Theology and Literature After Postmodernity-Bloomsbury Academic

Theology and Literature after
Postmodernity
T & T Clark
Religion and the University Series
Series editors
William J. Abraham
Gavin DCosta
Peter Hampson
Zo 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 Duy
Jerey 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.
ii
Theology and Literature after

Postmodernity
Edited by
Zo Lehmann Imfeld
Peter Hampson
and
Alison Milbank
Foreword by
Stanley Hauerwas
Bloomsbury T&T Clark

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
iii
Bloomsbury T&T Clark

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First published 2015
Zo Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson and Alison Milbank, 2015
Zo Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson and Alison Milbank have asserted their right under
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-0-567-25114-5
ePDF: 978-0-567-30414-8
ePub: 978-0-567-65495-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Theology and literature after postmodernity / edited by Zo 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, Zo Lehmann, editor. II. Hampson, Peter J., 1954- editor,
author. III. Milbank,Alison, 1954- editor, author.
PN49.T44455 2015
261.5'8dc23
2014033353
Series: Religion and the University, volume 3
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
iv
Contents
Foreword Stanley Hauerwas
Notes on Contributors
vii
ix
Introduction
Hospitable Conversations in Theology and Literature: Re-opening a
Space to Be Human Zo Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson, and
Alison Milbank
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
57
Part 2 Theological and Literary Reconstructions

4 Belief and Imagination Graham Ward
79
5 Literary Apologetics beyond Postmodernism: Duality and

Death in Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling Alison Milbank
95
6 Cusa: A Pre-modern Postmodern Reader of Shakespeare

Johannes Ho and Peter Hampson
115
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 Jerey Keuss
163
vi
Contents
9 Thrashing between Exoneration and Excoriation: Creating

Narratives in We Need to Talk About Kevin Zo Lehmann Imfeld
179
10 The Shakespeare Music: Eliot and von Balthasar on Shakespeares

Romances and the Ultra-dramatic Aaron Riches
195
11 Fictioning Things: Gift and Narrative
215
John Milbank
12 Language, Reality and Desire in Augustines De Doctrina

Rowan Williams
253
Index
269
Foreword
Stanley Hauerwas
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
I am a theologian. That means Im 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 eorts
that aim to help us better say what is true.
Finally, this is a book of immense signicance for current discussions about
the character of the university. Just as it is not at all clear what Christianity
vii
viii
Foreword
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 dees 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.
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 DCosta): 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 Ho is Professor of Systematic Theology at Heythrop College,
London, and previously taught at the Universities of Wales and Tbingen.
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 (fteenth 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 Postmodernity 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 Byrons 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 Byrons 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 Aect.
ix
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.
Jerey Keuss is Professor of Ministry, Theology and Culture and Director of
the University Scholars Program at Seattle Pacic 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 Neighbors 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 Ricur Section of the American Academy of Religion.
Zo 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-Vgtlin 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 ction.
John Milbank is Research Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at the
University of Nottingham, and Director of the Centre of Theology and
xi
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 iek, 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 Copleys A Fig for Fortune (1596), the rst
published response to Spensers 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 Dantes 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 Schmitts works: Political Theology II
(Polity, 2008) and Dictatorship (Polity, 2013). His latest book is entitled
xii
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: Reections 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
Zo 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 Religions 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 ourish;
without these prerequisites they may be compromised or rendered dicult.
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
1
See, for example, Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). For an
early debate see Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstor, Religion in the Public Square: The Place of
Religious Convictions in Political Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleeld, 1997).
Zo Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson, and Alison Milbank
and aggressive confrontation, serious questions of value, meaning, purpose,

and the common good, issues vital for a ourishing 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 DCostas Theology in the
Public Square,3 a book that specically explores what he calls the Babylonian
captivity of theology in the modern university, and the possible need for faithbased institutions in which theology and other subjects can be studied in their
full connectivity. It was this book that rst 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 inuenced 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 oer
each other, and sought to engage with the others world view, without belittling it or watering down
their own. Conducted sensibly, an agonistic, but still hospitable debate on these issues is clearly
possible.
Gavin DCosta, 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
Littleeld, 2009).
Introduction
desire to deepen and broaden the scope of the series, eectively 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 Zo 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-upmanship 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 insucient 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 dierent 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
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 strangers 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.
Bretherton, Hospitality as Holiness, p.148.
Introduction
theological stance either, though common and converging theological themes

do at times emerge across quite dierent genres as we shall see. Moreover, there
are situations in which literature clearly aords a common conversational
space for the search for (potentially shared) religious meaning, starting from
quite dierent theological suppositions, as the contributions by Graham Ward
and Jerey Keuss demonstrate for instance. Additionally, the volume oers
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 rst 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 congure literary study in
relation to, not in competition with, theology, in such a way that religion is not
treated merely in a deistic way; she oers 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 eld. We wanted our book to be dual facing, and to be of use to sta 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 oer 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 inuence on the eld. One
is Fictioning Things by John Milbank (Religion and Literature, 2005), which
oers a rich account of a theophanic, enchanted world; the other is Language,

