Centre for Public Christianity (March 2021)

The Centre for Public Christianity has posted two ‘Life and Faith’ podcasts, one (here) in which Francis Spufford ‘talks about heartbreak and loss, hope and eternity, in his latest novel, Light Perpetual’, and one (here) in which ‘best-selling children's author and publisher Susannah McFarlane tells… the story of her journey from atheism to Christian faith – which began in her 50s when she met her birth mother for the first time.’

Tony Watkins on Philip Pullman

The latest Cambridge Paper from the Jubilee Centre is available online here (from where a pdf can be downloaded here), this one by Tony Watkins:

Tony Watkins, ‘The Art of Darkness: Philip Pullman’s Christian Atheism’, Cambridge Papers 29, 3 (September 2020).

Here is the summary:

‘Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, is well known for his antipathy towards religion. Yet although he insists that this world is all there is, he seems constantly drawn towards ideas of transcendence. He advocates many Christian values, though he refuses to accept their Judeo-Christian origins, and assumes them in his attack on the church. He sees himself as an enemy of religion, but his atheism has a distinctively Christian flavour.’

Credo 10, 1 (2020) on Theology through Fiction

The current issue of Credo is available, this one devoted to the topic of ‘The Truth Inside the Lie: Theology through Fiction’.

Here’s the blurb:

‘The world of fiction and the world of theology might as well be worlds apart. Rarely, if ever, do theologians write fiction, or even pay attention to the insights they might imbibe from a world make believe. That must change. For not only does fiction communicate truth, but truth becomes incarnate through characters with flesh and blood, people not all that different from us. Through the art of the story, beauty itself is embodied. In this issue of Credo Magazine, we move past the artificial divide to explore the innumerable ways fiction infuses our minds and hearts with stories of rebellion and redemption, stories that in some substantial way bring us closer to the master storyteller himself.’

Individual articles, along with interviews and book reviews, are available to read from here.

Universally Acknowledged Truths?

I contributed this week’s ‘Connecting with Culture’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

This Sunday sees the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Besides selling over 20 million copies worldwide, it has been brought to life in many adaptations, including a Bollywood cinema version, an Israeli TV series, and a zombie mash-up which follows Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters as they battle the undead in a quiet English village.

From its oft-cited opening sentence to its (spoiler alert) cheery outcome, something about the tale has an enduring and wide-ranging appeal. Indeed, in the just-published Happily Ever After: Celebrating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Susannah Fullerton explores why Elizabeth Bennet is ‘the most charming heroine in literature’, why Mr Darcy has been voted ‘the most romantic hero of all time’, and why the book is regularly found in polls on favourite novels.

Those still tempted to suppose all this is a sentimental relic of a bygone age may pause to reflect on shadow health minister Diane Abbott’s warnings earlier this week about the damage caused by the hypersexualisation of society, where we’re seeing ‘an alien, warped view of sex normalised into our culture, engrained by the invisible hand of the market’. By contrast, while it is always possible to make an idol out of romantic love, we’re able to recognise something good and true and beautiful in the story Austen weaves – the flourishing that results from relationships based on genuine intimacy rather than social transactions or financial gain. For Christians, of course, the yearning for relationship points to our being made in the image of the triune God, and speaks of a higher need met fully in Christ.

But Pride and Prejudice does more than celebrate love. The two main characters undergo a transformation in which they see that their failures – the faults referred to in the title – must be overcome. The story is not just about the triumph of true love but the formation of good character.

Austen doesn’t deny the importance of passion, but believes, as Alasdair MacIntyre explains in After Virtue, that ‘morality is... meant to educate the passions’. Some currents in contemporary culture assume that virtue stifles passion, that nothing should stop us from ‘following our heart’. Austen paints a different picture – in line with Scripture – where humility, self-knowledge, and a willingness to act for the good of others deepens the emotional strength of relationships, where virtuous lovers are also the most passionate ones.

Links

BBC, Diane Abbott: ‘British culture “increasingly pornified”’ (22 January 2013).

Patrick Wintour, ‘Diane Abbott to launch attack on hypersexualised culture’, The Guardian (22 January 2013).

Susannah Fullerton, Happily Ever After: Celebrating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (Frances Lincoln, 2013).

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

Anvil 28, 3 (2012) on Theology and Literature

The November 2012 issue of Anvil is available online, with essays on ‘Theology and Literature’, prompted by the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens earlier in the year.

Paul Edmondson

Spiritual Reflections on the Work of Shakespeare and Dickens

A text’s theological or spiritual significance is not limited to the intent of its author. Here Paul Edmondson argues that a doctrine of incarnation enables the works of great authors, like Shakespeare and Dickens, to become useful as contemporary sources for spiritual direction. This paper has in view, not only the spirituality of the authors themselves, but also the way in which the creative act of writing connects the written word to the divine. Imaginative engagement with literature, therefore, can become a resource for spiritual growth and communion with God.

Julia Golding

What did Dickens ever do for you?

