Paul S. Fiddes, Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue Between Literature and Christian Doctrine, Studies in Literature and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1991).
Paul Fiddes sets out to show how the images and stories of literature can help make meaningful doctrinal statements, and how theology can aid in the reading of literary texts. He does this in dialogue with William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, and William Golding.
According to Fiddes, stories and poems ‘offer a new world to our imagination in two ways – consoling us with the assurance of order in an everyday world that appears random and chaotic, and promising something new in a world that appears dulled by routine’ (5).
‘The story with its “once upon a time” offers us the hope of ever-open beginnings in a world where nothing seems new under the sun. It invites us to immerse ourselves into lives other than our own, to extend our range of consciousness’ (5-6).
Poetic images and metaphors have can have a similar effect on us. Unexpected imagery, especially, ‘seems to dissolve the world as we know it, to disintegrate the familiar in preparation for a new order’ (7).
However...
‘The quest for a new world in literature would be mere escapism if we did not feel that the text was reaching beyond itself to something of “ultimate concern” to us’ (8).
‘In poetry, drama and novel, the imagination thus reaches out towards mystery, towards a reality that is our final concern but which eludes empirical investigation and bursts rational concepts. The power of making pictures in the human mind (“imagination”), transcends itself towards something Other than the world which lies open to scientific discovery’ (11).
If novels, poetry and drama contain a movement towards mystery, is the same true of Christian belief? In one sense, says Fiddes, yes:
‘Holy scripture... is itself a piece of literature containing narrative, poetry and drama with all the openness to multiple meaning that these have. The character of scripture should, indeed, lead us to realise that the primary forms of talk about God are metaphor and story, and that they invite an assent of faith which is like the imaginative assent we give to these forms in literature’ (12).
Fiddes briefly discusses four types of movement towards mystery: correspondence, personal insight, symbolic vision, and negative catalyst (15-22). Such a movement, he says, appears to stand in contrast to Christian doctrine:
‘The movement towards mystery is playful and questing, and lays a stress upon the autonomy of the imagination to create something new... Conversely, the theologian is always bound to be responsible to what he believes has been revealed in a movement from Mystery Itself’ (22).
However, when we consider revelation, the gap is narrowed. First, if revelation is not first and foremost the disclosure of propositions, but the very being of God himself, then ‘revelation can be nothing less than an encounter with the speaking God, where “speech” is understood as self-expression, an opening and an offer of the divine Self’ (22). Thus, the concepts of Christian doctrine are a ‘response and witness to revelation, not revelation in the immediate sense’, and the Bible can become ‘a place of encounter with the same God who unveiled himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and who finally disclosed himself in Christ’ (23).
Fiddes goes on to say that such a view of revelation has affinities with a view that literary texts ‘open up a new world to the reader through encounter and living interaction with the text rather than directly through any concepts it contains’ (23-24).
Thus, when it comes to revelation, ‘we may find the abiding substance of Christian doctrine neither in religious experience nor in a “deposit” of truth, but in a story – the story of Jesus in the context of the biblical narrative of God’s dealings with his people Israel’ (25).
‘We can see a parallel between the theological appeal to revelation and the use of imagination in literature; in both cases there is a story which calls for attention in its own right, which demands that we notice it, and take account of it as it is. We are not to treat the story as a storehouse for our own preconceptions’ (25-26).
He cautions:
‘However, if the story with which Christian doctrine is concerned, and which it affirms as the story which makes sense of all others, is to be the same story through every age, there have to be some agreed concepts connected with it. In the first place, the achievement of Jesus is to be understood in the context of God and his relationship to the world’ (26).
‘Thus, there is an indissoluble difference between the place of story in doctrine on the one hand and in literary imagination on the other; Christian theologians, working from belief in revelation, are moving within restraints that are not laid upon the novelist. Imaginative writers may, nevertheless, recognise their own kind of limits and tensions... It also remains to be shown that there is not only a parallel, but actually a union between revelation and imagination’ (26).
Fiddes takes the literary imagination to be ‘one type of response to “general” revelation (31). Even though creative writers might not understand themselves to be responding to divine revelation, it is ‘consistent with experience for a Christian theologian to interpret their work (even if they do not) as one kind of response to God’s offer of himself, in encounter between divine and human personality’ (32).