Reality and Desire in Augustines De Doctrina by Rowan Williams (Journal of
Literature and Theology, 1989) on word, sign, and signication in Augustine, an
essay that Jeery McCurry recently described as being After Derrida: An
inected interpreted performance.6 Both already t the aims of our volume
and we are delighted to rehouse them. Milbanks 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 Derridas theory of dirance into Augustines theology of
reading scripture and contemplating creation in order to make it new for
todayand not new for the sake of novelty, but new for the sake of letting
Augustines texts teach, interrogate, and console us in a time very dierent
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 cocreative power of literature, and the potentially participatory act of reading.
We feel that the ten chapters written specically 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,
6
7
8
Jerey McCurry, Towards a Poetics of Theological Creativity: Rowan Williams Reads Augustines
de Doctrina after Derrida, Modern Theology, 23.3 (2007), 415433, p.421.
McCurry, Towards a Poetics, pp.418419.
McCurry, Towards a Poetics, p.418.
Introduction
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 reection on death in
contemporary fantastic literature; and Johannes Ho and Peter Hampson
reect in a co-authored piece on pre-reexive 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 Zo Lehmann Imfelds chapter.
The hermeneutics used for this reconstructive reading are further unpacked
by Je Keuss, and, through readings of Shakespeares 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 nite, created, but also teleological,
grace-dependent creatures in a awed 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 oer the possibility of becoming
more fully human through a (frequently) pre-reexive doxological engagement
with and relational participation in a theophanic world (see for example
Montemaggi; Ho 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
(John Milbank; Ho and Hampson; Lehmann Imfeld; Montemaggi; Ward).

Imaginative belief then becomes possible again in human transcendence in
immanence, paradoxically uniting nitude and surplus, word and sign, and
obviating the oscillation across the cultural aporia (Ho 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 nitude and
vulnerability, and potential for transcendence together. This idea, and its
associated themes of being and becoming, emerges in various places,
quintessentially in John Milbanks work of course, but also in Johannes Ho
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 gure 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 gure in Zo Lehmann Imfelds examination
of the reconstruction of self and other through meaningful narrative, capably
elaborated by Je 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, nitude and innity converge and are
exceeded. Indeed two of the chapters are explicitly post-Derridean in this
fashion, Ho and Hampsons on critical theory and Nicholas of Cusa, but most
Introduction
notably the seminal chapter by Rowan Williams on word and sign in Augustines
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 innite (Ho and Hampson), and so on. Paradox
and apophatic penultimacy taken together signal a hospitable space in the
between where people can ourish.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 dierent 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 clichd 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, Zo Lehmann Imfeld has already creatively elaborated
William Desmonds metaxological description of the in between has signicantly informed our
understanding of this hospitable space. See God and the Between (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2008).
10
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 (Ho and Hampson; Ward; Williams).
Which brings us to a hidden benet we had not fully anticipated when we
rst 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 ourish.
Why? Simply because each turn of the cultural wheel has typically spun o its
distinctive literatures, indeed has been partly dened 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
10
Zo 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).
Introduction
11
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
rst 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.
12
Part One
Pedagogy
13
14
Religion, History, and Faithful Reading

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 Quran in a medieval literature course, one of my
students a practising Muslim tiptoed carefully: some would say, he would
oer, or usually it is taught that. Never I think or I believe: such statements
violate the public classrooms decorum. When I moved to the University of
Notre Dame, a private, religiously aliated institution, the separation of church
and state no longer applied. In the rst course I taught there, an honours
humanities survey, I assigned books 10 and 11 of Augustines Confessions, in
which Augustine reects on time, memory, and eternity, and oers a dazzling
phenomenology of mind. One student, a member of the universitys 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 hed
worked hard to understand the text because it answers a question Ive 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 students position vis--vis the text
was not studied neutrality but thoughtful receptivity.
Contrast this students reading with a scene from Shakespeares 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 Olivias serving
woman Maria to gull Malvolio into performing impossible passages of
15
16
grossness (III.ii.64). Before nding the letter, Malvolio indulges in grandiose

