally accompanied by the appreciation that not every cultural achievement is of equal value; there are differences that make a difference. Accordingly, Taylor tries to recover our authentic sense of the ‘good, the holy, the admirable’ that has emerged over long periods of time in various cultures, without getting trapped in the false alternative ‘between the inauthentic and

Thomas Aquinas, ‘Unde inter alia quae homines de sapiente concipiunt, a philosopho ponitur quod sapientis est ordinare.’ Summa Contra Gentiles, lib. 1 cap. 1. Jürgen Habermas, Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985).

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homogenizing demand for recognition of equal worth, on the one hand, and the self-­immurement within ethnocentric standards, on the other’.5 At this point, Cusa’s unerring but by no means sectarian or dogmatic philosophy of praise with regard to the manifestations of the beautiful, the true, and good might offer more help by indicating a route through this contemporary cultural impasse. In this essay, after examining some of the philosophical background to contemporary challenges that have affected critical theory and literary criticism, we will outline potential Cusan ‘responses’ in an expository manner, and finally demonstrate the scope and versatility of a Cusan approach to literary criticism using as a textual example a well-­known Shakespearean sonnet.

Epoché and the exploration of limits Scientifically rigorous late-­modern thinkers (in the sense of Edmund Husserl)6 like Foucault and Derrida might have agreed with Taylor’s conclusion that ‘[t]here is no reason to believe that [. . .] the different art forms of a given culture should all be of equal, or even of considerable, value’.7 It was not that they judged all differences to be of equal significance; instead, they suspended our inclination to judge. To suspend judgement is not the same as neutralizing value differences. To understand their caution, consider Husserl’s concept of epoché.8 In everyday parlance we associate ‘epoché’ with the word ‘epoch’, which designates the period following a historical break, or a political, social, and cultural crisis when people naturally hesitate and draw back from judgement, allowing themselves time to assess the new situation and reorient habits of thinking. The experience of ‘crisis’ actualizes the ‘critical’ potentials of thought without Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, eds. Charles Taylor and Amy Guttman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp.  25–74, quotations from pp. 72–73. 6 Edmund Husserl, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft (The Hague: Springer, 1984). 7 Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, pp. 72–73. 8 Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Husserliana II (The Hague: Springer, 1950, originally published 1907), pp.  5–10, 43ff.; also: Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. I. Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, Husserliana III (The Hague: Springer, 1950, originally published, 1913), pp. 64–74. 5

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premature closure or enactment of their implications. Antiquity had already conceptualized such a habit of suspending judgement (ἐποχή) as a spiritual practice, one characteristic of philosophical ‘forms of life’.9 In the post-­ structuralist response to what Husserl labelled ‘The Crisis of European Sciences’10 this quasi-­spiritual practice became an epochal focus of attention in its own right. Hence, the postmodern era might be called the ‘epoch of epoché.’11 In the wake of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist semiotics, Foucault and Derrida interpreted Husserl’s epoché semiotically, i.e. by focusing not on appearances but on ‘signs’.12 This semiotic turn was accompanied by a radicalization of Husserl’s concept of epoché insofar as it required us to ‘bracket’ not only the reference of signs to our natural world in order to focus on their essential meaning, but to bracket their meaning as well. We are no longer justified in assuming that every sign is meaningful; instead, we are required to investigate the conditions under which networks of signs might facilitate the emergence of meaning. Returning to our initial example, we need to perform a twofold epoché in the case of the ‘Chinese encyclopedia’: (1) As with Husserl, we must suspend our judgement about its relationship to the natural world. Before jumping to conclusions about the ‘unscientific fantasy worlds’ of a traditional but ‘unenlightened’ civilization we need to find out what context might have made it appear as meaningful. (2) But, unlike Husserl, we are also required to bracket the assumption that the encyclopaedia’s entry has any determinable meaning at all. Moreover, we are required to bracket both of the following possibilities: the metaphysical prejudgement that the world of signs is ultimately meaningful

Hans P. Sturm, Urteilsenthaltung oder Weisheitsliebe zwischen Welterklärung und Lebenskunst (München: 2002). Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis des europäischen Menschentums und die Philosophie (The Hague: Springer, 1954), pp. 314–348. 11 Johannes Hoff, ‘Dekonstruktive Metaphysik. Der Beitrag der Dekonstruktion zur Erschließung des Archivs negativer Theologie’, in Geistergespräche zwischen Philosophie und Theologie, eds. Peter Zeillinger, Matthias Flatscher, Kreuzungen and Jacques Derridas (Wien: Turia & Kant, 2004), pp. 138–168; the following paragraphs build on this essay. For a more comprehensive discussion of the discourse analytical hermeneutics of Foucault and Derrida see Johannes Hoff, Spiritualität und Sprachverlust. Theologie nach Foucault und Derrida (Paderborn, Germany: Schöningh, 1999). 12 Jacques Derrida, La Voix et la Phénomène. Introduction au Problème du Signe dans la Phénomenologie de Husserl (Paris: Quadrige Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), Jacques Derrida, Le Problème de la Genèse dans la Philosophie de Husserl (Paris: 1990); and Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge 2001), pp. 193–212. 9

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and the metaphysical prejudgement that it is ultimately meaningless. A rigorously scientific philosophy has to remain open to both the eventualities. This is precisely where Derrida merges Husserl’s scientific spiritual practice of epoché with what might be called the spiritual practice of modern literature, culminating in writers like Georges Bataille and where Derrida inaugurated an ‘epoché of the epoch of meaning’.13 This too is where a kind of studied ignorance comes into play for post-­ structuralist philosophers like Foucault and Derrida, seemingly going beyond the docta ignorantia of the mystical tradition (including Cusa’s).14 Building on Bataille, Derrida calls for a relation of knowledge to an ‘unknowledge’ that will be ‘scientific’, but in a radically altered way, belonging neither to ‘scientism’ nor ‘mysticism’.15 This ‘experimental’ style of investigating the limits of human knowledge displays similarities to the serious mystical tradition however. And this, in turn, might explain why Derrida’s philosophy in particular has been frequently either rejected as a kind of (Jewish) variation on Heidegger’s ‘neo-­pagan’ mysticism (as in Jürgen Habermas’)16 or embraced and celebrated as a kind of negative theology (as in John Caputo’s).17 However, as Michel de Certeau pointed out, this investigation of the limits of knowledge preserved merely the form of a mystical discourse without preserving its embedding in a religious tradition, and the ultimate destination of its linguistic transgressions.18 In the mystical tradition, the act of transgression was motivated by an insatiable erotic desire, in the Platonic sense of this word; and this desire was

Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 339. The writings of Foucault and Derrida differ considerably from each other in terms of their research foci and their approach to the topics under consideration. However, with the benefit of hindsight it is easy to see that they never significantly diverged. Cf. Johannes Hoff, ‘Das Subjekt entsichern. Zur spirituellen Dimension des Subjektproblems angesichts der Dekonstruktion des cartesianischen Wissenschaftsparadigmas’, in eds. Heinrich Schmidinger and Michael Zichy, Tod des Subjekts? Poststrukturalismus und christliches Denken (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 2005), pp. 213–242. 15 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 339f. 16 Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), p. 217. 17 See, for example, John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 18 Michel de Certeau, La Fable Mystique I. XVIe – XVIIe siecle (Paris: 1982); Michel de Certeau, ‘The Black Sun of Language: Foucault’, In Heterologies. Discourse on the Other (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1986), 171–184; see also Derrida’s response to Certeau in: Jacques Derrida, ‘Nombre de oui’, in ed. Luce Giard, Michel de Certeau (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou 1987). 13 14

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perceived as the expression of a natural desire for the vision of God. At the dawn of modern literature, however, this directed desire was transformed into an aimless spirituality of transgression. The poet Nelly Sachs, quoted by Certeau, summarizes this aimless transgression as ‘Fortgehen ohne zurückzuschauen’19 [departing without looking back]. While the ‘mystics’ of early modernity ended either in a kind of idiosyncratic madness or a collective sectarianism, the Western literary tradition offered an escape from this, by making available the possibility to deconstruct any residual sectarian attachments. Following Cervantes’s role model in Don Quixote,20 the mystical desire for the infinite plenitude of life turned into a fictive play with the undetermined idea of a ‘je ne sais quoi’. Mediated through writers such as Georges Bataille,21 Maurice Blanchot,22 and James Joyce,23 this spirituality of transgression eventually merged with the sceptical spirituality of phenomenological tradition, where it provoked the emergence of various kinds of ‘critical theories’. We no longer know the aim of our restlessness; the destination of our ‘discontent’ in civilization has become ‘undecidable’. This modern fate becomes most explicit in Derrida’s later writings, which display a manifold commitment both to agnostic and atheist traditions (such as Marx and Freud), and to his religious roots. While challenging the Western standard claim that philosophy and science are neutral undertakings that can be detached from the ‘singular archive of their history’,24 these writings ‘oscillate’25 between a plurality of irreconcilable positions. These in turn are well exemplified by the names to which Derrida dedicated his just quoted essay on the archives of Western science and culture: to the atheist Jew Yosef Hayim Yrushalmi, to his uncircumcised postmodern Sons, and to his religious Certeau, La Fable Mystique I, p. 411. Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 51–54. 21 Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of my Death, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 22 Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, Foucault, Blanchot. Maurice Blanchot, the Thought from Outside, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Zone Books, 1987). 23 Jacques Derrida, Ulysse Grammophone. Deux Mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilée, 1987). 24 Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.’ Diacritics 25.2 (1995), pp. 9–63, 32. 25 Derrida’s ‘positions’ are comparable with ‘meta-­modern’ attempts to overcome the relativist attitude of postmodernity by ‘oscillating’ between postmodernism and a sensitivity for the romantic tradition of modernity, see Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, ‘Notes on Metamordernism’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2 (2010), 1–14. As for Derrida’s Romantic sensitivities, cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, in eds. Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, et al., Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London and New York: Routledge 1996), pp. 77–88. 19 20

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Jewish father ‘who was also called, as is life itself, Hayim’.26 Derrida’s deconstruction tried to do justice to all three stances. For this reason, it is inappropriate to read his writings solely as a kind of Jewish or Christian mysticism, but it would be equally inappropriate to read them as a kind of atheism, an indifferent agnostic multiculturalism, or a naïve scientific positivism. At the summit of the apophatic tradition of Christian learning, however, Nicholas of Cusa developed a more rigorous response to the experience of crisis and plurality. In common with Foucault and Derrida, his approach avoided taking refuge in the sectarianism of allegedly orthodox metaphysical dogmas and narratives, but, unlike Foucault and Derrida, it simultaneously avoided becoming deadlocked in an undecided oscillation between irreconcilable positions.

Nicholas of Cusa’s mystagogical science of praise Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) lived when late medieval certainties were giving way to early modern pluralities. Formed by the orthodox tradition of Christian learning, as a man of his time he was aware of the complexities of his age. Straddling a world marked by the pre-­modern synthesis of science and wisdom, and their emerging early modern fractionations, Cusa offers a route that can help point through the ‘oscillations’ of late- or postmodernity. These we see as characterized by the shuttling between a modernist, univocal universalism on the one hand and a postmodern, equivocal emphasis on difference on the other. Cusa indicates an analogical middle route based on a confidence in common-­sense responses to and trust in reality. So, wisdom for Cusa is to be found as much on the street as in the academy, in the everyday, where beauty attracts, and in the embodied, experienced, real-­time event itself appreciated as a gift. Consequently, a key to understanding a Cusan approach to literature is that before any extensive ‘critical’ engagement with texts invariably comes prior,

Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, p. 20.

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lived engagement with the reality of its narratives and symbols. We suggest, following Cusa, that such a pre-­reflexive engagement inevitably implies an ethical and spiritual commitment or responsibility, which can be embraced or evaded to varying degrees, since reality of all sorts constantly, but non-­ coercively, invites us to move toward the good, the true, and the beautiful. When this invitation is refused or evaded, various kinds of accidie, melancholia, ennui or even depression can result. When, however, it is enthusiastically embraced, it encourages a praxis of doxological participation that helps us recognize the desirability of the good and the true, and the facticity of evil as a futile state of ‘non being’. Cusa, as the reader might expect, strongly encourages us to operate at the doxological end of this continuum. In his retrospective summary of his life-­long ‘hunt for wisdom’, De Venatione Sapientiae (VS), Cusa determines ten properties that are the object of the intellect’s ‘joyous pursuit’, joyous because the pursuit itself, mirroring that which it seeks, is ‘good, great, true, beautiful, wise, delightful, perfect, clear, equal and sufficient’.27 For Cusa these properties are ultimately equivalent or convertible and coincide in God, the highest good, greater than any imaginable good, beyond the paradoxical coincidence of opposites, the coincidentia oppositorum. Moreover, they are to be found most readily in ‘the field of praise’ where ‘[g]oodness is praised, greatness is praised, truth is praised, and each of the remaining things [is praised]. Therefore, these ten . . . are used in praise of God and are rightly ascribed to God, because He is the Fount of praise.’28 Tellingly, for Cusa and for us later, ‘all things praise God by their existence’ and therefore ‘all created things naturally praise God. And when a creature is praised, it itself (which did not make itself) is not praised but its Creator is praised in regard to it.’29 The idea that the cosmos is theophanic or ‘God showing’ and so praise worthy is thus at the heart of Cusa’s worldview. As Gerard Manley Hopkins would write much later, ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God / it will flame out, like shining from shook foil’,30 and Cusa maintains the world Nicholas of Cusa, De Venatione Sapientiae, 16.46. Translations of Cusa’s works by Jasper Hopkins, available from http://jasper-­hopkins.info/VS12–2000.pdf (accessed 27 May 2014). 28 Cusa, De Venatione Sapientiae, 18.51. 29 Cusa, De Venatione Sapientiae, 19.54. 30 Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur’, in ed. W. H. Gardner, Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Penguin, 1953, reprinted 1985), p. 27. 27

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embodies such attractive qualities that lure and feed the natural appetite for the good, the true, the beautiful, and so on, in a trustworthy manner. Indeed, in the limit case, the praiser and praised resonate in harmony. Cusa illustrates this with the image of a ten-­stringed harp that sings God’s praise, as Shakespeare the poet resonates with his beloved since ‘what is’t but mine own when I praise thee’.31 Also, the ‘one who ever-­praises God makes progress continually—as a cithara-­player makes progress in playing the cithara—and he becomes ever more like unto God’,32 or, as we might say with Shakespeare again, ‘Sweets with sweet war not, joy delights in joy /. . . / Mark how one string sweet husband to another / Strikes each in each by mutual ordering’.33 Which is not to suggest that Cusa is giving up on rigorous thought or analytics, simply that he has a basic trust in the fact that we are, so to speak, at home in the cosmos. This provides a secure pre-­reflexive basis for his subsequent metaphysical analyses. That said, Cusa’s theophany derives naturally from his participatory ontology as well as his common-­sense realism. In line with his Christian orthodoxy, Cusa views God not as a being among beings, but as the actualized possibility (possest) of everything that can be, and that in which be(com)ing participates (De Possest). Easily misinterpreted as pantheism, unlike pantheism this does not collapse God back into creation. Rather, the relation between God and creation is asymmetrical: creation depends utterly on God for its existence, but God does not depend on creation. Creation, Cusa maintains in De Sapientia (De Sap), is the ‘unfolding’ of the unmultipliable God into a plurality of unique creatures, which receive God as best they can.34 We are, then, for Cusa, living intimately with the transcendent yet immanent God in whom we ‘live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28), and this provides both meaning and purpose, indicating the goal of our restless strivings. These ideas afford Cusa a novel solution to the supposed impasse between the general and the particular. Do universal or general categories exist or only particular instances? This was the thorny question behind the classical

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 39. All quotations from the Sonnets are from Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 32 Cusa, De Venatione Sapientiae, 20.58. 33 William Shakespeare, Sonnet 8. 34 Cusa, De Sapientia, I.25. 31

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medieval debate between realists and nominalists, a debate arguably still relevant to understanding aspects of contemporary critical theory.35 Cusa, the ultra nominalist because of his thoroughgoing realism, puts it thus: Since the universe is contracted, it is not found except as unfolded in genera; and genera are found only in species. But individuals exist actually; in them all things exist contractedly. Through these considerations we see that universals exist actually only in a contracted manner. . . . Nevertheless, in the order of nature universals have a certain universal being which is contractible by what is particular.36

Hence, only particulars exist in actuality, but for Cusa this does not preclude their being the unfolding or contraction of universals, ‘borrowing’ or ‘leasing’ their being from God, the maximal universal. As we shall see shortly, it is precisely this idea that allows us to sympathize with Shakespeare that the ‘true rights of the beautiful’ are not a ‘poet’s rage’.37 Beauty, truth, goodness, and excellence that we see on earth are nothing but contracted instantiations of the divine. Wisdom and beauty are indeed to be found on the street! Taking seriously the idea that we are ‘contracted universals’ also helps us intuitively grasp the paradoxical reciprocities in seeing and been seen, where the contracted mutuality of the gaze of lovers stands for the infinite mutuality of gift exchange in God, and this because we and the world are created images of the uncreated triune God, in a world where: my seeing coincides with the visibility of a face that is exposed to the seeing of others. Hence, I am a true image of the ‘Seeing of God’ (in the double sense of this gerund) in which the ability to see coincides with the possibility of being seen. At the same time, however, I am only a created image of the ‘Seeing of God’, because my seeing is a gift that can actualize its unique mode of being only in the temporalized space of embodied face to face encounters.38

37 38 35 36

Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 1–18. Cusa, De docta ignorantia, II, 6, 124–125. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 17. Hoff, The Analogical Turn, p.  152. Conversely, in his first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis approvingly cites Buber’s definition of idolatry as arising ‘when a face addresses a face which is not a face’, LF, §13.

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It is important to grasp that the mirroring of our vision as an image of the Trinitarian God is not the outcome of a mirroring, reflection, or dialectical interaction of the divine in or with our created mode of being (as in Hegel, and his postmodern successors like Slavoj Žižek). We, the contingent instantiations of the Divine Word, do not implicate the Word itself in time and temporality, nor trap it in mutability. However, this does not mean that God is detached from his creation: On the contrary, the absolute mirror remains unaffected by the temporal change of her creation only because the eternal image of the triune God (the divine Word) is already everything that the creation actualizes through temporal change. What is united in the enfolding (God) appears as stretched out in the mutability of the unfolding (creation); which is remote from God only inasmuch it has not yet fully actualized its own being as an image of its creator. Briefly, God is remote from our temporal mode of being only because the ‘stretching out’ (distentio) of our embodied temporality makes us appear as remote from ourselves.39

T. S. Eliot will later illustrate this beautifully in The Four Quartets, where, like Cusa, he embraces a similar Augustinian concept of time. At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.40

The changing contingent dance depends utterly on the still point, yet there the dance is, and there is only the dance. Time, then, is inevitably our mode of being and the medium in which we can begin to actualize ourselves thereby bringing us closer to God from whom we might feel distanced. Yet for Cusa ‘the temporality of time is not temporal by itself ’.41 The tri-­unity of our original experience of time, which appears to be unchangeably stretched out between

Hoff, The Analogical Turn, p. 135. T. S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, The Four Quartets, II, (London: Faber and Faber 1944, reset edition 1979), p. 5. 41 Hoff, The Analogical Turn, p. 136. 39 40

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the ‘no longer’, the ‘not yet’, and the ‘now’ is a finite image of the infinite triunity of God. Ironically and poignantly, however, only through time time is conquered.42 We can only be re-­enfolded in and through time. Eliot’s ‘dancing still-­point’ attracts in real time, since it is the source and guarantor of the beauty that lures and is convertible with the good, the true, and triumphs over decay. We shall return to this again shortly, but these are sentiments that Shakespeare appears to have understood. Finally, the interpenetration of the unfolded contingent by the divine means that for Cusa, in De Dato Patris Luminum (De Dato) being qua being is ‘a gift from above [which] descends from the Father of all gifts; these gifts are lights or theophanies’.43 And ‘if a creature is a best gift, because every creature is exceedingly good, then God, it seems, has been given’.44 In human terms, we are, at best, literally gifts of God (again with both meanings, God’s gifts and God gifted) both to ourselves and to each other. We help give our lovers and friends back to themselves in other words, and this brings them further to life. Furthermore, where actual gift giving is involved, either through love or gift exchange, we are carried up further into the perfect gift exchange that is the Trinitarian life. As Paul Griffiths points out, ‘we are so made that we cannot fully be ourselves unless we are given by others the gift of being their friends or lovers’.45 Or, in Cusan terms, as incomplete, not fully actualized, unfoldings we must be enfolded by each other to have any chance of completion. But what is the relevance of all this for literary criticism? How might it be applied?

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: a Cusan reading From our discussion so far we should expect a Cusan approach to literature not only to be sensitive to the subtleties of beauty, temporality, creation, and the intimacy of the transcendent, but to start with a pre-­judgemental, non-­ propositional attitude with respect to its subject matter. This attitude relies crucially on the doxological dimension, which repeatedly (in a non-­identical 44 45 42 43

Burnt Norton, II, p. 6. Cusa, De Dato Patris Luminum, 1, 94 Cusa, De Dato Patris Luminum, 2,97. Paul Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), p. 62.

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repetitive sense) illuminates, feeds, and informs what we consider to be common sense. Hence, rather than bracketing everything that we intuitively appreciate in our encounter with the world, we might (in apparent naive faithfulness) look instead at what the world shows us, at what it ‘affords’. In the case of literature, then, we investigate the conditions under which networks of signs might or might not facilitate the emergence of meaning. This becomes particularly pertinent where poetry is concerned in that, thus approached, poetry can reveal a doxological linguistic aspect usually insufficiently appreciated or accounted for in secular readings. Yet whenever literary critics, secular ones included, try to be true to the nature of poems as poems (as distinct, for instance, from embracing a sociological or psychological ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’), this doxological dimension is at least in the background, in so far as they are implicitly responsive to the performative qualities of the poem. As a literary critic, Helen Vendler privileges the poem as a linguistic unity, appreciates its internal ‘truth’ and performative qualities, and offers high-­ quality, prototypical examples of modern criticism and close reading. Our reading draws on Vendler’s analysis. Holding together the sonnet’s technical beauty and moral insights, she believes that the deepest insights into the moral world of the poem, and its constructive and deconstructive energies, come precisely from understanding it as a contraption made of ‘words,’ . . . not only the semantic units we call ‘words’ but all the language games in which words can participate.46

Standing thus in a long, well-­respected, interpretive tradition of criticism, which she seeks to ‘supplement’, she is adamant that ‘[a] poem must be beautiful, too, exhibiting the double beauty that Stevens calls “the poetry of the idea” and “the poetry of the words”.’47 Moreover, as Coleridge argues, ‘balance or reconciliation of opposite discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with

Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 11. As Coleridge writes, ‘A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference therefore must consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object being proposed’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia Literaria, vol. II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907; first published, London: Best Fenner, 1817), p. 8. 47 Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 4. 46

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the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects’48 is the mark of the poetic power. Nevertheless, readings such as Vendler’s might carry with them implicit metaphysical assumptions that are not consistent with what a Cusan approach reveals about the doxological sources of human language. For example, they might often unwittingly incorporate liberal-­modernist presuppositions about the prosaic as opposed to the theophanic roots of our human nature. That said, it is still possible to use a modern ‘standard view’ as a reference point. We do so here, engaging with the poem qua poem, closely and centripetally,49 building on what we take to be a skilful, close literary reading, while, at the same time, reframing the sonnet in a quite different metaphysical context. We maintain that a detailed Cusan reading, even of such well-­known works as Shakespeare’s sonnets, can both de-­construct and intensify, without negating, such high-­ quality standard readings. We illustrate this through a detailed consideration of the well-­known sonnet 18 from the ‘young man sequence’. Sonnet 18 Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate; Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Sonnet 18’s standard interpretation, typified by Vendler’s, contrasts the ‘temporality of physical existence and the eternity of verse’.50 Earthly transient Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. 12. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 73. 50 Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 120. 48 49

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beauty described as every fair [which] from fair sometime declines,51 nevertheless exhibits superlative qualities that exceed by being more lovely and more temperate even than ‘the most beautiful thing, the summum bonum, in an (English) world. A summer’s day.’52 Yet this beauty is granted durability by being held in the eternal lines of a poem; intelligibilia, the stuff of the intellect, endure and are immutable even though sensibilia, things sensed or experienced, change. In the couplet, however, the poem’s power to ‘hold’ beauty is shown poignantly to depend on living readers. Yet, while ‘the ostensible (and perhaps actual) structure of the sonnet is one of contrast . . . the principle of expansive claim is as strong’.53 But, qualifying this, the expansive claims of the sestet are tempered and temporalized, since ‘the lines last only so long as men exist, among the men who can breathe, eyes that can see the poem.’54 The possibility of unfettered duration is corralled and domesticated. It is useful to note, however, that Cusa distinguished two kinds of the ‘unfettered’ (in-­finite), contrasting ‘privative infinity’ with the ‘negative infinity’ of God.55 His pre-­modern, theocentric concept of salvation as ‘deification’ focused on the unmixed and unaltered unity of the latter, negative infinity (God), with our unique being as contracted (corralled) embodied creatures.56 A privative infinity on the other hand is subject to the spatio-­temporal constraints of the created order. This can lead to confusion, for instance, where equivocal terms such as ‘everlasting’ are involved as these are often used interchangeably with ‘eternal’. It would be mistaken, for example, to associate the vitam aeternam of the Apostle’s creed, which we typically translate ambiguously as ‘life everlasting’, and not, more literally, as ‘eternal life’, with a kind of unfettered duration. Modern readers, however, might be inclined to do something similar when they encounter sonnet 18 and perhaps misconstrue eternal as ‘everlasting’ in the privative sense.

We adopt Vendler’s convention of italicizing quotations from verse and use Q1, Q2, Q3 to refer to the three quatrains of a sonnet. 52 Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 121. 53 Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 121 54 Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 122. 55 Cusa, De docta ignorantia II, 1, 97. 56 Hoff, The Analogical Turn, pp. 152ff.; and Johannes Hoff, Kontingenz, Berührung, Überschreitung. Zur philosophischen Propädeutik christlicher Mystik nach Nikolaus von Kues (Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Alber, 2007), pp. 436ff. 51

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We acknowledge, too, the important claim that the ‘deepest insights’57 into such literary creations come from understanding ‘all the language games in which words can participate’.58 In sonnet 18, we note, of course, its comparisons and hyperbole, but, at the risk of stating the obvious, it is first and foremost a gracious, intimate speech act of praise and gift exchange, and therefore an act of wonder and near worship of the beloved. This is critical for any Cusan reading, which can then treat the poem’s language use as doxological, as working through the created order to the eternal, and as reflecting the dynamics of ‘attraction’, where we might expect, ultimately, to be shown the general in and through the particular, and vice versa. In Q1 we are first offered a comparison of earthly beauties: the beloved and a summer’s day. In Cusan terms, the latter generic expression for the English summum bonum designates only a comparative good. It is exceeded by the contingent uniqueness of thy eternal summer, but the poet expresses this excess only ex negativo, rather than by asserting the ultimate perfection of the beloved’s manifest but still contingent beauty, since every fair . . . sometime declines (Q2). Next, and crucially, we take equally seriously the claim that the third quatrain is where we should expect Shakespeare to ‘advance to his subtlest or most comprehensive or most truthful position.’59 Revisiting Q3 in sonnet 18, there are indeed more subtleties at work; we read that – unlike both the English summer, and every fair – thy eternal summer shall not fade. Noting the subtleties of the phrase if not the nuances of ‘everlasting’, Vendler, for instance, treats this particular eternal summer as paradoxically expressing ‘an everlasting brevity’,60 and the description of this contingent instantiation of eternity as summer underlines again the sense of temporality; hence the poignant couplet’s ‘tempering of triumph’.61 But we might recall that the ephemeral beauty of our temporal world is not excluded from being united with the (negative) infinity of God. This time, the reference is not to a comparative relation between thy beauty and ‘something higher’, as in the case of the inverse comparison between the (lower) beauty of a summer’s day and

59 60 61 57 58

Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 11. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 11 Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 25. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 122. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 122

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thy beauty. Rather thy eternal beauty refers to a manifestation of the simplicity of infinite beauty in a unique creature, namely to the unadulterated and straightforward unity of a finite creature with the (negative) infinite, which transcends all comparative relations and distinctions, including the distinction between the finite and the infinite.62 Yet how can the two, the finite and the infinite, be united, but still poignantly dissociated in the couplet’s final deflationary move? Leaving the question hanging for the moment, we move to 12, Q3 where the paradoxical coincidence of eternal and temporal turns out to be one of ownership or debt: thy eternal summer, shall not lose possession. Of what? Clearly it shall not lose its ephemeral beauty, the fair thou ow’st. It is generally noted that ow’st can be read as ‘ownest’ or ‘owest’.63 If created beauty is ‘owed’, this fits comfortably with thy summer’s possession of the same, which exemplifies being and beauty ‘on loan’, ‘owed to’ or ‘descended from’ the transcendent (Cusa’s ‘Father of all gifts’). The subtlety of Q3 culminates in its last line and helps answer the question of the final deflationary move. Eternal lines to time can indeed be read conventionally as the metrical lines of a poem or even as lines of lineage or descent, but, consistently with our Cusan reading, the polysemous nature of lines refers equally well to the ultimately unique delineations, figures, shapes, profiles or features of contingent creatures. Thus, the infinite simplicity of the creator reveals itself in the mutable but unexchangeable singularity (singularitas)64 of this contingent creature, thou, to the same extent that the latter participates in the universal beauty of the (negative) infinite. On this reading, which intensifies the standard one, no longer are ‘the eternal lines . . . potentiated only by a . . . succession of human readers’.65 Nevertheless, the

Quoniam ex se manifestum est infinti ad finitum proportionem non esse. [It is self-­evident that there is no comparative relation of the infinite to the finite.] Cusa, De docta ignorantia I, 3, 9; cf. VS, 26, 79. 63 See for example, William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ed. Jack Kerrigan (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), p. 196. 64 Cusa, VS, c. 21 n. 65–67; see also Gerda von Bredow, ‘Der Gedanke der Singularitas in der Altersphilosophie des Nikolaus von Kues’. In Mitteilungen und Forschungsbeiträge der CusanusGesellschaft 4 (Mainz: Matthias Grünewald, 1964). 65 Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 122 (our emphasis). 62

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power of the poetic lines to reveal the ephemeral lines of the beloved can be strengthened by repeated reading – thou grow’st through repetition.66 More subtly still, growth occurs through the gift of praise and the poem itself. The event of the gift as given and received is precisely the eternal gift, as the speaker reflects and transmits what he has received via the lines of his poem to the repetitive lines of his readers. Such gifting testifies to the eternal quality of seeing and being seen, and ow’st then denotes indebtedness for the actualization of beauteous life that grow’st through such a gift ‘in eternal lines’. With this emphasis, the expansive quality of Q3 builds throughout. With delicious irony, it prefigures and yet beautifully tempers the poignant tempering of the couplet, rather than the couplet merely carrying ‘the tempering of triumph yet further’.67 As the speaker offers his verse to the beloved he acknowledges the temporality of this (line 14, first mention) written gift, yet it is this (line 14, second mention) very giving, the giving of the gift itself, the poem’s donation, that is life giving. Inevitably, we suggest, precisely at the point of donation, the indexical ‘this’ switches its referent and becomes indicative of a performative speech act. Sonnet 18, then, holds in exquisite tension the temporalizing of all created entities, including those which, like poems, transiently capture ephemeral beauties in eternal lines, with the fact that those selfsame temporal and finite realities exist only by gift and virtue of the (negative) infinite itself, which is revealed through them. Our emphasis here on the giftedness of creation, and its theophanic, incarnational qualities, makes ours a Christian humanist not simply a neo-Platonic reading. As far as we are aware, there is no evidence currently available that Shakespeare had direct contact with Cusa’s work.68 However, it is abundantly clear that Shakespeare was writing in precisely the

Hill writes: ‘The pervasive concern of English Renaissance Literature is to show how, in the face of his mortality, man is to make the most of the time at his disposal to put himself in tune with the providential order of the universe. The issue, that is to say, is fulfilment in time, rather than escape from time.’ John Spencer Hill, Infinity, Faith and Time: Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997), p. 100. 67 Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 122. 68 Although there are strong indications that a genealogical link can be made with Shakespeare via the Cusa-­influenced Giordano Bruno, see Hilary Gatti, The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge: Giordano Bruno in England (London: Routledge, 1989), and convincing arguments for describing Shakespeare as a ‘Christian humanist’. 66

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same Augustinian tradition as Cusa.69 Hence, we maintain that Cusa is well suited as Shakespeare’s exegete. As modern readers of Shakespeare, we are, however, arguably, handicapped in two ways. First, as we saw in Section I, our academic forms of life are typically constrained by the ‘epoch of a radicalized epoché’, marked by hyper-­reflexivity and an accompanying sceptical or ironical attitude with regard to passionate commitments. Second, our contemporary world typically oscillates between the fiction of analytic, scientistic precision and univocity, and the equivocity of (more or less entertaining) arbitrary chains of association. We seem to be left with ‘irreconcilable positions’. As late moderns we often find it difficult to dwell in the metaxu, the paradoxical ‘space between’, where the hyper-­determination of the present moment exceeds our reflexive capacities. By contrast, the speaker in sonnet 18 is not engaged dispassionately with speech-­acts of praise; he is already a lover who has practised the skills of his doxological art; one who is able to see the eternal in and through addressing his beloved with the gift of the poem. As is demonstrable in more detail with reference to Cusa’s ‘doxological epoché’, this pre-­reflexive commitment is not less but even more radical than the sceptical spirituality of a phenomenological or postmodern epoché.70 Cusa’s doxological approach does not build on dogmatic, preliminary, foundational decisions about the beauty and perfection of God’s creation. It thus avoids the trap of doctrinal rigidity highlighted in Section I. Nor does it depend on a rigid canon of narratives, though, as a matter of fact, there will always be archives of narratives and hymns that enable us to practise the skills of passionate lovers, poets, and hymn-­writers; troubadours are always skilful in ‘using’ quasi-­canonical traditions. Instead, Cusa’s epoché builds only on the basic insight of every science of praise: ‘We do not praise something

Hill, Infinity, Space and Time, pp. 104–126, especially p. 126, and with regard to Cusa’s Augustinian concept of temporality, p.  74. We do not agree, however, with Hill’s reading of Augustine’s (and mutatis mutandis Cusa’s) concept of time as ‘the correlative of mental activity’ (p. 82). For a concise account of Augustine’s anything but ‘spiritualised’ concept of time, and its roots in the pre-­reflexive life of the body (vita corporis) see David van Dusen The Space of Time: A Sensualist Interpretation of Time in Augustine, Confessions X to XII. (Brill: Leiden, 2014). As for the Augustinian roots of Cusa, see F. Edward Cranz ‘Saint Augustine and Nicholas of Cusa in the Tradition of Western Christian Thought’, Speculum 28 (1953), pp. 297–316. 70 Johannes Hoff, ‘Mystagogy Beyond Onto-­theology: Looking back to Post-­modernity with Nicholas of Cusa’, in ed. Arne Moritz, A Companion to Nicholas of Cusa (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 69

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because we judge it good. Rather, if our praise is genuine, and not just the expression of a herd instinct, we judge something to be good because it makes us wonder and praise without requiring further thought about what we are doing.’71 Cusa’s unbroken attachment to this pre-­reflexive truth enabled him to circumvent the emergence of a disengaged world,72 and to develop a hermeneutics of the good, the true, and the beautiful that avoids not only the ideological flaws of modern scientism, but also the spiritual flaws of the postmodern ‘epoch of epoché’. More than a hundred years after Cusa, this pre-­modern way of perceiving, speaking, and thinking is possibly only to be found in the melancholic language of artists and poets like Shakespeare. Later, it is to evaporate entirely, and, perhaps anticipating the post-Romantic quest for an ‘invisible masterpiece’ of art,73 we will find it hard to believe that the transcendent divine truly incarnates in the contingently visible immanent, as Shakespeare astutely anticipates in sonnet 17.74 If I could write the beauty of your eyes And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies— Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces’

Instead, he continues, beauty’s true rights will be termed a poet’s rage / And stretchèd meter of an ántique song. Even so, and countercultural though it might seem, Cusa’s full-­blown epistemic, ontological, and metaphysical attitude might be required of us as Shakespeare’s readers if we wish to enter fully into the world of his sonnets. We might need, in other words, to bracket our late-­ modern, stoic habits, and disciplines of detachment, to pre-­reflexively ‘engage’, and ally ourselves with the poet’s speech acts, and, by extension, with his receptive reader, before we can grasp the full import of the text.75 Hoff, The Analogical Turn, 16; cf. Cusa, De Sap, 20 and 35; and Hoff, Kontingenz, Berührung, Überschreitung, pp. 406ff. 72 See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007) for a discussion of the buffered self, especially pp. 37–42. 73 See Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece (London: Reaktion, 2001); and Hoff, The Analogical Turn, p. 129ff. 74 William Shakespeare, Sonnet 17, Q2. 75 See Hill, Infinity, Faith and Time, p. 126 for a related suggestion that just such an engagement is needed to appreciate fully The Winter’s Tale. The empirically inclined may be interested in the work of Don Kuiken and associates: Don Kuiken, ‘A Theory of Expressive Reading’, in eds. S. Zyngier, 71

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If we choose to follow this interpretative route, we are left reflecting on Cusa: Only the impossibility of accounting for the gift to be ‘one’ can account for our ability to discover in finite creatures an image of the divine oneness; only our ability to ‘wonder without why’ can open our eyes for the praiseworthiness of created faces; only the doxological gift to estimate the inestimable can touch on the inherent perfection of finite entities, such as their ‘oneness’, ‘goodness’, ‘actuality’, ‘beauty’, etc.76 Clearly, this doxological mode of knowledge and vision does not enable us to ‘conceive’ what it insinuates into the attentive mind. The poly-­unity of created ‘ones’ transcends the difference between identity and difference that would usually enable us to conjecture about the world with a certain level of clarity; but this transcendence is essential for the mode of knowledge that touches on the ‘end’ of our desire to know.77

With Cusa, we can only concur, and let our misty intuitions of transcendence take literary shape. Then, perplexed and astonished by the gift, as the familiar renders itself strange and the strange becomes familiar,78 we ‘open our eyes’ to the everyday world, ‘wonder without why’ at the beauty we see, and joyfully praise the ‘created faces’ of God.

M. Bortolussi, A. Chesnokova, and J. Auracher, Directions in Empirical Literary Studies (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008); Don Kuiken, Paul Campbell, and Paul Sopcák, ‘The Experiencing Questionnaire: Locating Exceptional Reading Moments’ Scientific Study of Literature 2.2 (2012), 243–272, doi 10.1075/ssol.2.2.04kui; Shelley Sikora, Don Kuiken, and David S. Miall, ‘Expressive Reading: A Phenomenological Study of Readers’ Experience of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 5.3, (2011), pp.  258–268. doi: 0.1037/ a0021999. We thank Dr Connie Svob for drawing our attention to this work. 76 In the last paragraphs of De ludo globi, Cusa compares the faces of created beings with coins that bear the face of a divine minter. According to Cusa these coins are designed to be assessed by a human ‘banker’ (nummularius). However, in contrast to the ‘casino capitalism’ of our time, the divinely appointed banker is called to assess real values in order to reveal the supreme glory of God, who is alone authorized to own the coins that bear his face (including the ‘coin’ of the banker’s mind). Hoff, The Analogical Turn, p. 253, Fn. 114. 77 Hoff, The Analogical Turn, p. 177f. 78 Genuflecting to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Derek Mahon’s eponymously titled poem begins with the line: The world is everything that is the case; the second stanza then astutely counters: The world, though, is also so much more – / Everything that is the case imaginatively. Derek Mahon, ‘Tractatus’, in The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. P. Muldoon (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 302.

7

‘The One Life within Us and Abroad’ Pathetic Fallacy Reconsidered Gavin Hopps

University of St Andrews, UK

[. . .] living things, and things inanimate, Do speak, at Heaven’s command, to eye and ear, And speak to social reason’s inner sense, With inarticulate language.1

John Ruskin believed in the ‘mediatorial ministries of nature’ and his writings are filled with delicate, vivid, and ingenious descriptions of how, in the words of the Psalmist, ‘the heavens declare the glory of God’.2 And yet he is also inadvertently responsible for a critical notion that has obscured the theological significance of literary depictions of nature. That critical notion is ‘pathetic fallacy’. In this chapter, I want to reconsider what might be signified by ‘pathetic fallacy’, to highlight the presuppositions built into the notion, to reveal the theological alternative that these presuppositions conceal – which is itself present in Ruskin’s work – and to show how this alternative theological model opens up fresh ways of reading Romantic literature.