A personal journey through the works of Charles Dickens. Novelist, Julia Golding, finds what he has to teach lies in the dust heaps.

Jane Gledhill

Dickens: The Law and Love

It is not clear the extent to which Charles Dickens deliberately used Christian themes and motifs within his writing, although that many are present is certain. Yet, as this overview of some of his key works and the themes they contain shows, Dickens’ fiction was not only influenced by real events in his world but through it he consistently displayed genuine compassion for those downtrodden by the society in which he lived. As such, the extent to which Dickens believed in the power of literature to challenge and to change can be seen.

Sarah Rowland Jones

Poems

Stephen R. Lawhead

Interview with author Stephen R. Lawhead

Adrian Chatfield

Conversations with Wilfred Owen: The Pity is in the Poetry

Owen’s powerful verse, describing the horrors of the First World War and its effects on those who experienced it, continues to move readers nearly 100 years after it was written. Here it is demonstrated, however, how Owen’s poetry can also have a theological significance when placed within a broad hermeneutical framework which allows the bringing into conversation of theology and secular literature. In so doing, Owen’s works continue to provide a prophetic voice to the evangelical church, despite him eventually rejecting the faith it professes.

Tony Watkins

Art’s Desire: Responding to Film and Literature

The media (including the arts) play a dominant role in western society. This article argues that Christians should engage with them positively, since they are the product of God’s image-bearers, yet critically, since they are also the expression of human fallenness. Focusing particularly on film and literature, this article briefly considers media and the arts in relation to the transcendental values of beauty, truth, and goodness. It sets out five aspects of a holistic response, taking account of the aesthetic, emotional, worldview, moral and spiritual aspects.

Cherie Harder on Stories

Cherie Harder has a nice, short piece on The Trinity Forum offering three reasons in response to the question, ‘Why Read Stories?’

• Stories engage our imagination in a way that non-fiction cannot.

• Stories require, develop, and enhance the reader’s empathy.

• Stories develop our moral reasoning in unique ways.

Rachel Thorpe on Life Without Certainty

Rachel Thorpe, ‘Life Without Certainty: Margaret Atwood’s Ambiguous Worlds’, Cambridge Papers 21, 1 (March 2012).

The latest Cambridge Paper from the Jubilee Centre is available online, this one looking at the dystopian worlds created in Margaret Atwood’s novels.

Here is the summary:

‘Margaret Atwood is one of the most important and influential writers alive today. Her fiction explores and reflects the current cultural move away from metanarrative and towards fragmented notions of truth. She celebrates this new intellectual trend, whilst also revealing the damage done by its more confused, frustrated and narcissistic elements. This paper will argue that Atwood’s “speculative fiction” in particular uncovers our deep human need for stable knowledge, language and sense of self. Furthermore, her novels point to society’s insatiable longing for the God that it has turned away from, showing all substitutes to be inadequate and dangerous.’

Marilynne Robinson on What Literature Owes the Bible

Marilynne Robinson, ‘The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible’, The New York Times (22 December 2011).

I read Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson’s first novel (published in 1981), during the summer this year and was utterly beguiled.

This is a short piece by her on the influence of the Bible on literature in English, from which the following is excerpted:

‘The Bible is the model for and subject of more art and thought than those of us who live within its influence, consciously or unconsciously, will ever know.’

‘Biblical allusions can suggest a degree of seriousness or significance their context in a modern fiction does not always support. This is no cause for alarm. Every fiction is a leap in the dark, and a failed grasp at seriousness is to be respected for what it attempts. In any case, these references demonstrate that in the culture there is a well of special meaning to be drawn upon that can make an obscure death a martyrdom and a gesture of forgiveness an act of grace. Whatever the state of belief of a writer or reader, such resonances have meaning that is more than ornamental, since they acknowledge complexity of experience of a kind that is the substance of fiction.’

I see she has a collection of essays due out in March 2012, which will be worth looking out for. The blurb tells us: ‘In this new collection she returns to the themes which have preoccupied her work: the role of faith in modern life, the inadequacy of fact, the contradictions inherent in human nature. Clear-eyed and forceful as ever, Robinson demonstrates once again why she is regarded as a modern rhetorical master.’

The Spectator on Harold Bloom on the King James Bible

The Spectator carries a brief review by Matthew Richardson of Harold Bloom’s The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

Under the title ‘A quirky dish’, Richardson notes that Bloom’s book ‘excels in showing the ways the Bible has influenced later literature’, but ‘is too often marred by the author’s idiosyncrasies’.

Paul S. Fiddes on Literature, Imagination, and Christian Doctrine

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).

Tony W. Cartledge on 1 and 2 Samuel in Literature

Tony W. Cartledge, 1 and 2 Samuel, Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary 7 (Macon: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 2001).

The publishers make available online the Introduction to this volume as well as the comments on 1 Samuel 1.

In addition to covering the expected ground (the place of the book in the canon, its authorship and date of composition, its historical setting, interpretation and theological significance), Cartledge also devotes a section to ‘the Samuel Narratives in literature’ (19-21), noting that retellings are also remakings of the story as readers filter the biblical material through their own presuppositions and concerns.