daydreams of the power that a marriage to Olivia would bring. The letter
seemingly conrms his fantasies: M.O.A.I. doth sway my life (II.5.106).
Malvolio sees himself in these letters, but the reection 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.5.1323). Malvolios
self-absorption rides roughshod over the texts 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 literatures
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 aected 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 rst oer a brief account of ways in
which religion has been congured 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
1
Much scholarly eort 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. 11991244. Citations of Twelfth
Night are to The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller (New
York: Penguin, 2002).
17
the University of Chicagos Divinity School and a similar program within the
University of Virginias Department of Religious Studies. Larry Bouchard
explains the two very dierent rationales behind these programmes. The rst
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
o 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 gures, prodigal son narratives in order
to elaborate Christian ideas. This scholarships 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 countercurrent. 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 reied dogma, opening
theology to lively, speculative forms of writing. The sense of the literary
became either broadened or diuse, depending upon ones 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; Kierkegaards excursus on the near-sacrice of Isaac in Fear
and Trembling is but one prominent example.
Neither approach made many inroads into the US academys 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 Gra argues that American literary
studies valued secularity and objectivity from the start of its institutional
2
Larry Bouchard, Religion and Literature: Four Theses, Religion and Literature 41.2 (2009),
pp.1220.
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.
18
life.4 In 1883, at the rst meeting of the Modern Language Association, the
dominant American association for literary study, H.C.G. Brandt claimed that
a scientic basis dignies our profession.5 At Harvard in 1876, the philologist
Francis James Child introduced a course on Shakespeares plays and another
on four major British writers: Chaucer, Milton, Dryden and Francis Bacon.6
Bacon presumably lent the prestige of scientic empiricism to literary study.
The preference for objectivity and secularity has ideological, even religious,
roots. As Tracy Fessenden has argued, eorts 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 paradigms dominance exacts a price:
Lori Branch maintains that the privileging of objectivity and secularisms
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 Donnes
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
5
6
7
8
9
Gerald Gra, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989).
Quoted in Gra, Professing Literature, p.68.
McMurtry, quoted in Gra, Professing Literature, p.66.
Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Jackson, Transcendence Hunting, Religion and Literature 41.2 (2009), pp.169177.
Branch, The Rituals of Our Re-Secularization: Literature between Faith and Knowledge, essay
forthcoming in Religion and Literature.
19
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 elds 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 specic manifestations and the more speculative mode of reading
literature for the ways it helps us think theology and reect 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
10
11
12
13
14
See for instance Jonathan Dollimores Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama
of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 3rd edn. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), inuential
on both sides of the Atlantic.
Cox, Introduction, Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith (Waco, TX: Baylor
University Press, 2007).
Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Oakland, CA: University of California
Press, 1991).
See for instance Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History,
and National Identity, 17781829 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), and Lori Branchs chapter
on Wordsworths Ecclesiastical Sonnets in Rituals of Spontaneity (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press,
2006).
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.6978.
20
homework need not be anti- or a-theological. The Gospel of Johns 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 Bibles revelations are mediated by the genres, grammars,
and vocabularies of specic cultures. Thus in Genesis 3, famously, two Hebrew
words oer 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 Christianitys 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 anothers world as fully as
possible.
Yet there is potential danger in separating too rmly 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 religions 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 terms Nietzschean legacy,
Pelikans work highlights the historicizing at work in the Reformation era, as
15
16
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 42.12 (2010),
p.282.
21
Christian groups fought to relativize and discredit those parts of inherited

tradition they found erroneous. On Pelikans 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 conne 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 historicisms 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 pasts 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 o 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
17
18
19
20
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jeerson Lecture in the Humanities (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); discussed also in Newman, Coming Out of the (Sacristy)
Closet.
See as one example Eamon Duys The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1994); for a
gentle criticism of Duy, see Kieckhefer, Todays Shocks, Yesterdays Conventions, Religion and
Literature 42.12 (2010), pp.259262.
Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert . . .
(London, 1670), p. 81.
James Simpson, Not Just a Museum? Not so Fast, Religion and Literature 42.12 (2010),
pp.141162.
22
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
studys 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
readers 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 Dantes 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 Malvolios crushing).22 Few
scholars have any desire to reanimate C. S. Lewiss 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 condent 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
21
22
23
24
25
Kirkpatrick, The I in Question, Religion and Literature 44.2 (2012), pp.116125.

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.
23
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 eld 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 eorts to complicate the opposition
between historically contextualized and faith-based readings, pointing out
that for the Su mystics she studies, such an opposition would have been
nonsensical.28 In my eld, there are parallels. When early modern people read
devotional lyric, they did so not only to appreciate verbal wit, or to wrestle
intellectually with dicult 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
26
27
28
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, introduction to Something Fearful: Medievalist Scholars on the Religious

Turn, Religion and Literature 42.12 (2010), p.6.
Daniel Boyarin, Nostalgia for Christianity: Getting Medieval Again, Religion and Literature 42.12
(2010), pp.4976.
Fatemeh Keshavarz, Faith in the Academy: A Visit to Where Fearful Things Are , Religion and
Literature 44.3 (2012), pp.153163.
24
propositional content as in the many studies attempting to link Donnes Holy