Wordsworth, The Excursion, IV, 1204–1207. Except for The Prelude, all references to Wordsworth’s poetry are taken from The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, eds. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940–1949). Quotations from the former are taken from The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979). 2 According to Michael Wheeler, the central theme of Modern Painters is ‘mediation, between God and man, heaven and earth, through divine revelation, through natural phenomena, through human agency’; Wheeler, Ruskin’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 34. For Ruskin’s discussion of ‘the ordinance of the firmament’ and its ‘mediatorial ministries’, see Modern Painters, vol. IV, ‘The Firmament’. 1

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Ontological scandal At first glance, the issue might appear to be fairly straightforward. Where human traits are ascribed to inanimate or non-­human phenomena, we have – so handbooks of literary terms inform us – an instance of ‘pathetic fallacy’.3 And yet certain problems immediately arise as soon as we reflect on what this assumes. Are the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, nature and culture, the human, animal and machine, etc. so easy once and for all to draw? Contemporary developments would seem to suggest otherwise. Indeed, one of the most prominent features of postmodernity is the unsettling or blurring of precisely such boundaries – which are exposed as contingent cultural constructions – and a corollary repudiation of essentializing definitions. To illustrate this, one might point towards the burgeoning diversity of work on the ‘post-­human’ or the proliferation of interest in the ‘excluded third’, both of which undermine accepted dualisms and open up ‘zones of indistinction’ between subject and object, inside and outside, natural and artificial, etc.4 Salient examples of such work include: Donna Haraway’s feminist appropriation of the cyborg as a destabilizing hybrid or ‘boundary creature’5; Bernard Stiegler’s reflections on the prosthetic exteriorization of the human and ‘technics’ as ‘the pursuit of life by means other than life’6; the baroque heterogeneities of Deleuze and Guatarri’s ‘assemblages’ and ‘becomings’, which challenge traditional notions of subjectivity and being7; the

As Jeffrey Hurwit has noted, ‘the pathos has largely gone out of the pathetic fallacy’; ‘Palm Trees and the Pathetic Fallacy in Archaic Greek Poetry and Art’, The Classical Journal, 77.3 (1982), p.  193. Originally, when the term was coined by Ruskin in 1856, it referred to a ‘falseness in all our impressions of external things’ that was engendered by ‘violent feelings’; Modern Painters, vol. III (London: George Allen, 1906), p.  165. Today, however, ‘pathetic fallacy’ tends to be seen more loosely as a species of personification and is ‘held to operate when there is any projection of human traits into nature or its animate or inanimate parts [. . .] whatever the stimulus’; Hurwit, ‘Palm Trees and the Pathetic Fallacy’, p. 193. 4 The ‘excluded third’ and ‘zones of indistinction’ are concepts central to work of Michel Serres and Giorgio Agamben, respectively. See, for example, Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), and Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). 5 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 2. 6 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 17. 7 See, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Continuum, 1980). 3

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‘unhomely’ betweens of Derridean spectrality and ‘hauntology’, which muddle the categories of the living and the dead8; Silvia Benso’s Levinasian account of the ‘faciality’ of insentient things9; Mario Perniola’s writing on the ‘sex appeal’ of the inorganic, whose mode of being ‘between life and death’ is compared to the ‘postvital, posthuman, pre-­mortuary, and pre-­funerary’ condition of the vampire10; Agamben’s ruminations on ‘bare life’, the ‘anthropological machine’ or the ‘indefinite being’ of the ‘Muselmann’11; and the lyrical meditations of Michel Serres on Hermes figures, parasites and the ‘angelic’ flows of information that subvert the distinction between the animate and inanimate.12 In spite of their manifest differences, all of these projects are more generally engaged in ‘deconstructing essentialist and universalist claims that human beings and nature are ontological and epistemological givens, prior to all construction and representation.’13 On this evidence, what we seem to be witnessing within postmodernity is what Elaine Graham has evocatively referred to as a dissolution of the ‘ontological hygiene’ with which Western culture has delineated the boundaries between the human and non-­human, nature and culture, organism and machine, etc.14 There is another problem, though, with the assumptions underlying the notion of ‘pathetic fallacy’, which has less to do with the anti-­essentialism of postmodernity and more to do with traditional theological concerns. The nature of this problem may be indicated as follows. If the divine is in some sense mediated by creation – as Scripture teaches and Ruskin affirms – how do we represent this act of mediation? To put this another way, if the created order participates in and analogically communicates something of its Creator, it may be said to possess an ‘excessive’ dimension or mysterious depth

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 9 Silvia Benso, The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000). 10 Mario Perniola, The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic: Philosophies of Desire in the Modern World, trans. Massimo Verdicchio (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 76. 11 See, for instance, Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), passim; and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), p. 48. 12 See Serres, Atlas, trans. Steven Connor (Paris: Julliard, 1994) and Angels: A Modern Myth, trans. Francis Cowper (Paris: Flammarion, 1995). 13 Gregory Castle, The Literary Theory Handbook (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 270. 14 Elaine Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 11. 8

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that paradoxically is and is not its own.15 What kind of ontology does this entail? At stake here is an altogether different kind of subversion, which, without abolishing quotidian distinctions, sunders the self-­identity of phenomena. This sounds rather bizarre of course, but as the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins reveals, it describes an orthodox Christian vision: The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil [. . .]. (‘God’s Grandeur’, 1–2)16 Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces. (‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’, 12–14)

Created phenomena, without in any sense ceasing to be themselves, are shot through with an in-­dwelling otherness that animates their being (the world is ‘charged’ with the grandeur of God), whilst the divine is made manifest by something other than itself (Christ is ‘lovely in eyes not his’), which results in a paradoxically shared embodiment, such that nature is more than it is. This ‘sacramental’ vision of nature has been helpfully described by Jacques Maritain: Things are not only what they are [. . .]. They ceaselessly pass beyond themselves, and give more than they have, because from all sides they are permeated by the activating influx of the Prime Cause.17

How can we represent such a vision of nature, in which things ‘are not only what they are’ and ‘give more than they have’? The problem isn’t simply the self-­ transcending character of created phenomena; it is further complicated by the nature of that ‘more’. For, if that which is revealed by the created order is, of its nature, infinite and eternal or ‘in excess of ’ being, and if our only means of representation are finite, how can we depict this ‘excess’?

In his reading of Augustine’s De Doctrina, Rowan Williams speaks of the Incarnation as a hermeneutical event, which reveals that created phenomena are capable of opening out beyond themselves to mean or communicate more than they are (see Chapter 12, this volume). 16 All references to Hopkins’ poetry are taken from The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, eds. W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). 17 Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York: Meridian, 1953), p. 127. 15

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One possibility is illustrated by Augustine in Book X of Confessions, where he famously asks ‘what do I love when I love my God?’ and ponders the role of the created order in his relationship with the divine.18 The first answer he gives in the great defence of natural theology that ensues prepares the way for his personification of the landscape: Not material beauty or beauty of a temporal order; not the brilliance of earthly light, so welcome to our eyes; not the sweet melody of harmony and song; not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices; not manna or honey; not limbs such as the body delights to embrace. It is not these that I love when I love my God. And yet, when I love him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace [. . .].19

Augustine’s ‘Not . . . And yet’ posture towards the created order – which Michael Hanby has referred to as a ‘paradoxical double turn to God, at once both toward and away from the world’20 – steers a middle course between gnosticism and idolatry, though it also sets in motion an ontological flickering that is dramatized in the famous colloquy with nature: I put my question to the earth. It answered, ‘I am not God’, and all things on earth declared the same. I asked the sea and the chasms of the deep and the living things that creep in them, but they answered, ‘We are not your God. Seek what is above us.’ [. . .] I spoke to all the things that are about me, all that can be admitted by the door of the senses, and I said, ‘Since you are not my God, tell me about him.’ [. . .] Clear and loud they answered, ‘God is he who made us.’ I asked these questions simply by gazing at these things, and their beauty was all the answer they gave.21

This second answer clarifies Augustine’s ‘Not . . . And yet’ posture: what he is looking for is not any part or all of creation, and yet created phenomena can tell us about and direct us towards the God he seeks. His manner of staging the inquiry, however, is also itself a sort of answer; for in making use of ‘pathetic fallacy’ in exploring the relationship between creation and Creator, Augustine M. H. Abrams has compared Augustine’s colloquy with nature to Wordsworth’s moments of communion with ‘the speaking face of heaven and earth’, remarking that the latter is ‘a lineal descendent of the ancient Christian concept of the liber naturae, whose symbols bespeak the attributes and intentions of its author’; Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 88. 19 Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961), p. 211. 20 Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 170. 21 Augustine, Confessions, p. 212. 18

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presents us with a ‘more’ in nature that in some sense is and is not its own (since creation doesn’t actually speak, although its beauty is a kind of voice),22 which imitates the ‘sojourning’ ontology of the divine (as this transcends but is communicated by created being). It seems therefore from Augustine’s colloquy with nature – in which he reflects upon modes of mute articulacy (‘I asked these questions simply by gazing at these things, and their beauty was all the answer they gave’) – that ‘pathetic fallacy’ may be a peculiarly appropriate way of representing a ‘foreign luminosity’ within nature and the ontological flickering of mediated presence.23 What this brief introduction of theological concerns brings to light is an ‘ontological scandal’,24 which radically problematizes the conception of nature upon which the notion of ‘pathetic fallacy’ rests. In view of this ‘scandal’, a strictly realist mode of representation would amount to a falsification of nature. Instead, paradoxically, in order to depict things as they are from this standpoint, it would be necessary to present them as more than they are. Commenting on Maritain’s ‘ontological’ conception of poesis, Rowan Williams has relatedly observed: ‘the artist does set out to change the world, but – if we can manage the paradox – to change it into itself.’25 One might of course object that one doesn’t believe in such a theological vision; however, this only reinforces the underlying point that interpretations of ‘pathetic fallacy’ are to some extent dependent on our manifestly contestable beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality. More precisely, if we believe there is nothing more to reality than its material appearances, then any ascription of animacy or personhood to inorganic matter will be a form of fiction and could correctly be characterized as ‘pathetic fallacy’. As Ruskin says of Wendell Holmes’ ‘spendthrift crocus’: it is ‘very beautiful, and yet very untrue’.26 If, however, we are prepared to countenance the possibility that the created order participates in, is permeated by, and thus analogically reflects its transcendent Creator, then intimations of animacy or personhood will not necessarily be a See Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). 23 The phrase ‘foreign luminosity’ is borrowed from Michel de Certeau’s discussion of Hieronymous Bosch in The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 58. 24 Graham Ward, Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 81ff. 25 Williams, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 18. 26 Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III, p. 164. 22

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matter of fiction. Rather, they may be an attempt by way of non-­naturalistic figurations to depict an otherwise inexpressible reality. It would therefore be a mistake to label such figurations ‘pathetic fallacy’. The distinction I am attempting to tease out between different uses of animistic figurations may be clarified with reference to Jean-Luc Marion’s account of the icon and the idol. Very briefly, Marion sets out a distinction not between two objects or types of depiction, in terms of their substantive properties, but between two kinds of referentiality, in terms of their function or the comportment they elicit.27 On the one hand, the idol is constituted by a gaze that terminates in and is exhausted by its object, whilst on the other hand the icon orients the gaze beyond itself towards that which is unenvisageable. Along these lines, we might distinguish – in theory, if not in practice – between ‘immanent’ and ‘transcendent’ uses of ‘pathetic fallacy’ – that is, between animistic figurations that metaphorically refer to certain realities (or, in presenting a distorted vision, reflect a psychological truth) but do not aspire beyond the plane of finitude, and those that serve an ‘iconic’ function, in pointing catachrestically towards that which is ‘without being’. (Orthodox icons similarly employ alogical forms, non-­naturalistic figurations or what Leonid Ouspensky describes as ‘a certain pictorial “foolishness” ’28 as part of a referential strategy – even as they swerve away from things as they are – since what they present us with is a proleptic vision of a transfigured universe.) What, in short, I am suggesting, then, is that ‘pathetic fallacy’ – where it registers an intimation of presence or personhood that exceeds but is mediated by the natural order – is not necessarily either ‘pathetic’ or fallacious and may instead be a literary fashioning of ‘icons’.

Transcendental realism Ruskin does not refer to icons in his ruminations on figurative language, but he does – in a number of separate discussions – outline a positive variant of Marion, God without Being: Hors Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 28 Ouspensky, ‘The Meaning and Content of the Icon’, in Eastern Orthodox Theology: A Contemporary Reader, ed. Daniel B. Clendenin (Michigan: Baker Academic, 1995), p. 61. 27

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‘pathetic fallacy’ that is consonant with the foregoing ‘iconic’ model.29 We find embryonic speculations on the subject in a letter written to Walter Brown in 1847, almost ten years before the publication of Modern Painters III, in which the discussion of ‘pathetic fallacy’ appears. This early exploration of the idea is of particular relevance to our present discussion as it clearly shows the influence of Wordsworth’s poetry: [T]here was a time when the sight of a steep hill covered with pines, cutting against the sky, would have touched me with an emotion inexpressible, which, in the endeavour to communicate in its truth and intensity, I must have sought for all kinds of far-­off, wild, and dreamy images. Now I can look at such a slope with coolness, and observation of fact. I see that it slopes at 20° or 25°; I know the pines are spruce fir – ‘Pinus nigra’ – of such and such an age; that the rocks are slate of such and such a formation; the soil, thus, and thus; the day fine, the sky blue. All this I can at once communicate in so many words, and this is all which is necessarily seen. But it is not all the truth; there is something else to be seen there, which I cannot see but in a certain condition of mind, nor can I make any one else see it, but by putting him into that condition, and my endeavour in description would be, not to detail the facts of the scene, but by any means whatsoever to put my hearer’s mind into the same ferment as my mind.30

Here we have a ‘meta’ account of a vision of nature, in which, according to Ruskin: (i) the ‘facts’ do not completely coincide with ‘the truth’; (ii) the ‘something else’ that eludes the ‘facts’ isn’t always apparent and depends upon ‘a certain condition of mind’ that needs to be artificially induced in the audience; and (iii) the author is prepared to use ‘any means whatsoever’ in order aesthetically to elicit this condition – which seemingly includes ‘all kinds of far-­off, wild, and dreamy images’. Thus, it seems, not only are radical figurative distortions justified in representations of nature, they are in Ruskin’s view paradoxically necessary – as a matter of ontological fidelity – in order to depict things as they are. How representative of Ruskin’s views is this account?

It is also worth noting that Ruskin’s more general Romantic contrast between imagination and fancy converges towards Marion’s distinction between the enclosed immanence of the idol and the infinite orientation of the icon: ‘Fancy plays like a squirrel in its circular prison, and is happy: but Imagination is a pilgrim on the earth – and her home is in heaven.’ (Modern Painters, vol. II, p. 205.) 30 Ruskin, Letter to Rev. W. L. Brown, September 28, 1847, in The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1912), vol. XXXVI, p. 80. 29

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We find a more sustained and explicitly theological endorsement of this kind of argument in ‘The Moral of the Landscape’ in Modern Painters III, a few chapters after the more famous discussion of ‘pathetic fallacy’. Given the relative unfamiliarity of this subsequent account, it is worth quoting at some length: [W]e see in this [Scriptural view of nature] that the instinct which leads us thus to attribute life to the lowest forms of organic nature, does not necessarily spring from faithlessness, nor the deducing a moral out of them from an irregular and languid conscientiousness. In this, as in almost all things connected with moral discipline, the same results may follow from contrary causes; and as there are a good and evil contentment, a good and evil discontent, a good and evil care, fear, ambition, and so on, there are also good and evil forms of this sympathy with nature, and disposition to moralize over it. In general, active men, of strong sense and stern principle, do not care to see anything in a leaf, but vegetable tissue [. . .] hence there is a strong presumption, when first we perceive a tendency in any one to regard trees as living, and enunciate moral aphorisms over every pebble they stumble against, that such tendency proceeds from a morbid temperament [. . .]. But when the active life is nobly fulfilled, and the mind is then raised beyond it into clear and calm beholding of the world around us, the same tendency again manifests itself in the most sacred way: the simplest forms of nature are strangely animated by the sense of the Divine presence; the trees and flowers seem all, in a sort, children of God; and we ourselves, their fellows, made out of the same dust, and greater than they only in having a greater portion of the Divine power exerted on our frame, and all the common uses and palpably visible forms of things, become subordinate in our minds to their inner glory, to the mysterious voices in which they talk to us about God, and the changeful and typical aspects by which they witness to us of holy truth.31

This section of Modern Painters represents a crucial qualification of the earlier discussion of ‘pathetic fallacy’. For what is revealed here is that Ruskin recognizes two versions of the act of attributing life to nature, only one of which is deemed to be fallacious, whilst the other is seen as a ‘sacred’ or

Modern Painters, vol. III, p. 324.

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revelatory act that attempts to depict the ultimate nature of things.32 Manifestly, this ultimate reality cannot be represented without a figurative swerve, as the advertised stammering of ‘seem all, in a sort’ suggests. Yet what this second account of animistic figurations also makes clear is that, for Ruskin, nature is in fact ‘strangely animated’ by a divine presence – it’s just that custom has bedimmed its lustre. Thus, according to Ruskin, what tends uniformly to be identified as ‘pathetic fallacy’ may in some circumstances turn out to be a form of ‘apocalyptic impressionism’ or ‘transcendental realism’.33 Whilst the fame of Ruskin’s ‘pathetic fallacy’ has all but eclipsed this theological counter-­model – and encouraged a misreading of Romantic moments of vision in the process – this kind of dualistic interpretation, which seeks to separate out truthful and fallacious modes of representation, is characteristic of Ruskin’s thinking. Indeed, we find several instances of this tendency in Modern Painters III. In his discussion of ‘The False Ideal’, for example, Ruskin distinguishes on the one hand between an ‘abuse’ of the imagination, which is concerned with ‘the impossible’ or ‘untrue’ and creates ‘false images’ for ‘mere pleasure’, and on the other a ‘legitimate’ or ‘honest’ use of the imagination, which is conversely concerned with ‘giving full power and presence to the possible and true.’34 Contrary to what we might expect, though, this distinction does not correspond to the material and immaterial or actual and ideal, but is rather drawn within the realm of ‘things which cannot be perceived by the senses.’35 Accordingly, Ruskin includes under ‘true’ or ‘legitimate’ uses of the imagination: visions of things ‘belonging to our future state or invisibly surrounding us in this’; ‘the ministry of angels beside us’; the giving to ‘mental truths some visible type in allegory, simile, or personification, which shall more deeply enforce them’; and even the act of refreshing the mind

Jonathan Bate has also drawn attention to the way in which ‘The Moral of the Landscape’ qualifies Ruskin’s chapter on ‘pathetic fallacy’. ‘In this extraordinary analysis’, he writes, ‘Ruskin puts God back into nature, in defiance of the tendency of his age, which [. . .] he took to be the substitution of the material for the spiritual [. . .] and the relegation of God to “a dim, slightly credited animation in the natural object” that has more to do with the perceiving mind than any intrinsic truth’; Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 78. 33 The first phrase is used by Harold Bloom to describe Ruskin’s theory of revelatory poesis; Harold Bloom, The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin (New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. xx; the second is borrowed from Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, p. 21. 34 Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III, pp. 49–50. 35 Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III, p. 49. 32

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‘with the suggestive voices of natural things, permitting it to possess living companionship, instead of silent beauty, and create for itself fairies in the grass, and naiads in the wave’.36 It would seem therefore from this account, firstly, that there are for Ruskin more things in heaven and earth than are encompassed in his chapter on ‘pathetic fallacy’; and, secondly, that not all figurations of the immaterial – which may require the use of ‘allegory, simile, or personification’ – are considered by Ruskin to be fallacious. On the contrary, figurative representations of unembodied presences, things that invisibly surround us or the ‘suggestive voices of natural things’ may, for Ruskin, be ‘real visions of real things’.37 In between the chapters on ‘The False Ideal’ and ‘The Pathetic Fallacy’ there is another on the ‘grotesque’, in which we find a parallel distinction, already adumbrated in The Stones of Venice (1851–1853), between a ‘true’ or ‘noble’ and a ‘false’ grotesque. Once again, this concerns a distinction that is internal to the realm of the imagination – that is to say, it does not correspond to the difference between the factual and the fictional, but is drawn according to differences in the manner of imagining (Ruskin illustrates his point by distinguishing between ‘true’ and ‘false’ griffins) – which once again makes clear that for Ruskin not all ‘excessive’ figurations are fallacious. What this adds to the earlier discussion, though, is a sense that certain realities, by dint of their nature, can only be signified catachrestically, by means of ‘allegory, simile, or personification’. As Ruskin explains it, the ‘noble’ grotesque ‘arises out of the use or fancy of tangible signs to set forth an otherwise less expressible truth’.38 And for Ruskin the highest form of such truth is religious: [I]n all ages and among all nations, grotesque idealism has been the element through which the most appalling and eventful truth has been wisely conveyed, from the most sublime words of true Revelation, to the ‘ἀ λ λ᾽ ὅ τ᾽ ἂ ν ἡ μί ονος βασιλεὐ ς’, etc., of the oracles, and the more or less doubtful teaching of dreams; and so down to poetry. No element of imagination has a wider range, a more magnificent use, or so colossal a grasp of sacred truth.39

38 39 36 37

Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III, p. 50. Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III, p. 62. Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III, p. 101. Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III, p. 103.

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Ruskin’s unusual collocation ‘eventful truth’ points us towards another important feature of the grotesque – namely, its affective dimension: [T]he noblest [grotesques] convey truths which nothing else could convey; and not only so, but they convey them, in minor cases with a delightfulness, – in the higher instances with an awfulness, – which no mere utterance of the symbolised truth would have possessed, but which belongs to the effort of the mind to unweave the riddle, or to the sense it has of there being an infinite power and meaning in the thing seen, beyond all that is apparent therein, giving the highest sublimity even to the most trivial object so presented and so contemplated.40

This ‘effort of the mind to unweave the riddle’ is important for two interrelated reasons. Firstly, as Alison Milbank has observed, the grotesque ‘prevents any easy sense of possession by the viewer’ and thus, like the obverse levity of the icon, functions as a safeguard against idolatry.41 At the same time, however, its bewildering distention of the imagination may also serve a ‘deictic’ function, since the impossibility of the object’s representation paradoxically becomes part of the signifying process. More specifically, eliciting a distention of the imagination towards an object that exceeds its grasp brings its excessiveness into view, even as its ‘whatness’ remains out of sight. As Wordsworth memorably expresses it in The Prelude, with a chiasmus that mimics the involutions of vision: ‘the soul / Remembering how she felt, but what she felt / Remembering not’ (II, 335–336). In this way, grotesque art may communicate something of what it cannot depict. Clearly, we are in the territory here of the Romantic sublime42; however, Ruskin’s preference for the term ‘grotesque idealism’ reveals his religious inflection of the notion. As he explains in The Stones of Venice: [T]he fallen human soul, at its best, must be as a diminishing glass, and that a broken one, to the mighty truths of the universe round it; and the wider the

Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III, p. 103. Alison Milbank,‘A Fine Grotesque or a Pathetic Fallacy?: The Role of Objects in the Autobiographical Writing of Ruskin and Proust’ in Ruskin’s Struggle for Coherence, eds. Rachel Dickinson and Keith Hanley (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006), p. 92. 42 The foregoing construal of the grotesque shadows Kant’s analytic of the sublime, which he summarily defines as ‘an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to think the unattainability of nature regarded as a presentation of Ideas’; Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Publishing, 1951), p. 134. 40 41

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scope of its glance, and the vaster the truths into which it obtains an insight, the more fantastic their distortion is likely to be, as the winds and vapors trouble the field of the telescope most when it reaches farthest.43

In Ruskin’s view, not only does the communication of certain truths necessarily require a form of accommodation – on account of our fallen human capacities44 – the accommodation involved is so extreme that the communication is a grotesque distortion of these truths. What can we conclude, then, from this foray into Ruskin’s literary criticism? Whilst Ruskin is well known for a critical notion that associates visions of an immanent ‘excess’ in nature with emotional derangement and false perception, what we find if we draw his various discussions of the subject together are three quite distinct things: (i) a tracing of historical variations in literary representations of ‘excessive’ life in nature, which he relates to wider historical changes in religious belief 45; (ii) an account of – and the coining of a critical term for – fallacious perceptions of life in nature, which may be a ‘wilful fancy’ involving ‘no real expectation that it will be believed’ or else ‘a fallacy caused by an excited state of feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational’46; and (iii) a parallel complementary account of intimations of immanent ‘excess’, which are by contrast held to be truthful and are justified in theological terms. Thus, if we read the account of ‘pathetic fallacy’ in the context of Ruskin’s other writings on animated visions of nature it becomes clear, as Harold Bloom has observed, that the theory has been seriously misinterpreted; for what is known as ‘pathetic fallacy’ is not at all Ruskin’s only Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 2 (London: George Allen, 1900), pp. 198–199. Ruskin goes on to distinguish explicitly between the sublime and the grotesque: ‘[S]o far as the truth is seen by the imagination in its wholeness and quietness, the vision is sublime; but so far as it is narrowed and broken by the inconsistencies of the human capacity, it becomes grotesque; and it would seem to be rare that any very exalted truth should be impressed on the imagination without some grotesqueness in its aspect, proportioned to the degree of diminution of breadth in the grasp which is given of it’ (p. 199). 44 Ruskin emphatically affirms this point in Modern Painters II: ‘Of no other sources than these visible can we, by any effort in our present condition of existence, conceive. For what revelations have been made to humanity inspired, or caught up to heaven of things to the heavenly region belonging, have been either by unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter, or else by their very nature incommunicable, except in types and shadows’ (p. 142). 45 Speaking of man’s ‘instinctive sense [. . .] of the Divine Presence’, he observes: ‘In the Greek it created [. . .] the faithfully believed gods of the elements; in Dante and the medievals, it formed the faithfully believed angelic presence: in the modern, it creates no perfect form, does not apprehend distinctly any Divine being or operation; but only a dim, slightly credited animation in the natural object, accompanied with great interest and affection for it’; Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III, p. 285. 46 Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III, p. 164. 43

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view of intimations of life in nature. Instead, it is ‘a searching criticism of Romanticism from within, for the sake of saving the Romantic program of humanizing nature from extinction through excessive self-­indulgence’.47 In other words, it is a corrective account, which describes the misuse of a legitimate or even necessary way of representing a sense that things in nature ‘are not only what they are’ and ‘give more than they have’.

A universe tingling with anthropomorphic life48 Thus far, we have seen that what is conventionally known as ‘pathetic fallacy’ may in some cases turn out to be a catachrestic strategy or fashioning of ‘icons’ that attempts to convey truths that are otherwise inexpressible. It has also been shown that this theological counter-­model – in which poesis and mimesis coincide – is consonant with Ruskin’s own writings on the subject. In this final section I want to consider, in a summary fashion, what difference this alternative theological model makes to a reading of Romantic writing. Due to constraints of space, I shall focus in detail on a single example – ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ by Wordsworth (1798) – though I shall also refer to a number of well-­known passages in The Prelude (completed in thirteen books in 1805), in which the poet reflects on his intimations of the ‘one life’. Here is the former poem in its entirety. I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind. To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.

Harold Bloom, The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin, p. xxv. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama, eds. Bonamy Dobree, Norman Davis, and F. P. Wilson, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 4.

47 48

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Through primrose tufts, in that green bower, The periwinkle trailed its wreaths; And ’tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes. The birds around me hopped and played, Their thoughts I cannot measure: – But the least motion which they made, It seemed a thrill of pleasure. The budding twigs spread out their fan, To catch the breezy air; And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there. If this belief from heaven be sent, If such be Nature’s holy plan, Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man?

Exhibited in this short poem are a number of Wordsworth’s central concerns and recurrent features of his poetic practice. The poem is situated in – or constructs, if you like – a pastoral space and describes a moment of ‘wise passiveness’,49 whilst the title, which foregrounds the act of composition, tacitly links the creativity of the poet with a corresponding awakening of life in nature.50 This sense of connection is explicitly affirmed in stanza 2 – ‘To her fair works did Nature link / The human soul that through me ran’ – which subtly heightens the sense of agency in dissociating Nature from ‘her works’ (behind which is the higher agency of ‘heaven’, which is kept distinct from though it appears to sponsor the poet’s animistic vision). This vital connection is reinforced by the unusual phrasing ‘that through me ran’, which strikingly re-­conceives the soul as something dynamic and pervasively involved in sensuous experience, in a manner that mirrors the life he sees in

Wordsworth, ‘Expostulation and Reply’ (1798), 24. Cf. The Prelude, I, 33–45.

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nature (though the phrase also dilates the soul’s capacity, as the use of ‘far’ in the ‘Boy of Winander’ passage attributes ‘infinities’ to the human heart).51 Following this summary statement of his ‘creed’, the poet offers us a vision of nature, which conspicuously involves what is typically seen as ‘pathetic fallacy’: ‘And ’tis my faith that every flower / Enjoys the air it breathes’; ‘It seemed a thrill of pleasure’; ‘And I must think, do all I can, / That there was pleasure there’. How should we read this attribution of pleasure and enjoyment to non-­ human nature? On the face of it, there would seem to be two options available: either it is a literal statement of belief – that flowers can ‘breathe’ and non-­human phenomena experience pleasure52 – or else it is fancy, which is to say, a metaphorical description that is ‘very beautiful and yet very untrue’.53 What is opened up by the ‘iconic’ model, however, is a third way between these literal and metaphorical approaches, according to which the artist attempts to depict things ‘as they are’ paradoxically by means of figurative distortion. How does this affect our reading of the poem? An ‘iconic’ interpretation might begin with the poem’s central intuition of something ‘excessive’ in nature. To speak of things in this abstract manner may appear to remove us from the poet’s claims, which describe a very particular feeling – namely, joy or pleasure. But the continuity of this feeling across phenomena – and even ontological categories – and its eventual loosening into quasi-­independence (‘there was pleasure there’) suggests that what we are presented with in these lines is something more than a series of discrete experiences. Wordsworth’s favoured name for this ‘something more’ is of course the ‘one life’: ‘in all things / I saw one life, and felt that it was joy’; ‘the pulse of being everywhere was felt, / [. . .] One galaxy of life

I am alluding to De Quincey’s famous commentary on Wordsworth’s lines; De Quincey, Articles from Tait’s Magazine and Blackwood’s Magazine, 1838–41, ed. Julian North (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), p. 75. 52 This is the direction a certain amount of criticism has taken. See, for example, Richard E. Matlak, who argues that the ‘romantic biology’ of Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia ‘underlies the faith of Wordsworth’s “doctrinal poems” ’, which include ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’; Matlak, The Poetry of Relationship: The Wordsworths and Coleridge, 1797–1800 (Basingstoke, UK: MacMillan, 1997), p. 114. 53 Both the foregrounded religious casting of the poem (‘soul’, ‘heaven’, ‘holy plan’) and the syntax of syllogistic reasoning (if . . . then) would seem to argue against this reading and suggest that something more is at stake. 51

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and joy’.54 We shall return to the ‘one life’ and its connection to joy shortly; however, there is another feature of ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ that supports an ‘iconic’ reading of its anthropomorphic gestures – that is, the advertised hesitancy of its affirmations: ‘And ’tis my faith’; ‘It seemed’; ‘And I must think, do all I can’. This is typical of Wordsworth, who tends to be most circumspect when he is being most bold (consider, for example, the rhizomic proliferation of modifying clauses that impede even as they prepare the way for the visionary assertion ‘we see into the life of things’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’). Now, this hesitancy can manifestly be interpreted in various ways. It might, for instance, be read as an indication of doubt, especially in view of the avoidance of copula certitude in ‘seems’. Yet the poet’s circumspection appears to abide alongside rather than exist at the expense of his countervailing boldness. (In Coleridge’s ‘one life’ speculation in ‘The Eolian Harp’ by contrast – ‘O! the one Life, within us and abroad, / Which meets all Motion, and becomes its soul [. . .] Methinks, it should have been impossible / Not to love all things in a world so fill’d’55 – the intuition is retroactively cordoned off as a hypothesis and pushed out of being by its subjunctive positing.) Alternatively, the advertised hesitancy of Wordsworth’s claims might be a way of signalling the simultaneous operation of ‘two consciousnesses’56 – that is, a quotidian awareness of the material realm and a visionary sense that it somehow exceeds itself or ‘gives more than it has’. We can see this kind of ‘amphibious awareness’ more clearly in the poem ‘To My Sister’ (1798): There is a blessing in the air, Which seems a sense of joy to yield To the bare trees, and mountains bare, And grass in the green field. (5–8)

The Prelude, II, 429–430; VIII, 626–630. The connection between the ‘one life’ and joy has been helpfully elucidated by Adam Potkay in The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For a contextualizing discussion of the Romantics’ emphasis on the immanence of the divine and its corollary ‘animated universe’ – which is of course a counter-­reaction to the eighteenth-­century deistic emphasis on the transcendence of God, the corollary of which is ‘a universe of death’ – see H. W. Piper, The Active Universe: Pantheism and the Concept of Imagination in the English Romantic Poets (London: Athlone Press, 1962). The changes in Wordsworth’s attitude towards the ‘one life’ have been traced in detail by Jonathan Wordsworth in William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 55 Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 18, n. 6. 56 The Prelude, II, 32. 54

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Here, in a parallel moment of vision, the natural phenomena are on the one hand emphatically described as ‘bare’, whilst on the other they appear to possess or participate in a circumambient sense of joy. Now although from a secular perspective this might seem to be untenably attempting to eat one’s cake and have it, from a theological point of view it is sanely holding onto both sides of a paradox – that the created order may be more than it is – both of which are held to be true. (It will be recalled that Ruskin’s theological variant of ‘pathetic fallacy’ involves a similar double awareness of the ‘common uses’ or ‘forms of things’ and ‘the mysterious voices in which they talk to us about God’.) There is, however, a further possibility, for not all hesitancy reflects a problem of perception. Instead, the poet’s recourse to ‘seems’ might betoken a problem of language; that is to say, it may be an ‘apophatic’ stammer, which advertises the ‘as it were’ character of his description. It will be helpful to ponder this a little further. In his illuminating discussion of ‘joy in the oneness of things’, Adam Potkay connects Wordsworth’s sense of ‘one life’ in The Prelude – and in particular his description of the ‘rapture of the hallelujah sent / From all that breathes and is’ – to the following lines from the book of Revelation: ‘I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying: Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.’57 In these lines, the use of the apophatic marker ‘as it were’58 would seem not to reflect a shortfall of apprehension (indeed, the similitic exuberance of the description suggests on the contrary an excess of givenness) but rather the inadequacy of the means available for expressing it. In other words, the stammering of ‘seems’ or ‘as it were’ may be seen as the hallmark of visionary speech and the corollary of the icon’s advertised evasions of naturalistic figurations. (An alternative strategy employed by Wordsworth for exhibiting the inadequacies of language in the face of the ineffable – as part of a ‘performative’ attempt to signify the transcendent – is the kind of predicative intoxication we find in his apocalyptic vision after crossing the Alps,59 in which Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2012), p. 83. This rendering of the Greek ὡς (hós) is translated as ‘what seemed to be’ in the English Standard Version and ‘something like’ in the New American Standard Bible. Michael Sells speaks of Plotinus’ use of the term hoion (as it were) as an ‘apophatic marker’; Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 16. 59 The Prelude, VI, 556–572. 57 58

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superfluity appears to serve an ‘aniconic’ purpose; for in generating an overabundance of names, the poet indicates the inadequacy of any single name, and thus gestures towards that which is beyond all names.) Either way, the poet’s wounding of his own articulacy seems to exemplify the principle underlying Ruskin’s theory of the ‘grotesque’ – namely, that certain truths must suffer distortion if they are to be represented at all.60 What this ‘iconic’ model brings into view, then, is a way out of the false dichotomy between literal truth and poetic fancy that is inscribed into the notion of ‘pathetic fallacy’. More precisely, it highlights a third alternative or ‘excluded middle’ in which truth and fiction are intertwined such that the poet ‘half-­creates’ what he senses to be there, and figurative language serves a revelatory function. John Milbank has lucidly summed up the paradoxical character of such theological poesis: ‘Since God is not an object in the world, he cannot be available to us before our response to him, but in this response – our work, our gift, our art, our hymn – he is already present.’61 In the case of ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ it might therefore be argued that the poet’s animistic envisioning of nature is neither a mere poetic fancy nor a literal statement of belief, but rather an ‘iconic’ or ‘grotesque’ attempt to represent a sense of ‘the one life within us and abroad’.62 Why does this matter? One of the ways in which recent criticism has sought to discredit the transcendent aspirations of Romantic writing is by associating figurative language with deception and denying it any foothold in reality. Such extremism may sound improbable, but it is precisely what Ross Woodman argues in his reading of The Prelude: ‘Every exertion of the imagination, no matter how slight, that moves the mind away from a “faithful copy” in the direction of the figurative is, in some sense, an act of deception.’63 According to Woodman, on the basis of this premise – which leads him to speak of ‘the nihilism that constitutes metaphor’ – Wordsworth’s descriptions of ‘celestial light’ and a

Earlier on in Book II of The Prelude, Wordsworth speaks of aniconic intimations ‘by form / Or image unprofaned’ (325–326). 61 John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 58. 62 In his illuminating study of Wordsworth’s ‘poetic thinking’, Simon Jarvis teases out a ‘laudable’ counterpart to the pejorative bestowal of moral meaning that is ‘pathetic fallacy’; Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophical Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 46. 63 Woodman, ‘Wordsworth’s Crazed Bedouin: The Prelude and the Fate of Madness’, Studies in Romanticism, 27.1 (1988), pp. 3–29. 60

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‘visionary gleam’ are metaphorical and therefore a ‘spell’, ‘conjuration’ or ‘delusion’.64 Whilst a detailed engagement with Woodman’s views is obviously beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth pointing out that this absolutist opposition between the literal (speaking of things ‘as they are’) and the figurative (defined as ‘a perfect cheat’), which structures the whole of Woodman’s reading, is problematical for a variety of reasons. One might, for example, query the ‘God trick’ involved in presuming to speak from a perspective, outside of interpretation, from where it is possible to determine conclusively what’s real, what’s delusion and whether or not there is anything ‘beyond the walls of the world’ to which our metaphors correspond. One might also question the opposition itself, which is presented as self-­evident but sits uncomfortably with his invocation of Derrida, who vigorously contested this dichotomous conception and argued to the contrary that metaphoricity is a condition of language that goes all the way down.65 One might furthermore object to the equation of figurative language with deception, which – even leaving the religious aside – ignores huge swathes of everyday experience, such as the connoisseur’s speech about wine, in which figurative language is the most accurate way of describing a thing.66 The iconic alternative outlined in this chapter challenges this ‘nihilistic’ foreclosure of reference, which in limiting the reach of figurative language attempts to snuff out its religious significance. More positively, in upholding the ability of figural language to orient us towards what it cannot grasp, this model underwrites a theological reading of ‘pathetic fallacy’. This is not to imply that all instances of animistic imagining will be of theological significance (though there may be an inchoate stirring of wonder or sense of a ‘foreign luminosity’ in nature signalled in ‘conventional’ uses of the figure). What it does mean, however, is that in some cases ‘pathetic fallacy’ may depict intimations of a ‘more’ in nature – a fugitive ‘excess’ that irradiates the created order and calls to us through the being of what it is not – which may be dimly apprehended or lightly entertained but which betokens the operation of a

Woodman, ‘Wordsworth’s Crazed Bedouin’, pp. 115–117. See Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 66 For an extended discussion of how figurative language may be reality depicting, even when it is approximate and subject to revision, see Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 64 65

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religious awareness. Alison Milbank has written instructively of the grotesque: ‘The imagination and nature herself are indeed mirrors of the Divine, but dark and even shattered; and hence the grotesque is the appropriate form to bear this true but broken vision.’67 One might similarly say of ‘pathetic fallacy’ in reverse that such figurations are often not explicitly religious, though it is precisely on account of this that they are appropriate, since what I am suggesting they represent is an incipient, shadowy or anonymous opening of the supernatural in nature. The conventional framework for making sense of this experience is ‘natural theology’. Before concluding, it may be useful to draw a few broad distinctions. In the course of this chapter, I have connected the views of Ruskin, Augustine, and Wordsworth in relation to the envisaging of an ontological surplus in nature. Whilst it is part of my argument that the former espouses an alternative religious interpretation as well, for Ruskin – in his most well-­known account – this ‘surplus’ is a fictional imposition or projection that transpires in a moment of passion when the beholder is ‘borne-­away, or over-­clouded, or over-­dazzled by emotion’.68 Whereas for Augustine, by contrast, the ‘becoming-­ articulate’ of nature is a moment of truth and a receiving in the elevated quietness of contemplation of what nature was always already declaring – namely, the glory of God. (The fact that nature speaks with hypotactic circumspection (‘not . . . and yet’) underlines the sense that, rather than an interlude of passionate confusion, what Augustine is concerned with is a moment of heightened lucidity.) Wordsworth appears to hover somewhere in between these positions. This is because his vision of nature as a reciprocally speaking subject is presented as both given and received, as a matter of fiction as well as truth, and as something that points beyond itself but that leaves the nature of that ‘beyond’ opaque. The problem, I am suggesting, with the notion of ‘pathetic fallacy’ is that it elides or occludes the distinctions between these three positions. This is especially unhelpful in Wordsworth’s case, as he is anxious to show us that he is engaged in an open and on-­going process of trying to work out

Alison Milbank, ‘A Fine Grotesque or a Pathetic Fallacy?’, p. 93. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III, p. 167.

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what he thinks about these possibilities, and his poetry is a staging of this working out. In Book II of The Prelude, for example, he writes:       I mean to speak Of that interminable building rear’d By observation of affinities In objects where no brotherhood exists To common minds. My seventeenth year was come And, whether from this habit, rooted now So deeply in my mind, or from excess Of the great social principle of life, Coercing all things into sympathy, To unorganic natures I transferr’d My own enjoyments, or, the power of truth Coming in revelation, I convers’d With things that really are, I, at this time Saw blessings spread around me like a sea. Thus did my days pass on, and now at length From Nature and her overflowing soul I had receiv’d so much that all my thoughts Were steep’d in feeling; I was only then Contented when with bliss ineffable I felt the sentiment of Being spread O’er all that moves, and all that seemeth still, O’er all, that, lost beyond the reach of thought And human knowledge, to the human eye Invisible, yet liveth to the heart, O’er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings, Or beats the gladsome air, o’er all that glides Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not If such my transports were; for in all things I saw one life, and felt that it was joy. (401–430)

Wordsworth advertises the unforeclosed agnosticism of his ruminations in the ‘or’s that stipple the first part of this passage: the ecstatic intuition of the ‘one life’ is either a projection (‘I transferr’d / My enjoyments’) or it is a moment of privileged vision, ascribed to the exceptional mind of the beholder (the ‘observation of affinities / In objects where no brotherhood exists / To common

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minds’) or else it is ‘revealed’, with the implication – left unclear by the whenceless ‘coming’ – that a supernatural third-­party is involved.69 The lines, however, have a ‘dramatic’ quality, since it is in their unfolding that they show us the poet in the act of thinking.70 Christopher Ricks has identified a beautifully poignant use of enjambment earlier on in Book II that helps to illustrate this point:     the moon to me was dear; For I could dream away my purposes, Standing to gaze upon her while she hung Midway between the hills, as if she knew No other region, but belonged to thee, Yea, appertained by a peculiar right To thee and thy grey huts, thou one dear Vale! (191–197)

As a result of the line-­break after ‘knew’, it is, as Ricks astutely observes, ‘with a gentle shock of mild surprise [that we find] knew was not as in savoir but as in connaître. Upon the brink of the real, there trembled our imagining that the moon knew; the attribution of the pathetic fallacy has seldom been made with such pathos, and the rescinding of the fallacy has seldom been made with such gentleness.’71 Later on in The Prelude, though, in the lines I have quoted, we find a reversal of this miniature elegiac drama:       I mean to speak Of that interminable building rear’d By observation of affinities In objects where no brotherhood exists To common minds.