David has appeared in literature as a ‘type’ – of Christ (e.g., in the early church fathers), of a penitent sinner (common in the Middle Ages), and of a model king (again, a feature of interpretation in the Middle Ages).

In 17th-century England, David was appealed to as the archetypal king by both sides in the Puritan-Royalist conflict.

The Renaissance and post-Renaissance periods saw an explosion of literature based on the books of Samuel, along with the sculptures of David by Donatello, Verocchio, and Michaelangelo, which celebrated his beauty and physical prowess.

The twentieth century saw a number of significant ‘rewritings’ of the Samuel narratives, including D.H. Lawrence’s play David (1926), William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), and Stefan Heym’s The King David Report (1973).

Cartledge notes that the materials are ‘uncommonly rich in suggestive themes, and readers continually “remake” the biblical stories to address modern-day concerns’ (21).

On Erich Auerbach

In the preface to The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), Hans W. Frei notes that the impact of Auerbach’s Mimesis is ‘evident through this essay’ (vii, and see esp. 1-16, 28-37). (Note also that Frei has the audacity to call his 350 pages of dense prose an ‘essay’…)

As we might explore in subsequent posts, Frei saw the identification of parts of the Bible as ‘realistic narrative’ (as described by Auerbach) as significant for understanding the history of biblical interpretation, the nature of biblical narrative, and the theological relationship between the two testaments.

In fact, however, Auerbach’s importance extends beyond his influence on Frei.

Like his peers, Leo Spitzer, Ernst Robert Curtius, Karl Vossler, and Helmut Hatzfield, Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) was grounded in the tradition of Romance philology and literary history.

[Jan N. Bremmer, ‘Erich Auerbach and His Mimesis’, Poetics Today 20:1 (1999), 3-10, provides biographical background.]

He gained recognition with his 1929 work on Dante and an essay published in 1938 on figural interpretation, but especially for his subsequent volume, Mimesis, first published in German in 1946 and translated into English seven years later.

[Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11-79; Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), reissued in 2003 with a significant introductory essay by Edward W. Said (‘Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition’, ix-xxxiii).]

Auerbach moved to Yale in 1950, and was Sterling Professor of French when he died in 1957, the year after Frei completed his doctoral thesis. Recent appraisals have explored the implications of his work for the place of philology in the curriculum, the institutional history of university departments of literature, the nature of realism, the status of the western canon, the relation between exile and reading, and the concept of periodisation in literary history.

[E.g., Seth Lerer (ed.), Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, Figurae: Reading Mediaeval Culture Series (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), and the essays in Poetics Today 20:1 (1999).]

Mimesis remains the most well-known of his works, and the one which to date has received the most critical attention.

[See William Calin, ‘Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis – ’Tis Fifty Years Since: A Reassessment’, Style 33, 3 (1999), 463-74, and A.D. Nuttall, ‘Auerbach’s Mimesis’, Essays in Criticism 54, 1 (2004), 60-74.]

As the subtitle suggests, ‘mimesis’, for Auerbach, has to do with the ‘representation of reality’, the changing conceptions of which he examines in western literature from Homer to Woolf (making his work even more a tour de force of intellectual history than Frei’s Eclipse). His method was to take a brief excerpt from a representative text and submit it to close reading, before discussing broader matters related to culture and society. As such the work has appealed to philologists, literary historians, formalists, and Marxists, and has even been studied as an historical phenomenon in its own right.

Michael Holquist (‘The Last European: Erich Auerbach as Precursor in the History of Cultural Criticism’, Modern Language Quarterly 54:3 [1993], 371-91) sees it as a foundational document of cultural criticism. Earl Jeffrey Richards (‘Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis as a Meditation on the Shoah’, German Politics and Society 19, 2 [2001], 62-91) contends that Auerbach uses examples from western literature figurally to address contemporary issues of Jewish history.

[More generally, see further Herbert Lindenberger, ‘On the Reception of Mimesis’, in Lerer (ed.), Literary History, 195-213.]

As might be expected, reservations have been expressed about Auerbach’s reading of select texts as well as his use of the concept of mimesis which has been accused of suffering from lack of clear definition. Frank R. Ankersmit, ‘Why Realism? Auerbach on the Representation of Reality’, Poetics Today 20:1 (1999), 53-75, detects at least five conceptions of realism in Mimesis.

In all this, however, he remains important, and his readings of Dante (and the Bible) are regularly cited. Even those who demur from him begin with deep admiration for his work. As A.D. Nutall notes:

‘Auerbach’s book survives… Again and again he emerges from the dust and confusion in somewhat better shape than his attackers… I have suggested that Auerbach on occasion flattens, overstates, simplifies, and I hold to the charge; but if he overstates he is usually overstating an important truth’ (Nuttall, ‘Auerbach’s Mimesis’, 72). Said also comments on the book’s ‘amazing staying power’ (‘Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition’, ix).