Sonnets or Shakespeares 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 Malvolios
crushing nor to give over all judgement; neither to appropriate the text for
modern agendas nor seal it o 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
Its 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 Nights 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
Hamiltons detailed reconstruction of the religious politics of Englands court
25
at the time of the plays rst recorded performance (early 1602); she nds in
the dramas religious language intricate allusions to contemporary aairs.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 plays characters use the word faith some twenty-one
times.30 Their invocations of faith invoke questions of ones relation to others
and their lived realities, as well as to theatrical ctions. The plays 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 reections
on relation.
Recently Richard McCoy argued that Shakespeares plays secularize the
language of faith so as to emphasize both the theatres 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 conict with change and, I would add, with
doubt.32 The academic fear of faith presumes faiths 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. Shakespeares 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.
29
30
31
32
Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (Lexington, KY: University Press of
Kentucky, 1992).
Roughly half of those usages are oaths: i faith is one of Aguecheeks favourite expressions. But the
recurrence of the oath may be signicant, sensitizing the audiences ears to the word.
Richard McCoy, Introduction, Faith in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Keshavarz, Faith in the Academy, pp.154155; Susm would lose half of its major gures if we
were to take out those who questioned every principle of their faith and practice . . . to many Sus,
faith was alive only if it remained vulnerable to death like all organic life forms.
26
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 oers 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 Englands dominant Protestant soteriology, faith is a gift from
God; saving faith does not waver, it does not doubt. Yet pastoral theology,
written for a ministers 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 denes unbelief as the feblenes, and imperfection
of my faith. Such imperfection may imply intellectual doubt or simply a lack
of condence that the Bibles 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 awed: 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
conict 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 reect upon the verse to oer the standard
Reformation assurance that, in Perkinss 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
33
34
35
I discuss this model of faith at greater length in It is requird you do awake your faith: Belief in
Shakespeares Theatre, in eds. Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson Religion and
Drama in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), pp.115138.
Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1960), p. 561.
William Perkins, A Treatise Tending unto a Declaration Whether a Man be in the Estate of Damnation
(1590), pp. 266267; 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. 127128. See also Shugers discussion of Hookers sermon in Faith and
Assurance, A Companion to Richard Hooker (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2008), pp.221250.
27
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 sured 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 ctions. Gosson writes that theatres dazzling of
eye and ear carries us beyond our selves.39 Shakespeares metadramatic habit
of puncturing his own illusions may oer a dierent 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 Jerey Knapp, Paul Whiteld 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 reect 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
36
37
38
39
40
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.
Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), B8r.
Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions, F3v.
Jerey Knapp, Shakespeares 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).
28
potential for abuse (as in Malvolios imprisonment) as well as growth (as in

Orsinos development). The faith the play asks us to have in theatre is, to use
Jacobss 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 theatres illusions, but the play
never demands the total absorption Gosson attributes to the stage. The plays
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 oers many forms of false faith. In Orsinos rst 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 Orsinos repeated references to digestive processes suggest
a form of neurotic self-obsession. Thus Orsino takes his companions 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 sisters passionate love for
a man, the Duke responds to the moving ction. The Dukes question But died
thy sister of her love, my boy? (II.4.119) represents his rst interest in anothers
story, in the suerings of someone other than himself.
41
42
Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in
Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Paul Dean notes that Violas 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. 500515; I characterize reality as relation, something Dean addresses through
Trinitarian theology.
29
If the Duke suers 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 Dukes 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 performers most important
qualities. By the plays end, the Duke arguably becomes a little like her. In
the nal scene, she and Sebastian piece together their family history: they
are fraternal twins, their identities crystallized for other characters only in
each others presence. And the Duke begins to improvise: I shall have share
in this most happy wrack (V.1.261). He imitates Violas plucky response to
the wrack or shipwreck she suered just before the play opens: he reacts to
the scene before him and seizes the opportunity for reciprocal love. At the
plays beginning, his self-absorption prompts his tautological characterization
of imagination: So full of shapes is fancy/That it alone is high fantastical
(I.1.1415). By his last line, he admits someone else into his fancy: Viola will
be his fancys queen (V.1.381). His insistence that he must see Cesario as
Viola, in her womans 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). Festes 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 Erasmuss
Praise of Folly and in line with moralists of the day. Like Erasmuss 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). Olivias anger at his absence quickly cools after his
catechizing begins to mend her (I.5.70), bringing her out of mourning and
into the plays festive world.
For most of my students, Olivia is more appealing than Orsino, at least in
the plays rst half; she quickly develops into an improvisatory, reactive
30
character who takes advantage of situations before her, self-aware enough to