In this case, the lines appear to begin with a sense of pathos that ‘no brotherhood exists’. And yet, once again we discover ‘with a gentle shock of mild surprise’ that it is only to ‘common minds’ that it doesn’t exist, and that what appeared

The poet similarly holds open a range of options in Book III of The Prelude: ‘To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower, / Even the loose stones that cover the high-­way, I gave a moral life; I saw them feel, / Or linked them to some feeling’ (130–133). 70 For a general discussion of this phenomenon, see Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London: Routledge, 1955). 71 Ricks, ‘Wordsworth: “A Pure Organic Pleasure from the Lines’, in Essays in Criticism, vol. XXI (1971), p. 27. 69

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to have been wistfully rescinded is in fact restored the other side of the line-­ break. Indeed, rather than eliciting a momentary enchantment, the enjambment here is like a passing shadow, which leaves the vision of kinship intact. It is the sense of separation that turns out to be a fallacy. This ‘dramatic’ dimension to Wordsworth’s verse doesn’t just reinforce what is explicitly said. Instead, the formal patterning of the poem’s syntax has an ‘eventfulness’ of its own, which is involved in the evocation of its speaker’s interiority; for in staging this activity or evolution of thought – in the readerly temporality of the lines’ unfolding – the poet is able to signal he is aware that this might be a projection, and yet, nonetheless, in spite of this awareness, is sufficiently convinced to venture the assertion. We should register, finally, two further complications of the poet’s ‘giving’ or creative perception. In the first place, we should note that his agnosticism with respect to causality is folded into a superordinate affirmative assertion, which suggests – whatever his doubts about the whence – there is no doubt that he receives something from nature. In the second place, whilst the poet makes clear that the act of perception involves some sort of ‘giving’ or creative element (a ‘plastic power’, a ‘forming hand’, and an ‘auxiliar light’),72 this ‘giving’ is performed by something that comes from but is curiously not co-­extensive with the subject. It is, the poet consistently maintains, a ‘spirit of its own’ and a power that ‘abode’ with him.73 Now although Wordsworth, characteristically, is not inclined to be very precise in naming this ‘something’, he appears – in a manner that is consonant with a Christian conception of the self – to conceive of the subject as self-­transcending or containing within itself an otherness that exceeds it.74 In a Lacanian idiom, we might say there is something in it more than itself; or as Wordsworth writes later on in The Prelude: ‘Our destiny, our nature, and our home / Is with infinitude’ (VI, 538–539). What this means in terms of our general discussion is firstly that the poet’s ‘giving’ is, itself, in some sense received, since it is performed by that which is part of and yet other than the self (the lineaments of this paradoxical subjectivity are exhibited in the

II, 381; 382; 387. II, 382; 384. See also lines 328–329, in which he speaks of the ‘visionary power’ that came strengthened with ‘a superadded soul, / A virtue not its own’. 74 Significantly, the poet repeatedly refers to his ‘soul’ in the preceding lines (II, 233; 244–245; 337; 351 and 371–372). 72 73

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closing lines of the verse paragraph, in which the poet seems to feel acted upon from without by that which he has himself engendered: ‘Hence by obeisance, my devotion hence, / And hence my transport’); and secondly that his ‘giving’ isn’t a decorative or deceptive fancy but is instead an ‘iconic’ fashioning of a ‘foreign luminosity’ that suffuses creation but which exceeds all determinate representations. Where, then, does this leave us, if we gather all of these complications together? For Wordsworth, it seems, the moment of vision is a creative act. However, such creativity is not – pace Woodman – set over against the truth; it is, rather, as Flannery O’Connor describes it, a distortion that reveals.75 The poet can affirm this, on the one hand, because the created order is of its nature self-­ giving or ‘ecstatic’, which he posits as a reality irrespective of what he creatively bestows – with the paradoxical proviso that such ‘giving’ is needed to reveal what’s there; and, on the other hand, because the poet’s giving turns out to involve a form of receiving – namely, the gift of being more than we are, by virtue of the infinite origin and destiny inscribed at the very heart of our being. Which is, I suppose, another way of saying there is ‘one life within us and abroad’.

‘Novelist and Believer’, in Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), p. 162.

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Love Among the Ruins Hermeneutics of Theology and Literature in the University after the Twentieth Century Jeffrey Keuss

Seattle Pacific University, WA, USA

Consider the following two citations by Paul Ricœur in regard to the task of hermeneutics at the end of the twentieth century: Modern hermeneutics [. . .] remains in the line of critical thought. [. . .] [We] are in every way children of criticism, and we seek to go beyond criticism by means of a criticism that is no longer reductive, but restorative.1 A general hermeneutic therefore requires that the interpreter rise above the particular applications and discern the operations that are common to the two great branches of hermeneutic. In order to do that, however, it is necessary to rise above, not only the particularity of texts, but also the particularity of the rules and recipes into which the art of understanding is dispersed.2

This chapter argues that we need the interpretative tools found in an honest hermeneutics, and that this exists within the interdisciplinary interplay of the liberal arts of the modern university. Exemplified within the twentiethand twenty-­first-century priority placed on the interpretation of texts and personhood in literature and theology, the call to a return of what I am terming authentic or honest hermeneutics is needed more than ever. Honest hermeneutics does not duck the larger systematic and ontological issues of Paul Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 350. 2 Paul Ricœur, ‘The Task of Hermeneutic’, in Paul Ricœur, Hermeneutic and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 43–62, especially p. 45. 1

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selfhood and reason in the search to better inform an adequate account of moral action and autonomy. These ontological issues are considered in the work of Paul Ricœur and his call for a universal, evaluative conception of the subject’s identity as self-­same (ipse), i.e., in terms of selfhood and the responsibility for the other that is both transcendent as well as found in the face of those we find as our neighbour. As a restorative rather than deconstructive thinker, Ricœur is poised to look beyond the ruins of late-­ twentieth-century disciplinary differentiation and post-­structuralist rhetoric by defining ipse-identity in relation to sameness (idem), as well as otherness (alterity). The method of truth appropriate to his account of selfhood is a form of ‘belief in’ or credence, which testifies to the very structure of being a self, both agent and patient, active and passive, same and other.3 As will be argued in the close of the chapter, after suspicion that comes from honest appraisal and scrutiny there is supposed to be a moment of retrieval in all academic disciplines seeking truth, which Ricœur originally described as a ‘second naiveté in and through criticism. In short, it is by interpreting that we can hear again.’4 This call of an authentic or honest interpretation of texts and experience of personhood is a repose of listening and response that enables a deep and abiding hermeneutic that will ultimately allow for a bridge betwixt and between academic disciplines and a return to deep inquiry freed from suspicion, needs for certainty and closure of discourse that haunts much of the work of the modern university in our time. To begin, the question of how the form, content, and import of writing itself makes claims of ‘ultimate concern’5 regarding the nature of the person of Jesus Christ has continued to challenge interpretive strategies in both literature and theology for centuries. As I explore in The Poetics of Jesus: The Search for Christ Through Writing in the Nineteenth Century,6 one needs only look to the drafting of the ecumenical creeds in the early centuries of Christianity to see how

For discussion of his method of ‘attestation’, see Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 21–23, 298–302; and The Just, trans. David Pellauer, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 24. 4 Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, p. 351. 5 To recollect Paul Tillich’s use of the phrase in reference to that which is of highest good and meaning. 6 Jeff Keuss, The Poetics of Jesus: The Search for Christ Through Writing in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002). 3

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challenging hermeneutics is, especially when the question of ultimate being is circumscribed into the limits of text. On the occasion of the Council of Nicaea in CE 325, for example, the dispute within the Church regarding questions brought forward by the Arians as to the very form and definition of Christ’s relation to God gave rise to the need for a particular form of writing – a poetics – which could both convey the depth and height of the Incarnate who is fully God and fully human. As the Arians argued in favour of a radical doctrine of monotheism, they in turn advocated a denial of Christ as being one with God, asserting him to be created and therefore not of the same substance as God. The Nicene Creed was drafted in response to this assertion. The actual poetics of the creed is presented in a manner to assert the orthodox stance of Christ as one who is only-­begotten Son of God; Begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God; Begotten, not made; Being of one substance with the Father; By whom all things were made7

Interestingly, it also presents a condemnation of those who did not ‘fit’ Christ into this shape. This is marked in the original form of the Nicene Creed, which concludes with a portion originally added as an anathema against the Arians: ‘But to those who say: “There is a time when He was not”; and “He was not before he was made”; and “He was made out of nothing,” or “He is of another substance or essence,” or “The Son of God is created,” or “changeable or alterable” – they are condemned by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.’8 Where a creed is to be an assertion of faith (the term coming from the Latin credo, ‘I believe’) this original rendering stands as a statement against; ‘I don’t believe’ as much as a statement for certain beliefs. The poetics thereby make claims that overturn the very definition of the genre itself (i.e., what constitutes credo) through its construction as a work and the claims it makes on how it is to be read. In this way, the poetics of the creed (and of much literature as I will

Nicene Creed (circa CE 325), in Readings in Christian Thought, ed., Hugh T. Kerr, 2nd edn (Nashville, TN: Abington Press, 1993), p. 76. Nicene Creed, Readings in Christian Thought, p. 76.

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argue throughout this chapter) makes claims that at times are more profound than the actual content or genre the work supposedly represents. This elevation of poetics is exemplified regarding the further history of the ecumenical creeds in the Council of Chalcedon in CE 451, where the re-­writing of the Nicene Creed as a response to such heresies as Arianism as well as Apollinarianism (the denial of the full humanity of Christ), Nestorianism (the denial of the union of the two natures in Christ), and Eutycheanism (which sought to deny the distinction of the two natures) rendered what is commonly known as the Symbol of Chalcedon. The very form and limits within which the Church can work out the orthodox doctrine of the person of Christ is given in its poetics. As a symbol, it operates as a frame within which all subsequent statements made regarding Christ can be seen – that which falls outside the scope of its language and its intent is thereby outside the limits of expression regarding the person of Christ. Due to the density of its form, the statement forged at Chalcedon is truly more ‘symbol’ than credo. Throughout the history of the Church, the Symbol of Chalcedon has ‘never had a wide liturgical or catechetical use because of the complexity of language and intricacy of definition’.9 This ‘complexity of language’ moves the Symbol of Chalcedon outside the orality of language and into a realm of form that seeks to judge subsequent language forms and uses, but does not itself participate in the common life of language in its fullest capacity.10 Thus is the danger and opportunity of writing, as while it is capable of releasing meaning it can also bind and conceal truth. Deep into the narrative of George Eliot’s masterwork Middlemarch, the author stands back from the plotline and muses on the nature of art (as she was oft to do) and in particular what it means to put things into words: Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? If it happens to have been cut in stone, though it lie face down-­most for ages on a forsaken beach, or ‘rest

Nicene Creed, Readings in Christian Thought, p. 75. Walter Ong makes the distinction in the way in which the very content of information shifts its meaning as it inhabits a different medium, since different senses are utilized to make ‘sense’ of the information received. What Ong terms as a ‘sensorium’ is the constructed form that communication takes in order to gain access to the subject via given senses. As he notes, the very potency of religion and the message it is trying to convey becomes lost as it moves into a purely literary form since it then becomes delimited by the manifold meanings of language. See Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), and Robert Detweiler and David Jasper, eds., Religion and Literature (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2000), pp. 36–38.

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quietly under the drums and tramplings of many conquests,’ it may end by letting us into the secret of usurpations and other scandals gossiped about long empires ago: – this world being apparently a huge whispering-­gallery. Such conditions are often minutely represented in our petty lifetimes. As the stone which has been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious little links of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labours it may at last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or stop-­gap may at last be laid open under one pair of eyes which have knowledge enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe.11

This ‘opening of a catastrophe’ was something of the concern surrounding the rise of writing within the early Church as a necessary part of the apostolic witness of the faith moving into the proceeding generations. Harry Y. Gamble in his important text Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts makes clear that, with the abandonment of Christianity’s original eschatological orientation, there was a clear shift toward language and writing as the placeholder for faith in its incarnational nature as ideas taking on flesh and then being released into ineffable meaning-­making through the preaching, teaching, and singing of God’s people. As Gamble states ‘there arose an awareness of this past as absolute and closed, an awareness that found its expression in the formation of the New Testament canon and enabled, indeed required, Christianity to undertake its history in the world and become a literary movement for the first time.’12 This was not merely the creation of a historical or dogmatic science we call ‘theology’ but something more akin to what New Testament scholar Douglas Templeton has called the vocation of ‘true fiction’ in the early church, whereby ‘the writers of the Gospels were not following the necessities of history, the critical examination of evidence, the sifting, the winnowing, the interrogation, the torture of witnesses. They were following the necessities of the religious imagination, as that imagination had been trained by a millennium of poetry to imagine.’13

George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study in Provincial Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; first published 1871–1872), pp. 406–407. Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 13. 13 Douglas A. Templeton, The New Testament as True Fiction (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), p. 37. 11

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To be sure, this notion of being ‘trained by a millennium of poetry to imagine’ has been widely documented, and the idea that the early church was deeply engaged in mimesis and intertextuality – the reading and re-­reading, listening and listening again, singing out loud, and even dramatically acting out of cultural forms around them that communities found as sources of meaning making – should be an invitation to do the same today. Dennis MacDonald in his collected volume Mimesis and Intertextuality in Antiquity and Christianity raises the point that scholars have long discussed not only early intertextuality such as the Synoptic problem, the sources used in the Gospels and Acts drawn from pagan sources but went so far as to discuss ‘quotations and obvious allusions to faint echoes and even non-­genetic comparisons’ as well as seeking a better ‘process of training students to write through imitation of recognized models’ found in the culture around them in order to do the work of the Gospel.14 What has become disciplinary division and animosity in the modern university between Literature and Theology would have indeed been foreign to the early church. We need only turn our attention to Acts 17 and St. Paul’s famous address to the Athenians to see how this reality of intertextuality of pagan sources has been canonized into Scripture. As St. Paul challenges the Athenians to turn and face ‘the unknown God’ (Acts  17. 23) who has ‘allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live / so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him – though indeed he is not far from each one of us’ (Acts  17. 27, 28) Paul ‘proof texts’ his point not with an appeal to the Hebrew texts of faith. No, Paul turns his attention to literature and philosophy and quotes the pagan poets Aratus (‘We are his Offspring’) and Epimenides (‘In him we live and move and have our being’) as the sources by which the Athenians have already heard the clear call of God on their lives. Epimenides is even called a ‘prophet’ in Titus ch.1 v.12 and given the designation with all the weight afforded such a title. Yet fast-­forwarding to the present, we find a different reality than St. Paul. Theology is now understood as a disciplinarily specific and overly described area of concern that largely negates the permeability Dennis MacDonald, ed., Mimesis and Intertextuality in Antiquity and Christianity (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001), p. xi.

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of disciplines seen in the early church. For example, John Webster, formerly of Oxford and now at Aberdeen, and truly one of the key voices in dogmatic and systematic Protestant theology, operationally defines ‘theology’ in this way: Theology is an office in the Church . . . Theology is not free thought or speech, if by ‘free’ we mean unattached to any given set of objects or any sphere of inquiry. Theology is not free speech but holy speech. It is set apart for and bound to its object – that is, the gospel – and to the fellowship of saints in which the gospel is heard as divine judgment and consolation – that is, the Church. Only as it does its work under the tutelage, authority and protection of the Church is theology free. ‘Church’, of course, is to be understood spiritually and not merely naturally, as the domain in which common human life is sanctified by the Holy Spirit and made into the communion of the saints. Theology is under the Church’s authority because it is a ‘positive’ science, a mode of reasoned inquiry which has been given a definite matter, apprehended in the Church of Jesus Christ in which he himself makes himself known. The self-­giving presence of Christ in the Church is the law of theology, the reality which governs theological reason. Theology is thus under the authority of the Church because the Church in its turn is under the wholly legitimate and quickening authority of the truth of the gospel. And theology is under the Church’s protection because what safeguards theology’s truthfulness is not the exercise of critical scruple but the fear of the one who is the Church’s Lord.15

Now return back to our reflection on St. Paul’s uses of pagan poets as key to his theological grammar and his method of mission to and with the Athenians. How does Webster’s definition hold up? I may be a bit anachronistic in applying Webster’s modernist thought to the first century prior to the rise of the Magisterium and the canonization of the Scriptures, but the gravity of what is at stake is still very real. By Webster’s account, only that which begins its gestation within the Church per se and is brought through the vetting process of the ecclesiastical rigours is to be considered ‘theology’. James Fodor in Christian Hermeneutics: Paul Ricœur and the Refiguring of Theology makes the astute observation that:

John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 2–3.

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The trouble with theology, many people think, is not so much that it is boring and irrelevant (although it can certainly be that!), or that it is unnecessarily abstruse and filled with technical jargon (although, again, it frequently suffers from those maladies), or even that it lacks significance and value. Indeed, theology is meaningful and helpful to a good number of folk; some find theology interesting, edifying, even absorbing. The trouble with theology, rather, is that in the estimation of most people it has nothing to do with truth. Theology may serve any number of otherwise useful, and perhaps even indispensable, functions for a particular group of people, namely Christians, but it is thought to have no bearing at all on truth. For when Christians invoke language about God it seems that their discourse is simply idling. It does not really engage, make contact with, or refer to anything. Theological language, in short, appears to have gone on holiday.16

The concern that theological language is always perilously close to merely ‘idling’ and simply ‘going on holiday’ rather than engaging the deep concern of God is evidenced in the gospel of St. John. The gospel of St. John reminds us in no uncertain terms that ‘this is the disciple who is testifying (martyreō) to these things and has written (graphō) them, and we know (oidamev – plural perfect active indicative: “to know”) that his testimony is true (alēthēs). But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books (bibloi) that would be written (graphō).’17 John’s gospel is famously not a synoptic gospel. No, it is a latecomer in many respects. But it is a gospel closer to us in so many ways. With its famous prologue ‘in the beginning (archē) was the Word (logos)’ and now ending with the instrumentation of that logos in graphō (writing) and bibloi (books) is only part of the full story and that we must look far and wide throughout the entire earth and not merely our closed disciplinary loci to even begin to grasp the hem of God’s garment. In his seminal two-­volume study of the rise of hermeneutical inquiry in the twentieth century, David Klemm delimits the various movements that occupy interpretative exploration and meaning-­making in the liberal arts, which traditionally have been seen as conservative, dialogical, critical, and radical in

James Fodor, Christian Hermeneutics: Paul Ricœur and the Refiguring of Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. vii. 17 John 21.24, 25. 16

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nature.18 As he states, the importance of acknowledging the complexities and necessary symbiosis of interpretive strategies across the university curriculum have always necessitated a robust hermeneutic awareness: Sacred scriptures, classic literature, and legal codes are texts that carry an intent to speak into a human situation. Because human situations change in unforeseeable ways, these texts call for hermeneutics to assist them in speaking again. The meanings that demand our understanding may be ritual gestures or significant actions within the social world. Here as well, hidden and disputed meanings must be brought to light. Hermeneutics functions as an aid to understanding meanings in texts and existence.19

Given the ‘hidden and disputed meanings’ that arise in the disputes and dialogues surrounding interpretation within the work of the university across the disciplines, it is important to trace a bit of the contours of these four traditional approaches to the reading and interpretation of texts, as they are not entirely distinct from each other and continue to inform and challenge the ways that texts are read and ultimately understood in the university disciplines.

I.  Conservative approaches to hermeneutics In his reading of Robert Scharlemann’s The Being of God and the Experience of Truth, Klemm employs Scharlemann’s tripartite strategy of authentic meaning-­ making as the alignment of (1) conceiving (‘the activity of forming abstract thoughts, universal notions that can be applied to many entities’), (2) perceiving (actively ‘noticing singular entities that are given to the senses for experience’), and then following onto (3) understanding (‘the activity of connecting our thinking with our experiencing of reality’).20 Each mode of hermeneutics is in

These four distinctive modes of hermeneutic inquiry have been outlined and discussed across disciplines and religious traditions. For a discussion of conservative, dialogical, critical, and radical hermeneutics in light of Islamic hermeneutic strategy see Michael Mumisa, ‘From Conservative Hermeneutics to Post-Hermeneutics’ in Al-Mahdi Journal 6.1 (2002), pp. 7–12. 19 David E. Klemm, Hermeneutic Inquiry. Volume I: The Interpretation of Texts (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986) p. 2. 20 Klemm, Hermeneutic Inquiry. II, pp. 26–27. 18

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some way contesting how best to render an authentic balance and clear articulation of conceiving, perceiving, and understanding. Conservative approaches to hermeneutics are defined as essentially a corresponding interpretative strategy in which approaches to the ‘truth’ (what Heidegger would see as aletheia or clarity) of the text that seek to balance perceiving, conceiving, and understanding directly reflect the author’s intentions as a fait accompli as well as the ‘world of the text’ – what those cultures and communities from which the text arose would understand the text to mean. Here authentic hermeneutic interpretation is essentially a reporting rather than an interpretation – truth is understood to mean what the pure text has to say. This is bound up in historical-­critical inquiry that is both prior to and sovereign over any contemporary understanding to be drawn from scientific inquiry. In this regard conservative hermeneutic strategies privilege a certain level of objectivity whereby historical and linguistic interpreters are able to set aside a myriad of biases and recover the pure text on its own standards.

II.  Dialogical approaches to hermeneutics Dialogical approaches to hermeneutics are framed by the methods of theorists such as theologians Paul Tillich and David Tracy.21 In contrast to the search for the pure and objective text that is key to conservative strategies of interpretation, dialogical approaches are defined as seeking a correlational rather than corresponding encounter between the text and the interpreting community. It is in the act of engagement where understanding is to be derived, not locked into the text. In a dialogical approach to the act of interpretation, ultimate concern is always shifting in relation to the zeitgeist and the community of interpretative needs at the present time. As famously stated by the hermeneutist Hans-Georg Gadamer, truthful rendering of meaning will arise not in locating merely those objective past conditions of a text nor merely the needs of a community rendering the text, but through a ‘fusion of horizons’ whereby a

See David Tracy, Blessed Rage of Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), and Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (London: SCM Press, 1981).

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via media is forged in which neither the text nor community has exclusive rights to dominate or control the flow of perceiving, conceiving, and understanding. For Gadamer what is central to this fusion of horizons is the notion of bildung or formatio, which is ‘the ancient mystical tradition according to which man carries in his soul the image of God, after whom he is fashioned, and which man must cultivate in himself ’ and through interpretation is formed into the image and likeness of the Divine.22 In sum, dialogical hermeneutics is primarily descriptive rather than prescriptive – it is a way of seeing and experiencing. Different points of view on the meaning of a text cannot always be resolved, and may be the basis of acceptable but different interpretations. What matters, as noted by Gadamer, is to keep the text as well as the interpretive community in a constant state of ‘play’, for it is in the movement of interpretation that truth is found, not in the stillness and fixity of certainty. As David Tracy explains: So deeply into one’s existence does the unmasking radicality of the Word strike that the radical contingency and ambiguity of all culture, all civilization, all institutions, even nature itself [in sum, the ‘world’] are unmasked by the same Word which commands and enables work for the world, and more concretely for the neighbor. This Christian insight into the conventionality, the arbitrariness, the radical contingency of all culture, all nature and all institutions has a reverse side: the radical ambiguity of all culture, nature, institutions – all the world – and their constant temptation to self-­ aggrandizement and self-­delusion. Yet this very same insight into the radical contingency and real ambiguity of the world posits itself not only by negating all ‘worldly’ pretensions to divinity, atemporality, eternity, but also by positing the command and the possibility of living in and for this contingent, ambiguous, created and divinely beloved ‘world’.23

III.  Critical approaches to hermeneutics As described by Kurt Mueller-Vollmer in his overview of the German tradition of hermeneutics from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century, what Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edn (New York, NY: Continuum, 1998), p. 11. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (London: SCM Press, 1981), p. 48.

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is now termed Critical Hermeneutics arises in the mid-­twentieth century as an outgrowth of the Frankfurt School and a commentary upon Max Weber’s conception of sociology in which interpretation of existence in line with interpretation of texts creates movement beyond traditional bound disciplines of literature and theology. In his 1967 On The Logic of the Social Sciences, Jürgen Habermas sees aspects of Gadamer’s theory as not merely pertaining to the humanities but providing a methodological principle applicable to the social sciences as well. In his chapter entitled ‘the Hermeneutic approach’, Habermas outlines a critical or ‘depth’ hermeneutics that takes on board the methodological concerns of sociology, and in doing so creates an interdisciplinary bridge between the humanities and social sciences. As noted by Vollmer, Gadamer’s approach to hermeneutics is ultimately a treatise seeking to bridge the humanities and social sciences where ‘he chose to concentrate his efforts on exposing and criticising the hermeneutic principles which underlie the humanistic disciplines in their actual history and present-­ day manifestations’.24 In this way a critical approach to hermeneutics is ultimately engaged in the way humanities and social sciences provide sufficient – and in many ways necessary – conversation partners that both challenge disciplinary exclusivity and draw out the deeper meaning of texts and human existence.

IV.  Radical approaches to hermeneutics Jean Hyppolite, author of Logic and Existence,25 posed the question to Jacques Derrida regarding his lecture on ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’ that in many ways exemplifies the turn toward a radical approach to hermeneutics in the late 1970s and into the twenty-­first century. Derrida was delivering a paper at Johns Hopkins University and was asked, in relation to his notion of deconstruction that at this time was new to North American discussions, as to

Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, ed. The Hermeneutic Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present (New York, NY: Continuum, 1997), p. 256. 25 Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997). 24

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‘what a center might mean’26 that is to be deconstructed. In Hyppolite’s words, is ‘the center the knowledge of the general rules which, after a fashion, allow us to understand the interplay of the elements? Or is the center certain elements which enjoy a particular privilege with the ensemble?’27 Derrida’s answer was as follows: ‘I don’t mean to say that I thought of approaching an idea of the center that would be an affirmation.’28 The ‘center’ of which he speaks is not a certain place, as we shall see, not a place to be affirmed and locked into meaning, for this would do to the word ‘center’ what Derrida says the term ‘center’ now does – making a ‘substitution of linguistic center for true center’ – so that ‘the center receives different forms or names’ and we ultimately lose that which we seek. Derrida’s definition of ‘center’ constitutes abstracted definitions of a communally concerned identity: ‘The center, which is by definition unique, constitutes that very thing within a structure which while governing that structure, escapes structurality.’29 In some sense radical hermeneutics involves a critique of hermeneutics itself, and specifically a critique of any attempt to find the truth of a particular text by constantly destabilizing and rupturing any essentialist understandings of meaning-­making in favour of pure interpretative discourse. On the one hand, if hermeneutics involves a project to identify an interpretation as the interpretation, then radical hermeneutics is not hermeneutics at all. Or it is something altogether free of the burden other approaches to hermeneutics have, which is the goal of rendering meaning or some manner of truth at the end. Radical hermeneutics concerns itself with the interpretation (or deconstruction) of texts and it is the act that is vital, not the goal of understanding. The use of ‘radical hermeneutics’ is to signify approaches that are sometimes called post-­structuralist (Foucault, Derrida), postmodern (Lyotard), or post-­metaphysical (John Caputo).

Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp. 265ff. Lee Morrissey makes interesting comparisons between the questions raised by Derrida in ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’ and the political undertones of the essay. See Lee Morrissey, ‘Derrida, Algeria, and “Structure, Sign, and Play” ’, Postmodern Culture 9, 2. 27 See footnote 26. 28 See footnote 26. 29 Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 279. 26

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What remains? The future and hope that is the university These four distinct yet often enmeshed methods of interpretation continue to quarrel with the modern university and continually challenge and often foreclose ultimate disclosure of meaning that is the goal of hermeneutic inquiry. As conservative, dialogical, critical, and radical approaches to texts in theology and literature seek dominance, the reality is that what is truly needed is not resolve as to which approach to texts – be they sacred or secular – is best, but what space for dialogue is hospitable for the multivalent hermeneutic strategies to find a humble repose with one another. As the twenty-­first century continues to remove the option for public discourse and civility as normative and holistic, it falls back to the university to be where literature and theology can find a common hospitable space and varying interpretative strategies can dialogue rather than dominate. By its very nature the university needs to be truly ‘interdisciplinary’ in order for hermeneutics to achieve its goal of bridging the deep meaning of the text with the deep and ultimate concerns that are the purpose of human beings in our age. Where will the next millennium take this discussion? In what ways does the university move the question forward into the twenty-­first century? Time will certainly tell. One thing is indeed clear: neither theology nor literature seem to be fading into the background. Both disciplines continue to rise and fall like the waves crashing on Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach in an ever dimming day yet never truly darkened horizon. No, as long as humans continue to wonder in silence as well as aloud in communal gatherings as to the manner of their being and the purpose of their existence, these contesting disciplines will fire the imaginations and artistry of generations to come. Yet there is needed a voice perhaps from outside both disciplines to not only bridge the gaps and fissures betwixt and between theology and literature, but interpret and restore meaning as well. In this way, a new vision for theological hermeneutics is needed. As David Klemm has often reminded me, theological hermeneutics has no natural textual domain of its own, not even the religious, and this is perhaps the salvation for us all. What theological hermeneutics adds to the manifold disciplines of human flourishing is to point and reference the infinite depth of meaning in the structure of literary, philosophical, or for that matter, scientific hermeneutic as an outsider that is also of the heritage of all these. In

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many respects, theological hermeneutics is a discipline of the line of Melchizedek – one that is ultimately of pagan origin yet equipped more than anyone to identify the Divine in our midst as a voice from outside the essential constructs of academic disciplines yet bears the heritage and authority to speak in two distinct ways: either by interpreting the explicit references to the infinite ground of thought and experience found in writing and the reception of texts, or by making explicit the implicit ultimate presupposition of the infinite ground that has not been made explicit by the author or creator of a work. As the Melchizedek of the Hebrew Bible in Genesis 14 points to Abram and declares that God is at work in a place and a people that is not found in his own, so too can a poetics of Melchizedek in the form of theological hermeneutic of literary texts offer a fulfilment of all that theology and literature as disciplines have sought. This, however, will take courage. First, a poetics of Melchizedek can interpret literary elements such as plot structure for its reference to the infinite ground of all meaning and name ‘God’ in the text. Second, a poetics of Melchizedek can interpret significant symbols that stand for the element of the infinite ground within the manifest structure of the plot such as the Christological element that arises. Third, it can interpret the ways in which specific linguistic symbols or figures of speech combine with structural elements to produce thought of the infinite depth of the text such as the work of the Spirit of God who not only moves on the surface of waters and separates light from dark but animates and perfects the text that is before the reading community.

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‘Thrashing between Exoneration and Excoriation’ Creating Narratives in We Need to Talk About Kevin Zoë Lehmann Imfeld

University of Bern, Switzerland

Lionel Shriver’s 2001 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin follows Eva Katchadourian as she reels in the aftermath of the actions of her fifteen­year-old son Kevin. Kevin, in a ‘high-­school shooting’, has murdered seven children and two adults, as well as his father and sister. In letters to her dead husband, Kevin’s mother Eva attempts to understand Kevin’s actions, and indeed Kevin himself. She writes: I have reflected on the fact that for most of us, there is a hard, impossible barrier between the most imaginatively detailed depravity and its real-­life execution. It’s the same solid steel wall that inserts itself between a knife and my wrist even when I’m at my most disconsolate. So how was Kevin able to raise that crossbow, point it at Laura’s breastbone [the first high-­school victim], and then really, actually, in time and space, squeeze the release? I can only assume that he discovered what I never wish to. That there is no barrier.1

In this act, which Eva refers to as ‘Thursday’ (the day on which it took place), Kevin not only extinguishes life, but renders himself unrecognizable within commonly accepted moral constructs of humanity. In her letters-­cum-diary, Eva recalls Kevin’s childhood, and indeed her own life before it, in an attempt at emplotment and configuration through which she can recover her son from beneath the annihilating act under which he has been subsumed.

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin (Croydon, UK: Serpent’s Tail, 2003), p. 443.

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This chapter will understand the narrative process depicted in We Need to Talk About Kevin through Paul Ricœur’s concept of narrative identity as expressed in Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another. This reading will highlight not only the ways in which the equivocity of postmodern constructs of self contribute to such an undermining of being, but that Eva’s narrative demonstrates an attempt at a hermeneutical process through which she and the reader can come to terms with both Kevin’s humanity and the inhumanity of his actions. Eva’s epistolary narration is one of configuration and reconfiguration in which she attempts to bring Kevin into being by searching for him within a post-­hoc narrative. By doing so Eva confirms Hans-Georg Gadamer’s recognition that our way of being in the world is irreducibly hermeneutical.2 Ricœur describes a narrative arc which, through the mimetic process of preconfiguration, configuration, and reconfiguration, shows the self to be embedded in the story of one’s life. The identity of character becomes comprehensible through the process of emplotment.3 Thus does narrative identity, being the dialectic of character and plot, ‘provide a poetic reply’4 to the aporias of selfhood. However, the necessary detours of this arc cannot be travelled in isolation. By distinguishing between two types of identity, idem and ipse, Ricœur shows identity to be comprised both of sameness and difference. While through idem we identify through sameness to a group, ipse describes selfhood. Ricœur writes: ‘The difference between idem and ipse is nothing more that the difference between a substantial or formal identity and a narrative identity.’5 This narrative arc towards selfhood then, requires not only participation with others, but the participation of others. Ricœur emphasizes that we are mutually vulnerable, and that ‘self-­esteem’, preceding

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. (Chennai, India: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. xxiii: ‘It is not only that historical tradition and the natural order of life constitute the unity of the world in which we live as men; the way we experience the natural givenness of our existence and our world, constitute a truly hermeneutic universe, in which we are not imprisoned, as if behind insurmountable barriers, but to which we are opened.’ 3 Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 143. 4 Ricœur, Oneself as Another, p. 147. 5 Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative: Vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 276. 2

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‘self-­respect’, relies on reciprocity. Ricœur calls this ‘solicitude’.6 The normative process that develops from this fundamental solicitude will be discussed further below, as Kevin’s actions are shown to demonstrate the devastating consequences of its absence. Meanwhile, however, Eva’s attempt at a reconfiguration of her own and Kevin’s narrative reveals a tension between the hermeneutic circle of mimesis and the dependency on ‘another’ in Ricœur’s narrative arc. In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricœur describes a hermeneutical cycle of narrative made up of a threefold mimesis. This cycle is begun by a prefiguring of the plot (mimesis1) which is followed by configuration (mimesis2) and reconfiguration (mimesis3). Ricœur draws heavily on Aristotle’s Poetics for his construction of mimesis, and Aristotle’s own ‘case text’, Oedipus Rex, provides a useful analogy here as well. Mimesis1 recognizes the need to approach a story with an understanding of the signs within it through cultural preconceptions. For instance, to understand the social hierarchy this makes Laius ‘king’. This symbolic understanding refers to an initial ‘readability’ of an action, but moreover, it allows an understanding of the ritual of that action. To understand Laius’s kingship is to understand his fear of a prophecy of his downfall. As Ricœur explains: ‘To understand a story is to understand both the language of “doing something” and the cultural tradition from which proceeds the typology of plots.’7 It is this preconception of what human action is that enables emplotment, or mimesis2. Through mimesis2, or configuration, comes the unity of emplot­ ment, in which we can see a series of events as a causal chain. In what Aristotle calls ‘anagnorisis’, we see that an outcome that may have surprised us, was in fact inevitable. For Oedipus Rex, it is the moment in which we realize that the play could only ever have culminated in its tragic end. ‘Plot’ thus has a mediating function in that it draws a meaningful story from a diverse set of incidents.8 Moreover, and this is crucial to our use of Ricœur in under­ standing Eva’s narrative, the process of configuration mediates the paradox of temporality in a story. To follow a story is to have imperfect knowledge of it,

Ricœur, Oneself, p. 190. Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative: Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 57. 8 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, p. 65. 6 7

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but the ‘conclusion’ to that story allows it to be perceived as a unified whole. Of this ‘end point’, Ricœur goes on to explain: I may now add that it is in the act of retelling rather than in that of telling that this structural function of closure can be discerned. As soon as a story is well known – and this is the case for most traditional or popular narratives, as well as for those national chronicles reporting the founding events of a given community – to follow the story is not so much to enclose its surprises or discoveries within our recognition of the meaning attached to the story, as to apprehend the episodes which are themselves well known as leading to this end.9

Mimesis3 fulfils this configurational act – where mimesis2 has given the plot the capacity to be followed, mimesis3 actualizes this capacity.10 For Aristotle, for instance, Oedipus Rex has its origins in early myth, but now survives in the permanence of the written form, to be passed back into the communal consciousness. As we ‘reconfigure’ the plot, we not only understand it, but are altered by it. Indeed, the community is altered by it, and mimesis3 thus feeds back into mimesis1. In what David Parker would describe as the ‘epistemic gain’,11 poetry ‘teaches’ the universal. ‘It is in the hearer or the reader’, as Ricœur claims, ‘that the traversal of mimesis reaches its fulfillment.’12 This actualization is crucial to Eva’s narrative. To Ricœur, mimesis2 is the pivotal point of the hermeneutical cycle, as at mimesis3 the narrative is given over to the reader. Reconfiguration, as it were, is brought about by the act of reading. For Eva, however, the actualization process is contained within the storytelling process. By writing to a dead husband, Eva, in her dramatically isolated existence, is essentially creating a post-­hoc diary, a narrative in which she is both storyteller and reader. (In the absence of a correspondence, Eva calls her writing ‘more of a respondence’.13) Eva’s hermeneutical process of configuration and reconfiguration allows her not only to start to understand Kevin, but to bring herself and her family more fully into being, even after the

Ricœur, Time and Narrative, p. 67. Ricœur, Time and Narrative, p. 76. 11 David Parker, The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 175. 12 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, p. 71. 13 Shriver, Kevin, p. 385. 9

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family has been physically destroyed. Moreover, Eva comes to recognize this process as an act of necessity: I may need too badly to tell myself a story, but I’ve felt compelled to weave some thread of connection between the otherwise meaningless dishevelment of that backyard [where Eva finds the bodies of her husband and daughter] and the finest in the man I married.14

Eva’s narrative is thus a beginning, rather than the epilogue to an event. It is at this point that I suggest that a reading of this novel using a theological anthropology can reveal a potential easing of this tension between a resolving hermeneutic and the communal demands of a narrative arc. The danger in relying here on a sense of identity too closely informed by narrative theology would be firstly, to describe Shriver’s novel as a thinly-­veiled Christian apologetic, which it clearly is not, and secondly, to do an injustice to Ricœur’s own careful disentanglement of philosophy and theology in his own writings. This is not, therefore, a reading in which Ricœur’s hermeneutic should be subordinated to narrative theology. Rather, I hope to describe an instance in which a hermeneutical reading after Ricœur can be fully realized through a theological anthropology. In an effort to strengthen the dialogue between Ricœur and certain strands of theology, Boyd Blundell takes care to acknowledge Karl Barth’s differentiation between the ‘human being’ and the ‘human creature’, or the phenomenal and real human. To Barth, ‘the basis of human life is identical with its telos. Deriving from God, man is in God, and therefore for God.’15 With respect to Eva, such a theological understanding of the human creature ascribes a teleology to her narrative process, and thus allows the hermeneutic of her narrative to actually take place within and for itself. Indeed, Ricœur himself recognizes this capacity in the theological human creature: If a theological interpretation of conscience is to be possible, it will precisely presuppose this intimacy of self and conscience. It is to the dialogue of the

Shriver, Kevin, p. 453. Boyd Blundell, Paul Ricœur between Theology and Philosophy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010); Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol  3, eds. Geoffrey William Bromiley, Thomas F. Torrance and G. T. Thomson (Edinburgh, UK: T & T Clark, 1977; originally published in 1936), III/2 p. 71.