realize that by falling in love at rst 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 gure who takes on some of her
characteristics, making her an apt match for Violas biological twin. And indeed
Sebastian is a good match for her: he too goes along with the plays madness,
its dreamlike and illusive qualities, trusting as his sister does that all will work
out in the end: Theres something int/That is deceivable. But here the lady
comes (IV.3.2021). 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 plays most infamous
use of religious language. Maria, chang from Malvolios 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.3.137138), playing the role of one above his
station. His character is opposed to the plays energy not because of Puritanism,
nor because he criticizes Sir Toby Belchs 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.2.6366). Malvolios 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, 6970); he thereby becomes the butt
43
44
Kristen Poole, Saints Alive! Falsta, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging of Puritanism, Shakespeare
Quarterly 46:1 (1995), pp.4775.
This includes publicly rebuking Olivia for his supposed mistreatment. Malvolio is not wrong, as
David Schalkwyk shows, to believe that a servantmaster 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.76100).
31
of religiously tinged ridicule. Malvolios 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 ction (III.4.121122).
Malvolio becomes the improbable ction that anti-theatricalists condemned
precisely by refusing to engage with others in carnivalesque play.
The language of anti-theatricalism recurs in Malvolios 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 Malvolios imprisonment scene, theatre
may harm but asks for an armation of faith in the stage despite its
shortcomings. Similarly, Violas rst soliloquy both uses anti-theatrical
language and rearms acting itself. Viola rst 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 crossdressing causes erotic confusion: Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness/
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much (II.2.2728). But after elucidating the
suerings that cross-dressing and misdirected eros may cause, she turns to a
performative sense of self: she rst voices her dilemma through her assumed
role as I am man,/My state is desperate for my masters love (II.2.3637)
and then through her supposedly true identity; as I am woman, (now alas the
day!) What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe (II.2.3839). From this
awareness that performance may compete with reality and cause pain, Viola
turns to time carnival time, the plays time to unravel the situation: O Time,
thou must untangle this, not I;/ It is too hard a knot for me tuntie (II.2.4041).
Her nal turn is comic and trusting; she will continue to play. The soliloquy
moves from an anti-theatrical puncturing of theatrical illusion as wicked
45
While the work post-dates the play, its tactics do not; Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious
Popish Impostures (London, 1603).
32
disguise to a sense of performance as having a competing power of its own, to

trust in the plays time to right things.
Yet the solution Violas soliloquy oers, like the plays 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 hes travelled two hours closer to his grave
(V.1.15960). Meditation on death was a common spiritual practice, a familiar
way to enliven faith. Perhaps there is an analogous function for the plays
invocations of death and suering. 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.2.7679). But in Twelfth
Nights melancholic comedy, mentions of death and suering tend to move
characters to invest in, have faith in, the plays carnival, even as compromised,
as melancholy, as it sometimes can be: come kiss me, sweet and twenty, Youths
a stu will not endure (II.3.4950).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 worlds Malvolios have to oer.47 The plays nal line
substitutes for the melancholic refrain For the rain it raineth every day an
invitation to relation despite the rain: well strive to please you every day
(V.1.401).
In my experience, students usually accept the plays invitation to engage
with characters as they are Orsinos self-absorption, Toby Belchs outrageous
drunkenness, Festes 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 theatres shortcomings, a gentle incredulity about its
illusions. The play invites us to reect about what faith might mean and to
bring to bear characterizations of faith at the plays and our moments in time.
46
47
On the plays instructional use of mortality, see Lisa Marciano, The Serious Comedy of Twelfth
Night: Dark Didacticism in Illyria, Renaiscence 56.1 (2003), pp.319.
See Greenblatts 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 Nights balance between Festes rain and the Dukes golden time, see
Nancy Lindheim, Rethinking Sexuality and Class in Twelfth Night, University of Toronto Quarterly
76.2 (2007), pp.679713.
33
The politics of late sixteenth-century Protestant quarrels, fascinating as they

are, do not exhaust the plays religious dimensions, which extend to the stance
the play asks us to adopt towards its own ction. 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 plays resolution
(Antonio, whose longing for Sebastian remains unsatised; 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 antitheatrical discourses, or the meanings of faith in Shakespeares 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 plays 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.
34
Theology, Literature, and Prayer