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self with itself that the response of the prophetic and the christomorphic self is grafted. 16

As will be seen in the failure of the community to respond to Eva or Kevin’s narrative, Eva’s narrative becomes, by necessity, a confession of faith in the human creature. While without explicit Christological reference, her process requires the possibility for an actualization of the self within one’s own narrative. Eva’s narrative is one in which she reconfigures herself and Kevin from phenomenal human beings to human creatures. If Eva’s narrative is to be a beginning, however, rather than a conclusion, it must involve a pre-­configuration, a recognizable structure in which to put the narrative. For Eva, this involves a return to the memory of her life before Kevin and the expectations and desires that led to his birth. It is here that Eva first establishes a setting within a normative environment, in which her husband has bought whole-­heartedly into the ‘American dream’. Meanwhile, she herself enacts a pseudo-­resistance to this normativity, condescending the American lifestyle in favour of the cultural idiosyncrasies that she comes across as a travel writer. Each of these constructs, however, lacks an authenticating narrative tradition. His is one in which univocal identities are constructed upon ‘universal’ ideals of social selfhood. Of Franklin’s approach to fatherhood, for instance, Eva writes to him: ‘There was a persistently generic character to your adoration that I’m certain he sensed.’17 Despite platitudes towards her Armenian cultural history, Eva also rejects all but nominally any cultural tradition, instead delighting in the apparent equivocity of a multifold human society.18 Between them, they reflect the metamodern friction between a univocal identity construct and total equivocity.19 The decision to have a child Ricœur, ‘The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation’, in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer, ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 271. 17 Shriver, Kevin, p. 103. 18 The couple’s conversations before Kevin’s birth include a telling discussion in which each parent argues for the unborn child to have their last name. Eva calls on Armenian history to claim a cultural vulnerability and significance that is absent in Franklin’s American heritage: ‘You care about your last name just because it’s yours. I care about mine – well, it seems more important’ (p.  71). Eva, having won the argument, ends her recollection by recognizing the irony in that through his infamy, ‘our son has done more to keep the name Khatchadourian alive that anyone else in my family’ (p. 73). 19 Cf. Thomas Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker, ‘Notes on Metamodernism’, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2 (2010), doi: 10.3402/jac.v1i0.5677, in which they define metamodernism as a discourse that ‘oscillat[es] between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony.’ 16

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is not a continuation of tradition, but an attempt to ‘create’ their own identities, to become through becoming parents: ‘Well,’ you conceded, ‘at least a kid would answer the Big Question.’ I could be perverse too. ‘What big question?’ ‘You know,’ you said lightly, and drew out with an emcee drawl, ‘the old e-­e-existential dilemma.’20

This sense of absolute autonomy leads to what William Desmond would describe as ‘a self-­activation that can lead to an extreme of hyper-­activism’.21 Both Franklin and Eva see their Hegelian constructions of autonomous identity as signifiers of freedom. As Eva revisits this period in her letters, however, she recognizes that this immanent freedom is in fact without an anchor with which to give it meaning. In contrast to having children as part of a continuation of community (she mentions tilling fields and caring for elderly parents), ‘love, story, content, faith in the human “thing” – the modern incentives are like dirigibles, immense, floating, and few; optimistic, large-­ hearted, even profound, but ominously ungrounded.’22 Ricœur writes that ‘the destruction of any genuine sense of tradition and authority [. . .] amounts to an increase of forgetfulness, especially that of the past sufferings of humankind, which is the ultimate cause of the impinging death of the capacity for storytelling’.23 It is from within this disruption of identity and being that Kevin attempts to (re)create and actualize his own sense of being. He has, however, no symbolic language of a community of suffering on which to configure such a consciousness of being.24 Nonetheless, it seems that Kevin recognizes the counterfeit of his parents’ identity constructs, and in several conversations with his mother there is evidence that he is attempting to explore the gap left by a genuine narrative tradition. Discussing the secular celebration of Christian holidays, Eva explains:

Shriver, Kevin, p. 21. William Desmond, God and the Between (Chennai, India: Blackwell, 2008), p. 21. Shriver, Kevin, p. 31. Ricœur, Figuring the Sacred, p.  238. [Original italics.] See also William Desmond, God and the Between, in which he writes: ‘We in the West are heirs to a number of religious traditions, but as descendants we have turned our inheritance into hostility itself ’ (p. 18). 24 Cf. Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 8. 22 23 20 21

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‘I learned studying anthropology at Green bay that it’s important to observe cultural rituals.’ ‘Just so long as they’re totally empty,’ said Kevin breezily.25

While Eva does not regret that she raised Kevin outside the structure of an organized religion, in her recollections written to her husband she recognizes the role of such a community to a sense of self: ‘The fact that you and I were brought up with something to walk away from [Armenian Orthodoxy and Presbyterianism] may have advantaged us, for we knew what lay behind us, and what we were not.’ Of Kevin, she writes that ‘though Kevin seemed to want practically nothing, I now realize that he was spiritually ravenous’.26 Without the myths27 of a community which help to configure the self, Kevin sees being as a sort of nihilism, and instead attempts to create his own myth. William Desmond writes poignantly on this sense of autonomous being without relation to another: We cannot live with the devalued thereness and redouble our opposition to it by reconstructing it: the world has no value, we are the value of the world, and the bored God pares his nails in the crystal heavens.   This redoubling of opposition can only mean aggression against creation. There now seems no creation really, only the devalued thereness we cannot accept and that we must make valuable, come hell or high water.28

The Augustinian tradition recognizes fallen man’s capability to turn away from God and towards nothingness, but in this novel, Kevin is blindly fleeing from nothingness. Through his own ‘aggression against creation’, Kevin attempts to force himself into actuality. Eva describes this in her letters to Franklin: ‘No interpretation I slather over events in this appeal to you has a chance of overwhelming the sheer actuality of Thursday, and maybe it was the miracle of fact itself that Kevin discovered that afternoon.’29 This ‘ontological tyranny on ourselves’, which occurs when the ‘patience of being is overridden in this Shriver, Kevin, p. 319. Shriver, Kevin, p. 302. 27 Cf. Ricœur, Symbolism of Evil, pp.  7–9, Fallible Man, trans. Charles Kelbley (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1965), p. xix: ‘The exegesis of these symbols [myths of the fall] prepares the myths for insertion into man’s knowledge of himself.’ [Original italics.] Ricœur takes the creation of myths as vital in providing a language with which to face the human condition, and sees Biblical storytelling and the Hebraic tradition as exemplars. 28 Desmond, God and the Between, p. 63. [Original italics.] 29 Shriver, Kevin, p. 188. 25 26

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overdrive of the endeavour to be’,30 anticipates the dissymmetry between what one does and what one does to another, which Ricœur identifies as ‘power-­ over’.31 This exercise of ‘power-­over’, in its opposition to the affirmation of solicitude, can, by Ricœur, ‘be held to be the occasion par excellence of the evil of violence.’32 Indeed, it is against the ‘thereness’ of Kevin’s forced actuality that Eva’s interpretative process struggles throughout the novel. In her visits to the juvenile prison where Kevin is held, Eva comes to see that Kevin’s being, or at least his sense of being, has been subsumed within this act. He relates to himself through his social notoriety. After years of playing out the roles expected of him by each of his parents (the malevolent stranger to his mother and stereotypical ‘regular kid’33 to his father), Kevin announces to Eva that now, as a notorious killer, ‘I’m not playing a part. I am the part.’34 Unlike his mother, however, he has not begun to configure this actuality, and thus is trapped within it: Because every time Kevin takes another bow as Evil Incarnate, he swells a little larger. Each slander slewed in his direction – nihilistic, morally destitute, depraved, degenerate, or debased – bulks his scrawny frame better than my cheese sandwiches ever did.35

As Eva begins her own process of configuring the events of ‘Thursday’ and reconfiguring them as part of her own sense of being, she recognizes that she too is starting from this position: ‘These days it is solely through notoriety that I understand who I am and what part I play in the dramas of others.’36 Without the reciprocity of the self as another, ‘the story stands for the person’.37 Just as Eva signifies the tension at the point between storyteller and reader, so too she signifies the point at which the being of culprit and being of victim

32 33 30 31

36 37 34 35

Desmond, God and the Between, p. 21. Ricœur, Oneself, p. 220. Ricœur, Oneself, p. 220. Shriver, Kevin, p. 216. The theme of Kevin’s acting to his father’s expectations recurs throughout the novel as Eva searches for the ‘real’ Kevin in her storytelling. She writes to Franklin: ‘But do you ever consider how disappointed he must have been when you accepted the decoy as the real thing?’ (p. 280). It is only as her process of reconfiguration develops that she comes to see her own view of a sociopathic child as just as much a constructed identity. Shriver, Kevin, p. 287. Shriver, Kevin, p. 287. [Original italics.] Shriver, Kevin, p. 188. Ricœur, Time and Narrative 1, p. 75, quoting Wilhelm Schapp.

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meet. Eva’s exploration of her recollections is not only an attempt to understand Kevin and his actions, it is a process of confession and penance of her own. It is Ricœur’s recognition of evil as two heterogeneous categories, the doing of evil and the suffering of evil, which allows for this point of tension. To speak of guilt as poena, or pain, is to understand it as a term that bridges the gap between evil committed and evil undergone.38 For Ricœur, ‘It is at this major point of intersection that the cry of lamentation is most sharp.’39 For Eva, however, the tension of her lament comes not from her position as both victim and culprit (both widow and grieving mother and failed mother), but in that she is neither victim proper nor culprit proper. Eva repeatedly describes her alienation from the outpourings of righteous grief by the other families of the dead, but despite seeming to want the penance that comes with a public allocation of blame (she is taken to civil court by another mother), this process leaves her equally un-­manifest. Indeed, the beginning of the novel finds Eva in an existential limbo, isolated from those around her and living in a sparsely furnished apartment. She writes: ‘This tremulous little house – it doesn’t feel quite real, Franklin. And neither do I.’40 Through storytelling, Eva realizes that her configuration of events into a narrative is a catharsis, a catalyst that allows for a reconciliation of the self. By presenting herself with a story, Eva transfigures her experiences by reading herself in the narrative. In forensically retelling Kevin’s history, Eva faces her own guilt and gives a language to it. It is in this way that she gifts a language to Kevin. Such a moment of catharsis is seen most clearly as Eva remembers once, and only once, throwing Kevin as a child across the room, breaking his arm: ‘For two seconds I’d felt whole, and like Kevin Khatchadourian’s real mother. I felt close to him. I felt like myself – my true, unexpurgated self – and I felt we were finally communicating.’41 Though still unreconciled at this stage in the novel, and arguably unconvincing if the scene is read as a justification, Eva’s retelling of the episode as a confession has begun a process in which the ‘real’ Eva, and in turn the ‘real’ Kevin, can be actualized. She continues: ‘For once I’d Ricœur, ‘Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology’, in trans. David Pellauer, ed. Mark I. Wallace, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 250. 39 Ricœur, ‘Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology’, p. 250. 40 Shriver, Kevin, p. 6. 41 Shriver, Kevin, p. 232. 38

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known myself as his mother. So he may have known himself also, sailing amazedly across the nursery like Peter Pan, for my son.’42 Eva is creating a narrative tradition of confession and self-­recognition that her son can potentially inherit. It is at this point that Eva relinquishes the absolutist ontology of autonomy, and can model what Desmond describes as ‘the patience of being’. Now, Eva’s internal hermeneutic circle can open out to (and for) Kevin. As Ricœur writes: This is perhaps the supreme test of solicitude, when unequal power finds compensation in an authentic reciprocity in exchange, which in the hour of agony, finds refuge in the shared whisper of voices or the feeble embrace of clasped hands.43

An act of confession and penance ultimately requires forgiveness in order to be actualized, a step that relies on others. Hannah Arendt writes: Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell.44

While Eva enacts her own penance in her weekly visits to Kevin, she recognizes the arrested condition described by Arendt in her son, writing: ‘Culprits are stuck in what must be a tyrannical rehearsal of the same old tale. Kevin will be climbing the stairs to the aerobic-­conditioning alcove of the Gladstone High gym for the rest of his life.’45 Both Ricœur and Arendt see in forgiveness the possibilities for beginning, in which both culprit and victim can be freed from the act committed. Shriver’s novel, however, illustrates the complexity of the process of forgiveness, affirming that it is a process, one in which both culprit and victim must participate for it to have meaning. Eva’s isolation is punctuated with social interactions in which she faces the world as Kevin’s mother: ‘It’s still difficult for me to venture into public. [. . .] No one in this “community” shows any signs of forgetting, after a year and eight 44 45 42 43

Shriver, Kevin, p. 238. Ricœur, Oneself, p. 191. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 237. Shriver, Kevin, p. 49.

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months – to the day. So I have to steel myself when provisions run low.’46 Her hesitant use of the term ‘community’ is testament to the difficulties in responding to a woman who is both within and without that community. Eva’s encounters with the community demonstrate the fractured nature of their responses to ‘Thursday’. Amongst incidents of impotent vengeance (such as when Eva finds her eggs broken in her shopping trolley), Eva records the community’s attempts to reach reconciliation, and finds their attempts at blanket forgiveness unconvincing. As one mother publicly forgives Kevin on CNN, Eva responds: Had she built a box around Kevin in her head, knowing that only rage dwelled there; was our son now simply a place her mind refused to go? At best, I reasoned that she had successfully depersonalized him into a regrettable natural phenomenon that had descended on her family like a hurricane or opened a maw in their living room like an earthquake, concluding that there was nothing to be gained from railing at the likes of weather or tectonic plate shifts.47

Eva’s response reveals that such forgiveness is unconvincing because the culprit, Kevin, is essentially absent from it. Aside from Kevin’s lack of participation in this process of forgiveness (to be further discussed below), the ‘depersonalization’ of such forgiveness has removed Kevin as culprit altogether. It is not Kevin who has been forgiven, but rather that the evil produced by the act has been accepted. Indeed, Eva comes to see such a depersonalizing forgiveness as itself an act of vengeance upon the being of the culprit. In relating other (historical) shootings that took place within the timeline of the narrative, Eva comments on the community response to Michael Carneal, who in 1997 opened fire on his school’s prayer group.48 Eva sees the attempts at immediate forgiveness as one of subsuming the culprit within his act: He managed to kill three students and wounded five, but judging from the cheek-­turning memorial services and merciful banners in classroom Shriver, Kevin, p. 2. Shriver, Kevin, p. 272. 48 This account refers to an actual school shooting which took place at Heath High School in Kentucky, in which the fourteen-­year-old Michael Carneal opened fire on the school’s prayer group, killing three students and injuring five. 46 47

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windows – one of which embraced photos not only of his victims but of Carneal himself with a heart – the born-­again victims got theirs back by forgiving him to death.49

In this climate, then, Eva must not only configure the narrative language with which to enable Kevin’s confession and penance; she is the only one able to receive that penance, and thus complete it with genuine forgiveness. Eva’s process from lament to confession and penance is not one in which she absorbs Kevin’s sin into her own maternal guilt. Although she admits to ‘indulging’ in self-­blame, she ultimately dismisses it as containing a ‘self-­aggrandizement in these wallowing mea culpas, a vanity’.50 This recognition confirms Ricœur’s view of the ultimate inadequacy of the moral norm. In creating a narrative for Kevin, she gifts him the opportunity for confession and forgiveness. Thus Eva performs the ultimate form of solicitude; an authentic reciprocity in which she recognizes Kevin not through the lens of an institutional moral norm, but as another fallible human creature. Ultimately, however, it is clear that Eva is unable to absorb Kevin’s guilt as her own, although ‘there may be a fragile peace to be found in the assumption of total responsibility’.51 She writes that ‘for me this greedy gorging on fault never works. I am never able to get the full story inside me.’52 Eva must acknowledge that while Kevin’s act might be part of her narrative, it is not her story. Instead, Eva’s writing initiates a tradition of storytelling which can potentially replace Kevin’ attempts at immanent myth making. The opportunities for passing on this tradition are seen at Eva’s weekly visits to Kevin, during which she seeks to challenge ‘Kevin’s more impenetrable pose as the sociopath who is beyond reach’.53 Kevin may have laid claim to his actions but he has not confessed to them as acts of digression. Kevin cannot receive forgiveness as he does not yet afford forgiveness. Eva sees this in the attempts by others to reassign Kevin’s guilt to the circumstances surrounding his actions: ‘Kevin has received dozens of letters offering to share his pain, 51 52 53 49 50

Shriver, Kevin, p. 305. Shriver, Kevin, p. 78. Shriver, Kevin, p. 78. Shriver, Kevin, p. 78. Shriver, Kevin, p. 48.

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apologizing for society’s having failed to recognize his spiritual distress and granting him blanket moral amnesty for what he has yet to regret.’54 Eva recognizes that for the process of confession and forgiveness to begin, Kevin’s actions must be acknowledged as actual evil committed. Kevin is still, however, trapped by his imagined narrative, his counterfeit double of himself. Eva sees an interview with Kevin on television, in which he is asked about a planned Hollywood film of the shootings: ‘And while we’re on that, I wanna complain that Miramax and everybody should be paying me some kind of fee. They’re stealing my story, and that story was a lot of work. I don’t think it’s legal to swipe it for free.’ ‘But it’s against the law in this state for criminals to profit from—’ Again, Kevin swung to the camera. ‘My story is about all I got to my name right now, and that’s why I feel robbed. But a story’s a whole lot more than most people got.’55

In their final meeting of the novel, before Kevin is to go from juvenile to adult prison, Eva sees that the prospect of an adult prison has shaken Kevin’s ‘character’, and spots a new humility in him. Of the television interview, she tells him: ‘You present yourself very well. Now all you have to come up with is something to say.’56 Thus Eva introduces her narrative tradition to Kevin, telling him of her letters, and offering him the potential tools for his own confession. For the first time, Kevin’s answer is not one designed to maintain his own myth, and as when she questions his motivation, he replies: ‘I used to think I knew, [. . .] now I’m not so sure.’57 It is clear that Kevin has begun his own process not simply of telling a story, but of configuring his narrative and thus reconfiguring his myth of self. ‘For Kevin’, writes Eva, ‘progress was deconstruction. He would only begin to plumb his own depths by first finding himself unfathomable.’58 From here, Kevin’s own process of confession and penance can (potentially) begin, and the novel ends with a bedroom ready for him in his mother’s ‘serviceable’ apartment. 56 57 58 54 55

Shriver, Kevin, p. 385. Shriver, Kevin, p. 417. Shriver, Kevin, p. 463. Shriver, Kevin, p. 464. Shriver, Kevin, p. 464.

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In Fallible Man, Ricœur writes that: In an ethical vision, not only is it true that freedom is the ground of evil, but the avowal of evil is also the condition of the consciousness of freedom. For in this avowal one can detect the delicate connection of the past and the future, of the self and its acts, of non-­being and pure action in the very core of freedom. Such is the grandeur of an ethical vision of the world.59

Such an avowal of the actuality of evil affirms Gadamer’s claim that a hermeneutic existence is necessarily pre-­judicial.60 An act of evil must be configured within a communal and discursive narrative which accounts for that act as evil, but which allows for a process of confession and forgiveness. We Need to Talk About Kevin demonstrates the inadequacies to such an ethical vision of an equivocal understanding of evil as a mere consequence of circumstance. While a configuration of narrative (though perhaps difficult enough in such an event as ‘Thursday’) is necessary in making intelligible the events, the narrative also requires ‘reconfiguration’, in which meaning can be revealed. Narrative theologians ascribe this reconfigurative task to Biblical narrative. The stories are universal narratives of a people, in which sin is made universal, as is suffering. Likewise the psychologist Jerome Bruner ascribes such narrative traditions to the family, claiming that it is here where ‘canonical stories’ are formed,61 and ‘home’ becomes a mode of discourse, a way of relating to others.62 Kevin has none of these narratives, and so attempts to create his own, to bring himself into immanent being through self-­created myth. The effect is, however, perhaps inevitably, to subsume Kevin within his actions, it seeming that ‘the facts remain bigger, bolder, and more glistening than any one small grief ’.63 Also facing the absence of a narrative tradition, Eva instead configures and reconfigures her own narrative, acknowledging Kevin’s actions as actually evil, thus enabling a beginning, an opportunity for reconciliation. While We Need to Talk About Kevin is a novel of isolation and counterfeit autonomy, then, Eva’s narrative of reconciliation reveals the possibility for 61 62 63 59 60

Ricœur, Fallible Man, p. xxviii. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 278 sqq. Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 126. Bruner, Acts of Meaning, p. 133. Shriver, Kevin, p. 442.

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modes of being that transcend social or moral constructs. Eva’s act of solicitude facilitates an unconditional and forgiving love as being. Paul Tillich describes this facilitation succinctly in Dynamics of Faith: No love is real without a unity of eros and agape. Agape without eros is obedience to a moral law, without warmth, without longing, without reunion. Eros without Agape is chaotic desire, denying the validity to the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as an independent self, able to love and to be loved. Love as the unity of eros and agape is an implication of faith.64

Eva’s narrative, her gift of story, is ultimately just such an act of faith. Through her narrative process, Eva is able to deconstruct first the constructed identities that she and her husband have imposed on Kevin, then those that he has imposed on himself. Eva’s hermeneutic journey is actualized not by a narrative arc that submits, ultimately, to a reader, but by its fulfilment in an anthropology that is recognizably theological. This is an anthropology not of ontological autonomy, but, as Ricœur would recognize in faithfulness, ‘in spite of’.65 In this way, Kevin as being can be realized outside of his actions, and the actualization both of Kevin’s guilt and Kevin as himself can begin.

Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), pp. 114–115. Ricœur, ‘Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology’, p. 260.

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10

The Shakespeare Music Eliot and von Balthasar on Shakespeare’s ‘Romances’ and the ‘Ultra-­dramatic’1 Aaron Riches

Instituto de Teología Lumen Gentium and Instituto de Filosofía Edith Stein, Granada, Spain

But, hark, what music? ....................................... The music of the spheres! ....................................... Most heavenly music! It nips me unto listening . . . Shakespeare, Pericles (21.211–221)2

In the prolegomena to the Theodramatik, Hans Urs von Balthasar singles out Shakespeare’s late so-­called ‘romance’ plays as unique realizations of the Christian drama of forgiveness.3 According to Balthasar, Pericles, Cymbeline, I owe a great debt of gratitude to the late Mrs. Valerie Eliot, for first granting me permission (many years ago) to read her husband’s unpublished lectures on Shakespeare. I would also like to thank Padre Ricardo Aldana, SDJ, of the Instituto de Teología Lumen Gentium, for fruitful comments on an earlier draft of this essay and for conversations on Balthasar and tragedy. Finally, I thank Alison, Zoë, and Peter, for their valuable editorial suggestions. 2 All citations of Shakespeare are to The Oxford Shakespeare series, edited by Stanley Wells. The individual volumes cited are: As You Like It, ed. Alan Brissenden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); King Lear, ed. Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Macbeth, ed. Nicholas Brooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Pericles, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); and The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1989), pp. 135–140. The plays were originally termed ‘romances’ by Edward Dowden, in his Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875). For some recent work on the significance of Shakespeare’s later plays, see Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare’s Late Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2000); various of the essays in Anne Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kiernan 1

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The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest move beyond the mystery of tragedy into a vision of the deeper mystery of ‘the underlying quality of grace in Being as such’ in which the drama of ‘forgiveness becomes . . . transparent’.4 In a series of unpublished lectures on ‘Shakespeare as Poet and Dramatist’, delivered in Edinburgh in 1937, T. S. Eliot argued something comparable. But for Eliot, the plays do not merely move beyond the tragic, they move beyond the dramatic itself into a realm of ‘ultra-­dramatic’ vision and action. The ‘ultra-­dramatic’, for Eliot, is the point at which theatre ‘becomes ritual’ and drama ‘turns back towards liturgy’.5 For both Eliot and Balthasar, the newness of Shakespeare’s late plays issues concretely from the Paschal Mystery: death turned inside out by the life-­giving cross of redemption.6 The newness beyond tragedy discerned by Eliot and Balthasar in Shakespeare’s last plays, correlates uncannily and inversely with what Will Slocombe has recently called the ‘nihilistic absurdity’ of the ‘sublime postmodern’.7 Whereas the drama of tragedy normatively presumes ‘value’ and ‘meaning’, nihilistic absurdity, according to Slocombe, submits every value, (not only death and the nihil, but even non-­meaning insofar as it can be ascribed a value) to the drama of tragic collapse.8 In this way nihilistic absurdity distinguishes itself from the ‘nihilist tragedy’ of modernity, which reified ‘non-­meaning’ into a ‘fixed nihilism’ and functioned for a time as the negative guarantor of normative tragic ‘meaning’.9 According to Slocombe, the movement beyond tragedy accomplished by nihilistic absurdity recognizes,



4 5



6



7 8



9

Ryan, Shakespeare’s Last Plays (London: Longman, 1999); Ruth Nevo, Shakespeare’s Other Language (New York: Methuen, 1987); and Alison Thorne, Shakespeare’s Romances (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Cf. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 466. T. S. Eliot, ‘Shakespeare as Poet and Dramatist’, an address delivered in two parts at Edinburgh University in 1937, housed at the Houghton Library, Harvard and at King’s College, Cambridge, here at pt. II, p. 18. On the theological need for Shakespeare to make this move after King Lear, see John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 138–154. Will Slocombe, Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern (London: Routledge, 2006). Another way of saying this is to say that the sensibility of the postmodern sublime has submitted the ‘ontological depth and high seriousness’ that tragedy presupposes to catastrophe and so arrived at an ‘unbearable lightness of being’ that simply forecloses the drama of meaning tragedy requires; see Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. ix. On the metaphysics of ‘nihilism’, see Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London: Routledge, 2002). Cf. Slocombe, Sublime, p. 107: ‘Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605) . . . may end on a note in which “All’s cheerless, dark, and deadly” (V.iii.289) but this is tragic only because “meaning” was temporarily abandoned and it is still reinstated at the close of the play.’

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and is realized by, a ‘reflexive nihilism’ for which now even the absolute quality of non-­meaning and death are radically questioned. Thus ‘reflexive nihilism’ opens up a vision of the unencompassability of meaning and reality, predi­ cated on a negative mystery, which ‘forces us to “see the whole world with fresh eyes” by turning ourselves “inside out” ’.10 The ‘reflexive nihilism’ of the sublime postmodern turns tragedy ‘inside out’ precisely to the extent that it overdetermines all the predetermined ontological densities on which the drama of the world was once thought to unfold. Insofar as it accomplishes this, the sublime postmodern realizes a negative ‘ultra-­dramatic’ vision in which ‘nothing is . . . that if anything is, it cannot be known, and . . . if anything is and can be known, it cannot be expressed in speech or communication to others’.11 But whereas the sublime postmodern realizes its movement beyond tragedy and dramatic communication through a mystical negation of meaning,12 the Christian movement beyond tragedy realizes a different kind of mystical vision, one that preserves the drama of tragedy now in an overflow of meaning-­ as-love realized as the ‘underlying quality of grace in Being’. This essay is an exploration of the Christian movement beyond tragedy as Eliot and Balthasar variously elaborate it through their respective readings of Shakespeare’s last plays. Setting it against the backdrop of the ‘reflexive nihilism’ of the sublime postmodern, it offers the Christian mystery as an alternative, and more radical, movement beyond tragedy. At its heart, the essay is an exploration of how the newness of this Christian movement is based on a new kind of catharsis, a catharsis of merciful recognition and graceful reversal dramatized in the recognition scenes of Shakespeare’s late plays. The essay is divided into three sections. The first looks at how the Shakespearean movement beyond tragedy can be understood as dramatizing this new catharsis of misericordia, in a process as much cultic as dramatic. The second Slocombe, Sublime, p. 109; here quoting Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade: ‘The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes’ (I.12–15). 11 David R. Morgan, ‘And Now the Void: Twentieth Century Man’s Place in Modern Tragedy’, Contemporary Review 234 (1979), pp. 315–320, p. 320. Cited in Slocombe, Sublime, p. 107. 12 Cf. Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism, p. 258, where he argues that tragedy precisely presumes a non-­tragic metaphysics, for if tragedy becomes the ‘ “metaphysical” status’ of reality, it ‘leaves it without the requisite space for tragedy to occur’. And likewise, ‘Absurdity and nihilism operate in a similar fashion, for they are names that settle into the gap between being and thought, re-­forging a novel chain. This is the “Devil of the Gaps”, who is a bridge to the void, after which it lusts’. 10

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focuses on Eliot’s reading of Shakespeare’s last plays, and how they move beyond the dramatic, and even the cultic, into the realm of liturgical participation and, what Eliot calls, the ‘submarine music’ of the deepest mystery of being. The final section explores Balthasar’s reading of Shakespeare and the World Stage, and how Shakespeare’s movement beyond tragedy (unlike the corresponding movement of the sublime postmodern) does not negate tragedy, but rather catches it up into a more complex drama of meaningfulness.

Dramatizing the new catharsis of misericordia Sometimes called ‘tragicomedies’ for their blend of form, modern scholars notoriously dispute the genre of Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.13 One commentator has suggested that they are best understood as simply ‘beyond genre’.14 Apart from this indeterminacy of dramatic form, what unites these plays is their common pattern of enacted forgiveness and return of what was thought to be lost forever to death. This occurs for the most part through a key ‘recognition scene’ in which the person supposedly lost to death is recognized as newly present and so re-­given to life – and with this recognition, sorrow and guilt give way to a dramatic experience of mercy and forgiveness. In The Winter’s Tale, having accused his wife of infidelity only then to suffer (penitently) the experience of her apparent death for sixteen years, Leontes, in an ultimate experience of reversal and recognition, beholds the ‘statue’ of his dead wife come to life. In Cymbeline, Imogen, thought by her brothers to be dead, is revived next to a beheaded corpse she originally thinks is that of her husband, only to learn from Jupiter that she and her husband will be ultimately reunited. In Pericles, with its most exceptional example of the recognition scene, the king of Tyre, having suffered the apparent death of his daughter and wife, is revived from mourning by a vision of his daughter Marina only to have the goddess Diana appear to him in a dream and bid him come to the temple Cf. Russ McDonald, ‘ “You speak a language that I understand not”: listening to the last plays’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Last Plays, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 91–112, at p. 91. 14 Nevo, Shakespeare’s Other Language, p. 6. 13

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where he is reunited with his wife Thaisa. Finally, in The Tempest, which lacks a formal ‘recognition scene’, we have a wider dramatization of recognition by Prospero of the ‘rarer action’ (5.1.27) of forgiveness as he gives up his magic, pardons his offenders, and frees his angelic servant Ariel. These various dramatizations of recognition and reversal are key to how Eliot understood Shakespeare to have moved into a new realm of dramatic action ‘beyond good and evil’, not through a negation of meaning or value, but through the realization of a positive, ‘ultra-­dramatic’ reality.15 This finds a correlate in Balthasar, for whom the movement beyond tragedy ‘does not abandon the order of justice’ but realizes it within the deeper order of forgiveness.16 The religious implication for both is crucial: the Shakespeare romances dramatize a uniquely Christian recapitulation of tragedy in which, we could say, a new catharsis is realized in the dramatic experience of forgiveness and return of a loved one thought to be dead. This new Christian catharsis does not negate the meaningful drama of tragedy, but draws it up into a greater experience of meaning realized in misericordia, divine ‘lovingkindness’ (khesed). In this sense, the late plays of Shakespeare can be read as extending – while recapitulating and turning ‘inside out’ – the mystery at the heart of tragedy as Aristotle classically delineated it. The Aristotelian idea of tragedy as ‘a mimesis of an action . . . [morally] serious and purposeful, having magnitude’ and ‘bringing about through [a process of] pity and fear the purification (catharsis) of those destructive or painful acts’17 is also based on the dramatics of recognition and reversal.18 Aristotle argued that the ‘finest recognition, anagnorisis [is achieved], when it happens at the same time as the peripeteia (reversal), as occurs in Oedipus’,19 and when the reversal and recognition occur ‘unexpectedly and [yet] out of [the inner logic]’ of the plot.20 While there is a well-noted ambiguity as to who exactly, for Aristotle, is purified by the tragic action, Balthasar clearly construes T. S. Eliot, Introduction to G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London: Methuen, 1961; first published in 1930), p. xx. 16 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 477. 17 Aristotle, Poetics (1449b). Quotations from Aristotle’s poetics follow George Whalley, Aristotle’s Poetics, eds. John Baxter and Patrick Atherton (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). All square brackets in Aristotle quotations are Whalley’s; curved brackets are mine. 18 Aristotle, Poetics (1452a). 19 Aristotle, Poetics (1452a). 20 Aristotle, Poetics (1449b). 15

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it as productive of the ‘purification of the spectator’.21 Specifically this occurs, according to Balthasar, through a participation in the action as ‘sacrament’ of hidden quasi-­grace, which is both ‘not more to be made sense of than the process itself ’ and also ‘determined by the gods’.22 The original cultic root of tragedy is here crucial. It has been argued in detail that ancient Greek tragedy is so deeply embedded in the cultic that it is almost a category error to think of it as ‘theatrical’ in the modern sense.23 This is due not only to the element of the profound incorporation and incantation of religious symbolisms in Attic tragedy, nor merely to the fact that the dramas were originally framed in the cultic context of the festival of Dionysus, but more profoundly: the dramas themselves were understood by their ancient audiences as ritual, and so as ‘cultic’ in the sense that through them the audience was itself made a partaker in a religious rite. According to Balthasar the cultic basis of tragedy is bound, moreover, to an existential contradiction that lies at the heart of human being itself: the human is a finite being who is yet animated by desire for the infinite; he is a fragile being, and yet frail as he is, he is called to freely act in the name of a supernatural (and so immeasurably meaningful) destiny. Tragedy dramatizes this contradiction by enacting ‘the absolute truth that holds sway between god and man’ in the form of ‘a sacred symbol . . . something like a sacrament that contains something like grace and redemption’.24 This quasi-grace, for Balthasar, lies in the fact that the tragic hero must resign himself to the reality that he cannot master or abolish ‘the fundamental contradictions of [human] existence’, but nevertheless must act freely ‘in the light of the gods and the darkness of the gods’.25 And herein lies ‘the incomprehensible power’ of the Greek heart: it says Yes to this [human] existence both in the light and in the darkness of the Absolute: the pacified Yes that has collected together with care all the Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘Tragedy and Christian Faith’, in Theological Explorations, vol. 3, Creator Spirit, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1993), pp. 391–411, at p. 398. 22 Balthasar, ‘Tragedy’, p. 398. 23 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Athenian Religion (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), and ‘Greek Tragedy and Ritual’, in A Companion to Tragedy, Rebecca Bushnell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 7–24. 24 Balthasar, ‘Tragedy’, p. 397. 25 Balthasar, ‘Tragedy’, p. 397. 21

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reasons to say No, in order despite everything to transcend these reasons. The unity of all the tragedies [of the ancient world] lies in this Yes.26

The cultic origin of tragedy, in this light, is radically opposed to the sublime postmodern, not to the extent that it fabricates a human heroism, but to the extent that it preserves the value of human existence in the form of a human ‘Yes’ beyond every negation and tragic fact. Pagan tragedy in this light confronts directly the aporia at the core of human existence while yet at the same time affirming against everything the meaning of human existence and the value of human action. Against this backdrop, the dramatic novum realized in Shakespeare’s late plays lies in how the poet dramatizes an action beyond the pagan horizon of mere contradiction, rising thus ‘above the tragic sphere’ to a drama of recognition that is able to ‘look down from the highest level of a divine providence onto the earthly confusions and culs-­de-sac, unravelling the tangles with fingers of grace’.27 Thus far, the cultic involves the spectator, but in what action precisely? Eliot takes this argument further and shows how the cultic inevitably leads to the liturgical in Shakespeare’s late plays, as we shall now see.

Eliot’s reading of Shakespeare’s last plays In the Edinburgh lectures of 1937, Eliot recapitulated significantly what he had already expressed in his fourth Ariel poem, ‘Marina’ (1930), in which he realized a fine poetical interpretation of the recognition scene of Pericles.28 Shakespeare’s Marina was born at sea in a tempest, in which her mother is thought to have died in childbirth. Unable to raise his daughter alone, Pericles leaves the child in Tarsus only to learn that she has died there. Grief struck, ‘He swears / Never to wash his face nor cut his hairs. / He puts on sack-­cloth, and to sea’ (18.27–29). This is how we find Pericles when his ship comes to Mytilene, where the governor, hearing of the grief of Pericles, sends Marina, who has Balthasar, ‘Tragedy’, p. 397. Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 475. 28 Cf. Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Charter and Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 157–179. 26 27

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become an entertainer in Mytilene, to cheer the despondent king with song and with her pure beauty. Then Pericles recognizes the impossible. Overwhelmed, he calls his councillor Helicanus: O Helicanus, strike me, honoured sir, Give me gash, put me to present pain, Lest this great sea of joys rushing over me O’erbear the shores of my mortality And drown me with their sweetness! (To Marina) O come hither, Thou that begatt’st him that did thee begat, Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tarsus, And found at sea again! (21.179–186)

In the Edinburgh lectures, Eliot insisted that this is ‘the finest of all the “recognition scenes” ’, and ‘a perfect example of the “ultra-­dramatic” ’,29 the point at which poetical drama ‘becomes ritual’ and ‘turns back towards liturgy’ such that ‘the scene could end in no way [other] than by the vision of Diana’.30 The concrete rite that the recognition scene of Pericles approximates and analogically evokes is clearly the regenerative illumination of the neophyte through the waters of baptism. It is a new life through death, an act of being ‘buried . . . by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead . . . we too might walk in newness of life’ (Rm 6.4). And so in Pericles, the mortality of the father is overborne by the new waters of joy in the recognition of the daughter he believed to have been dead. And in this recognition the father awakens from the death of despondency of his old life to the sight of a face that now draws him through the maternal waters of rebirth.31 One detail Eliot could not have missed is the inversion of paternal and filial begetting. To any student of Dante, ‘Thou that begatt’st him that did thee begat’ could only have sounded like an echo of the Marian line of the Paradiso: ‘figlia del tuo figlio’.32 The paradox of the father’s filiation through the life-­giving recognition of his daughter is bound, moreover, to the paradox of what Eliot called the ‘criss-­cross’ of life and death, signalled in the epigraph of Eliot’s poem: Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?33 31 32 33 29 30

Eliot, ‘Shakespeare’, pt. II, p. 18. Eliot, ‘Shakespeare’, pt. II, p. 18. Cf. Justinius, Apologia prima, c. 61 (Patrologia Graeca 6.420b-­c). A line of Dante that Eliot would later take up in the Marian prayer of The Dry Salvages. ‘What is this place? What realm? What region of the world?’

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The epigraph is taken from Hercules Furens, words spoken by Hercules as he awakens to the fact of his murdered family, whom he has killed unwittingly in a fit of madness provoked by the goddess Juno. Eliot wrote of the epigraph that he ‘intended a criss-­cross between Pericles finding alive, and Hercules finding dead – the two extremes of the recognition scene’.34 This criss-­cross is key to the deeper meaning of the recognition scene of Pericles, according to Eliot, which turns the logic of tragedy inside out to open up a new and unfathomable vision beyond good and evil, comedy and tragedy: a vision of new life born through death. In ‘Marina’ this means that the daughter ‘brings with her the fragility of old age’, some kind of recognition of death in the tragic fact of finite being, while yet the father experiences the birth of misericordia that lies on the far side of death: the astonishment ‘that an old ship, once split, could be restored’ (The Tempest, 5.1.221–225).35 Here the movement beyond tragedy is not so much a negation of tragedy – as it is both with the ‘nihilistic absurd’, from the one side, and with the fairy-­tale ‘happy ending’ from the other – but a catching up of the tragic reality of death into the comic reality of life, now realized in terms of an infinitely greater complexity of dramatic reality irreducible to death. And so just as the resurrected Christ bears forever the wounds of his death and crucifixion, so the new life of Pericles bears within it death in restored life. This is the movement into the truly ‘ultra-­dramatic’: death is not the last word, but neither is death evaded nor is its tragic fact negated; death is transformed into the means of new life. Insofar as Eliot’s ‘Marina’ is a poetic commentary on the recognition motif in Shakespeare’s late plays, we can here pinpoint the epigraph as signalling the new cathartic reality of ‘ultra-­dramatic’ recognition. The recognition of Hercules exemplifies a classical recognition scene that confirms Aristotelian catharsis, insofar as the peripeteia here is a dramatic turning point for the hero, awakening to a reality the opposite of what he would in every case have wanted and expected. It is exemplary too of anagnorisis, in that the recognition of Hercules is a ‘change from not-­knowing to knowing, in [matters of] love or hate [within blood relationship], in people who have been marked out for From a postscript of a letter to Sir Michael Sadler, 9 May 1930. As quoted in Bush, A Study in Charter and Style, p. 167. 35 Bush, A Study in Charter and Style, p. 167 34

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success or disaster’.36 The drama of ‘Marina’ does not cancel this tragic catharsis but rather turns it inside out in a new recognition of the deeper mystery of ‘the underlying quality of grace in Being’, as Balthasar puts it. And so, in the new Shakespearean recognition scene poetically interpreted by Eliot, those things that signify ‘Death’ are to ‘become insubstantial, reduced by a wind’ (14). This wind invokes the breath of Jesus on the apostles (cf. Jn 20.22), which itself recalls the original breath of Genesis, both on the waters (Gen 1.2) and in the ‘breath of life’ blown into the nostrils of Adam (Gen 2.7). But the wind also provokes, and is, the strength of the tragic tempest, and so reinforces the awakening of the speaker to the recognition of his own fragility of being, the reality of his dying as a means to rebirth. In both cases, the wind is linked to ‘this grace dissolved in place’ (16). In this event, the passage from forgetfulness (‘I have forgotten’ [23]) to remembrance (‘And remember’ [24]) is provoked by the recognition of the face of one the speaker thought he would never see again. The recognition of this face, moreover, provokes an experience of anamnesis in the fullest sense: illumination before the deepest mystery of being, ‘unknowing, half conscious, unknown’ (27), now verified in ‘This form, this face, this life / Living to live in a world of time beyond me’ (29–30). Having recognized his daughter and put on fresh clothes, Shakespeare’s Pericles begins to hear the ‘music of the spheres’ (21.216), a ‘Most heavenly music’ that ‘nips me unto listening’ (21.220–221). For Eliot this was crucial; he called it the realm of ‘submarine music’,37 the concrete point at which, in these plays of Shakespeare, ‘we touch the border of those feelings which only music can express’.38 Eliot’s ‘Marina’ is nothing other than an attempt to give poetical voice to this mysterious illumination of being by the ‘submarine music’ internal to the event of recognition. Accordingly this music accompanies Eliot’s speaker throughout, in the ‘woodthrush singing through the fog’ (line 3), ‘and the woodsong fog’ (15), and in the ‘woodthrush calling through the fog’ (34). The ‘submarine music’ draws the speaker of ‘Marina’ into the deepest reality of being: ‘Resign my life for this life’ (31), which in turn awakens the speaker’s ‘hope, the new ships’ (32). All of this signifies, in Aristotle, Poetics (1452a). Eliot, Introduction to Knight, The Wheel of Fire, p. xix. 38 Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), p. 87. 36 37

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poetical form, how Eliot understood Shakespeare to have moved into the drama of an experience of encounter that lies ‘beyond the nameable, classifiable emotions and motives of our conscious life’,39 and into ‘a hidden and mysterious pattern of reality [that] appears as if from a palimpsest’.40

Balthasar’s reading of Shakespeare and the World Stage Balthasar’s similar understanding of Shakespeare’s late plays occurs within the wider context of his Theodramatik.41 It centres on the classical idea of the World Stage and what Balthasar understands as the tri-­fold analogical relation between the drama of human life, the drama of the stage, and the ‘inner dramatic tension of revelation’.42 Inscribed on the Globe Theatre itself – Totus mundus agit histrionem43 – the idea of the World Stage stretches back to the Greeks.44 The theme is ubiquitous in Shakespeare, but iconic in Jaques’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ (As You Like It, 2.7.139–143) and in Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ soliloquy. In the latter, the World Stage is expressed in a deeply tragic key in which human life is described as ‘a poor player’ who ‘struts and frets his hour upon the stage’, whose history is a ‘tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing’ (Macbeth 5.5.24–28). In its classical origin, tragedy sets the question of the World Stage in divine darkness, where the gods seem to have become aloof, invisible or alien, while yet they still determine the meaning of human existence. This vision is captured in Gloucester’s declaration in King Lear: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; / They kill us for their sport’ (15.35–36). At the core of the veiled mystery of the relation of human suffering to the divine, lies the cultic origin of tragedy, and to this extent it undergirds the logic of the rite in honour of Dionysius: ‘[I]t is in honor of the god that it [tragedy] brings into the open the fate of man Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, p. 86. Eliot, ‘Shakespeare’, pt. II, p. 17. 41 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, pp.  135–257. For an overview of the five volumes of Balthasar’s Theodramatik, see Aidan Nichols OP, No Bloodless Myth: A Guide Through Balthasar’s Dramatics (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2000). 42 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 125. 43 Most commonly loosely translated as ‘All the world’s a stage.’ 44 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 162, and cf. n. 28. 39 40

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in the dark light of the gods.’45 The interrelation of cult and drama from the origin is here crucial, but equally is the fact that tragedy is internal to the human experience of life.46 Existence, for the human creature, is tragic in the sense that the human person must confront his finitude and yet discover and know that he possesses an infinite desire – a longing to know and to love. And this leads the human being to the further realization that it is not only the trajectory of desire and love that is frustrated by finitude, but also that every human life bears an ‘opaque guilt’ that cannot be expiated or redressed, even while it can neither be easily located or understood. Balthasar traces a correlative tragic motif in the Old Testament, pointing to the linked stories of Iphigenia in Aulis to Jephthah’s daughter; Hercules to Samson; Cassandra to Jeremiah; Hecuba to Job. Balthasar is careful here to emphasize that it ‘is not the similarity in motifs [that is important] but the parallel situation of man, who is fully affirmed even in his whole finitude’ both in Greek tragedy and in the Old Testament.47 At the crux of this parallelism, for Balthasar, is the contradiction that lies at the heart of the human relation to divinity: The outline and figure of man are deciphered just as radically [in the Old Testament as in Greek tragedy] on the basis of his exposure before God, indeed God demands of him that he may no longer understand himself in any other way at all than in such a transcendence into fate (from fari = to speak), into the divine oracle of the Lord that is both threat and assurance of salvation at the same time.48

There may be various ways to perform an escape from the tension of this contradiction, but the one offered by Christianity is less a way out of the pathos of human existence than a way through it. As Balthasar puts it: The tragedy of Jesus Christ surpasses the Greek and the Jewish tragedies only by simultaneously fulfilling them in itself. And it fulfils the contraction of the existence (ex-­sistentia) that emerges in ekstasis into the divine darkness, not by dissolving the contradiction but by bearing that affirmation of the human situation as it is through a still deeper darkness in finem, ‘to the 47 48 45 46

Balthasar, ‘Tragedy’, p. 393. Balthasar, ‘Tragedy’, pp. 393–395. Balthasar, ‘Tragedy’, p. 399. Balthasar, ‘Tragedy’, p. 399.