A Pedagogical Suggestion1
Vittorio Montemaggi
University of Notre Dame, IN, USA
My aim in this essay is to reect on the relationship between theology, literature,

and prayer: to reect, that is, on how these modes of thinking, of writing, and
of being might be mutually illuminating. But my aim is not to oer a general
denition of the relationship between theology, literature, and prayer. It is
rather the simpler one of oering, through comparative reading of three
relatively short texts, a suggestion concerning the value that reecting 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 Greats Moralia in Iob,
lines 88138 of Canto 20 of Dantes Paradiso, and the Epilogue of Shakespeares
The Tempest. I should make it clear at the outset that in oering 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 rst version of the essay was prepared for the Systematic Theology Seminar at Kings
College London, and its current form is indebted to comments received from Susannah Ticciati
and the seminars participants. It is also indebted to comments received from Christian Coppa,
Peter Hampson, Zo 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 Reection, Religion and Literature 41.2 (2009), pp. 7986; Dante and
Gregory the Great, in eds. Claire Honess and Matthew Treherne, Reviewing Dantes Theology vol. 1
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013); Forgiveness, Prayer and the Meaning of Poetry, Literature Compass
11.2 (2014), pp. 138147; see also Robin Kirkpatrick and Vittorio Montemaggi, Theology and
Literature: Reections on Dante and Shakespeare, in eds. Mervyn Davies, Oliver D. Crisp, Gavin
DCosta, and Peter Hampson, Christianity and the Disciplines: The Transformation of the University
(London: Continuum, 2012).
35
36
Vittorio Montemaggi
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 inuence
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 oer 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
eld 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 reection. 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 Greats Moralia in Iob

Gregory the Greats Moralia is one of the most important and inuential texts in
the Western Middle Ages. Indeed, as both theologian and pope, Gregorys
inuence throughout the Middle Ages was vast. It is important to emphasize this,
because despite his great inuence throughout the Middle Ages, and despite his
continued inuence in monastic and spiritual contexts today, Gregory remains a
relatively underexplored gure in academic theological debates. Hence, renewed
interest in Gregorys 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.
37
The passage of the Moralia I would like to focus on comes at the end of
Book 35, the last in the work. Gregorys 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 Gregorys 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 Gregorys ponticate. 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 nished 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 souls 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 nd 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 nd 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
38
Vittorio Montemaggi
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 suer. 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 oer my help to some of my brethren (as much as I can), and I seek the help
of others. To the rst 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 nds 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 oers 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 ones words
that one runs the risk of forgetting ones true self. As Gregory says, one wishes
through ones words to please and praise God, for it is only from God that any
good in ones 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
2
Translation by James ODonnell, 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.
39
their tears, in such a way that the value of prayer might surpass the value of
Gregorys 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 benet of the doubt. But be that as it may, what
I would like for our present purposes is for us to take Gregorys words seriously.
For whatever their authors 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 nal 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 works thirtyve books to drown into the tears shed by readers in prayer for Gregorys
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 nds its ultimate fullment.
A commentary that had set o 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 edication. 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 deled 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 rst the notion
of dependence: the dependence of human beings on God and on each other.
For at the heart of the nal paragraph of Gregorys 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
3
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, Gregorys words suggest, and any theological worth
ones words might have is undermined by pride; take humility away, and any
theological worth ones 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 dicult 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
Gregorys text is sacramental in character, eecting what it signies. 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.
41
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 reect further on the implications of the kind of theological
perspective opened up by the end of Gregorys Moralia, let us turn to the
second of our three texts.
Love in Dantes Paradiso

In each of the heavens he traverses in the Paradiso, Dante meets a dierent
group of blessed human beings. This is not because dierent groups of blessed
human beings inhabit dierent 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), dierent 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 Dantes attention.
The rst 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 signicance of this. The second is the Eagles 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 (20.3742). 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 Virgils 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
4
Paradiso 19.112.
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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 Eagles 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 nal 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 (19.22111).
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 (7984). The passage I would
now like to turn to is the beginning of the Eagles response to Dantes 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 (10.7096). On this terrace Dante nds marble carvings crafted
directly by God showing three paradigmatic examples of humility, the virtue
through which pride is puried: 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 Trajans
Column in Rome that Gregory, deeply moved by Trajans actions, prays for his
salvation). In Paradiso 20, in the Eagles response to Dantes doubt concerning
the presence of pagans of Heaven, we then nd:
I see that you, because I say these things,
believe theyre 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 Gods own will,
90
93
96
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 rst life and the fth that mark this brow
cause you to wonder. Youre amazed to see
the realm of angels painted with these lights.
They left their bodies, contra your belief,
as Christian souls, not Gentiles, rm 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 were now speaking of,
returning even briey to his esh,
believed in Him whose power could bring him aid,
and, so believing, blazed forth in such res
of love in truth that he, on second death,
was t 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 Ripheuss eyes,
grace upon grace, to when wed be redeemed.
In that redemption, he believed. And so
he did not suer 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
43
99
102
105
108
111
114
117
120
123
126
129
132
44
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do not yet know who all the chosen are.

Yet this deciency for us is sweet.
For in this good our own good nds its goal,
that what God wills we likewise seek in will.5
135
138
Following Gregorys 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 nd an emphasis on dependence). Commentators
have often been embarrassed by Dantes references to the legend surrounding
Trajans salvation. Compared with the overall sophistication and complexity of
Dantes treatment of theological questions, his references to the legend
concerning Trajans 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 rst of all to
note the recurrence of living hope, in line 95 and in lines 108 and 109. The
living hope embodied in Gregorys 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
9499 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 Dantes belief in the perfect
union between the community of the blessed and God, and Dantes 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 Gods own will to be
synonymous, and both are dened in terms of love that conquers not by imposing
violence but by suering it in the goodness inherent in suering the demands of
love itself and living hope. And it is precisely as such an instance of living hope
that Gregorys prayers are presented to us when the term recurs in lines 108 and
109. Gregorys 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.
5
Translation by Robin Kirkpatrick, as found in Dante Alighieri, Paradiso The Divine Comedy, vol.
3, trans. Robin Kirkpatrick (London: Penguin, 20062007). Published with permission.
45
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 eect a change in the will of God (Purgatorio
6.2848; Paradiso 20.4954). 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 Gregorys prayers for Trajan ought to be
understood. It is not that Gregorys prayers change divine will with respect to
the question of Trajans salvation. It is rather that Gregorys prayers are the
particular way in which divine will is fullled with respect to Trajans salvation.
What we are presented with in our passage, then, through the reference to
Gregorys 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 Gregorys own Moralia?
One way of approaching these questions is to read Dantes text as providing,
like Gregorys, 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, Dantes text provides us with a theological
development of the kind of perspective with which the Moralia ends. The kind
of community Gregorys text wishes to enliven explicitly through its request
for readers prayers becomes, in Dantes text, the very expression of divine
truth itself. It is through the help of Gregorys 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 Dantes text as compared to Gregorys
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 nd in this respect
something quite extraordinary in lines 106107, 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 Dantes whole poem. Gregorys prayers and Trajans
salvation do nothing less than call into question the apparently rigorous
structures on which Dantes 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 Eagles pronouncement in
lines 133138 about the impossibility for the blessed, let alone mortals, to
scrutinize divine judgements. Dantes 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 oer 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 condently asserted as an absolute category by which to
understand the workings of grace: non-Christians too are granted the
possibility of salvation. Dantes preferred name for the mystery in which all
truths reside is love.
The reference to Gregorys 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
condence 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 eect 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 rst 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,
47
confesses his pride, his desire for the praise of human beings (Purgatorio
11.11820; 13.133138). And I do not think it is a coincidence that the nal
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 28.130135).
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
Gregorys 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
Trajans salvation, into an understanding of the divine in which belief in
something like Trajans 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, Transguration, and Resurrection, our condence
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 specic reference to Dantes Commedia as a
literary text. Here, this prayerful sense of wonder might be associated not only
with the dynamics of Dantes theology but with the literary dynamics of the
text as which such theology is embodied. For the legend surrounding Trajans
salvation not only raises questions concerning the relationship between belief
and superstition but, as inserted within Dantes poem, also sharpens questions
concerning the relationship between truth and ction concerning the
measure in which we should assess the truthfulness of Dantes 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 ction.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 denable as a mystery for which Dantes 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 Gregorys 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 Gregorys request for prayers at the
end of his Moralia.
Forgiveness in Shakespeares The Tempest