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end’, as love: for the Father and for men . . . [And this] event becomes the universal sacrament in the centre of the history of the world.49

The experience of contradiction of human life is thus recapitulated, for Balthasar, when the Son of God is incarnated and freely submits to die. This is the truly dramatic gesture of history. In Jesus, ‘God’s omnipotence . . . was able to make itself known . . . as powerlessness and unutterable limitation’.50 And in this way Jesus becomes the ‘once-­for-all drama’ that must now be ‘exalted as the norm of the entire dramatic dimension of human life’.51 This is possible because in Christ ‘the abyss of all tragedy must be plumbed to the bottom’ while ‘in it, and transcending it, we . . . discern the . . . gracious destiny that genuinely touches human existence’.52 This way beyond tragedy, through tragedy, is paradoxical to the extreme, but only in a sense that confirms the Paschal troparion: ‘Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death.’ The death of Jesus is truly tragic insofar as it is predicated on, and realizes, a movement through tragedy that transfigures it into a deeper mystery of being in new life. In light of the forgoing we now more clearly see the Christian need of Eliot to append an invocation of the recognition scene of Hercules Furens to his ‘Marina’. Only in the criss-­cross of Hercules finding dead and Pericles finding alive do we realize the newness of how the Christian mystery passes beyond tragedy. The misericordia of the Paschal Mystery does not erase the wounds of old age, human suffering, or the injury of sin, it transfigures them in forgiveness and the second gift of life graced with meaning beyond the horizon of death. Or as Balthasar puts it: the true passage beyond tragedy is not an escape from death, but the realization that ‘the human destiny of death is undergirded by the death of Christ’.53 This means that the ‘inner dramatic tension of revelation’,54 enjoins a freedom of value on a World Stage in which human action is accompanied by the dramatic action of God, which provokes a dramatic human response. Balthasar, ‘Tragedy’, p. 401. Balthasar, ‘Tragedy’, p. 401. 51 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 2, Dramatis personae: Man in God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1990), pp. 83–84. 52 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 2, p. 84. 53 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 5, The Last Act, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1998), p. 325. 54 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 125. 49 50

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For Balthasar, the truth of the Christian World Stage was realized in the theatre above all by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, in his autos sacramentales, and especially in his El gran teatro del mundo.55 In that play, God, the creator of all things, conceives humanity to will and act as actors in a play for which God takes the main seat in the audience, to watch from heaven the drama of the World Stage. God, having given out the roles of Beauty, Peasant, King, Beggar, and Rich Man to his players, bestows on them the freedom precisely Prospero did not give until the end of The Tempest. The ultimate stage direction of El gran teatro del mundo is thus: ‘Obrar bien, que Dios es Dios.’56 And the actors play their roles under this direction until Sad Voice calls the players to their death, to which some go repentantly, but all unwillingly, that is, except for Beggar, who embraces her death and so receives a seat at the promised feast. But if Calderón articulates in the clearest way the theo-­dramatic reality of the World Stage, it is Shakespeare who dramatizes the newness of the theo-­ dramatic gesture of the ‘rarer action’: the ‘dramatist of forgiveness is and remains Shakespeare’.57 And so if Calderón better than any realized the truth of the Christian World Stage, it must be Shakespeare, the ‘dramatist of forgiveness’, who realizes better than any the irreducible newness this realization brings. In the world A.D., in what Balthasar calls the ‘postfiguration’ of the Gospel, the dramatic possibility of letting mercy take the position of justice becomes ‘a major dramatic theme that also brings ancient motifs into the brighter light of Christianity’.58 While Balthasar identifies many dramatists who experiment in this new dramatic theme, the transition from equalizing justice to unequalizable mercy is, in his judgement, one of the ‘innermost motives’ of Shakespearean drama tout court.59 In this regard, a crucial third expression by Shakespeare of the World Stage needs to be noted – beyond the comic vision of As You Like and the tragic vision of Macbeth – an expression of the World Stage in which the absolute power of the director-­author is realized in the ‘rarer action’ to free and forgive. This is the dramatic gesture of Prospero. Cf. Christian Andrés, ‘La metáfora del «theatrum mundi» en Pierre Boaistuau y Calderón’, Criticón 91 (2004), pp. 67–78. 56 ‘Do good, for God is God.’ 57 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 466. 58 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 465. 59 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 465. 55

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Prospero’s original power is magnificently realized in Peter Greenaway’s film adaptation of The Tempest, Prospero’s Books (1991). In Prospero’s Books, Greenaway has Prospero speak the lines of every character, reducing in this way the dramatic action of the play to the power of Prospero’s ventriloquism.60 The players are un-­free. And they are as un-­free as they are un-­real, a point emphasized in The Tempest in Prospero’s acknowledgement of the theatricality of his magic (cf. 4.1.148–156). In Prospero’s world there is no drama because there is no freedom, and no reality outside the power of the ventriloquizing author-­cum-director-­cum-hero, that is, until all of this is recapitulated into the new freedom of the ‘rarer action’ realized in Act Five. The gesture of forgiveness Prospero shows to Antonio, Alonso and Sebastian, and to Caliban, is internal to the freedom he restores to Ariel. All of this is given a kind of sacramental expression in the engagement of Ferdinand and Miranda. Forgiveness and freedom are here constituted in relation to the nuptial bond of love. The ‘rarer action’, however, finds its full meaning in Prospero’s resolve to ‘break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth’ (5.1.54–55), and ‘drown my book’ (5.1.57). The gesture of the ‘rarer action’ is a gesture of renunciation and death, a renunciation that makes possible a new realm of dramatic action in misericordia. This is evidenced in the ultimate dramatic reversal wherein Prospero begs the audience itself to set him free: ‘my ending is despair / Unless I be relieved by prayer’ (5.1.333–334). In this way Prospero’s renunciation – his act of mercy to those who betrayed him and his gift of freedom to those he enslaved – is the basis of a new acceptance of fragility and the limits of being. And so the central dramatic hope at the end of the play, the joyful homecoming and marriage festival, must be coupled with a new need to accept the mercy of an other, to wait on the other and ultimately be dependent on the gesture of the other. A few verses of Eliot’s ‘Marina’ can be applied here to Prospero, who can be understood as asking ‘to live in a world of time beyond me; let me / Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken, / The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships’. There is at the end of The Tempest, even as there is in ‘Marina’, an unbearable weight being placed on the criss-­cross of joyful-­life and suffering-­death: In this paragraph I am indebted to Emma Smith’s lecture on The Tempest, delivered as part of her Oxford University series on ‘Approaching Shakespeare’ (http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/ approaching-­shakespeare).

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I have hope to see the nuptial Of these our dear-­belov’d solemnizèd; And thence retire me to my Milan, where Every third thought shall be my grave. (5.1.308–311)

The dramatic movement of the play is at once a movement towards the joyful reconciliation of the nuptial mystery (‘the hope, the new ships’), while at the same time it is a movement towards the renunciation of death (‘And thence retire . . . every third thought shall be my grave’).61 In this way the ‘criss-­cross between . . . finding alive, and . . . finding dead – the two extremes of the recognition scene’62 – is internal to the vision of The Tempest in a way that unsettles the possibility of a sentimental reading of the play’s end, as if a ‘happily ever after’ could displace the drama of needing to learn how to renounce the ‘self ’ and die.63 In The Sea and the Mirror, W. H. Auden gives voice to the nature of this new realm opened by Prospero’s renunciation.64 In the sequence ‘Prospero to Ariel’, the aged magician is made to share his ‘resigning thoughts’ (2) with the spirit he held captive, explaining that for him it will be to ‘Briefly Milan, then earth’ (5). Prospero has become cognizant of the grave no human being can escape, even now as he becomes as free as the spirit he will presently give up. In all, things have turned out better   Than I once expected or ever deserved; I am glad that I did not recover my dukedom till I do not want it; I am glad that Miranda No longer pays me any attention; I am glad I have freed you, So at last I can really believe I shall die. (5–10)

Putting these words into the mouth of Shakespeare’s Prospero, Auden helps us to see how the magician’s renunciation is internal to his ‘every third thought’, and how this new renunciation to death is internal to the freedom that enlivens the ultimate movement beyond tragedy into the new realm of Shakespeare’s Cf. Nevo, Shakespeare’s Other Language, pp. 130–152. From a postscript of a letter to Sir Michael Sadler, 9 May 1930. As quoted in Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Charter and Style, p. 167. 63 See Harry Berger, Jr, ‘Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Shakespeare Studies 5 (1969), pp. 253–283. 64 W. H. Auden, The Sea and Mirror: A Poem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; first published in 1944). 61 62

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ultra-­drama. That the tragedy of death is only overcome in the ultimate renunciation of ‘self ’, confirms and conforms to the gesture of Jesus himself, who is ‘the firstborn of the dead’ (Rev. 1.5). The recognition and reversal of death that issues from the Paschal Mystery of the Son, finally, is the source of the freedom and misericordia of the one who uniquely has the power to lay down his life and lift it up again (Jn 10.18). Only through death, then, does the drama of the World Stage truly move ‘beyond good and evil’, not by negating the tragic but by catching it up into a meaning of gift beyond the limited horizon of death. According to Balthasar the key to Shakespeare’s last plays lies in how they ‘rise above the tragic sphere’.65 In these plays what is important, what is being dramatized, is not the pleading for forgiveness of evildoers, but rather ‘that they are given an overflowing abundance of the grace of forgiveness’.66 And yet what is crucial in this overflowing of grace is that the ‘costliness’ of mercy is never undervalued. Shakespeare ‘does not abandon the order of justice’.67 All this leads to Balthasar’s final judgement of Shakespeare’s achievement: ‘the dramatist causes the Good to predominate without feeling it necessary to reduce the totality of world events to some all-­embracing formula’.68 This refusal of formulae is crucial. The final passage into forgiveness can no less negate justice than can the passage beyond tragedy negate death; to the contrary, the final passage is a passage into freedom, into an authentically dramatic action, not dominated by fate or the futility of life, but animated rather by a sense of the redemptive purpose of every human gesture. And so, while Balthasar judges that Shakespeare in fact ‘takes up a position beyond tragedy and comedy’ even in the so-­called ‘tragedies’ (‘because the world he portrays is a mixture of both elements’), in the late ‘romances’ he rises also above justice and mercy by allowing both of them to persist, partly in each other and partly in opposition to each other, but all the time confident that the highest good is to be found in forgiveness.69 And yet, however much forgiveness becomes transparent and dominates in the late plays to reveal ‘the underlying quality of grace in Being as such’, nevertheless ‘the poet is 67 68 69 65 66

Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 475. Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 475. Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 477. Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 478. Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 478.

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aware that the cost of forgiveness . . . must be a rarity if it is to have its full effect’.70 In other words, forgiveness cannot negate justice, just as return cannot negate loss, and new life cannot negate death. The dramatization of forgiveness must dramatize a complex form of gift beyond ‘measure for measure’ in the concrete wonder of life’s miracle: the human gesture of renouncing oneself for an other.

Conclusion In Le Théâtre et son Double, published two years after Eliot’s Edinburgh lectures, the French avant-­garde writer Antonin Artaud proposed a ‘theatre of cruelty’ in order to foment a revolution against the ‘disinterested idea of the theatre’ that leaves ‘the public intact, without setting off one image that will shake the organism to its foundations and leave an ineffaceable scar’.71 On one level Artaud can be understood as wanting to recover something of the cultic root of drama in which the theatre could be newly experienced as a visceral contact between the audience and the players through an experience of ‘cruelty’. On another he seems to have wanted to overdetermine the experience of meaning of drama in order to turn inside out every predetermined sense of what theatre can be. To achieve this heightened sense of drama, Artaud sought to excite a dramatic movement beyond language, through a dramatic enactment of ‘situations that are expressed in concrete gestures’.72 These concrete gestures, he argued, ‘must have an efficacy strong enough to make us forget the very necessity of speech’.73 In some respects the programme of Artaud finds a correlate in Eliot’s understanding of Shakespeare’s late plays as realizing the point at which theatre becomes ritual again and ‘turns back towards liturgy’. For both, the ultimate expression of drama entails a radical movement ‘beyond’ that draws the audience into the action, an action that indeed must also move beyond the limits language. But whereas Artaud can see no further than ‘cruelty’, Eliot 72 73 70 71

Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p. 466. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), pp. 76–77. Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, p. 108. Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, p. 108.

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with Balthasar sees a paradoxical beyond, in which the cruelty of the World Stage and the dramatic contradiction of human experience is ‘undergirded by the death of Christ’ and so by an ‘underlying quality of grace in Being’. Here the recognition scenes of Shakespeare’s late plays are crucial because they dramatize, in the ‘rarer action’, an embodied gesture of flesh and blood that recognizes and reveals this ultimate depth of being. And so for theatre to be truly dramatic, it must move beyond genre and become concrete and embodied, it must return to the dramatic source of liturgical action. For Christian theology this passage can only be a passage into the Sacrifice of the Mass, where the truly dramatic gesture is given and received. In this criss-­cross of life in death – this anamnesis of recognition and reversal – grace untangles with her fingers the knot of tragedy to reveal the deeper mystery of the ‘rarer action’.

11

Fictioning Things Gift and Narrative John Milbank

University of Nottingham, UK

Reprint permission granted by the University of Notre Dame, Religion and Literature, Issue 37.3 (Autumn 2005).

Childhood and narrative Theologians today exercise almost zero public influence. And yet, through the medium of children’s literature and fantasy literature generally, a public theological debate of a kind continues to be conducted. From George Macdonald in the Victorian era through G. K. Chesterton to the Inklings, an attempt has been made to represent Christianity in the mode of what Macdonald already called the fantastic imagination.1 If one judges by book sales, the avid readership of this literature must extend well beyond the numbers of those who go to church, although the latter group also have been perhaps much more profoundly shaped by this literary mode of reflection than by the work of conceptual theologians. As if in recognition that by this means Christianity still exerts a covert hold on the global imagination, Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials has written an anti-Christian fantasy trilogy, which to some extent is deliberately directed against certain key themes of the Macdonald tradition – in particular

See Macdonald, George, ‘Fantastic Imagination’, in ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher, The Complete Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1999).

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the privileging of the innocent, childish eye – while at the same time it is manifestly indebted to this tradition for its mode of construction. This is especially apparent in terms of its envisaging of a parallel universe with its own laws, which is deployed both to point out the arbitrary contingency of the universe we inhabit and to indicate more sharply an essence of ethical legality that might transcend arbitrariness and display its imperatives in any possible world whatsoever.2 Moreover, Pullman’s ethical prescription remains a theological one of a sort – he offers a kind of materialist Gnosticism as an alternative to orthodox Christian faith. The fact that it is now possible and respectable to offer this sort of thing to children could be seen as one measure of de-Christianization – although already Pullman has called forth a popular work of Christian fictional critique in the shape of D. P. Taylor’s Shadowmancer3 – unfortunately a work that is well conceived but poorly executed, though little more so than the latter part of Pullman’s trilogy, which severely degenerates, perhaps because of its mythopoeic incoherency, after the unsurpassed brilliance of the first volume (especially the first half). And of course the Harry Potter sequence – so much better in the films when the plodding prose is cast away to leave the superbly imagined core – is rightly recognized as essentially sustaining a Christian vision. And this calls forth a wider reflection – is the entire adaptation of Christianity to a fantastic mode itself a sign of de-Christianization and a postreligious approach to religious materials? A conversion of doctrine into a fictionalized myth might be seen as one manifestation of a post-Christian phase in which what was once truth still persists in the echo of public value. Moreover, the association of erstwhile Christian realities with other worlds, lost worlds or past worlds, might suggest a certain note of pathos pervading all such literature. In a way, it is arguable that Lewis and Tolkien or J. K. Rowling are in negative agreement with Don Cupitt: there is no core of theological realism that can survive the lapse of belief in an enchanted cosmos. Hence one can read their work at times as a lament for the loss of enchantment. If it is Pullman, Philip, His Dark Materials: Northern Lights; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass (London: Scholastic Press, 1995, 1997, 1999). On ethics and fantasy, see Chesterton, G. K., ‘The Ethics of Elfland’ in Orthodoxy (London: The Bodley Head, 1957), pp. 66–103. 3 Taylor, D. P., Shadowmancer (London: Faber and Faber, 2003). 2

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more than that, if it is part of a project of re-­enchantment, as seems to be the case, then one might ask, would not such a project have to exceed the realm of the fictional imagination? Can there be in any sense a realist understanding of this literature’s engagement with the seemingly fantastic? I want to suggest in what follows that it is possible to read what I shall call ‘The Macdonald tradition’ as more than a kind of rearguard action of retreating faith. It is not so much, I shall contend, that this tradition merely re-­presents Christianity in a fictional mode, as that it re-­envisages Christianity altogether, in continuity with certain strands of the Romantic tradition, in terms of the categories of the imagination, the fairy realm and of magic. It is as if, in the face of the decline of Christianity, Macdonald and Chesterton put forward the radical claim that this decline is linked to a perennial failure of abstract reason sufficiently to grasp the character of Christian doctrine and practice. This has a very important implication for the attitude of theology towards the striking emergence in our time – especially in the British Isles – of modes of neo-­ paganism, new-­ageism, etc. My argument in this paper will suggest that we approach this phenomenon in a sympathetic and mediating rather than confrontational manner, and that only such an approach will allow us to formulate a more precise critique of neo-­paganism. This re-­envisaging goes along with a kind of subversion of traditional notions of catechesis. In terms of the latter, Christian teaching is something fully grasped by adults in abstract terms, and is then presented to children in terms of image and story that they will find more readily comprehensible. Yet at the centre of Christianity – still more so than with Judaism and Islam – stand narratives and symbols. It is these that are held to be inexhaustibly inspirational and to ensure that abstract doctrine must endlessly develop because it can never be finally conclusive. It follows that the most basic, the most fundamental elements of the faith can be taught to children and that in their initial imaginative and intuitive response to this saturation of meaning, there lies something of more authority than adult reflection. Adults may be the means of transmission, but in a sense they are conveying what they have received and must continue to receive themselves as children. The gospels themselves leave no doubt about this: it is children, particularly, who need to come to see Jesus and if the rest of us are to see him, we will ourselves have to become ‘like children’ and be born again. The infant Jesus in the temple was

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able to instruct his elders, not just because he was the Logos incarnate, but also because the true Logos is the Son in whose generation the Father alone exists and therefore is also the child who instructs his parent with exact equivalence to the measure in which he is himself instructed. Thus the Logos speaks on earth first with a childish wisdom that even his developed humanly adult mind does not lose sight of. So there is a privileging here of the innocent eye, which is the inner eye whose ‘common-­sensing’ is initially overwhelmed, before any strong degree of reflection intervenes, by the impressions made by images, sounds, touches, and narrative sequences.4 Such things are enjoyed by the child for their own sake, in the mode of play, and in this way the childish eye has more regard for the entire ultimate ‘point’ of things, since, as yet, it is relatively immune to the goals of ambition, possession, and sexual conquest. Like a cat, a child needs a certain range of its own, a certain territory for its safe free-­ranging, but this is more to do with the child losing itself beyond egotism, than it is to do with possessiveness versus the equally ego-­conscious claims of non-­possessiveness. The child wishes to lose itself in a world of which it is nonetheless a part, outside the adult oscillations between possessive seizure and the imperative of self-­ sacrifice. And it is this mode of losing of self that the gospels seek to recommend. It is an entering back into the paradisal before the very possibility of evil and death and their required remedies of sacrificial suffering and preparedness to die. This is not however to say that Christianity identifies childish innocence with Adamic innocence; that would be the post-Christian Rousseauian modification of the Christian view. Nevertheless, in the Christian view – for example in Augustine and contrary to most readings – before the individual will has freely assented to that impairment of our nature which is the legacy of original sin, it remains relatively innocent and there is a real powerful echo of Eden.5 To be sure, because of this legacy of impairment, constantly reinforced by all the evil decisions of the past, there is, from the outset, even for the child, See Charles Peguy on the balance in humanity between childhood and adulthood in Basic Verities: Prose and Poetry, trans. Ann and Julien Green (New York: Pantheon, 1943), pp. 198–205, 222–231, 232–251, esp. 223: ‘It is innocence that is full and experience that is empty’, etc. 5 Milbank, John, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1–26. 4

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a corrupted habitual tendency and so an adult travail to be gone through, which necessitates self-­sacrifice and the preparedness to die oneself rather than inflict death upon others if evil is to be cancelled. But to die this way is to die ‘innocently’ and not purposely out of some half-­concealed suicidal urge. Innocence no more wills harm to itself than harm to others – innocence is ranged on the side of cosmic justice and the free, peaceful play of all with all. For this reason, as the tradition has sometimes envisaged, it is Christ the confused child who dies upon the cross, and if he is able to sing the song of experience in such a way as to cancel the effects of experience although he cannot escape enduring them, then this is because he sustains in the face of adversity the vision of innocence – the vision of God himself who has experienced nothing, undergone nothing, passed no trials, no tests and for just this reason is good, as pure-­envisaging, pure inner-­playfulness, and pure intuition without any degree of reflection whatsoever. It is clear, as I have already suggested, that for Christian doctrine God’s ‘adulthood’ as Father is his originating, without remainder, the Son and therefore is but the emergence of God as child – it is, to repeat, fundamentally for this reason that it was appropriate for the Logos to become incarnate first as a child and, as a child, to instruct the learned. The Christian reversion of pedagogy is consummated in the vision of Trinity and Incarnation. This Christian privileging of childhood as the exemplary beginning of wonder has perhaps been especially grasped within British tradition from Thomas Traherne through to William Wordsworth. But already in the Middle English poem Pearl,6 the narrator has a vision of his dead infant daughter as a spotless pearl who is justly elevated to the same beatitude as those who have lived, suffered, endured, and persisted. They all receive by grace an equal justice due to innocence; they are all equally adorned by the white pearls of simpleness and purity. For if unsullied innocence should in justice be protected and given all that there is to give, so also those who have done justice must, precisely in order have done so, have defended innocence, and themselves sustained or further achieved an innocence by developing their own resources in an unsullied manner, since to do rightly is to preserve the Andrew, Malcolm, and Ronald Waldron, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter, 1996).

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integrity of one’s own nature, to let it grow – whereas if something ‘happens’ by mere unabsorbed chance experience to this nature, that something must be an evil contamination. As Charles Peguy put it: ‘It is innocence that grows and experience that wanes.’7 Hence if the innocence of the dead child is rightly rewarded, so, symmetrically, the achieved justice of adults receives the reward of innocence. Christ is a holy innocent on the cross; the holy innocents share in advance in his crucifixion. However, it seems to have been only in the nineteenth century that a Christian and post-Christian sense that childhood was ‘special’ received a full recognition, and especially so in Anglo-Saxon countries. (The great French contributors to this theme are Peguy and Alain Fournier.) This is most certainly a complex phenomenon and full of ambivalences: it was sometimes indeed related to a dark and gloomy account of adult sexuality and a correspondingly perverse promotion of childhood and children themselves as objects of adult desire. This further entailed a series of projections rendering children either implausibly sexless or else sexualized in all too adult a manner. Another danger here is that of a cult of childhood as a retreat from a modern, adult, disenchanted world with its trials of sexual freedom and increased need for self-­direction. This is clearly part of Philip Pullman’s legitimate worry about this legacy. However, to stress only this dark side would surely be to ignore the way in which, late in the day, and ironically after the onset of its public decline, Christianity finally helped to bring about a recognition that childhood is a fully human phase of human life and yet one characterized by special needs and priorities of which the allowing of free reign to the imagination and to the realm of play are paramount. Pullman notably wishes to offer a Gnostic account of the need for transgression and of loss if we are to grow up. In George Macdonald’s work however, there is something like a Blakean sense that if the sexual field is to be properly negotiated, it must be re-­envisaged in terms of its original innocence – that in a sense it must be seamlessly integrated into unfolding childhood, in order that its wonder, play, total commitment to the immediate range of what is offered in the shape of Peguy, Charles, Basic Verities, p. 223.

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one’s sexual partner, and its selfless excess to the contrast between sacrifice and egotism may be successfully embraced. Thus, in his fairy-­story ‘The Light Princess,’ the sheer childishness of the Prince and Princess causes them entirely to surrender to nights of swimming in the moonlit waters of an enchanted lake. The eponymous heroine who lacks a sense of gravity, both literally and figuratively, is not to be taken in Pullmanesque terms simply as an ultra-­child who needs to learn to ‘fall’ and so to grow up, because in fact she lacks also the child-­like gravity of serious play – which she discovers only through the pull of water and not on dry land – and can laugh, even at disaster, but lacks the capacity to smile. She is if anything a damaged, autistic child, gaping amorally at the world of gravity as if at the harmless bangs and crashes of a Disney cartoon, and the point of her fictional creation by Macdonald is to point out how our subjection to gravity is what literally helps to make us metaphorically ‘grave’ and to value our being held-­down, pulled towards finite things, including in a sexual sense. As with his friend and contemporary Lewis Carroll and with Chesterton later on, Macdonald’s play with counter-­factuality makes us see the contingent absurdity of our own world which might have been otherwise, and at the same time the specific value of this elective set of circumstances. Being held to the ground gives rise to a certain set of appreciations and for a human being to be without gravity is grotesque. And yet, the princess at the end of the story still occasionally misses her levity, and there is a hint that for other modes of created being – the angelic, for example – such an idiom might be appropriate. So it is not the case that this story can be culturally instrumentalized as a parable about the need for the child to grow up, nor about a necessary passage through rupture – the ‘light’ which it sheds on our world and the comparative weight which this ‘lightness’ grants it, is rather more subtle and indirect, since the princess must, in a unique fictional fashion, adapt to the reality of our world from which she has been sundered at birth through the malice of a wicked fairy. Although she must indeed learn to fall, this is not a passage through a happy transgression, but simply the acquiring of our peculiarly human ontological density. Particularly striking in this respect is the fact that, since the Princess has not been able to fall, save into waters, tears have not been able to fall from her eyes either. The reader of the story anticipates that they will do so – thereby

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inducting the rest of her body into weightiness – when she sees that the Prince is prepared to die for her by acting as a human stopper to prevent the draining of the lake (!) under the further evil enchantment of the wicked fairy. But we are disappointed – this does not occur. Instead, the Princess’s tears fall first through joy when the Prince is resurrected from his sacrificial death. In this way a Gnostic or Hegelian message that all spiritual reality must suffer in order to develop is avoided – for what the Princess has endured through the hand of malice is less an outright evil condition than it is an ontologically inappropriate one. (For this reason it is also not a Heideggerean ‘fall’ into the ‘guilt’ of ontic existence as such.) Hence her cure does not lie – as it must for a fallen creature and for those around her who have to endure her anomalous condition as an evil – via the passage through suffering of which her levity remains autistically oblivious, but rather through her rebirth into genuine humanity – including the capacity for sympathetic suffering – by joy and ecstasy. Something at last ‘gets through to her’. Thus the Princess becomes able fully to love the Prince by belatedly becoming a normal child. Here, for Macdonald, ontologically speaking, maturation is an event within childhood and this sophisticated aspect of his vision is something which Pullman’s critique is unable truly to come to terms with. One could say something similar about Pullman’s key theme of self-­ reflection, self-­consciousness and the acquiring of a determinable identity when one’s ‘daemon’ takes on a fixed habitual shape – a wonderful mythopoeic thematic in his trilogy. Surely this work of individuation is always already begun within childish play itself, in the trying out and gradual selection of different roles? Gradually, such role-­play becomes in adolescence more ‘for real’ and then, indeed, self-­consciousness sets in. But the ferocious Lyra is, I would contend, more plausible in her early childish phase than in her later pre-­pubescent and adolescent ones, for such a degree of boldness is more characteristic of the unselfconscious child who imagines that, if one merely adopts a role, the wherewithal successfully to fulfil it will automatically follow . . . this is true of Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite, who remains very much a child and on whom it seems to me Lyra may be somewhat based. Adolescent self-­ consciousness, by contrast, is inhibiting as much as it is awkwardly promoting of action and of a distinctive identity that is still to some degree a childish try-­on. In this respect Lyra’s character does not seem to alter sufficiently and

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her adolescent experimentation is too confused with a childish and uncomplicated directness. Moreover and more decisively, the ‘reduction of one’s daemon to one fixed shape’, since it occurs under the aegis of an insecure adolescent trying-­on of a specific front, is surely both more unstable and less final than Pullman’s fiction imposes? One could argue that such a reaching for fixity is really characteristic of adolescent, initial adulthood, rather than fully achieved adulthood as such. Surely, by contrast, full adult mature self-­consciousness comes at the point where, as C. S. Lewis indicated, one half steps back into childhood and relocates self-­reflection within a certain forgetting of self in order to re-­engage with the world, and where also one steps somewhat back into a flexibility of role-­playing in the surer knowledge that one’s unique character, since it survives such public metamorphoses, will shine through many necessary social disguises.8 So only the pathological adult would be always a psychic wolf, fox, spider, etc., and it may be that the problem with adults in our own time is less that they remain still monstrous children as rather that they remain still awkward, graceless adolescents. But the adolescent phase itself need not be pathological where greater self-­reflection is correlated with the realization that, if the individual mind uniquely reflects the world, then also certain aspects of the world are thereby reflected through the mind back to the world. Perhaps a lack of this sort of somewhat neoplatonic metaphysical realism helps to foment adolescent narcissistic pathologies in our own time – in the case where the emerging child imagines that she is stuck simply with her own peculiarity that has no broader disclosive significance, self-­consciousness can take the form of either nihilistic aggression or else anorexic self-­laceration and self-­starvation. Yet altogether to avoid these pathologies and to sustain a sense that self-­reflection is also an induction into the world reflecting itself in us as truth, requires that the healthy adolescent remain somewhat a child, able still to put her experiences into the perspective of a playful experiment which strives to echo the play of the whole of existence. Of course a human being may succumb to the syndrome of the puer aeternus: remain forever over-­attached to the smothering embrace of his parents. But the point here is that the drama of trying to remain, as one must, See Lewis, C. S., Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955).

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attached to one’s legacy, and yet capable of freely developing it, begins in childhood itself, indeed in babyhood. At any point in a human life one can be either too childish or too grown-­up, or both in different ways. To be a child is to begin to work out how to be a determinate and deliberating adult; to be a rounded adult is to know how constantly to qualify egoistic self-­consciousness with a childishly active but unselfconscious participation in the real. Thus as has so often been said, fairy-­stories work well with children, especially less self-­ conscious younger ones, because they are not mainly about children or animals, but about adults facing grim tasks and horrors in an obviously make-­believe universe. In this way, the oft-­repeated theoretical story goes, real trials to come can be safely negotiated in imagination in advance in a way that shapes and steels the child’s intellect and will. And no doubt this is all true. But should one entirely reduce the make-­believe factor to the instrumental – as if living out the realist novel in one’s own life were the real point in the end? I am not so sure. For the child is not initially concerned just with his own success or otherwise, but also with the very defining of worthwhile projects to pursue. The latter depends upon a conception of an ideal world, to whose ideality such projects would contribute. The ‘otherness’ of make-­believe therefore constitutes the distance of never fully realized value, and not just the distance of play or safety. Indeed play as such is related to ideality in terms of the ‘for its own sake’ beyond the instrumental, and its experimental character is related to a sense that cultural and even natural worlds are only given contingencies which might be otherwise. And not only does this tried-­out variety postulate different values, it is also an experiment carried out in order to discover precisely which values survive transmondain adventures – what code of chivalry applies in the deserts of Arabia as much as in the frosts of Norway, so to speak. Nor is play just a preparation for reality. To the contrary, the sane adult must continue to play – to keep the world of her work in perspective, she must continue to imagine other realities. To sustain, for example, a political critique, within the United Kingdom, she must retain the mythical sense that the island of Britain belongs not just to the current government but to nature, to the past, to the future, and to many hidden communities and changing racial configurations. Perhaps the great British-Irish literary theme from the

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hero-­tales and the Mabinogion through to Brian Merriman (the eighteenth-­ century County Cork author of the great Gaelic poem ‘The Midnight Court’, where a fairy judgement is dealt out in favour of Irish women against the male priesthood), Kipling, Yeats, Machen, Buchan, Tolkien, J. C. Powys, Hope Mirrlees, and now Susannah Clarke9 that the islands really belong to the Longaevi, the fairies (or else to the giants) is to do with just such an exercise of the critical imagination. And in the end, if the whole of the cosmos has a point, or is its own point, the rituals of play and dance come closer to reality than the solemnities of work, skills, targets, and means, so beloved of our current masters. This question of the role of fairy-­stories and of play for young children relates strongly to what I said earlier about a radical pedagogy. One can imagine that the real theoretical work in thought concerns the extending of the frontiers of understanding, while education only deals with the instrumental question of how to induct people into new knowledge. But, to the contrary, if what we first learn is the pregnant essential, the entire grammar, including linguistic grammar, within whose infinite scope or range all later cognitive permutations lie, then deciding what to teach means theoretically to decide on what is basic – not in the sense of foundational presuppositions, but in the sense of the most dense and the most simple – precisely the pearls of wisdom that we should first offer to the uninitiated. Since children first learn through pictures and stories, the selection of the right stories told the right way becomes the most central concern of philosophy – and this of course is precisely what Plato, the first real philosopher, taught from the outset. Thus in debating, as we so often do nowadays, what and how we should teach children, we are really asking, as Rowan Williams has so often recently indicated: what is central to our culture and what do we wish to be central and therefore to pass on? This is perhaps one reason why children’s literature has

See in particular, Kipling, Rudyard, Puck of Pook’s Hill (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2001); Kipling, Rudyard, Rewards and Fairies (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2002); Powys, John Cowper, Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages (New York: Colgate University Press, 1994); Buchan, John, Midwinter: Certain Travellers in Old England (Edinburgh: Band W, 1993); Mirrlees, Hope, Lud in the Mist (London: Gollancz, 1991); and Clarke, Susannah, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). All these works concerning the interactions between Britain and an ‘other’ parallel world of Faerie or else ‘the giants’ (Powys) are strongly political in character.

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recently come to such prominence. Perhaps most great literature, since it deals with what is altogether fundamental and in some fashion therefore simple, is accessible by children – entirely adult novels totally inaccessible to children are rarely the very greatest ones, with some important exceptions. But today adult literature is more easily able to pose as pure diversion, whereas we still guiltily feel that we must offer to children something of value and something entertaining in a legitimate way. Moreover, the fact that sex, though it can be mooted, cannot be at the centre of children’s literature, as neither can the world of adult work (although the world of adult warfare can be – precisely why?) ensures that this literature must often be more concerned with the mysteries of space, time, the immediate physical environment, the cosmos and the entirety of being, in a way that its adult counterpart is not.

Myth and fairy-­tale If children are therefore increasingly offered ‘foundational narratives’, then one might say that this is because children’s literature lies very dose to the mythic. But what do we mean by the mythological? Here it is perhaps best to commence with the outright scepticism of Marcel Detienne. For the latter, there is no genre of ‘myth’, and ‘myth’ and ‘mythology’ are Greek inventions later revived and repeated by the Enlightenment.10 To begin with in Greece, mythos and logos, narrative and reason, were synonymous – they began to be distinguished when history separated itself from false tale or rumour, ethical religion from scandalous tales about the gods, and philosophical abstraction from mythological personification. But in all three instances, claims Detienne, the ‘critical’ turn against myth failed to reflect that it was in large part substituting the protocols of a written culture for those of an oral one. If one realizes that so-­called ‘myth’ is essentially oral narrative, then one aspect of the supposed ‘puzzle’ of myth, namely its authorless social dispersion in multiple versions, evaporates. In the case of writing, the text sustains a single author, but in the case of oral narrative, the survival of the tale Detienne, Marcel, L’Invention de la mythologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), pp. 15–87.

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depends upon the chain of recipients and their re-­tellings. For oral narrative there are endlessly shifting versions and ‘public truth’ much more incorporates multiple subjective perspectives and interpretations. Not just supposedly, but in a sense really and truly, in a history that is lived out in relation to oral reportage and memory, natural events, dreams, imaginings, premonitions, and forebodings form part of the fabric of what actually occurs. By contrast, written history has a formal bias towards isolating objective and impersonal facts that must be accepted as true by all. In a somewhat parallel fashion, the abstract concept in philosophy concerns something delimitable and precisely repeatable, like a passage of writing. This tends to insinuate the idea that behind the processes of nature lie regularly operating forces rather than capricious and quasi-­wilful ones, as mythology often suggests. If one were to accept Detienne’s perspective, then ‘mythology’ would simply denote the entire world of oral narrative reasoning – including what we tend to think of as fairy-­stories as well as what we tend to think of as ‘myths’. The Greek gesture, partially refusing its own oral culture, was then repeated on a global scale from the eighteenth century onwards – Westerners were again scandalized by the shocking features of tribal myths; they once more sought to disinter a ‘real’ history of tribes that could be written down from the morass of oral accretion and they sought to teach to peoples of oral cultures a supposedly truer religion, focused upon abstract concepts and ethical imperatives.11 It then became yet more urgent than it had been for the Greeks to account for supposed mythical delusion – and many conflicting answers were supplied. Myth was proto-­science (Comte); it was language without abstraction (Tylor); it was the deceit of metaphor (Max Müller); it was the trace of the subconscious (Freud); it was the detritus of an archaic humanity which confused subject and object (Lévy-Bruhl), or it was rather the work of a strictly rational classification and grasping of contradictions, albeit in concrete terms (Lévi-Strauss).12 And so on and so forth. But Detienne contends that all these theories tend to miss the sheer multifariousness and formal necessity of myth once we have grasped that it is equivalent to oral culture. Detienne, L’Invention de la mythologie, pp. 15–50. For an excellent summary of this history, see Segal, Robert, Myth: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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Now, on the whole, I suspect that Detienne is right. Nevertheless there are three ways in which one might defend a certain specificity of myth after all, building on some of Detienne’s own observations. First of all, he himself notes that in terms of written culture there is a great difference between the hieroglyphic imperial worlds of Egypt, Babylon or China and the phonetic alphabets of Greece, and, we can add, Israel. In the case of the former the graphic is linked to secrecy, elitism, centralization, and bureaucratic control. We are talking about the records office. In the case of Greece, by contrast, remarkably few public records were kept and democratic procedures remained predominantly oral. Phonetic writing was here an exoteric instrument which made news more publicly available and allowed greater ease of access to collective memory.13 One can add that in Israel also legal practice remained overwhelmingly oral compared with that of her towering neighbour Babylon, and that alphabetic writing was less an instrument of central control than of sustaining and fixing in the public realm certain exemplary key laws, narratives, and prophecies. But Detienne fails to reflect that, if Egypt was seen by the Greeks as the land of the longest memory and of the most ancient stories of divine and human origin, then this was deeply connected by them, as Plato tells us in the Critias, to the long survival in Egypt of written records and of authoritative graphic depiction. This then would suggest that myths as stories of origins exhibit a kind of formal bias towards writing rather than towards orality. And in this connection Detienne perhaps exaggerates the differences between oral and written cultures: insofar, as he says, that oral narration constantly obliterates older versions, it can also exhibit a bias towards the paradigmatic and atemporal, and tends gradually to distil certain stable features of a tale which survive all retellings, like Mr. Punch and his club. Indeed one can argue that, by contrast, the moderate alphabetization of Greece and Israel actually assisted the more syntagmatic aspect of orality: a record of earlier versions of a story or of earlier oracular predictions can serve to bring about a consciousness of non-­identical repetition which swerves away from the mythical sense of a repeated static foundation towards one of an irrecuperable loss of origin which can only be saved by eschatological Detienne, L’Invention de la mythologie, pp. 155–224.

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recovery.14 It is also the case that the more static aspect of oral narration is reinforced by graphic depiction on bodies and on the surface of the earth. Derrida was quite right to say that there is no cultural phase before any mode of writing whatsoever.15 But the key point to note is the coincidence of an esoteric, hieroglyphic, and bureaucratic writing, with a strongly mythological culture like that of Egypt, in the sense of one concerned with tales of gods and origins, the relation of rulers to Kings, and the ritual repetition of origins by these monarchs. There is relatively less interest here in tales of heroes which tend to concern stories of the usurpation of kingship or the restoration of the hidden legitimate heir and so forth – such stories are relatively legendary and popular in character compared with the high tales of the origination of the world and of key features of nation and culture. In the second place, Detienne sees the Greek refusal of myth as a rejection of scandalous stories about the gods, depicting them as involved in violence, adultery, and the like. However he rightly contrasts Xenophon, who seeks a purified religious belief and practice free of all myth, with Plato, who seeks rather to re-­tell myth in a purified form. At first in The Republic, this seems to be a matter of an élite re-­educating itself and the masses, but in The Laws, it is rather a matter of the popular circulation of what Plato calls a ‘rumour’ (pheme) of the good and the beautiful, distributed through folk-­tale, proverb, and ritual practice. In general, in ejecting myth, the Greeks, including Plato earlier, were deploring old wives tales, but in The Laws Plato celebrates the passage of oral sequences from old people to children as most sustaining the vision of justice in the city, even though both these groups lie outside active citizenship. Here politics is a moment within education, instead of education instrumentally serving the polity.16 Therefore Plato, uniquely, envisaged a popular and yet not scandalous mythos. Detienne does not ask whether there is a profound inherited justification for this – but there might indeed be so. One can take mythos in the Greek sense Milbank, John, ‘Pleonasm, Speech and Writing’, in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 55–84. Derrida, Jacques, On Grammatology trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 16 Detienne, Marcel, The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: The Humanities Press, 1977), pp. 155–190; see Plato, Laws, X, 887 c8–el; XII 966 c5. 14

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as including both what we would more think of as myth and what we would think of as fairy or folk-­tale. Yet it is clear that when oral stories first got written down, as by Hesiod and Homer, it was initially the ‘higher’ matters of gods and origins, or of heroes in relation to the gods which were selected out – the deliberate writing down of more ‘folkish’ material, as in Apuleius or indeed Virgil’s Aeneid, seems to have come later, whereas in Homer, etc., it is more accidentally present and has to be discerningly disinterred.17 For this reason Detienne would be right to say that ‘mythology’ was paradoxically invented by writing. However, cannot one say, as we have already seen, that there is a certain elective affinity between ‘high’ stories of origins and the stability of writing? Equally though, one could argue that the ‘scandalous’ element of arbitrary violence, grotesque metamorphosis, and superhuman sexual greed is rather more to the fore in the mythic as a tale of origins than in the folkloric. It is often as if the contingency of the given world is here recognized in a tale of an initial arbitrary violence like the sundering of Cronus by his sons or the plundering of the giants’ bodies by the Aesir in Norse mythology. Folk-­tales, for all their frequent violence, more often than mythological tales frame this violence by a wistful evocation of a realm where the bias of physical reality favours the doing of justice or the elevation of the weak in the shape of magically self-­renewing sources of food, or Cinderella’s carriage, and so forth. In a sense then, Plato in The Laws demands that the more popular folkloric and ritually dispersed idioms begin to speak of the highest origins and of mediation from the highest sources. Folk-­tales are about exchanges of objects, whether by gift or by combat, and the generally just outcome of the latter means that their bias runs towards gift – in fact the entire ‘plot’ of a fairy-­tale is less the work of the hero and heroine than it is in the gift of a sender-­helper figure like Cinderella’s fairy-­godmother. So, for example, in the Scottish tale ‘The Land of Green Mountains’ the helper-­figure clearly knows in advance that the hero will violate the ban on touching anything in the princess’s bronze castle because, prior to this violation, he has already ensured that the hero

This task has been carried out by Graham Anderson in his Fairytale in the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2000).

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secure for himself the friendship of a giant and the king of the fish, who later extricate the hero from the dire consequences of his violation.18 In what we tend to think of as myth proper, however, the origin is rarely envisaged as pure gift, but rather as original rupture, or even as an original sacrifice, as in the Vedas. Often, in consequence, the ritual relation to myth concerns a sacrificial repetition of, or compensation for, this initial rupture, while the later dramatic relation to myth takes the mode of tragedy, wherein the agonized self-­consciousness of the hero – wholly alien to the wooden protagonist of the folk-­tale – is nevertheless the counterpart of an impersonal fated process which has overridden even the arbitrary deeds of the gods from the cosmic outset.19 Comedy and tragicomedy, on the other hand, are equally more linked to the folkloric. For Plato in The Laws, however, the real tragedy lies in the city itself – perhaps we should take this to include as well as high delight, also everyday anguish, dilemma and apparently good choice that fails to work out. But this implies that it no longer lies at the framing margins. Instead, origins can now be told and mediated in terms of the non-­sacrificial donation of the good, true, and beautiful. His reformation of myth in effect constituted an intellectually-­ led ‘folk rebellion’ against both aristocratic myth and bourgeois reason, since it makes the folk-­tale, not the myth (nor pure philosophy) speak of beginnings. Yet this denial of scandal does not restrict orality, which Plato always privileges over writing. To the contrary, if popular, folkloric tales concerning more lowly personages than heroes are more constantly in circulation, then this mode of circulation, which is a kind of verbal gift-exchange, conforms exactly with the bias towards gift in the content of these stories. The inner reality of an oral culture is always the most oral: at its edges stands something more like fixed graphic boundaries – whether with other cultures or with myth – whose institution may be conceived as unilateral, arbitrary, violent. Plato in effect projects the inner reality of oral culture also onto its margins and onto its

‘The Land of Green Mountains’ in Scottish Fairy Tales, ed. Donald Mackenzie (New York: Dover, 1997), pp. 64–92. See also ‘The Rider of Grianaig and Iain the Soldier’s Son’ in Popular Tales of the West Highlands, vol 2, comp. and trans. J. E. Campbell (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1994), pp. 212–239, for a similar story in which the sender-­helper figure is a raven. 19 See Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone, 1990), esp. pp. 49–85. 18

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cosmic and ontological origins. Presently I shall argue that Christianity carries this process still further.20 In the third place, despite his denial that myth is a genre, Detienne seems to endorse Georges Dumézil and A. J. Greimas’s cautious distinction between myth and fairy-­tale, according to which one can say that in myth the actants are primarily subjects, but in fairy-­tales they are primarily objects.21 Strikingly, this understanding of fairy-­tale is exactly that also of J. R. R. Tolkien, working in a very different philological tradition in his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’.22 Tolkien argues that drama, which focuses on interpersonal action, tends to neglect objects, and so inevitably sees the death of subjects (subordinating the survival of objects and signs) in tragic terms as the end of the plot. Oral, reported narrative, by contrast, does not ‘present’ death on stage, but speaks of those who are already dead, and concomitantly is concerned with that which, like itself, the story, has nonetheless survived this death – including especially material objects which outlive human lives. Such objects, when narrated, are in fact surviving signs of promise, like the Biblical rainbow. The ineliminable positivity of things has to be read as a sign of promise despite of or beyond death, unless we deliberately refuse to receive things as gifts – failing to see that, as for Hopkins, there remains ‘the dearest freshness deep-­ down things’. By contrast, following Greimas’s insight, we can see that stories of origin or ‘high’ hero tales are already mainly dramatic, in that here subjective personages are dominant: this is most clearly evident in stories of aetiology and metamorphosis where things originate from persons: the Myrrh tree from the incestuous Myrrah for example in the story of Adonis, or the rapid mini-­ growth cycle of the dog-­days from the premature and excessive passion of Adonis himself.23 Conversely, in the fairy-­tale, it is the girdle, the ring, the vessel, etc., whose circulations move the plot – so much so that, as Greimas

Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis, pp. 155–190; see also Pickstock, Catherine, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 3–47. 21 Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis, pp. 209–210; also see Greimas, A. J., ‘Les Acquis et les projets’, in ed. J. Courtés, Introduction à la semiotique narrative et discursive (Paris: Hachette, 1976); Greimas, A. J., ‘La Littérature Ethnique’, in Sémiotique et sciences sociales (Paris: Editions du Seuil: 1974); and Greimas, A. J., On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 3–16, and 63–105. 22 Tolkien, J. R. R., ‘On Fairy-Stories’, in Poems and Stories (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980), pp. 75–113. 23 See Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis. 20

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says, one can reduce the fairy-­tale actors to the status of mere occasional sources for the shifting positions of significant objects. However, there is a lurking paradox here, not brought out by Greimas. Myths apparently foreground subjects or persons, yet this purity of form is often tragically undercut by a shadowy objectivity which may be primordial chaos or obscure fate. Myth focuses on persons, but persons do not here triumph. Fairy-­tale yields up a symmetrically opposite paradox: the circulation of objects in the basic plot is shadowed by the operations at a meta-narrative level of misty personages – senders and helpers, preternaturally ‘other’ fairy figures and giants or else legendary human persons. Moreover, though the human heroes and heroines of the main plot are ciphers, who simply receive gifts and assistance and undergo trials and violate magical prohibitions as well as performing impossible tasks, etc., these ciphers, unlike the more strongly characterized gods or heroes, do in the end triumph, thanks to the mediations of the magical objects and a series of exchanges at the meta-­narrative level with the ‘other’ fairy realms.24 Thus although objects move the fairy-­tale plot they magically subserve the fulfilment of subjects, whereas while subjects move the mythical plot, nevertheless all plot and purpose is finally undone by a shadowy but inexorable objectivity. One can well illustrate this feature of fairy-­tale from a folkloric element within the story of Sigurd in the Volsungssaga, following the crucial explorations of Wendy Doniger.25 Here the hero Sigurd changes shapes with his rival Gunnar for the hand of Brynhild before riding through Brynhild’s curtain of wavering flames, which is the test she has set for an aspiring bridegroom. Thus on the level of subjectivity and appearance one has here a deception and a masking. However, when lying in bed afterwards with Brynhild, Sigurd takes from her hand the fateful ring Andvaranaut, which much earlier he had given to her as a plight of their eventual intention to marry (and which the dwarf Andvari, at the outset of the tale, had put under a death-­dealing curse, after it was stolen from him by the greed of the half-­god Loki.) Soon afterwards, Brynhild’s female rival Gudrun who is already married to Sigurd See the various works by Greimas cited in footnote 21. Doniger, Wendy, The Woman who Pretended to Be Who She Was: Myths of Self-­Imitation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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(the unfortunate upshot of his drinking of ‘the ale of forgetfulness’), in order to prove the greater valour of her consort, reveals to Brynhild what has occurred by presenting her with the ring which she has now taken from Sigurd. Thus the object here undoes the subjective deception, but only to prove that Sigurd was in reality impersonating another only in order to impersonate himself. For the valour that allowed him to leap through the flames was his alone; the ring was truly his own pledge, such that he now takes back what truly belongs to him, and in the shape of Gunnar he has allowed Brynhild to sleep with her truly desired bridegroom. Thus in their stolen nuptial, the authentic has occurred under the guise of the inauthentic. The material object which is the ring gives this circumstance away, since both its meaning and its series of circulations cannot, like a spiritual being, hide behind a corporeal mask. On the other hand, the true meaning and the true journey of the ring are only revealed because Sigurd, through subjective heroic valour, has managed to keep pace with the course of the ring’s wanderings and thereby is able to seize it back to himself. This story of ‘self-­impersonation’, often involving a ring as an identifying object, has been told many times within Indo-European tradition and actually more often of female subjects, as in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well. The tale has the opposite implication (one could add to Doniger) to that of Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ as understood by Jacques Lacan, where the object as sign commands the action of the story by ensuring that its subjects are governed by an inter-­subjective repetition-­compulsion which displaces them from one fundamental role in the plot to another. Supremely, the Government Minister who has seen through the Queen’s attempt to hide a compromising letter by leaving it in apparently exposed visibility, in turn resorts to the same ruse and is undone by the insight of the private detective Dupin.26 In principle, the latter could in turn become subject to the same unconscious forgetfulness, in which the subject becomes trapped within an ‘imaginary’ gaze upon herself and forgets that self-­identification is but a moment within the chain of signification of the ‘symbolic’ order that escapes any subjective control and always moves towards at least temporary public disclosure. See Lacan, Jacques, ‘The Purloined Letter’, trans. J. Mehlmann in Yale French Studies, 48 (1972), pp. 38–72.

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But in the case of the Sigurd story, as in the others like it, the wiles of the sign as object are undone to the extent that the original subject and mover of the plot himself has contrived to catch up with all the circulations of the object and restores his own and others’ authenticity by a total laying-­claim to the object and its material history, which is still what helps to personify him. Thus within this folk-­tale structure, objects as identifiers can deceive, but often with magical aid the heroine (more often than the hero) can pretend to be herself and be in the right place to receive the right gifts, which are hers even though they appear not to be so – like Cinderella receiving the vapour fairy trappings of a prince’s bride because she really is to become such by right of her beauty. So in the case of this archetypal folkloric story, it is the object that exposes the truth of subjective maskings, but it is only able to do so because the subject fully ‘keeps up’ with the gift-­object (combining sign and materiality) that truly identifies him or her in their noble and honourable status. The ‘magic’ of the object finally subserves the subject, and yet the subject truly becomes subject in a certain history of association with the object. This structure is in excess of Lacan’s post-­structuralism precisely because it takes more account of the necessary material vehicle of the sign and therefore makes the gift (for example an exchanged ring) more fundamental than the sign. Since the latter can only be exchanged if a material thing is also exchanged (for example the paper that Poe’s message is written on), a sign is but an aspect of a gift, while inversely, every culturally exchanged thing is also a sign and therefore a gift. Gift is fundamental because it is the precise point of intersection between the real and the signifying, as also between the historical and the fictional. When a gift is received in real life, like a ring given as a promise of love, historical reality suddenly becomes also romance or fairy-­tale, since for a while it loses its normal deficiency of meaning. The mere story of such an event, on the other hand, possesses a symmetrical deficiency of the real, and yet the very telling of the story brings it back within the real historical framework of actual offering in which the tale itself is offered as a gift to its hearers. Such a gift then represents a shadowy hope for a transformed historical future. Because a sign must be always a gift and possess an object-­dimension, it is this dimension that is able to rescue the subject from the Lacanian doom of the

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perpetual deceptive outrunning of the subject by the signifier. For even though the subject cannot pre-­command all the endless new meanings that a sign may conjure into being, he need not necessarily be blind to their ceaseless instance in order to ‘imagine’ himself as a subject. Instead, he can keep pace with the signifier, and this is possible just because each new event of signifying interpretation of previous signs will always involve also a new material inscription and movement of objects which can only be accomplished by a subjective actor. This actor need not, of course, be the original initiator of the plot (indeed, scarcely ever will be, and finally, because of human death, will certainly not be) and yet, in principle it could be, if the original actor recoups the meanings stolen from him (for example the bonds of troth between lovers) by impersonating those impersonating him, and so occupying in turn all the fundamental role positions of the plot: those of ‘ruler’, ‘violator’, and ‘revealer’ as disinterred by Lacan. So whereas the Poe story turns out to be ‘mythic’ (in keeping with the view that mythology already demythologizes – see below) in that a drama of modern subjects in a disenchanted world is shown to be ruled by the impersonal circulations of sign floating free of gift, the Sigurd story remains folkloric, in that here a magical sign that remains also gift-­object permits the ‘recovery’ of the subject against the possible deceit exerted by the sign (which thereby is reduced, contra Lacan, to contingency). In the ‘mythical’ Poe tale, the letter alone circulates; in the ‘fairy-­tale’ Sigurd story, the hero also circulates along with the sign-­as-gift. Of course, the paper that the betraying message in written on in the Poe story is also a gift and then an anti-­gift or stolen object, but it represents a disenchanted attempt to reduce objectivity to the pure blankness of an instrumental vehicle without meaning in itself. Nevertheless, it is the sight of this very blankness that reveals the truth first to the Minister and then to Dupin, and Lacan does not do real justice to this negative gift-­object dimension. For the blank paper is not simply an absent Lacanian ‘real’ always implied by the symbolic order: on the contrary it is a material real that always ‘keeps pace’ with the symbolic and permits its instant. Correspondingly, it allows the detective to ‘catch up with’ the sign-­driven plot, even though he does not ‘keep pace’ with it throughout, like the folkloric hero. In principle, Dupin might never be self-­deceived in turn, since the rupturing hiddenness of the symbolic

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order to imaginary self-­delusion itself depends (as ‘The Purloined Letter’ shows) upon an actual material act of subjective concealment which can never be final because every hidden thing is always through this very hiding dangerously exposed to view, since all space is finally public space. In consequence, the never-­foreclosed realm of signification is also the transcendentally coterminous realm of subjectively-enacted unconcealment. It follows that the more that objects are disenchanted and we try to let signs float free of their material vehicles (from the symbolic token through the pictograph to the hieroglyph to the phonetic alphabet to printing to the internet), then the more indeed it is hard for the original actors to ‘keep pace’ with their meanings and self-­identity. And yet, the always remaining possibility that the wiles of signs and maskings can be ‘detected’ by some subject or other, remains the trace of this ineliminable, because transcendental possibility, of a trans-­narrational keeping pace with signifying circulation on the part of the initial actor. And this is because the most ethereal vehicle remains a vehicle and the most abstracted signs must still deploy this vehicle and so remain in some degree also objects and therefore – as sign-­objects – gifts. This is even true of the sign-­systems of fiction itself: because fictions, in order to be transmitted, must be really offered as gifts, it is a transcendental condition of their very preservation in time that historical actors might be able to ‘catch up with’ fictional meanings and actually realize their utopian import. One could say that drama is the middle term here: on stage fictions are made ‘more real’; remove the convention that drama is only ‘pretend’ and fiction itself is returned to history. Because a fiction is also an objective gift, and is in excess of a sign-­ system precisely because it narrates the exchanges of (semi-­material) gifts and not just the exchanges of meanings, its first narrators can, in a way, through later hermeneutic surrogates, even ‘keep pace’ with it throughout historical time. Fiction is therefore more fundamentally theorized in terms of gift than it is in terms of sign. In the end, the Sigurd story is not in its whole course folkloric, but rather conveys something of the tragedy of the mythic, since the cursed ring lures all to their doom. Nevertheless, the ring is not a pure cipher for impersonal fatality, since its magical action is complicit with a subjective greed and willto-­hoard which denies the fundamental Nordic social principle of generosity and gift-­circulation. If Loki had not exercised inordinate greed in exacting

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excess ransom from Andvari, the fatal chain of events would not have been set in motion. Here, therefore, a mythical fateful order seems to arise only through refusal of the norms of oral-­gift culture now ideally enshrined in the folk-­tale. This may betoken the distinctive bias of Scandinavian mythology (as opposed to the Indian versions of the same Indo-European mythemes) against the notion of an original neutral violence. All conflict, fair and unfair, for the Scandinavian sources, seems to have originated in an original contingent evil deed like that conveyed through the fatal mistletoe which felled Baldur.27 Conforming to this singularity is the Scandinavian intimation of an eschatological crisis even for the gods. This shows how the borders between myth and fairy-­tale can be very fluid: in ‘The Land of Green Mountains’ the magical objects of transport – a ship, a horse – are provided by the metamorphosis of the sender figure himself; yet unlike a tragic nymph or hero sacrificially reduced to a tree or whatever, the sender ‘gives’ these transitions and always recovers from them. Given what I have so far suggested, there is no reason to think that myth, just because it concerns the cosmically primordial, is ‘older’ than fairy-­tale. There will always have been stories of a hidden other world within this one, alongside stories of origins. Moreover, if divinities were often at first local presences and familiar spirits, fairies may often be older than gods, even if, no doubt often in a post-Christian era, gods were re-­understood as fairies – for example the Scottish folk-­tale of a battle between a Black and a White fairyKing for the White fairy’s bride is fairly clearly a reduced folk version of a piece of nature mythology.28 Nevertheless, one can argue that fairy-­tale lies closer than myth to the fundamental structures of human language as such. One should certainly beware of reducing myth or fairy-­tale to a disguised feature of early language that lacked abstract concepts. However, more compelling than this approach is Greimas’s argument that all human language has a narrative structure.29 The basic sentence contains a subject and an object, and slightly more complex ones two subjects. If one sticks to the purely grammatical modal values of See Greimas, ‘Comparative Mythology’, in On Meaning, pp. 3–16. See ‘Battle of the Fairy Kings’, in ed. Donald Mackenzie, Scottish Fairy Tales (New York: Dover, 1997), pp. 1–7. 29 See Greimas, ‘Elements of a Narrative Grammar’, in On Meaning, pp. 63–83. 27 28

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these language elements, then one could deny that every sentence tells a story. But in fact, we only speak sentences at all because cultural values overdetermine the modal ones and no object is ever neutrally identified – a stick, a call, a flower, a house, a car, etc., always already have meaning for us. Thus narrative structure hypotactically encompasses sentence structure. And as Greimas says, within this structure the subject is secondary to the object – the subject can only be identified by what he possesses, seizes, gives or receives. (‘According to our topological interpretation, the various dis­ placements of objects are alone enough to account for the organisation of story, with the subjects being no more than the loci of their transfer.’30) Such activities of the subject – whose series supplies her with a character – only make sense to us at all because objects are subjectively accorded some cultural value. Inversely though, meanings are still conveyed by objects – and for this reason Greimas sees narrative (and therefore language as such) as fundamentally about gift-­exchange and as itself located within gift-­exchange.31 And herein lies the source of meaning as such, if one adds to Greimas the fact that we perceive an object through the operation of all our senses such that in the mysterious synaesthetic blending (or ‘exchange’) of incommensurable sights, touches, sounds, scents, and tastes, we already have, in ‘common-­sense’ embryonic form, an ‘intellectual’ apprehension of the object as meaningful. Yet this meaning is always further publicly coded in terms of the desirable or undesirable and such a cultural selection, if it is to be seen as more than arbitrary, has to be understood in terms of objects as themselves valuable gifts, and so as receiving their value from an ‘elsewhere’ which is the source of all validation. This, as Greimas indicates, is the ‘fairy realm’ of folk-­tale. Thus the English seventeenth-­century poem lamenting the loss of the monasteries and of enchantment had it right: ‘Farewell rewards and fairies’.32 One can then see how the fairy-­tale lies close to the fundamental narrative structure of all language; here subjects acquire and lose identity and prestige via the production and exchange of valued objects which are gifts. In the story See Greimas, ‘Problem of Narrative Semiotics: Objects of Value’, in On Meaning, pp. 84–105. See Greimas, ‘Elements of a Narrative Grammar’ and ‘Problem of Narrative Semiotics: Objects of Value’, in On Meaning. 32 Corbet, Richard, ‘Proper New Ballad, intituled the Fairies Farewell, or God-­a-Mercy Will’, in eds. H. J. C. Greirson and G. Bullough, The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 206–208. 30 31

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of Cinderella, for example, she is identified and re-­identified through objects (the ashes, the magical coach and ball gown) and moves from a negative economic exchange with her sisters to a positive one with the Prince. At the same time, she is involved in a more fundamental exchange with the fairy realm within which meaningful valuation as such is constituted and transformed: this exchange includes the ban on her remaining at the ball beyond midnight, and in some versions also an offering of food to the fairy-­ godmother in return for the magical items.33 At the meta-­narrative level in all fairy-­stories, objects receive valuation from the ‘other’ fairy realm (identified by Georges Dumézil with the Indo-European ‘sovereign’ sphere)34 to which we are bound to convey return gifts. However, this circumstance also constituted something of a problem for structuralist analysis, as Greimas recognized. For while such analysis is comfortable with the apparent sway of the paradigmatic over the narrow plot repertoire of fairy-­tales in general, this sway is not so clearly maintained in the case of fairy assistance. For here it seems that the entire narrative universe of cultural gift-­exchange is itself hierarchically and unilaterally given by the sender figure in a syntagmatic structure whose event character is irreducible to any synchronic reversibility.35 This contrast is doubled by a second one. At the human level of the fairy-­tale plot, as Greimas notes, there is always instability associated with gift-­exchange, in that anything ‘held’ may be later lost through re-­attribution or renunciation within the processes of offering or else by dispossession within the processes of test or trial (which is an agonistic mode of exchange). In consequence, nothing immanent can be stable and the permanent framework within which exchange takes place is itself a more unilateral sort of gift that arrives from the ‘elsewhere’ of the féerique. Greimas deals with the resulting problem that this realm appears to be outside the sway of structural reciprocity by arguing that the sender of the gift of the plot itself does not, like the human characters within the plot, lose what he gives, but eminently retains what is given, in the fashion of a sovereign power. See Courtés, Joseph, ‘Une lecture semiotique de “Cendrillon” ’, in Introduction à la sémiotique narrative et discursive (Paris: Hachette, 1976), pp. 100–137. 34 See Greimas, A. J., Preface, in ed. Joseph Courtés Introduction à la sémiotique narrative et discursive (Paris: Hachette, 1976), p. 25. 35 Greimas, ‘A Problem of Narrative Semiotics: Objects of Value’, in On Meaning. 33

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However, one can criticize Greimas’s reading of this situation in two ways. First of all, it is only modern absolute sovereignty that is not in any sense involved in exchange and never exposed to depletion.36 More traditional human political rule constantly had to recoup its plenitude and reserve of donatable honour by receiving tribute from its subjects. Since the fairy realm was not itself the divine realm, this applied somewhat also to its only partial sovereignty – as certain stories of fairies exchanging rulers with the human realm (especially the Welsh story ‘Pwyll, Lord of Dyfed’ in The Mabinogion37) and of requiring other human goods and abilities (including the ability to die) clearly reveal. If the fairy realm was a source of valuation for humans, then this means something more like the partial source of valuation that is located in the ‘other’ realm of nature, but which combines with the human realm to promote true value in a process of mutual supplementation. It follows from this that the fairy realm in itself is not fully sovereign like the divine realm, and therefore does not itself escape the instability of exchange. How then, is the latter to be escaped in order to undergird the fairy-­tale’s characteristic happy ending? Here the second point to be made against Greimas is that gift-­exchange is not a modern zero-­sum absolute exchange of equivalence, and thus the continuing attachment of the giver to the thing that he has given is not necessarily a kind of permanent looming threat of reversal (though it can be that) but rather represents an ideally irreversible syntagmatic advance towards further strengthening of the bonds of sociality. The crucial mark of this is that, while the gift given has inaugurated an endless expectation of future exchanges, the same identical thing is not expected back by the initial giver, but rather a ‘counter-­gift’ – even if this be the same thing, time and place will differentiate it, as they do not for our ‘commodity’. This ensures that reciprocity is not a circle but a spiral and that the synchronic is constantly breached by the diachronic. Hence the solution to Greimas’s dilemma concerning stability, reciprocity, and unilaterality lies with breaking the norms of his structuralist assumptions. On the one hand, one could suggest that the entire inter-­human and See Milbank, John, ‘The Gift of Ruling: Secularization and Political Authority.’ New Blackfriars 85.996 (March 2004), pp. 212–239. 37 ‘Pwyll, Lord of Dyfed’, in The Mabinogion trans. Jeffrey Gantz (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), pp. 45–66. 36

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human-­fairy interaction is teleologically lured through spiralling gift-­exchange by a higher divine realm which the stories only ever remotely hint at. On the other hand it is notable that, for the usual mythological outlook, the divine realm itself is often seen as subject to fateful drastic reversal – so from this perspective it is more as if the fairy-­tale narrates a mainly immanent reversal that leads to stability, and that this narrating has a wistful, ungrounded quality to it. An adequate grounding in a stable divine good is only provided first by Plato and the Hebrew Bible and later by Christianity. In this way the fairy-­tale is elevated and newly granted an ontological disclosiveness beyond the power of myth, which its former wistfulness only intimated. An exceeding of the structuralist perspective also allows one to see that, at the level of the existential situation of fairy-­tales themselves, they do not, despite their strongly paradigmatic features, tediously reiterate the same story, as the Russian formalist and later the French structuralist tradition tended to imply – rather their variations are their interesting points and most of all reveal their structure as syntagms of contingent givenness. Their tautegory is precisely their deepest meaning, as with a piece of music, as George Macdonald said.38 As human personality grows more complex and reflexive, we tend to forget that it has its source in an identification with objects. The grain of truth in Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of pre-­logical ‘participation’ is perhaps that less reflexive peoples have not yet lost the sense that ‘form’ as the location of meaning necessarily circulates between people and things.39 Indeed, LéviStrauss’s idea that savage peoples classified the abstract in terms of the concrete, and located fundamental cultural structures and contradictions ‘out there’ in the wilderness of particular things, only makes sense (despite what he claimed against Lévy-Bruhl) if there were this relatively different – but not necessarily pre-­logical – experience of the world.40 The magical sense of the fairy-­tale that things also are actors, and work with us or against us as much as persons do, lies closer than the world of myths of origin to this primordial sense that we can only be identified and active in and See Macdonald, ‘Fantastic Imagination’. See Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, How Natives Think, trans. Lilian A. Clare (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926); and Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, The ‘Soul’ of the Primitive trans. Lilian A. Clare (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1965). 40 See Levy-Strauss, Claude, La pensée sauvage (Paris: Pion, 1962). 38 39

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through things which are themselves contingently given to us and can take us by surprise. Myths of origin, by contrast, seem to project personages reflectively free of objective entanglement. Concomitantly and paradoxically, they appear also to project a more purely impersonal objective world, indifferent to subjective happiness. Myth therefore itself already demythologizes, by dividing subject from object and by seeking to locate a fundamental abiding structure, identically repeated. In this way, myth is proto-­science, and myth, as Adorno and Horkheimer precociously argued, unlike the non-­identical repetition of the Hebrew Bible, preshadows rationalist enlightenment.41 But does this mean that myth is actually ‘later’ than fairy-­tale? Not really. Rather, one could argue that myth always belonged to the margins, the borders, the origins. Oral and gift circulation abide within a tribe: but at its borders and origins one has mystery that tended to be internally configured as rupture, sacrifice, violence, and fixed contract – all linked to a notion of how things arbitrarily are and always will be. Reflection on borders and origins therefore sustained an initial abstraction that tended towards the formulation of impersonal laws that governed the apparently unruly itself. Of course, one can exaggerate this contrast: I have already indicated how different cultures (for example, the Scandinavian) might more project an oral-­gift element onto all of reality, while conversely a sacrificial and violent division is generally itself repeated within the tribe as a crucial aspect of what is exchanged and perpetuated.

Fairy-­tale and Christianity The reflections of the foregoing section permit us to approach in a new way the question of why the Macdonald tradition should have reconfigured theology in terms of fairy-­tale, and concomitantly suggested that Christianity requires the re-­education of adults by children. For it is possible to read Christianity as finally imagining the origins and ending, the whole human and cosmic story, in terms of the hitherto inner-­tribal local folk-­tale, just as Christianity projects founding gift and gift-­exchange beyond the inner-­tribal Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 43–81.

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also to this funda­mental ontological level. These twin developments perhaps show us in a new way just why Christianity proposes itself as the universal religion, since it seeks to ensure that every locality, every tradition, is also the ultimate and universal location and tradition now that it no longer need undergo self-­estrangement at its own borders. It is conceivable that Christianity properly understood is the metahistory of sending-­helping which should rescue and not imperially overrule local tales and revelations. The Christian narrative is more fairy-­tale than myth. Initially, God confronts no primordial beast, but shapes a thing, the Creation, and then does further things with that thing. Human beings and even angels enjoy no original and independent spontaneity, but begin and remain entirely objects of the divine shaping. Later on in this story, the plot is not propelled by the primordial and irremediable conflict of warring personal impulses as in myth: love and war, love and domesticity; Aphrodite and Ares, Aphrodite and Hestia, etc. Adam and Eve do not first compete for the apple, but Eve transgresses the fairy-­tale ban on eating this object, which is objectivity as such in the mode of illusion of a value-­neutral control over one’s fate and over life and death. Cain and Abel were not doomed to quarrel; rather Cain’s murderousness had something to do with his possessive approach to the realm of things. The later story of Israel concerns their escape from the obsessive rule of cruelly indifferent things (idols); their construction of a more mobile thing, the Ark, which realizes but does not entrap their subjective identity; the losses and regainings of this mobile thing; and finally more detailed self-­identification in terms of a legal handling of things which was throughout concerned with the protection of spirit and life from the fated objectivity of regular blood-­letting. In the New Testament, as the Russian teller of fantastic tales Nikolai Leskov suggested, Christ is as much a sender and an enchanter as he is also a sent and aided hero, able to command and subordinate all objects, but under the ban of not deploying this power for the sake of his own power.42 As with the original tale of creation, the entire narrative of the New Testament builds towards the shaping of a new ‘thing’ of redemptive power, namely the Eucharist, which as food is the most exact example of an object necessary for subjective identity Leskov, Nicolai, ‘The Enchanted Wanderer’, The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Tales (Moscow: Progress Press, 1974), pp. 85–239.

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which nonetheless ultimately subserves that identity. (In consuming this food, unlike all other food, says Augustine and many others, we must become what we eat.) Consistently with this folkloric structure, it is objects to do with the Passion and the Mass which become the crucial ‘magical objects’ of the Grail legend. The work of the Eucharist undoes the abuse of the fruit of the tree. For here, the original absolute divine power over things and fate was subverted by human freedom, whose refusal of gift in favour of autonomy re-­enslaves it to fate and the rule of objects – physical things, like its own body, which will eventually betray it. In the Eucharist, however, God descends beneath humanity into thinghood, thereby restoring kenotically through this sub­ mission to the ways of things its subordination to subjective freedom, but retaining the truth that this freedom is only sustained by a measured use of objective material reality. The later effect of Christianity upon literature – or rather perhaps the invention of literature in our sense by Christianity – is consistent with the reading of Christian narrative as fairy-­tale rather than myth. On the Atlantic seaboard of the Christian West, the fairy-­tale evolved into the romance or roman, within which space the novel fundamentally remains. The romance displaced in a permanent fashion – despite later early modern resistances – the epic and the tragic, dominated by mythic fate, by claiming for itself a new sort of universal seriousness. The Welsh writer of strange fantasies (which again revolve round the sense that there is within Britain ‘another’ world that belongs to more radiant beings, either sinister or benign) Arthur Machen, is supposed to have said that the literary worth of all novels is the degree of their conformity to Catholic doctrine, and by this outrageous claim, he perhaps meant that the meaning of all romances is to do with the murky transition from paganism to Christianity and the question of what status now belongs to the dethroned Celtic and Germanic gods of war, erotic love, and natural forces. As already the Scandinavian Edda, the Acallam ná Senórach (an account of St. Patrick’s encounter with the old pagan heroes) and the Welsh Mabinogion imply, the ‘fairy’ reduction of erstwhile gods and heroes to preternatural presences is in fact not a reduction, but an elevation, properly understood.43 Larrington, Carolyn, trans. The Poetic Edda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Dooley, Ann, and Harry Roe, trans. Tales of the Elders of Ireland: Acallam na Senorach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Gantz, Jeffrey, trans. The Mabinogion (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966).

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For previously, they were chained by objective fate, bound in the end to suffer and even to die. But now they can in the end outplay the magical machinations of objects. Excalibur is drawn and eventually returned to await another day; the rings are restored to their rightful wearers; the Grail objects are glimpsed by some, and though they must be questioned and not commanded, they minister to human fulfilment. The Irish sagas and the Edda even face up to the death of the gods, which perhaps earlier pre-Christian pagan versions of these narrations did not so fully intimate (or even did not fully intimate at all – since all these stories have been mediated to us through the re-­writings of monks). They can do so because, beyond the invocation of fate, they can now speak of Odin and Baldur again picking up the chess pieces – magical objects which have sacramentally outlasted all subjective destruction – in a reborn Asgard, or of St. Patrick meting out immortality and retrospective baptism to the old gods and heroes. For the Grail stories, it is as if the salvific object – the Eucharist – has arrived, but must be everywhere and constantly sought out in the realms of nature and hidden polities which exceed the sway of human governance.44 The Grail is in the keeping of the ‘fairy’ realm, and the romance explores the counter-­factual of the fairy much as the theologian explores the counterfactual of the angelic. This is borne out by the sporadic medieval speculations as to whether fairies were semi-­fallen angels, fallen angels, unfallen human beings or a species between the human and the angelic.45 As C. S. Lewis said, the later early modern banishing of the fairies did not occur under the auspices of reason, but rather under those of superstition which concluded, like James VI of Scotland and I of England, that all fairies were really demons.46 If one recalls Greimas’s point that the role of the fairy sender-­helper figure is to do with valuation, then one could say that the romance constitutes a theological exploration of the variety of immanent goodness beneath the sway of greater angelic and then divine governance. It concerns, as I have already suggested, the call of the other ‘within’ nature – that tantalizing suggestion which we constantly experience of See Pickstock, Thomas d’Aquin et la quête eucharistique. See Lewis, C. S., ‘The Longaevi,’ in The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp.  122–138; for the early Irish exploration of these possibilities; see Carey, John. ‘The Baptism of the Gods.’ A Single Ray of the Sun: Religious Speculation in Early Ireland (Andover and Aberystwyth: Celtic Studies Publications, 1999), pp. 1–39. 46 Lewis, ‘The Longaevi,’ pp. 137–138. 44 45

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something ‘behind’ the distant hill or the near tree that we will never quite grasp – an integrity of nature to be respected, its own life which we cannot fully understand and yet which constantly teaches us in symbolic mode, ethical and aesthetic lessons – patience, hope, joy, keeping the right distance and perspective and so forth – if we will but pay attention. (This sense has been constantly captured by the modern French poet Philippe Jaccottet.47) And perhaps the most acute aspect of the sense of something ‘elsewhere’ within the natural realm lies in the sexual sphere – or in the intersection of this sphere with non-­human nature. One recalls the first meeting of Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester on a dark country lane at twilight where they both, as they later reveal, appear to each other as superhuman, fairy-­like beings.48 Here one can comment that, properly understood, monotheism concerns an ultimate unified source beyond mere numerical unity and diversity – and it is a consequence of this very plenitude at the origin that there should be multiple and diverse spiritual mediators, some of whom can only be locally understood. It is the mark of true apophatic acknowledgement of the one God that one approaches him by multiple mediation of gods, angels, daemons, spirits, and fairies: claims to direct access to a hypostasized subjective will are by contrast all too likely to issue in arrogant, terroristic interventions.

Christianity and magic Perhaps then, the entire tradition of Christian romance as renewed by the Macdonald tradition points to a re-­envisioning of Christianity which will stress its links to fairy-­tale and a sense of the faerie and its elevation in significance of this folkloric consequence which is clearly focused upon gift rather than sacrifice and on spiritual-­material intercourse rather than tragic dualism. And such a stress might perhaps in turn allow it to show a more generous sympathy for all local cults and practices. Jaccottet, Philippe, Under Clouded Skies and Beauregard/ Pensees sur les nuages and Beauregard trans. Mark Treharne and David Constantine [French-English bilingual edition] (Newcastle-uponTyne, UK: Bloodaxe, 1994). 48 Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985), pp. 143–147. 47

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So far, though, while I have pointed out that fairy-­tale gives the prime role to objects and thereby paradoxically renders subjectivity ultimate, I have said little about the magical character of fairy-­tale objects, which is precisely the factor that sustains this paradox. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien, following certain leads in northern mythology which I have already alluded to, offers a very Christian fictional account of cosmic origins more in terms of fairy-­tale than myth in which, indeed, fairies or elves occupy a central cosmic role which they certainly do not in the Edda. In his preface to the second edition, he links this to the focal question of ‘the two magics’ with which all his work is concerned.49 The sinister magic is technology too slavishly deployed, and here he rightly indicates that we avoid noticing the fact that modernity threatens to be the triumph of this sort of magic – since no one, including scientists, really quite comprehends why the radio, the light switch, the automobile, the mobile phone and the internet can by regular formulae command the powers they do. To surrender exclusively to technology is theologically to fall in the most fundamental sense as far as human beings (not angels) are concerned – through the will to dominate objects and so to forge a single means of domination: ‘one ring to rule them all’. By contrast, the ‘good magic’ and the higher magic of the elves is art, which constitutes the original musical beauty of the world. Where objects are approached in the mode of art, we attend to their inexhaustible values, or attempt to mould something that will charm in its own unique terms, untranslatable into a general formula of repeatable control. In this way, Tolkien offers a kind of ‘ecological’ re-­reading of Christian doctrine that is linked to a respect for the ‘fairy’ values immanent in nature and art. Now if one were to extend this theology and attempt a more abstract transcription of the Macdonald tradition, then one might ask the following questions: first of all, if human thought is a psychic and not just a material reality, then how can it act on reality and be influenced by things? How can the subtly differing inflections of the wind affect my mood? Or a pattern of shadows, or the interplay between sea and sky? Inversely, how is it that words Tolkien, J. R. R., ‘Preface to the second edition’, The Silmarillion (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983), pp. x–xxiv; and Tolkien, J. R. R., ‘Ainulindalë: The Music of the Ainur’, The Silmarillion (London: George Allen and Unwin 1983), pp. 15–22.

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which do not obviously resemble things can invoke things in such a manner that things become thereby more powerfully present, even in their absence, than they are present to us ‘on their own’? Unless my consciousness is an illusion thrown up by my brain – and what could it mean that the illusion is ‘there’? – is not this two-­way intercourse between matter and mind a kind of ineffable, magical influence? (Perhaps the supreme explorer of this most basic mystery of all poetic experience was the novelist J. C. Powys.) Secondly, why might it be that the creative imagination is indispensable for thought? The neoplatonist Proclus, who is the real source for all later reflection on this topic, as the English Romantics (after Thomas Taylor) well knew, suggested that the mind must reach back downwards into matter, because in a certain sense the simplicity and non-­reflexivity of matter, like the Pearl in the medieval poem, better reflects the simplicity and non-reflexivity of the original One which lies above intellect (even though it may think in its own, for us unaccountable manner) than does the spiritual realm.50 It is for the same reason that Proclus, like Plato, did not think we could rise to the divine by theoretic contemplation alone: rather the divine itself descends to us and obscurely speaks to us in the language of myths and symbols. In consequence, even though the soul tends to lose itself by over-­attention to the material realm, the cure for this can only be homeopathic: a new recognition of transcendence first of all within the material sphere under the reach of divine grace – since the soul having surrendered its superiority over the material cannot then, of itself alone recover it. (The proximity to Christian thematics here is of course far greater than has often been thought.) Perhaps it is only these Proclean reflections, as partially taken over by Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor, that fully allow Christian theology to comprehend the inherent value of the realm of matter and the role of unthinking things, and so to answer the crucial question: why did God create the material cosmos and not just the angelic realm? Although indeed, spirit stands above matter because it is able to acknowledge its own nature as gift and so live appropriately as gratitude, the expression of this gratitude as imitative free-­giving and reciprocal sharing with others is rendered possible insofar as things allow us to exit the circle of self-­reflexivity – giving See Trouillard, Jean, La Mystagogie de Proclos (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1982), esp. pp. 44–53.

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to ourselves – and bestow things on others and share things with them. This mediation by the material is for us the pre-­condition of intersubjectivity and it may be that the relative ‘simplicity’ of things permits a certain coincidence of self-­sacrifice – ‘I give this thing to you’ – and of community – ‘this thing is neither you nor me’ – as well as creative tension between the two, that is impossible even for the angels. Thirdly, if the supreme art is liturgy, does not this art magically invoke the divine through human work? We cannot alter the divine mind by prayer or ritual, but this does not mean that they are merely convenient pedagogic instruments for self-­education. Rather, as the pagan neoplatonist Iamblichus suggested, these practices ‘attune’ us to the divine and so as it were ‘magically’ channel divine power, even though God of course ultimately and entirely shapes our very invocations.51 In this way God is allowed to retain his aseity, yet is conceived as really and truly acting through our prayers and ritual performances. In the fourth place, if creation is a divine work of beautiful art and our appropriate response to this is the grateful making and ethical exchange of things of beauty in turn, then what is the nature of the holding together of diverse things in a unified beauty and the recognition of this beauty by mind? Is it not ‘magical’ in the precise sense that the blending of the different and the identical as beauty, and the aesthetic response of mind to beauty in material things, is taken as real, yet cannot be described or invoked save ‘tautegorically’ by re-­presenting the beautiful effect? One has here irreducibly ineffable ‘connections’, and if one accepts their reality, this is tantamount to acknowledging a magical dimension in the real. Proclus was also the ultimate source for Aquinas’s participatory ‘analogy of attribution’ which concerns just such an ineffable belonging together of the diverse in an hierarchical ascent up to God. But in Proclus this notion of participatory analogy is inseparable from his sense of ‘magical connectors’ as an ontologically fundamental principle.52 The authentically Thomistic Pico della Mirandola

Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, trans. Emma Clarke et al. (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003). 52 Proclus, The Theology of Plato, Book Four, Chapters XIX–XXI, pp. 265–272; Proclus, The Elements of Theology, trans E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), propositions 100, 108, 110, 139, 185. 51

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(far more so than the neo-­scholastics) in the Renaissance was well aware of this and so revived the crucial magical dimension of the analogia entis.53 We tend to think, of course, that magic simply anticipated science because it was a false mythical attempt at prediction and control. Yet the absolute contrast between free spiritual action and response on the one hand, and ‘automatic’ material action and response on the other is a post-Cartesian one, which fails to reckon with the given fact of transition of meaningful forms between the one realm and the other. Much of ‘magical practice’ in the human past was in reality more like a ‘prudential’ mix of received formula and willed intuitive adaptation to circumstance that exceeded the prescription of rules, in just the way that ethical action did for Aristotle. This was because, in many ways like religious liturgy, it tended to blend formulaic ‘conjuration’ with willed invocation of hidden personal powers or traces of such powers (in the ‘signatures’ of things) – these powers including the fairies, the angels, even God himself and the demons in the case of sinister magic. (Up until the fifteenth century the word ‘magic’ tended often to be reserved by theologians for bad, demonic magic, but the observation and benign manipulation of occult forces, that later came to be termed ‘natural magic’, was still recognized.54) Hence it could just be that ‘magic’, as for example practised by the alchemists and the Cabbalists (Jewish and Christian), names a lost possibility of a just and prudential as well as spiritually-­elevating interaction also with nature as well as with the human realm. Certainly, one suspects that magic already in the Middle Ages (Roger Bacon, for example), and more especially in the Renaissance era after Paracelsus, became often routinized in a way that was indeed proto-­technological. Nevertheless, it remains striking that a thinker pursuing a more hermetic and magical approach to the cosmos like Giordano Bruno seems to have far more anticipated modern physics which allows for uncertainty, mysterious action at a distance, singularities that evade the rule of general laws, the operation of unknowable forces, and even the mediation of matter with subjectivity than does the finally disenchanted Newtonian

Pico della Mirandola, Heptaplus, ‘Sixth Exposition: of the Affinity of the Worlds with each other and with all Things’, in trans C. G. Wallis et al. On the Dignity of Man/On Being and the One/Heptaplus (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), pp. 139–147. 54 See Kieckhefer, Richard, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 8–17. 53

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tradition.55 In seeking to extend these sorts of recognition also to the chemical and the biological sciences (following perhaps the example of Goethe) it might be that even in the realm of scientific and technological interaction with nature we need to infuse Tolkien’s ‘lower magic’ with the higher ‘elvish magic’. Therefore, if the Christian narrative can be taken as a fairy-­tale that centrally concerns the proper use of material things and their sacramental nature, it remains truer than we have suspected to the magical nature of the fairy-­tale sign-­object which is gift (and then supremely the Eucharist as grail), just as it takes more seriously than we have suspected the immanent mediation of valuation that can be identified as ‘the fairy realm’. (The most astonishing example of this is the Presbyterian minister Robert Kirk’s neoplatonic and Biblical presentation of Scottish fairy-­belief in his 1692 treatise, The Secret Commonwealth.56) Perhaps then, the fictionalization of Christianity in imaginative children’s literature is not a sign of the post-Christian but a harbinger of a new and truer re-­imagination of Christianity as such. And it may be time to bid farewell to the monotheism of the grown-­up, disenchanted cosmos – the grown-­ups it produces are called bin Laden and George Bush, who invoke the sacred only as a crudely positivized apologia for their operations in a drained desert of money, machinery, and electronic signals. But most people, aside from Biblical fundamentalists or analytic philosophers of religion (who have rather similar outlooks), cannot understand – and with good reason – a worldview where one acknowledges no mysteries until one suddenly stumbles upon the ultimate one of the one God. (It was to this abiding hidden popular Catholic sense of the plurally mysterious that first Newman and later Chesterton appealed.) By contrast, belief in God and in the triune God can perhaps only be revived if we re-­envisage and re-­imagine the immanent enchantments of the divine creation which appropriately witnesses to the transcendent One through a polytheistic profusion of created enigmas. The new tellers of fairy-­tales to children and adults open out just this real horizon. See Bruno, Giordano, ‘On Magic’ and ‘A General Account of Bonding’, in Cause, Principle and Unity and Essays on Magic, trans. Richard J. Blackwell, ed. Robert de Lucca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and see Gatti for a well-­received argument for Bruno’s relevance to thought in our own time; Gatti, Hilary, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 56 See Kirk, ‘The Secret Commonwealth’, in Hunter, Michael, ed. The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late 17th Century Scotland: The Secret Commonwealth and Other Texts (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2001), pp. 77–107. 55

12

Language, Reality, and Desire in Augustine’s De Doctrina Rowan Williams

Magdalene College, Cambridge, UK

Rowan Williams, ‘Language, Reality and Desire in Augustine’s De Doctrina’, Journal of Literature and Theology 3.2 (1989), pp. 138–150. Copyright © Oxford University Press.

De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine’s treatise on Christian education (not ‘doctrine’ in the modern sense), has been called the first Christian essay in hermeneutics. It is not simply a discussion of biblical exegesis and the skills necessary for this, but a general consideration of how to understand strange texts, texts of an alien culture and language. Just how strange the Christian scriptures were to the literate late antique mind is almost impossible for those formed in an even residually Christian culture to imagine; Augustine is writing about the literature of what, from the ‘civilized’ point of view, is unmistakably a counter-­culture. The Latin of the North African Bible would at times have been as bizarre to the educated reader as is the distinctive religious English of a Rastafarian for most of us. There is a good deal of room for exploration here – of the function and effects of specialized forms of language in the life of a religious community, of how this affects the way in which a community is perceived from outside, and, not least, of how it is possible for individuals to be bilingual and bicultural – like Augustine – in this respect; but my present task is less ambitious. Augustine’s account of interpretation in the de doctrina (henceforward DDC) is a set of variations on a single theme, the relation of res and signum, thing and sign, reality and representation; I want simply to outline

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his account of this, and to look at one or two aspects of this scheme which may perhaps have some contemporary interest and pertinence. I have not entered into detailed consideration of the whole of the saint’s thinking about language as it appears especially in de magistro and early in the Confessions.1 Nor have I tried to examine in detail the background of the ideas in DDC, a job already done with distinction by others.2 The following pages are a reading of DDC designed to bring into profile some features of Augustine’s thinking on language that are both heavily theologically conditioned and in certain respects in tension with his professed theories of language. As so often with Augustine, he is most philosophically interesting when not being self-­consciously philosophical. ‘Things’, says Augustine (DDC I.ii), ‘are learned about through signs’; a res is, first and foremost, something whose being is not determined by the function of meaning something else. It is what it is, and does not belong in a system of representation. It may become part of such a system, and be both res and signum; and there are some things whose being is in practice wholly determined by the signifying function – words (clusters of sounds), whose reality has come to be bound up in pointing beyond themselves (though, as we shall see, this is convention: the clusters of sound remain res in that they do not signify by nature, being just vibrations of the air). This is not a wholly novel3 nor, at first sight, a very sophisticated picture. There is an obvious problem with the notion of definable things standing independently of systems of representation, and Augustine does not help with this when he insists on the arbitrary nature of the relation of words to things (DDC II.i and ii), and the distinction between natural – involuntary – signa and conventional signs that refer to groundless consent.4 But, unlike his classical predecessors, Augustine also insists that a E.g., Conf. I.8. The seminal study is R. A. Markus, ‘St Augustine on Signs’, Phronesis I.I (1957), pp.  60–83. See also R. Lorenz, ‘Die Herkunft des augustinischen Frui Deo’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 64 (1952–53), pp. 34–60, and O. O’Donovan, ‘Usus and fruitio in Augustine, de doctrine Christiana I’, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s.33 (1982), pp. 361–397. 3 It is outlined in de magistro IV and VIII. Markus, ‘St Augustine on Signs’, pp. 60–63, summarizes the classical debates about signs, and notes Aristotle’s definition of the sign as something that involves in its being the being of something else. 4 He is eager to avoid the Stoic doctrine that signs are a natural effect of things, and his inclusion of words among signs is a highly important step towards freeing semiotics from a kind of naturalistic determinism and allowing room for a more culturally oriented account of language and meaning. Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (London, Macmillan, 1984), pp. 33ff. points this out, though considers that Augustine refuses to follow the path he himself opens up. This is 1 2

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doctrine of signs is a step towards a more general theory of language, and goes on to fuse this with a much more characteristic theme of his own. The world of res is not, after all, so simply defined. There are things which, on one analysis, do not ‘speak’ of anything further or ‘make known’ anything other than themselves; but human beings do not live only a cognitive life. We are engaged with the world, moving through it as subjects of will and of love, and each res operates in one of two ways upon our willing and loving. It may be something to be ‘enjoyed’, something that gives us a satisfaction entire in itself, not leading to or demanding interpretation in terms of anything further; or it may be something to be ‘used’, a means to a more final satisfaction, meaning or ‘intending’ more than itself. And, adds Augustine, there are things – subjects – that do the enjoying and the using – an important addition; Augustine assumes that ‘signifying’ is a threefold, not a twofold, affair, involving the subject for whom signs signify. We cannot miss the point that discussion of signification is also discussion of those beings who are involved in meaning or ‘intending’ or understanding.5 The distinction between frui and uti (I.iii)6 is thus superimposed on the res–signum distinction, and will pervade the whole of DDC; it is the means whereby Augustine links what he has to say about language with what he has to say about beings who ‘mean’ and about the fundamentally desirous nature of those beings – a link that is undoubtedly the most original and interesting feature of the treatise. For the Christian, God is supremely res (I.v); he alone is what he is, determined by nothing else, confined by no function, requiring no context or interpretation. He is the ‘context’ of everything, paradoxically not a res at all in the strict sense, not one in a series (non aliud, as a later theological tradition would put it). He is beyond all naming (I.vi); though Augustine does not so express it, it could rightly be said that no signum is adequate to his being. Yet he has himself provided a signum in the Word made flesh (xi–xiii). By God’s

largely true; but part of the purpose of the present paper will be to argue that he goes rather further than Eco believes – at least, if one reads his semiotic theory in close connection with his theological programme in DDC. I am enormously indebted to John Milbank’s paper, ‘Theology Without Substance: Christianity, Signs, Origins’, in Literature and Theology Pan I, Vol. 2, No. 1 (March, 1988), pp. 1–17, Vol. 2, No. 2 (September, 1988), pp. 133–152, for discussion of Eco’s views. 5 Markus ‘St Augustine on Signs’, p. 72, brings this out with exemplary clarity. 6 On its possible sources, see Lorenz, ‘Die Herkunft des augustinischen Frui Deo’, and, much qualifying Lorenz’s conclusions, O’Donovan, ‘Usus and fruitio in Augustine, de doctrine Christiana I’, pp. 365–367.

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own act and initiative, there is a speech available for talking of him: the mind of God is embodied in Christ as our thoughts are in our words, and by this means God can be truly enjoyed by us, perceived, contemplated, and loved in his self-­sufficient being. God is res, and, in respect of him, all else is signum; God alone is to be enjoyed in and for himself, and in respect of him all else is to be used (xxii). As Augustine himself was well aware, such language is misleading if taken at its face-­value7; there is something odd in saying that the proper love of neighbour is a ‘using’ of the neighbour to draw closer to God, and there are very considerable problems (xxxi) in applying the scheme to God. The difficulties have been often noted. But we must be careful to avoid a superficial reading. Augustine is consciously playing here with a notion both ambiguous and challenging. Our last end is to enjoy self-­sufficient truth and reality; since it is the glimpses and intuitions of this that make any understanding, any intellectual life, at all possible, it is not conceivable that anything should be preferable to this (xi).8 Thus our last end is the contemplation of that which in no way depends on us or is defined in terms of us (we, rather, are defined in terms of it); and so we cannot for this end use other objects of love in a self-­interested way. To ‘use’ the love of neighbour or the love we have for our own bodies (a favourite example of Augustine’s) is simply to allow the capacity for gratuitous or self-­forgetful dilectio opened up in these and other such loves to be opened still further. The language of uti is designed to warn against an attitude towards any finite person or object that terminates their meaning in their capacity to satisfy my desire, that treats them as the end of desire, conceiving my meaning in terms of them and theirs in terms of me.9 ‘If you settle down in that delight and remain in it, making it the end and sum of your joy, then you can be said to be enjoying it in a true and strict sense’ (xxxiii); and

Its contradictions are set out by O’Donovan, ‘Usus and fruitio in Augustine, de doctrine Christiana I’, pp.  383ff.: he argues that Augustine attempts to identify fruitio with love (so that what is not enjoyed is not strictly speaking loved), and that his understanding of uti wavers between an instrumental and an ‘ontological’ sense (the latter simply having to do with an object’s place in the scale of being). I am not myself convinced that this latter point holds, as will become clear in what follows in the text. 8 On the dependence of all intellectual perception on the tacit and occasionally realized awareness of eternal and unchanging truth, see, e.g., Conf. VII. 10 and 17, de libero arbitrio II.xii, 33–34. 9 Conf. IV.4–9 sets out the traps of loving other human beings as if their ultimate meaning and one’s own were mutually definitory. 7

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no such cessation of desire is legitimate in relation to finite objects of love. It is painfully absurd, as well as destructive of self and others, to conclude our exploration when we are in reality still in via, still being formed and transformed by what we receive (xxxiii). The first book of DDC therefore offers a definition of moral and spiritual error in terms of confusing means with ends. God alone is the end of desire; and that entails that there is no finality, no ‘closure’, no settled or intrinsic meaning in the world we inhabit. And God is not an object among others, a point in the world to which other points relate and in terms of which they naturally and plainly organize themselves – except in the sense that there is indeed one ‘point in the world’ entirely transparent to God: the incarnate Word. There is one authorized ‘sign’ which for once we cannot mistake for anything but a sign. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are res in the world’s history, yet they are signum in a unique sense: they are God’s speech, and so, like our speech, defined by what they teach, what they point to. Here is a worldly res that cannot mislead us into thinking that it is to be enjoyed in and as a purely worldly object. Because it is entirely and authoritatively marked out as an object of ‘use’, it can and does lead us to the ultimate fruendum, insofar as we can ever lay hold on this within our history. Thus the way God is present in our history preserves us from the proud illusion that we can step outside history or halt it (and we can compare Augustine’s critique of the Platonists in Confessions VII, which echoes closely so much of DDC I on the incarnation). The Word’s taking of flesh is not a dissolving of history as eternal truth takes over some portion of the world: it is not, says Augustine (I.xii), that God comes to a place where he was not before. Rather the incarnation manifests the essential quality of the world itself as ‘sign’ or trace of its maker. It instructs us once and for all that we have our identity within the shifting, mobile realm of representation, non-­finality, growing, and learning, because it reveals what the spiritual eye ought to perceive generally – that the whole creation is uttered and ‘meant’ by God, and therefore has no meaning in itself. If we do not understand this, we seek for or invent finalities within the created order, ways of blocking off the processes of learning and desiring. Only when, by the grace of Christ, we know that we live entirely in a world of signs are we set free for the restlessness that is our destiny as rational creatures.

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The coming of the Word in flesh establishes, we might say, the nature of fleshly being as word, as sign, the all-­pervasiveness of ‘use’. That is to say, we live in a world of restless fluidities in meaning: all terms and all the objects they name are capable of opening out beyond themselves, coming to speak of a wider context, and so refusing to stay still under our attempts to comprehend or systematize or (for these go together) idolize. As Augustine says at the very beginning of his discussion (I.ii), ‘wood, stone and cattle’ are all res at first sight; but there was a piece of wood with which Moses sweetened the waters, a stone on which Jacob laid his head and saw a vision of angels, a beast that Abraham slaughtered in place of his son. ‘Not everything is signum’ in the ordinary course of things (I.ii); but in the light of Christ, no res is left alone. It can be used, and so become a sign; it can mean what it is not.10 Book II of DDC turns to apply all this to Scripture. In Book I, Augustine has assumed that Scripture is a sort of primary derivative from the work of Christ, a unique object of ‘use’. If we were perfected in charity, we should not need Scripture (I.xxxix) – just as, if we had known how to ‘read’ the created order, we should not have needed the incarnation (xii). As it is, Scripture arouses in us an appropriate love and delight when read properly, the delight fitting to a vehicle that is carrying us forward efficiently (xxxv). It is thus the supreme signum after Christ, and Book II reflects on the practical consequences of this in our study. Signs are various, and we need skills to read them; much of this discussion is, accordingly, a treatment of the linguistic, semantic, and historical skills required. But in the light of what has gone before, one of the most significant passages is a rather awkward and inconclusive chapter early on in this second book (II.vi). Scripture is full of ‘obscurities and ambiguities’; it does not lie open to the casual reader. If it is meant to be a pointer to the ultimate res beyond – the Trinity – why should such difficulty pervade it? The main point of Augustine’s reply is that we do not properly value what we It is the point that must lead us to qualify Eco’s conclusions: Augustine still operates with a semiotic world of individuated substances referring to or pointing to each other, admittedly, but the way in which objects may be absorbed into the realm of sign does suggest something more than ‘denotative unambiguity’. The word may, trivially, denote an object, and the object another object (as the ram ‘means’ Isaac); but the point of the ram denoting Isaac, and, through Isaac, Christ, is not either information or rhetorical decoration, but a warning against supposing we know exactly what ‘ram’ as a word means, and what the ram of Mount Moriah means, independently of the ‘culture’ of Christian cantos.

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discover rapidly or easily, an argument familiar from elsewhere in ancient rhetoric and patristic theology.11 But this is combined with another fairly standard argument, that the unravelling of obscurity occasions delight. ‘I don’t quite know how’, says Augustine, ‘but I understand the saints in a more agreeable way when I see them as the teeth of the Church, cutting people off from their errors’ (II.vi) – alluding to the allegorical interpretation of a passage in the Song of Songs, ‘Thy teeth are like flocks of sheep’ (4.2). The similitude contains no extra information, but, for reasons Augustine says he cannot understand, it makes reading proceed suavius. Augustine lived in a culture that prized literary difficulty, and these words of his were to be a charter for later generations attempting to defend the legitimacy of difficulty, of polysemy and metaphorical fluidity in the understanding of Scripture. The Bible becomes a paradigm of what the late antique reader valued. But Augustine is doing more than simply commending it as a suitable field for the exercise of over-­sophisticated literary critics. When he recapitulates the argument in the (later) Book IV (vi and viii), he stresses even more the function of difficulty in guaranteeing that learning from Scripture is a process – not a triumphant moment of penetration and mastery, but an extended play of invitation and exploration (the resonances of these metaphors are deliberate, and not wholly absent from Augustine’s vocabulary). The Christian life itself, as we have seen, is in constant danger of premature closure, the supposition that the end of desire has been reached and the ambiguities of history and language put behind us; and thus the difficulty of Scripture is itself a kind of parable of our condition. We cannot properly enjoy what we swiftly and definitively possess: such possession results in inaction and ultimately contempt for the object (II.vi). Obscurity in the words of revelation is one of the things that anchors us in our temporal condition; the search for instant clarity and transparency is like the Platonist’s search for ‘unattended moments’ of ecstasy, as Augustine describes it elsewhere. A language which indefinitely postpones fulfilment or enjoyment is appropriate to the Christian discipline of spiritual homelessness, to the character of the believing life as pilgrimage. Yet Scripture is equally, as we have noted, an effective vehicle for the journey home, and its purpose is to E.g., Gregory Nazianzen, Second Theological Oration (Or.28), 12.

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perfect that unqualified and self-­forgetting caritas which human beings are made for. And so the tracing of the intricacies of scriptural symbol, the unending decoding of revealed obscurity must remain a morally controlled matter. It is not suggested that the difficulty of the sacred text offers a kind of elevated recreation for advanced souls, as an unsympathetic reading of Origen on allegory might imply.12 The recognition that revelation is not obvious to the fallen mind is humbling, and humility is the indispensable soil for caritas to grow upon. Things are plainly stated elsewhere, Augustine admits (II.vi), there is nothing central to the Christian revelation that is restricted to those possessed of advanced hermeneutical skills; but the many transformations of what is plainly stated warn us of the folly of supposing we have rapidly and definitively grasped what is being said in a single successful event of communication. Obscurity can also, for Augustine, include grotesqueness – the stylistic horrors of the Old Latin, the moral horrors of the Old Testament. The infidel reader may be simply put off (IV.viii), and this is probably just as well, since such a reader lacks the key to the text, which is conversion to Christ; though on the other hand, grotesquerie and strangeness may serve as at least a partly converting invitation. But, for the believer, these are a prophylactic against ‘fastidiousness’, the assumption that we have nothing to learn from what startles or offends our taste (we may recall Thomas Merton’s remarks13 about the ‘difficulty’ of the writings of Thérèse of Lisieux – a very considerable challenge to the young Merton’s modernist sensibility). We are again being warned against closure; we can and shall learn from the unexpected and from what is not readily culturally assimilable. The bizarre as well as the ambiguous has its place in preserving our openness to the final non-­representable end of desire. The fact that we live in a world where, in a sense, everything is potentially signum, potentially speech, where the boundaries of meaning that seem to delineate the clear outlines of a res that is uncontroversially what it is are constantly being broken by the apparent metaphorical anarchy evident in Augustine’s own exegesis – all this does not amount to a self-­indulgent Origen, de principiis I.praef. 3 and 8 sets out the principles on which his allegorical readings are based. 13 Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (New York, 1948; London, 1975), pp. 353–354. 12

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relativism, an exaltation of rhetoric and semantic ingenuity for their own sake. So much is clear from the later chapters of DDC II, especially xxiv to xl. We understand the all-­pervasiveness of use and sign only in the light of that reality which, as we have seen, points unequivocally to God and shows once and for all that creation is not our stopping place. Scriptural exegesis may have its surface anarchy – you never quite know what may stand for what – but ultimately its exchanges and substitutions converge on the cross, ‘On which all Figures fix their Eyes’. II.xli spells this out a little further: the cross stands for the whole of discipleship; as we live it out, we learn the depth and riches of the caritas of Christ. The cross is the final ‘passover’, the point of disjunction between slavery and freedom; but only humility can grasp this – the humility, presumably, that has learned to live in the realm of time and symbol and not to ‘enjoy’ it as complete or final, the humility signified in the passover narrative by that insignificant plant, hyssop. ‘Rooted and grounded’ in this humble and accepting love, we see the scope of Christ’s love in the cross. Relating this both to earlier passages, and, once again, to the almost contemporary Confessions VII, we can say that the scope of Christ’s love lies precisely in his own supremely gratuitous acceptance of the limits of history: what is uniquely res, the eternal wisdom of God, becomes uniquely and entirely signum, a worldly thing meaning what it is not. To look to the cross, then, and to ‘sign’ ourselves with it, is to accept the same limits, and thus to live in hope – and, Augustine adds, oddly at first sight, to have proper reverence for the sacraments; not so odd if we see this as a further illustration of the need to see the symbolic life of the Church itself as pointing beyond itself, rather than providing a ground for spiritual complacency and stasis (as for the Donatists, perhaps, whom Augustine certainly has in mind here). The cross in particular, and the incarnate life in general, display the distance between God and creation in displaying their union. How is God present in the world? in a death, in weakness, inactivity, negation, the infirma divinitas of Confessions VII. 18, the weak God lying at our feet. It is the ‘void’ – in worldly terms – of Christ incarnate and crucified that establishes the difference of God; it is this emptiness of meaning and power that makes Christ supremely signum. He is God’s speech because he is worldly ‘silence’; he is what cannot be enjoyed or rested in. We can do nothing but ‘use’ this (if we relate to it at all) – that is, we can only allow it to detach us from self-­sufficient satisfaction, from

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image and expectation. The unbridgeable distance between the eternal res and all earthly representation opens up through this ‘anti-­representation’ that is the cross; yet in the recognition of distance is also buried the apprehension of gift or revelation. Here is an event that, in itself and in its long-­term effect in the formation of the Church, speaks of absolution or re-­ creation, of grace; in challenging our ‘possessing’ of objects or events, challenging our urge to ‘enjoy’ the world, and so too the urge to close the question of meaning, it rescues us from the stasis of pride, the self-­paralysis Augustine so vividly describes in the Confessions as the fruit of misdirected and misconceived desire. In the Confessions, Platonism serves first to liberate desire, to stop us enjoying limited objects, so that our longing can turn towards what is not in the realm of things; but desire must undergo a second purification. It is not to seek for timeless vision, for the true and the eternal, as a kind of place to escape into from the vicissitudes of the material world; it must enact its yearning through the corporate life of persons in this world (through the Church, ultimately, for Augustine). And it is directed or instructed and enabled in this by the fact that the crucial liberation from pride is effected by encountering the utter difference, the transcendence, of unchanging truth in the life, death, and resurrection of a mortal man. All this remains buried in what is very often a quite unreconstructed set of Platonic antitheses14; yet in the works of the later 390s, the breach with Platonism (Platonism as Augustine understood it and had experienced it) is perhaps more clearly marked than in any earlier or later writings. Having sketched with some care the Platonic vision of the superiority of the incorruptible and immaterial, Augustine is then obliged by his commitment to the incarnate Christ to deny that the incorruptible and immaterial can ever as such be an object for the cognition of material, historical and ‘desirous’ beings. Only in the non-­finality of historical relationships and historical ‘satisfaction’, and in the consequent restlessness that keeps us active and attentive, is unchanging truth to be touched. The language and the setting of Confessions IX.x, the famous Ostia ‘vision’, bring this out vividly: it is in the mutual stimulus, the urging further and further, of a conversation that For a brilliant interpretation of the tensions in Augustine between Platonic metaphysical resolution and questioning faith, see Joseph S. O’Leary, Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in Christian Tradition (Minneapolis, Winston Press, 1985), ch.4.

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there comes a momentary glimpse of sheer fruition. Cast as much of it is in the terminology of a purgative ascent through creatures to the soul and thence to the highest being, this account is nonetheless a powerful challenge to the ‘Platonic’ model of individual escape from words and matter, because of its conversational character. Heaven would be a perpetuation of the moment of fruition, the shared reaching out ictu trepidantis aspectus of Augustine and Monica; and now all that can be said or understood of that fruition is through the image of the moment of mutual transparency that can issue from the intense exchange of words: where the fluidity of utterance itself, a play of words that is also the modification and re-­forming of a relationship between material persons, so indicates or rather embodies its own unfinishable nature that it expresses or introduces the irreducible ‘difference’ of God. ‘There is no absolute knowledge but rather a textual infinite, an interminable web of texts or interpretation’ (Geoffrey Hartman15). Allowing – as one always must with such statements – the widest possible sense to ‘textual’ (as relating to any structure of intelligible representation in words or acts), it is possible to see Augustine’s treatment of reality and representation as moving in this direction. In the sense that no worldly res is securely settled as a fixed object ‘meaning’ itself, or tied in a fixed designation, that no worldly state of affairs can be allowed to terminate human desire, that all that is present to us in and as language is potentially signum in respect of the unrepresentable God, and despite the surface crudity of his distinction between things and names, Augustine’s scheme in DDC certainly has affinities with the popular notion that everything is language, everything is interpretation. What we know is what we ‘read’. But the point at which this ceases to be an adequate characterization of Augustine is precisely the point where this discussion began: the canonical text that witnesses to the canonical (normative) representation, Christ; the text that exists not simply for ‘play’, but for the formation of caritas. It is not textuality that is, ultimately, infinite, but the love of God, shaping our love. Scripture is a text with a centre; it is to be interpreted in the light of Christ crucified and only so.16 The central displacement of fixed concepts involved Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 202. Well delineated in M. Pontet, L’exégèse de s. Augustin prédicateur (Paris, 1945), esp. pp. 377ff. – ‘La croix donne le sens même de l’Ecriture’ (p. 377).

15 16

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here – God, flesh, time, eternity, mortality, creation, dissolution, power, and impotence – reminds us that the sign-­quality of the world is not to be trivialized into a mere system of ciphers, puzzles that yield solutions, fixed material symbols for a fixed immaterial object or set of objects (when you know the code, you read off the content). When Augustine in DDC III.v–x warns against the fundamental error of mistaking signum for res, he is not so much complaining that some people are ignorant of the code of scriptural symbolism as noting the importance of the central hermeneutical collision that occurs between Christians and Jews. In Augustine’s eyes, the problem for the Jews is that they have long lived unconsciously under useful signs; without any theological overview to make full sense of it, the people of the Old Covenant knew how to ‘use’ the signs established in the Law, symbolic acts, ceremonies, modes of behaviour. By God’s providence, these signs began to teach caritas, they did not invite enjoyment. But in fact the whole of this symbolic order looks forward to the point at which it is shown to be such, when it is finally revealed to be signum: with the coming of Christ and his passion and resurrection the full scope of divine and human caritas appears, so that the previous history in the light of which Christ is intelligible, and which he in turn makes newly intelligible, is seen to serve, to be ‘useful’, in relation to this decisively liberating event. Faith in Christ now renders the exact observance of the old symbolic forms redundant: from practices, they become words only, the written record of the Law, because the relevant ‘useful’ practice is now the resurrection life in the Church, with its new and more restricted and austere symbolic life (III.ix). A sign may be usefully observed in ignorance; but when it is shown to be a sign, a choice is introduced. To observe a symbolic form or deliberately go on inhabiting a symbolic structure of words and images in the old way, when the definitive sign appears that draws together all law, all rites, all images, is to turn the old order of signs into something different, to begin to ‘enjoy’ it, to choose it for itself, and so to refuse the summons to time and history and the possibility of caritas which the sign is meant to carry. The sign chosen for itself as against the liberation towards the one true res offered by the final sign of Christ is being turned into a pseudo-res: symbolic practice has lost its innocence. Although this discussion is predictably cast in the rhetoric of anti-Jewish polemic (Augustine does not ask, for instance, what a Jewish exegete might

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want to propose as a focusing or definitive signum, or indeed what exactly the Law is a sign of for the Jew), he allows that the problem of confusing res and signum is a more general one. The Christian may so treat the sacraments of the Church as to cease properly ‘using’ them; there are useless interpretations of useful signs, and it is better to be ignorant of the explanation of a sign’s use than to have a wrong understanding of it – presumably an understanding divorced from caritas (III.ix). But the importance of the application of all this to Scripture is that Augustine has in effect defined Scripture as the paradigm of self-­conscious symbolic awareness: it is a pattern of signs organized around – and by – the incarnate Word in such a way that all the signs remain signs, all are kept open to the horizon of God, in virtue of their relation to the central acting out in cross and resurrection of God’s otherness from the realm of representation. Only the God who is irreducibly different in this way (non aliud, not another in a series or class) can finally open up desire to the dimension of caritas, love which is both passionate (engaged, actively committed, exposed) and disinterested, self-forgetful. To know the difference between res and signum is, for the Christian believer, to know the difference of God, and so to be equipped for life in God’s image, the unending expansion of love. ‘It would be a great relief ’, writes Hartman,17 ‘to break with the idea of the sacred, and especially with institutions that claim to mediate it. Yet the institution of language makes every such break appear inauthentic. It keeps us in the “defile of the word”, meeting, slaying, purifying what is held to be sacred or sublime again and again. The very persistence, moreover, of so many and various ideals of language purification betrays something religious in spirit, if not in name.’ Hartman, like some other contemporary critics, comes close to a ‘natural theology’ grounded in the facts of language and interpretation, the unfinishable nature of discourse: the Other is inescapable, in that, once anything has been said, its incompletion, silences or embarrassments require a different utterance, ‘friend or antagonist’ to what has already been said.18 When all has been said, we still face a question, even a claim, which expresses itself in language’s pressure to self-­purgation. This is a theme that needs careful Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, p. 249. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, p. 260.

17 18

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handling (like all supposed natural theologies, it delivers only an abstract conclusion); but it could at least be agreed that no religious world-­view could survive without an account of the unfinished and fluid character of the linguistic world, a conviction that atomistic ‘systems of representation’ purporting to label discrete objects are a snare and a delusion. The interest of Augustine’s scheme is that he avoids giving a simplistic version of this conviction. He goes farther than the argument, familiar from the Cappadocians,19 that names leave a ‘residue’ undescribed and indescribable in things. Because he is ceaselessly attentive to the inseparability of knowledge from love, Augustine’s own concern is not to secure such a residue, but to understand how language in its fluidity and displacements is inseparably interwoven with the restlessness or openness of desire that is what is fundamentally human. Language is not a set of discrete acts of unsuccessful naming any more than it is a set of discrete acts of successful naming. ‘Success’ in our discourse is the skill of continuing with the shifts of interconnecting perceptions that material history and relationship produce. To return to Augustine’s example, we may start with the supposition that an animal is a res, a distinct object bearing a name; but the ram, once brought into the narrative orbit of covenant and sacrifice, slaughtered to redeem Isaac, is not to be so easily shepherded and penned in. Even the most trivial talk about rams is now liable to be haunted by this metaphorization. Only God means nothing but God. And further, Augustine, by directing our attention to the particular set of signs we call Scripture, explains how the interweaving of fluid language and open desire is the locus of transforming grace. Cross and resurrection, to which all scriptural signs lead us, free us once and for all from the threat of an idolatry of signs. They are both inescapable and provisional. God has ‘placed himself in the order of signs’ (de la Taille’s famous phrase), and so brought to light the nature of all signs in respect of his own nature as uniquely res. Caritas is the goal that lies in and beyond the skill of ‘continuing with’ the shifts of discourse; since, for the Christian, language is no more capable of being a ‘neutral’, closed, self-­reflexive pattern of play than is human being itself. The

Basil, adversus Eunomium 1.1.6,11.4, Gregory of Nyssa, contra Eunomium X, etc.

19

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‘realism’ of such a view – to open up a rather unmanageably large issue – is implicit in the directedness of interpretation towards love, and the conviction that adequate interpretation begins with the primordial ‘non-­worldly’ love enacted in Christ. The world of human discourse is, for Augustine, extended between the love of God in creation and redemption, and the Beatific Vision. The omnipresence of metaphor, then, is ‘controlled’, not by a breakthrough into clear metaphysical knowledge (though Augustine constantly struggles with the pull towards this resolution, not always successfully), but by a central metaphor to which the whole world of signs can be related, a sign of what all signs are. The Word incarnate and crucified represents the absence and deferral that is basic to signum as such, and represents also, crucially, the fact that absence and deferral are the means whereby God engages our desire so that it is freed from its own pull towards finishing, towards presence and possession. Christ can only be shown to be the enactment of God if, as bearer of ultimate promise, he at the same time defers and transforms that promise by a death that presages our baptismal death as believers (and our daily losing of and longing for the face of God in the practice we call faith), and a resurrection that does not destroy our creatureliness but at least strips it of creaturely ‘attachment’. Wisdom elects to be mortal; and what prevents this from being a straightforward theophany that would lead us to identify Wisdom with the world of mortality is that it is precisely mortality itself, limit, incompletion, absence, that is the speech of Wisdom with us. A world of mortality can only be theophanic (in the sense of pure ‘presence’) if its mortal elements are erased: theophanies are seen in ‘orient and immortal wheat’. But whatever the religious significance of such ‘timeless’ moments (and it is not something the mature Augustine dwells on; he is more inclined to see terror and mystery in the natural world than to sense God in it in any undialectical way), it is not here that Wisdom is active in the transformation of the world, but in the presence-­in-absence of Christ hastening towards his death and calling us after (DDC I.xxxiv; the same image is found in Confessions IV.12). Wisdom is mortal for and with us not to destroy but to affirm and then transfigure the world in which we actually live, the world of body, time and language, absence and desire. There is indeed a requies promised to the people of God, the ‘presence’ of heaven and the vision of God’s face; but by definition this

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cannot now be talked about except in the mythological language of future hope (as if it were a future state like other future states, like what I shall feel tomorrow). It is the presence of God at our own end, our death, the end of time for us, and in some sense the end of desire in fruitio; not, therefore, for possession now in the language of belief, or any other language.

Index academia, fear of faith 25 Acallam ná Senórach 245 accommodation, and truth 149 act of faith 90 actualization process 182, 184, 188, 194 adolescence 222–3 Aeneid 230 Aeterni Patris 1879 98 Agamben, Giorgio 139 agape, and love 194 Aiken, Joan 222 All’s Well that Ends Well 234 Alternative Service Book 62 Amber Spyglass, The 101–2, 103, 105, 106, 107 American Gods 113 American literature, post-1960s 58 anagnorisis 181, 203–4 anamnesis 213 angelic aesthetic, dangers of 65 angelic spirituality, and symbolic spirituality 68 angelic vision, and symbolic vision 67 Anglican faith 60 Anglican liturgy, reform of 62, 63 ‘Anglo-Welsh literature’ 68 anti-theatricalism 27, 30, 31 Apollinarianism 166 apologetics 97, 99 apophaticism 40, 121 applause, and prayer 50 Aquinas 58, 98–9, 116, 250 Aratus 168 Arendt, Hannah 189 Arianism 165, 166 Aristotle 91, 116, 181, 199 art creation as 250 as higher/good magic 248 liturgy as supreme 250 Artaud, Antonin 212

‘Arundel Tomb’ 76 As You Like It 205, 208 atheism, new 58 atheist writers 100 Auden, W. H. 71, 210 Augustine 15, 80, 84, 85, 125, 141–2, 157, 253–68 author’s act of creation 82 autonomous being 186 autos sacramentales 208 Babel, culture and learning as 71 Bacon, Francis 27 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 195, 196, 197, 199–200, 204, 205–12 bare life 139 Barth, Karl 183 Bataille, Georges 120 Baxter, Richard 26 beauty durability of in poetry 129, 132 in material things 250 Beckett, Samuel 96 begetting, inversion of paternal/filial 202 being autonomous 186 disruption of 185 and grace 196, 197, 204, 211, 213 as nihilism 186 patience of 189 transcending social/moral constructs 194 Being of God and the Experience of Truth, The 171 belief Christian and salvation 42 and ideology 92–3 and imagination 80, 83, 87, 89 and language 18 making it believable 90 and meaningless 58, 59, 60

270 and novels 83 in postmodernism 59 religious 24 believing act of 80 conditions for 82 reconfiguration of 88 and seeing 79 structure of 88 without belonging 58 Benso, Silvia 139 Berryman, John 73 Bible(s) Corinthians 67 Genesis 20, 100–1, 177 Geneva Bible 26 John 20, 79, 170 King James Bible 26, 63 Luke 20 Mark 26 New Testament 167, 244, 245 Old Testament 206–7 Psalm 139 72 bildung 173 Blake, William 109 Blanchot, Maurice 120 ‘Bleak Liturgies’ 71, 74 Bloom, Harold 149 Blundell, Boyd 183 body, and the mind 81 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 96 Book of Common Prayer 62, 63 Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts 167 Borges, Jorge Luis 115 bottomless collapse 59, 75 Bouchard, Larry 17 Boyarin, Daniel 23 Bradley, Arthur 100 Branch, Lori 18 Brandt, H. C. G. 18 Bretherton, Luke 4 Brighton Rock 82, 86–7, 89 Bronte, Charlotte 247 Brown, Walter 144 Bruner, Jerome 193 Bruno, Giordano 251 Bultmann, Rudolf 84 ‘Byzantium’ 67

Index Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 208 Calvin, John 26 Caputo, John 17 caritas 261, 264 Carroll, Lewis 221 catechesis 217 categories, universal and general 123–4 catharsis and forgiveness 199 of misericordia 197, 198–210 narrative as 188 recognition scenes as 203 Catholic Church, modernization of 62 Catholic imagination, contemporary 64–5 Catholic novels 89 Certeau, Michel de 119, 120 Cervantes, Miguel de 120 charitable reading 22 charity, faith founded in 28 Chesterton, G. K. 96–7, 221 Child, Francis James 18 childhood, and narrative 215–26 children, role of fairy-stories/play 225 children’s literature and culture 225–6 fictionalization of Christianity 217, 252 and theological debate 215 Christ caritas of 261 faith in 42, 264 in the New Testament 244 person of 166 relation to God 165, 256, 267 scope of his love 261 Christian belief, and salvation 42 Christian catharsis 199 Christian discipline, of spiritual homelessness 259 Christian faith, contributing to scholarship 22 Christian Hermeneutics: Paul Ricœur and the Refiguring of Theology 169–70 Christian humanist readings 132 Christian learning, apophatic tradition of 121 Christian movement, beyond tragedy/ mystical vision of 197 Christian narrative 244, 252 Christian perspective 22

Index Christian theology, and realm of matter 249 Christian World Stage 208 Christianity covert hold on global imagination 215 and culture 57 decline in 217 effect on literature 245 and fairy-tales 243–7 fictionalization of 217, 252 imperative of 20 as literary movement 167 and magic 247–52 and narratives/symbols 217, 244 re-imagination of 252 religionless 96 as universal religion 244 church and state 15 vocation of ‘true fiction’ in the early 167, 168 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 80, 86, 87, 127, 153 comedy, as folkloric 231 Commedia 46–7, 48, 53, 99 commentary, value of 38–9 common sense 127 Common Worship 62 communal intellectual community 96 communication and forgiveness 53 and loss of true self 38 communion, and forgiveness 53 community of literary enjoyment 54 and sense of the self 186 compassion, as way of life 40 confession and forgiveness 189, 192 narrative tradition of 189 process of 193 Confessions 15, 141 Confidential Agent, The 88–9 conflict, as mode of enquiry 100 consciousness, and poiesis 85 contemplation, in Gregory’s works 37 contracted universals, humans as 124 contradiction, of human life 206–7 Corinthians 67

271

cosmos, as theophanic 122 Council of Chalcedon 166 Cox, John 19 Cranmer, Thomas 62 created order, relationship with the divine 141–3 created phenomena, otherness of 140 creation aggression against 186 as a divine work of beautiful art 250 doctrine of 58 and God 123 as God’s writing 82 having no meaning in itself 257 mediating the divine 139 mythology 100 relationship with Creator 141–3 and revision 72 creative act, vision as 161 creative imagination, and thought 249 creative instinct, and sexual instinct 90 creativity, as a distortion that reveals 161 creativity of the poet, and awakening of life in nature 151–2 creeds 165–6 Crisis of European Sciences, The 118 criss-cross, of life and death 202–3, 207, 210, 213 Critias 228 critical theory 115, 120 criticism, interpretive tradition of 127 cross anti-representation of 261–2 as scriptural sign 266 standing for discipleship 261 cult of childhood 220 cultic basis of drama 206, 212 of tragedy 200–1 cultic leading to the liturgical, in Shakespeare 201–5 cultural-linguistic narratives 115–16 cultural technologies 81 culture(s) as Babel 71 British 58 and children’s literature 225–6 and Christianity 57 oral 227, 228, 231–2

272 recreation of 69 and religious studies 57 as site of meaning 96 Welsh 60, 68, 69 written 228 Cupitt, Don 216 Cymbeline 195–6, 198 dance, rituals of 224–5 ‘dancing still-point’ 126 Dante Alighieri Commedia 46–7, 48, 53, 99 De Vulgari Eloquentia 22 Inferno 102 Paradiso 41–8, 52, 53, 102, 202 symbolic imagination of 64 vision of 65 ‘Dau Gapel (Two chapels)’ 67–8 Davie, Grace 58 D’Costa, Gavin 2 de-Christianization 216 De Dato Patris Luminum 126 De Doctrina Christiana 253–68 De Venatione Sapientiae 122, 123 De Vulgari Eloquentia 22 dead, reunion with the 109 death Harry Potter novels 108–13 His Dark Materials trilogy 100–7 and love 111 meanings of 100–13 as means of rebirth 204 renunciation to 209, 210–11 turned inside out 196 and Twelfth Night 32 debate, hospitable 4 deception, and figurative language 155–6 deconstruction, notion of 174–5 deconstruction of texts, and radical hermeneutics 175 deep, symbol of 60–1, 64, 66 defamiliarization, Harry Potter novels 112 Deleuze, Gilles 60, 138 demythologization 84 Dennett, Daniel 104 dependence of humans on each other 54

Index of humans on God in and through each other 39–40, 45, 46, 47 on Mercy 51 depth, idea/symbol of 60–1, 62, 66, 67, 69, 71, 73, 74 Derrida, Jacques 59, 116, 118, 119, 120–1, 139, 156, 174–5, 229 Descartes, René 85 desirability, of the good and true 122 desire, open/and fluid language 266 Desmond, William 185, 186, 189 Detienne, Marcel 226, 229, 232 dialectical method, accounting for truth 99 Difference and Repetition 60–1 difference, politics of 116 disbelief, suspension of 80, 82, 83, 90 discipleship, cross standing for 261 discourse human 267 success in 266 disillusion, His Dark Materials trilogy 110 distortion, and truth 155 divine created orders relationship with 141–3 found in poetic language 65 mediated by creation 139 divine truth 41, 45, 48, 53 divine will 44–5, 46 divinity, human relation to 206 doctrine, and pluralism 58, 59 doctrine of Creation 58 Don Quixote 120 Donatists 261 Doniger, Wendy 233 Donne, John 18, 21, 24 drama cultic roots of 206, 212 heightened sense of 212 of tragedy 196–7 dramatization, of forgiveness 196, 199, 209 Drysalter 57 Dumézil, Georges 232 Dynamics of Faith 194 Eagleton, Terry 58 early church 167, 168 Echoes Return Slow, The 70–1, 72 ecumenical creeds 165–6

Index Edda 245, 246, 248 education British system of 96 politics as a moment in 127 role of 225 university 100 Egypt, mythological culture of 229 El gran teatro del mundo 208 Eliade, Mircea 91 Eliot, George 166 Eliot, T. S. 64, 65, 125, 126, 196, 197, 199, 201–5, 207, 209, 212 emplotment, process of 180, 181. See also plot(s) enchantment, loss of/re-enchantment 217 Encyclopaedia Britannica 95 encyclopaedic rationality 95 End of the Affair, The 84–5, 89 England, Elizabethan 26 England Made Me 89 English Romanticism 19 enjambment 159, 160 Enlightenment, the 226 ‘Eolian Harp, The’ 153 Epimenides 168 epistemic gain 182 epoché Cusa’s doxological 133 and exploration of limits 117–21 Erasmus 29 eros, and love 194 erotic desire 119–20 eternal and everlasting 129, 130 and temporal 131 Eucharist, the 244, 245, 246 Eutycheanism 166 eventful truth 147–8 everlasting, and eternal 129, 130 evil 122, 188, 193 Face of the Deep 60–1 fairies 246 fairy assistance 240 fairy realm 239, 241, 252 fairy-tales Christian narrative as 252 and Christianity 243–7 and gift-exchange 240

273

and myth 226–43 and narrative structure 239–40 objects 248 plot of 230, 233–4, 240 role of 225 structural perspective 242 understandings of 232–3 faith as approach to literary studies 33 as arcane and inert 57 in Christ 264 in Christ and salvation 42 difficulty in speaking of 57 false 28–9, 30, 32 fear of 25 founded in charity 28 as gift from God 26 ‘hole in’ and verbal changes 74 as imperfect 33 meanings of 32 and meditation on death 32 mixed 26, 32 poetic 80 and postmodernity 58 and Protestantism 26 receding of established 71 secularizing the language of 25 and Shakespeare 25 and suspicion/scepticism 19 and Twelfth Night 27–33 Fallible Man 193 false faith 28–9, 30, 32 fantastic imagination 215 fantasy and imagination 87 literature 215 witing 97–8, 113 Fear and Trembling 17, 110 fear, of faith 25 Felch, Susan 20 Fessenden, Tracy 18 fiction sign-system of 237 and truth 47–8, 53 vocation of ‘true fiction’ in the early church 167 fictionalization, of Christianity 217, 252 figurative language 155–6 final judgement 42, 102

274 finite, and the infinite 131 Fodor, James 169–70 folk-tales fairy realm of 239 and oral-gift culture 238 and violence 230 folkloric comedy/tragicomedy as 231 and the mythic 230, 237 folkloric structure, New Testament 245 folkloric tales 231, 235 foreign luminosity iconic fashioning of 161 and pathetic fallacy 142 forgiveness and catharsis 199 Christian drama of 195 and communication/communion 53 as condition for meaning 52 and confession 189, 192 cost of 212 depersonalizing 190–1 dramatization of 196, 199, 209 grace of 211 and justice 212 and love 209 and mercy 52 need for 40 and penance 189, 191 and prayer 50, 52 process of 189–90, 192, 193 recognition of need for 51, 52 and Shakespeare 48–52, 208 formatio, notion of 173 Foucault, Michel 81, 95, 115, 116, 118, 119 Four Quartets, The 64, 125 ‘Frame for Poetry, A’ 64 Frankfurt School 174 Frederick II 99 freedom, and love 209 frui and uti 255 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 172, 173, 174, 180, 193 Gaiman, Neil 113 Gamble, Harry Y. 167 Geertz, Clifford 91 genealogical mode, of rationality 96, 97 Genesis 20, 100–1, 177

Index Geneva Bible 26 gift circulation, and oral circulation 243 gift-exchange and fairy-tale plots 240 and narratives 239 spiralling 241–2 gift(s) and counter-gifts 241 the eternal 132 faith as gift fron God 26 humans as gifts of God 126 as life giving 132 and signs 235–6 globalized societies, and complexity/ confusion 116 Gnosticism 91, 216, 220 God under attack 75 Christ’s relation to 165, 256, 267 and creation 82, 123 embodied in Christ 256 faith as gift from 26 love of 263 as maximal universal 124 meaning nothing but God 266 praise of 122–3, 135 as res 255, 256 truth as 54 Golden Compass, The 100–1 goodness and human beings 40 search for 112 Gospel of John 20, 79, 170 Gospel of Luke 20 Gospel of Mark 26 Gospels, writers use of religious imagination 167–8 Gosson, Stephen 27, 28 Gothic literature 96 governance, technologies of 81 grace and being 196, 197, 204, 211, 213 of forgiveness 211 and mercy 211 quasi-grace 200 transforming 266 Graff, Gerald 17 Graham, Elaine 139 Grail stories 246

Index Great Divorce, The 97 Greenaway, Peter 209 Greenblatt, Stephen 32 Greene, Graham Brighton Rock 82, 86–7, 89 Confidential Agent, The 88–9 End of the Affair, The 84–5, 89 England Made Me 89 Honorary Consul, The 82–3, 90, 91 and imagination 87–8 and Manichean cosmology 91 Name of Action, The 89 novels of 81, 83 Power and the Glory, The 87, 89, 90 Stamboul Train 82, 89 Third Man, The 88 Gregory the Great in Dante’s Paradiso 47, 52 moral dimensions of 37 Moralia in Iob 36–41, 45, 48, 52, 54–5 and Trajan 42, 46 Greimas, A. J. 232, 233, 238, 239, 240, 241, 246 Griffiths, Paul 126 Grossberg, Lawrence 92 grotesque idealism 148 and sublime 149n.43 theory of 155 grotesqueness, and obscurity 260 Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19 growth, and gift of praise 132 Guattari, Félix 138 guilt facing/giving language to 188 and His Dark Materials trilogy/Harry Potter books 107, 108 and human life 206 as poena/pain 188 Habermas, Jürgen 174 Hamilton, Donna 24 Hanby, Michael 141 Haraway, Donna 138 Harry Potter novels 100, 107, 108–13, 216 Harsnett, Samuel 31 Hart, David Bentley 86 Hartman, Geoffrey 263, 265

275

hate 87 Heaven 263 Heidegger, Martin 119 Herbert, George 60, 75 here-and-now, and literature 16 hermeneutical collision, Christians and Jews 264 hermeneutical cycle, and mimesis 181, 182 hermeneutics 163–4, 171–7, 183 ‘high’ hero tales 232 His Dark Materials trilogy 100–8, 109, 110, 112, 113, 215–16, 222–3 historical scholarship, moral dimensions of 20 historicism literary studies use of 21 pure 21 religion studied through 20–1 term 20 history comparative cultural 17 written 227 Holmes, Wendell 142 Holy Sonnets 24 ‘Homage to Mistress Bradstreet’ 73 Homer 230 Honorary Consul, The 82–3, 90, 91 Hooker, Richard 26 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 122, 140, 232 hospitable space, and universities 176 hospitality 3–4, 54 ‘How do you see’ 62 human beings, and human creatures 183 human existence and divine truth 41 pathos of 206 human language, narrative structure of 238–9 human life, contradiction of 206–7 human personality, and objects 242 human thought 248–9 humanistic studies, and personal commitments 22 humanities, and social sciences 174 human(s) becoming more fully 8 as contracted universals 124 dependence on each other 54

276 dependence on God in and through each other 39–40, 45, 46, 47 as gifts of God 126 and goodness 40 phenomenal and real 183 relation to divinity 206 humility in Moralia in Iob 36–41 and passover narrative 261 and pride 38, 40, 42, 46–7 and theological reflection 54 Hungerford, Amy 58, 59 Husserl, Edmund 117–21 hyper-activism 185 Hyppolite, Jean 174 Iamblichus 250 icon, and the idol 143 iconic interpretation of foreign luminosity 161 of poetry 152–3 iconic model, pathetic fallacy 144, 152, 155, 156 iconic spaces 9 idea, poetry of the 127 idealism, grotesque 148 ideas, meaningfulness of 53 idem, identity 180 identification, through objects 240 identity(ies) construction of 184–5, 194 disruption of 185 idem and ipse 180 narrative 180–1 objects necessary for subjective 244–5 Protestant 18 Welsh and R. S. Thomas 60, 68 ideology, and psychology of belief 92–3 idol, and the icon 143 ‘Idols of the Theatre’ 27 imagination and belief 80, 83, 87, 89 exercise of 80 as faculty of the soul 84 and false images/legitimate use of 146 fantastic 215 and fantasy 87 Gospel writers use of 167–8 and Graham Greene 87–8

Index hate as failure of 87 and image-making 86 and making sense 85, 87 and novels 82, 83 and perception 80 and reasoning 83, 84 and Romanticism 84 and thinking 83 immaterial, figurations of 147 improbable fiction, and anti-theatricalists 31 incarnation, as sign/trace of maker 257 Inferno 102 infinite, and the finite 131 infinity, privative/negative 129 Inklings group 96 innocence 218–20 innocent eye, privileging of 218 inside out, turning ourselves 197 instrumental reasoning 84 interpretation, dialogical approaches to 172 interpretation of texts, and radical hermeneutics 175 interpretative exploration, liberal arts 170–1 intertextuality, and early church 168 intimate, and other 61 invisible, and visible 79 ipse, identity 180 Jaccottet, Philippe 247 Jackson, Ken 18 Jacobs, Alan 22 James VI of Scotland and I of England 246 Jane Eyre 247 Jasper, David 17 Jesus 207, 257 Joyce, James 120 judgement, suspension of 117–18 Juilfs, Jonathan 23 justice and forgiveness 212 and mercy 208, 211 Kant, Emmanuel 80, 83–4, 85 Kate, Laurens ten 59 Keats, John 67 Keller, Catherine 60–1

Index kenosis 59, 60, 63, 67 Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn 23 Kermode, Frank 82 Keshavarz, Fatemeh 23, 25 Kierkegaard, Søren 17, 110 King James Bible 26, 63 King Lear 205 Kirk, Robert 252 Kirkpatrick, Robin 22 Klemm, David 170, 171, 176 Knapp, Jeffrey 27 knowledge doxological mode of 135 limits of 119 and love 266 and seeing 87 Lacan, Jacques 234, 235, 236 ‘Land of Green Mountains, The’ 230–1, 238 language of anti-theatricalism 31 and belief 18 in Book of Common Prayer 63 complexity of/Symbol of Chalcedon 166 danger of familiar/formalized 72 doxological sources of 128 of faith 25 figural 156 figurative and deception 155–6 fluid/and open desire 266 liturgical and depth 74 narrative structure of 238–9 poetic 64, 65, 70 power of liturgical 71 purification of 265 reform of liturgical 62 religious 30, 63, 66 revelatory function of figurative 155 and signs 255 as source of division and conflict 64 specialized in religious communities 253 spiritual practice of 119 use as doxological 130 of virtue 100 Larkin, Philip 71, 76 Lawrence, D. H. 104

277

Laws, The 229, 230, 231 Leaf by Niggle 97 Leander of Seville 37 learning as Babel 71 of children 225 from Scripture as a process 259 skills-based 100 things through signs 253 through signs 253 Leskov, Nikolai 244 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 242 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 242 Lewis, C. S. 22, 96, 97, 111, 216, 223, 246 Lewis, Sanders 67 liberal arts, interpretative exploration/ meaning-making in 170–1 liberal Protestantism 96 ‘Light Princess, The’ 221–2 limits, exploration of 117–21 ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ 150–3, 155 literacy difficulty, prizing of 259 literary sense of the 17 and the theological 82 literary contest and conflict 99 literary criticism 4–5, 117 literary movement, Christianity as 167 literary scholars, engagements with religion 19 literary studies faith as approach to 33 and religion 16 secularity and objectivity in 17–18 U.S. academy 17 use of historicism 21 literary texts, religious dimensions 17 literary theory and theology 17 turn to religion 19 literature adult as pure diversion 226 American post–1960s 58 children’s 215, 225–6, 252 Cusan approach to 126–35 discipline of 3 effect of Christianity on 245 fantasy 215 Gothic 96

278

Index

and here-and-now 16 mode of enquiry through conflict 100 and religion/disciplinary contexts 16–24, 96 and theology 48, 54, 176 Literature and Theology 57 liturgical action, and liturgical language 74 Liturgical Commission 62 liturgical language and depth 74 and liturgical action 74 power of 71 liturgical reform 62, 63–4, 65, 71, 74, 75–6 liturgy, supreme art as 250 living hope, and divine will 44–5 Logic and Existence 174 Logos, the 86, 218, 219 Lord of the Rings, The 98, 109 love in Dante’s Paradiso 41–8 and death 111 as divine truth 45, 48 and eros and agape 194 and forgiveness/freedom 209 of God 263 and knowledge 266 meaning-as-love 197 objects of 256–7 and prayer 45, 47 scope of Christ’s 261 truth as 54 as way of life 40 lovingkindness (khesed) 199 Mabinogion, The 225, 241, 245 Macbeth 205, 208 MacDonald, Dennis 168 Macdonald, George 215, 217, 220, 221, 222, 242 Macdonald tradition 243, 247, 248 Machen, Arthur 245 MacIntyre, Alasdair 95, 96, 98, 99, 100 magic anticipating science 251 and Christianity 247–52 good 248 natural 251 sinister 248, 251

make-believe, otherness of 224 Man Who Was Thursday, The 97 Manichean cosmology, and Graham Green 91 ‘Marina’ 201, 203, 204, 207, 209 Marion, Jean-Luc 143 Maritain, Jacques 140, 142 Mass for Hard Times 71 matter, realm of 249 maximal universal, God as 124 McCoy, Richard 25 meaning-as-love 197 meaning-making 170–1 meaningfulness, of ideas 53 meaningless and belief 58, 59, 60 metaphysical prejudgement as 119 meaning(s) culture as site of 96 of death 100–13 disclosure of and hermeneutics 176 of faith 32 forgiveness as condition for 52 negation of 197 revealing 193 and signs 118, 127 truthful rendering of 172 mediated redemption 8 Melchizedek, poetics of 177 Melville, Herman 61 ‘memoria’ 84 mental maps 84 mercy costliness of 211 dependence on 51 and forgiveness 52 and grace 211 and justice 208, 211 truth as 54 Merriman, Brian 225 Merton, Thomas 260 metaphor, nihilism constituting 155 metaphorical description 152 metaphysical analyses 123 metaphysical debate, in novels 100 metaphysical prejudgement, as meaningless 119 Metaphysics 91

Index metaphysics and fantasy writing 113 of Tolkien 98 metaxu 133 Middle Ages 36 Middle-earth 97, 98 Middlemarch 166–7 ‘Midnight Court, The’ 225 Milbank, Alison 148, 157 Milbank, John 6, 155 Milton, John 75 mimesis and early church 168 hermeneutic circle of 181, 182 Mimesis and Intertextuality in Antiquity and Christianity 168 mind and the body 81 and soul 85–6 mirror, metaphor of 65, 66, 67 misericordia 203, 207, 209, 211 catharsis of 197, 198–210 mixed faith 26, 32 modenity, nihilist tragedy of 196 Modern Language Association 18 modern language, spiritual practice of 119 Modern Painters III 144, 145, 146 modernity, and sinister magic 248 modernization, of Churches 62 Moevs, Christian 48 monotheism 247 moral character, of theological discourse 40 moral dimensions, of historical scholarship 20 moral norm, inadequacy of 191 moral realism, and imaginary universes 111 moral world, of poems 127 Moralia in Iob 36–41, 45, 48, 52, 54–5 mortality, and wisdom 267 ‘Mountains, The’ 69–70 Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt 173 mystagogical science, of praise 121–6 mystical tradition 119–20 mysticism, neo-pagan 119 mythic, and the folkloric 230, 237 mythological culture, of Egypt 229 mythological, the 90–3, 97, 226–7 mythology creation 100

279

invented by writing 230 Scandinavian 238 mythos, in Greek sense 229–30 myth(s) of the community 186 and fairy-tale 226–43 Greek refusal of 229 making 191 and oral culture 227 and oral narrative 226–7 of origin 228, 243 and persuasion 92 reformation of 231 of self 192 self-created 193 shadowy objectivity of 233 Name of Action, The 89 names, leaving a residue 266 Narnia 97 narration, oral 228, 229 narrative arc 180–1, 183 narrative identity 180–1 narrative structure and fairy-tales 239–40 of human language 238–9 and sentence structure 239 narrative traditions 189, 192, 193 narrative(s) as catharsis 188 and childhood 215–26 Christian 244, 252 and Christianity 217, 244 cultural-linguistic 115–16 and gift-exchange 239 oral 226–7, 230 self-actualization within one’s own 184 natural magic 251 natural theology 141, 157, 265 nature animated by divine presence 146 attribution of life to 145–6, 149 and Augustine 157 depictions of as pathetic fallacy 137, 152 falsification of 142 ontological surplus in 157 representations of 144–7 sacramental vision of 140 Wordsworth’s vision of 157–60

280 Neb 63, 66 negative infinity 129 negative theology 59, 119 neo-paganism 119, 217 Nestorianism 166 New Atheist Novel 100 New Testament 167, 244, 245 Newman, Barbara 20 Ngai, Sianne 92 Nicene Creed 165–6 Nicholas of Cusa 117, 121–6, 132–3 Nietzsche, Friedrich 95, 96, 99, 106, 111 nihilism 155, 186, 197 nihilistic absurdity 196–7, 203 non-being, evil as a futile state of 122 Northern Lights, The 100–1 novelists 82 novels and belief and imagination 82, 83 Catholic 89 New Atheist 100 since 9/11 100 objectivity, and secularity 17–18 objects fairy-tale 248 and folkloric tales 235 and human personality 242 identification/re-identification through 240 of love 256–7 in mode of art 248 necessary for subjective identity 244–5 rule of 245 as signs of promise 232 world of 98 oblivion 104, 105 obscurity 259, 260 O’Connor, Flannery 96, 161 Oedipus Rex 181, 182, 199 Old Covenant, people of 264 Old Testament, tragic motif in 206–7 ‘On Fairy Stories’ 232 On The Logic of the Social Sciences 174 ontological scandal, of pathetic fallacy 138–43 opposition, between internal and external 66 oppression, and religion 18

Index oral circulation, and gift circulation 243 oral culture 227, 228, 231–2 oral-gift culture, and folk-tales 238 oral narration 228, 229 oral narratives and myth 226–7 written down 230 Order of Things, The 115 organized religion, and sense of the self 186 origin, myths of 228, 243 Ostia ‘vision’ 262 other, and intimate 61 otherness becoming intimate with 76 of created phenomena 140 of make-believe 224 Ouspensky, Leonid 143 Oxford Inklings group 96 pagan sources canonized into scripture 168, 169 of theological hermeneutics 177 Pagan tragedy 200 pain guilt as 188 performance causing 31 pantheism 123 Paradice Lost 107 Paradiso 41–8, 52, 53, 102, 202 Parker, David 182 participatory desire, and belief and imagination 83 Paschal Mystery 196, 207, 211 passover narrative, and humility 261 pathetic fallacy attribution of life to nature 145–6 attribution/rescinding of 159 and foreign luminosity 142 iconic model 144, 152, 155, 156 immanent/transcendent uses of 143 and literal truth/poetic fancy 155 literary depictions of nature as 137, 152 as literary fashioning of icons 143 ontological scandal of 138–43 problem with 157 theological reading of 156–7 transcendental realism 143–50 patience of being 189 Pearl 219

Index Peguy, Charles 220 Pelikan, Jaroslav 20–1 penance and forgiveness 189, 191 process of 192 perceiving, pre-modern way of 134 perception(s) 79–80, 84 performance, causing pain 31 Pericles 195–6, 198–9, 201–4 Perkins, William 26 Perniola, Mario 139 personhood, honest interpretation of 164 persuading, literary act of 90 persuasion, and myth 92 persuasion-to-believe 92 Petrolle, Jean Ellen 58, 59 phenomenological tradition, spirituality of 120 phenomenology of religion, literary 17 Philosopher’s Stone, The 113 philosophy 19, 225, 227 physical existence, temporality of 128–9 Pico della Mirandola 250 piety, practices of as political 93 Plato 225, 228, 229, 230, 231, 249 Platonism 262 play, rituals of 224–5 plot 181, 182 of fairy-tales 230, 233–4, 240 pluralism, and doctrine 58, 59 Poe, Edgar Allan 234, 236 poena, guilt as 188 poetic faith 80 poetic fancy, and literal truth 155 poetic language 64, 65, 70 poetic truth 67 poetical drama, becoming ritual/turning to liturgy 202 Poetics 181 poetics, elevation of 166 Poetics of Jesus: The Search for Christ Through Writing in the Nineteenth Century, The 164 poetics of Melchizedek 177 poetry and changes to liturgy and language 66 depths of God in 73 doxological dimension of 127 iconic interpretation of 152–3

281

of the idea 127 moral world of 127 power to hold beauty 129, 132 of the words 127 poets, giving of/and receiving 160–1 poiesis, and consciousness 85 political practices of piety as 93 secret power of 92–3 politics, as moment in education 229 politics of difference 116 Politics of Recognition 116 politics of universalism 116 ‘porous self ’ 9 post-Christian phase 216, 252 post-metaphysical approaches, and radical hermeneutics 175 post-religious approach, to religious materials 216 post-structuralist approaches, and radical hermeneutics 175 post-structuralist philosophers, hermeneutic of 116 postmodern approaches, and radical hermeneutics 175 postmodern sublime, nihilistic absurdity of 196–7 postmodernity belief and loss of certainty in 59 as blurring of boundaries 138 and celebration of difference 116 dissolution of the ‘ontological hygiene’ 139 and faith 58 Potkay, Adam 154 Power and the Glory, The 87, 89, 90 power, of the political 92–3 power-over 187 Powys, J. C. 249 praise of God 122–3, 135 and growth 132 mystagogical science of 121–6 and prayer 50 science of 133–4 speech-acts of 133 Praise of Folly 29 prayer and divine truth 53

282 and divine will 45 and forgiveness 50, 52 and love 45, 47 and praise and applause 50 and truth 53 value of 38–9, 46 prayerfulness, in the classroom 54 prayers, as divine truth 45, 53 pre-modern traditions 116, 134 Prelude, The 148, 154, 155, 158–60 presentism 22 pride and humility 38, 40, 42, 46–7 liberation from 262 and truth 39 privative infinity 129 Proclus 249, 250 profane, and sacred 61 Prospero’s Books 209 Protestant identity 18 Protestantism, and faith 26 Psalm 139 72 puer aeternus 223 Pullman, Philip 100–8, 112, 215, 220, 222, 223 Puritans, anti-theatricalism 30 ‘Purloined Letter, The’ 234, 236–7 rationality encyclopaedic 95 genealogical mode of 96, 97 Thomist mode of 98 readers positioned above text 16 receptive 134 reading charitably 22 as conditioned practice 81 detailed Cusan 128 novels 81 of Romantic writing 150–61 of Scripture 258–60 skilful, close literary 128 theology of 22 reality, performance competing with 31 reasoning 83, 84 rebirth, dying as means of 204 recognition and reversal 198–9, 213 recognition scenes 202, 203, 204, 213

Index ‘Redemption’ 75 redemption, mediated 8 reflection, on prayer and truth 53 Réflexions sur la violence 92 reflexive nihilism, of the sublime postmodern 197 reform, liturgical 62, 63–4, 65, 71, 74, 75–6 Reformation Church, and Anglican liturgy 62 Reformation era 20 rejecting aesthetic, dangers of 65 relationship creation and Creator 141–3 between human and God 59–60 religion literary phenomenology of 17 and literary study 16 and oppression 18 performing relation 24–33 role of in society 1–2 and sense of the self 186 studied through historicism 20–1 the turn to 19 and Twelfth Night 24–5 Religion and Literature 19, 23 religion and literature, disciplinary contexts 16–24, 96 Religion and the University 2, 3 religionless Christianity 96 religious belief, reduced to propositional statements 24 religious dimensions, literary texts 17 religious language 30, 63, 66 religious studies, and culture 57 renunciation, to death 209, 210–11 Republic, The 229 res God as 255, 256 life, death, resurrection of Jesus as 257 and signum 253, 254, 255, 258, 260, 264, 265 wisdom of God as 261 resurrection, as scriptural sign 266 reversal and recognition 198–9, 213 revision, and creation 72 Reynolds, J. H. 67 Ricks, Christopher 159 Ricœur, Paul 163, 164, 180–5, 187, 188, 189, 191, 193, 194

Index rituals, of play and dance 224–5 Roman Catholic Church Aeterni Patris 1879 98 Thomism 98, 99 romances Christian tradition of 247 fairy-tales evolving into 245, 246 and transition from paganism to Christianity 245 Romantic sublime 148 Romantic vision, misreadings of 146 Romantic writing, reading of 150–61 Romanticism criticism from within 150 English 19 and imagination 84 Rowling, J. K. 100, 107, 112, 216 ‘rumour’ 229 Ruskin, John 137, 139, 142, 143–50, 155, 157 Sachs, Nelly 120 sacred and profane 61 rehabilitation of 61 sacred text, difficulty of 260 salvation as deification 129 and faith in Christ/Christian belief 42 Sauf le nom 59 Saussure, Ferdinand de 118 scepticism, and faith 19 Scharlemann, Robert 171 Schoenfeldt, Michael 28 scholarship, Christian faith contributing to 22 science anticipated by magic 251 of praise 133–4 Scott, Nathan 17, 22 Screwtape Letters, The 97 scriptural symbolism 264, 266 Scripture interpretation of 263–4 learning from 259 pagan sources canonized into 168, 169 reading of 258–60 as self-conscious symbolic awareness 265 as signum 258

283

sea imagery of 66 and R. S. Thomas 72–3 Sea and the Mirror, The 210 Secret Commonwealth, The 252 secular pluralism, and doctrinal belief 59 secularity, and objectivity 17–18 secularization of American public sphere 18 of language of faith 25 seeing and believing 79 and knowledge 87 seeing-as 89 self configuration of 186 losing of 218 myth of 192 shadow of 70 self-activation, leading to hyper-activism 185 self-actualization 184 self-consciousness 223, 224, 265 self-esteem, and reciprocity 180–1 self-impersonation 234 self-questioning, and search for good 112 self-respect, and reciprocity 181 selfhood 164, 180 sense of the self, and community 186 sentence structure, and narrative structure 239 Serres, Michel 139 sexual field, re-envisaged in original innocence 220–1 sexual instinct, and creative instinct 90 sexual sphere, and non-human nature 247 shadow, of the self 70 Shadowmancer 216 shadowy objectivity, of myths 233 Shakespeare All’s Well that Ends Well 234 cultic leading to the liturgical 201–5 and Cusa 132–3 Cymbeline 195–6, 198 and faith 25 and forgiveness 48–52, 208 and the imagination 80 King Lear 205 late plays of 205

284 Macbeth 205, 208 Pericles 195–6, 198–9, 201–4 plays of 24, 25 recognition scenes 204, 213 romances 199, 211 sonnets 123, 124, 126–35 Tempest, The 48–52, 53, 55, 196, 198, 199, 208, 209–10 and time 126 tragedies 211 Twelfth Night 15–16, 24–5, 27–33 ultra-dramatic reality 199 Winter’s Tale, The 196, 198 and the World Stage 205–12 As You Like It 205, 208 ‘Shakespeare as Poet and Dramatist’ 196 shame, and His Dark Materials trilogy/ Harry Potter books 107 Shriver, Lionel 179 Shuger, Debora 19 sign-as-gift 236 sign-objects-gifts 237 sign-quality, of the world 264 sign-system, of fiction 237 signification, realm of 237 signifying 255 signs central metaphor for 267 and gifts 235–6 and language 255 learning through 253 and meaning 118, 127 and signum 254 skills to read 258 teaching caritas 264 world of 257 signum all but God as 256 life, death, resurrection of Jesus as 257 and res 253, 254, 255, 258, 260, 264, 265 Scripture as 258 wisdom of God as 261 Silmarillion, The 248 Simpson, James 21, 23 sinister magic 248, 251 skills-based learning 100 Slocombe, Will 196–7 ‘slumber did my spirit seal, A’ 103–4 Smith, Stevie 62–3

Index social sciences, and humanities 174 society, role of religion in 1–2 Socrates 112 solicitude 181 sonnets, Shakespeare’s 123, 124, 126–35 Sorel, Georges 90–1, 92 soul, and mind 85–6 space(s) the between 9–11, 133 to be human 9–11 contested 1–2 iconic 9 speaking and loss of true self 38 pre-modern way of 134 speech-acts of praise 133 spirit, of theological discourse 40 spiritual homelessness, Christian discipline of 259 spiritual journeying 68 spiritual practice 118, 119 spirituality of phenomenological tradition 120 of transgression 120 Welsh 68, 69 St. Augustine. See Augustine St. John, gospel of. See gospel of John St. Paul address to Athenians 168, 169 Corinthians 67 stage as dangerous 27 used to defend faith 27 and the world 51, 52 Stamboul Train 82, 89 state, and church 15 Steiner, George 82 Stiegler, Bernard 138 Stones of Venice, The 147, 148 story within a story 89 storytelling, tradition of 191 structural perspective, fairy-tales 242 ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’ 174 subjectification, technologies of 81 sublime, and grotesque 149n.43 sublime postmodern and cultic origin of tragedy 200 and negation of meaning 197 reflexive nihilism of the 197

Index submarine music 204 Subtle Knife, The 101, 106 suspension of disbelief 80, 82, 83, 90 suspension of judgement 117–18 suspicion, and faith 19 Symbol of Chalcedon 166 symbolic imagery of the deep 60–1, 64, 66 of depth 60–1, 62, 66, 67, 69, 71, 73, 74 of R. S. Thomas 65 ‘Symbolic Imagination: The Mirrors of Dante, The’ 64 symbolic practice, loss of innocence of 264 symbolic spirituality, and angelic spirituality 68 symbolic understanding 181 symbolic vision, and angelic vision 67 symbolism, scriptural 264, 266 symbols, and Christianity 217, 244 Symmons Roberts, Michael 57 Symposium 112 Tate, Allen 64–5, 67 Tate, Andrew 100 Taylor, Charles 9, 116–17 Taylor, D. P. 216 technologies cultural practices as 81 as sinister magic 248 of subjectification and governance 81 Tempest, The 48–52, 53, 55, 196, 198, 199, 208, 209–10 Templeton, Douglas 167 temporal, and eternal 131 temporality of physical existence, and the eternity of verse 128–9 texts, honest interpretation of 164 textual ‘crushing’ 16 theatre 32, 212, 213 Théâtre et son Double, Le 212 theatre of cruelty 212 Theodramatik 205 theological, and the literary 82 theological debate, and children’s literature 215 theological discourse 40 theological hermeneutics, new vision for 176–7

285

theological reading, of pathetic fallacy 156–7 theological reflection, and humility 54 theology defined by John Webster 169 discipline of 3, 36, 168–9 and literary theory 17 and literature 48, 54, 176 natural 141, 157, 265 negative 59, 119 as propositional content 23–4 of reading 22 in terms of fairy-tale 243 Theology in the Public Square 2 theophany, of Cusa 123 theopoiesis 86 things, learning through signs 253 thinking/thought and creative imagination 249 evolution of 160 and imagination 83 pre-modern way of 134 Third Man, The 88 Thomas Aquinas. See Aquinas Thomas, R.S. 60, 63–76, 99–100 Thomism 98, 99 Thomist mode, of rationality 98 thought Tillich, Paul 172, 194 time 125, 126 Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another 180 ‘To My Sister’ 153–4 tolerance, and hospitality 4 Tolkien, J. R. R. 96, 97, 109, 111, 112, 216, 232, 248 Tracy, David 172, 173 tragedy ancient Greek 200 Christian recapitulation of 199 cultic basis of 200–1 drama of 196–7 and human life 206 as mimesis of an action 199 newness beyond 196 Pagan 200 tragic motif, in Old Testament 206–7 tragicomedy, as folkloric 231 Trajan, salvation of 42–7

286 transcendental realism, pathetic fallacy 143–50 transgression 119–20 Trinitarian life 126 truth and accommodation 149 construals of 99–100 and distortion 155 divine 41, 45, 48, 53 eventful 147–8 and fiction 47–8, 53 as God/love/mercy 54 and literary fiction 53 of our dependence 54 poetic 67 and poetic fancy 155 and prayer 53 and pride 39 universal nonperspectival theory of 96 Twelfth Night 15–16, 24–5, 27–33 ‘two consciousnesses’ 153–4 ultra-dramatic 196, 197, 199, 202, 203 uncertainty and postmodernism 59 recognition of 58 understanding and perception 80 symbolic 181 unfettered, and privative infinity/negative infinity 129 United Kingdom, education system 96 United States, universities 96 universalism, politics of 116 universals, maximal/contracted 124 universities 96, 176 university education 100 University of Cambridge 96 University of Chicago’s Divinity School 17 University of Virginia’s Department of Religious Studies 17 US academy, language and literature departments 17 uti, language of 256 value, of prayer and of commentary 38–9, 46 Velman, Max 104 Vendler, Helen 127–9, 130 verbal gift-exchange, folkloric tales as 231

Index verse, eternity of 128–9 violence, and folk-tales 230 Virgil 230 virtue ethics 98 virtue, language of 100 visible, and invisible 79 vision as creative act 161 doxological mode of 135 Volsungssaga 233–4, 235, 236, 237–8 Vulgari Eloquentia, De 22 Waiting for Godot 96 Wales, and R. S. Thomas 60, 68, 69 Walton, Izaak 21 We Need to Talk About Kevin 179–80, 182–3, 184–94 Weber, Max 174 Webster, John 169 ‘Whiggish’ secularity 18 White, Paul Whitfield 27 will, divine 44–5, 46 will-to-power 99, 112 Williams, Charles 64, 65 Williams, Rowan 6, 142, 225 window, metaphor of 66 Winter’s Tale, The 196, 198 Winterson, Jeanette 57, 61–2 wisdom for Cusa 121 and mortality 267 pre-modern search for 116 pursuit of 122, 124 wisdom of God, as res and signum 261 Woodman, Ross 155–6 Wordsworth, William 103, 144, 148, 150–61, 157–60 world, and the stage 51, 52 world-making, and perceptions 84 World Stage Christian 208 cruelty of 213 idea of 205 and Shakespeare 205–12 written history 227 Xenophon 229 Yeats, William Butler 67