The Tempest is, after Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winters 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 Dantes Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press/
AAR, 2005), especially pp.314 and 169185.
49
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, Prosperos daughter. Also on the island are Ariel (a
spirit in Prosperos 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 Prosperos magic powers. Prospero
uses these throughout the play to control nature, human beings, and the supranatural, so as to guarantee a perfect union between Miranda and Ferdinand,
and to bring about a nal reconciliation. Thereby, notwithstanding the plot
devised by Caliban and two of Alonsos 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 (5.1.3357). 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 oerthrown,
And what strength I haves mine own,
Which is most faint. Now tis true
I must be here conned 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 ll, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
10
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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
15
20
With these words, the actions of the audience are brought into the sphere of
meaning of the play itself. It is towards the audiences applause that the play has
been tending all along. Shakespeares text too, like Gregorys, 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 audiences praise and applause is identied with prayer, without which,
Prospero says, his ending is despair. Prayer can relieve him from despair, he
further species, because it can pierce Mercy itself, or God, and free all faults.
Finally, in the nal couplet of the play, it is further claried with a striking
allusion to the Lords Prayer that the audiences praise and applause will be
ecacious only if, in these, the audience prays for the forgiveness of Prosperos
faults in recognition of their own need for forgiveness.
So, whereas the main action of the play ends with Prosperos granting
forgiveness to others, the play as a whole ends with Prosperos 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 Prosperos 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
Lords 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.
51
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 specic 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 eects 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 plays 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 plays 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 plays sole purpose is that of entertaining, Prosperos
words foreground the fact that they belong to a world of illusion, or of dream,
as Prospero himself famously suggests earlier in the play (4.1.146163): a
world of dream created in the rst 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 audiences 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 nal unfolding of the plays
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 dierent from that into which we are invited by
Gregory at the end of his Moralia, and by Dantes reference to Gregorys prayers
for Trajan in his Paradiso. Shakespeares text, like Gregorys, presents to us our
prayers as its fullment; fullment 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 Dantes
53
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 Gregorys text: we have moved from a commentary on Scripture aimed at
the spiritual edication 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 oered 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 dierences between them is Dantes 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 ction. In Dantes 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 Dantes 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 reection
on prayer as a way genuinely to reect 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 dierent texts together might
54
Vittorio Montemaggi
sharpen our sense and appreciation of the hospitable and broad space needed
to bring to bear more general theological reection 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 reection: 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 dierently: 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 eld 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 dierent as
55
Gregory the Greats Moralia in Iob, Dantes Commedia, and Shakespeares 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.
56
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 Robertss 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
dicult but necessary now it addresses a ssure in the human psyche, how
we deal with faith and secularism; how we nd a life.1 The diculty 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-ve 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
1
Jeanette Winterson is quoted from http://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/forward-prizes-forpoetry/forward-prizes-2013/
57
58
Hester Jones
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
Hungerfords analysis of such writing is elegant and persuasive. What she

identies in American literature perhaps shares some common ground with
the existence of believing without belonging that the British sociologist Grace
Davie identied in British culture in the late 1990s.3 And, as Jean Ellen Petrolle
has remarked, while it is hard to dene 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
Eagletons recent, trenchant defence of Christian doctrine, against the (as he
sees it) ignorant and prejudiced assaults of the new atheism, nds 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
2
3
4
Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2010), p. xxi.
Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
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.
Bleak Liturgies: R. S. Thomas
59
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 identied two distinct
understandings of kenosis, one emphasizing the innite distance of God from
humanity, and one stressing the possible proximity, which the emptying of
Gods innite power makes possible. Using Derridas 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 identies 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: Reections 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.285310 (pp.300, 302). See Jacques Derrida, Sauf le Nom
(Post-Scriptum), rst published 1993; published in English as On the Name, trans. I. McLeod
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
60
Hester Jones
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
signicant 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 conne 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 nd 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
identied with eorts to express a nationalist aliation, but Thomas remained
aware that this movement risked a sidelining or diminishing of his signicance
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 Kellers 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 Dierence
7
Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003).
61
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 nds 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 Melvilles
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 nitude, every
wave of becoming. It is characterized by an innite 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. Thomass 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 Kellers 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 ssure Jeanette
8
10
11
Gilles Deleuze, Dierence and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 1994, reprinted
2004), p. xvii.
Dierence and Repetition, pp.288, 290. See also, Walter Blissett, The Long Conversation (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1981), p.76.
Keller, Face of the Deep, p.146.
Keller, Face of the Deep, p.154.
62
Hester Jones
Winterson refers to. I shall focus on Thomass 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 Thomass
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 eld, 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 Cranmers Book of Common Prayer being
replaced in most Anglican churches, rst 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 eorts 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 gures in this period, some without wanting to aliate 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
12
Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James McGibbon (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975), p.521.
63
For Stevie Smith as for many, changes to Anglican liturgy that sought to
respond to and absorb changes in wider society, signalled a falling o 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 qualied to assess these new versions. But it was
a dierent 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 wasnt
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 wasnt 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.
13
R. S. Thomas, Autobiographies, trans. Jason Walford Davies (London: Orion, 1997), pp.8889. Neb
was rst published in Welsh in 1992 and translated into English in 1995.
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Hester Jones
In short, the language Thomas cherishes is also understood as a source of

division and conict 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 languages relation to
religious truth that can be seen expressed in Thomass 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 diculty indicated
by a reference to T. S. Eliots 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 attens, evacuates, and
damagingly limits the deep and the common substance that has hitherto
animated poetry.14
In seeking to nd 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
14
15
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.424446.
65
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 oers to the
symbolic poet clearly denotable objects in depth and in the round. Tate
concludes by arming that Dantes greatness is found in his works 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. Thomass 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, Thomass
vision also had much in common with Tates, with Charles Williamss, and
with Dantes. 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 poets 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 Tates 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 Dantes 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 oered 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 Thomass mind, importantly linked with changes to language and
16
Tate, Essays, p.446.
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Hester Jones
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 sh) than in more conventional symbols (the stair, the rose garden),
since those latter situations provoke an awareness of inhibiting selfconsciousness. 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 Thomass 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 faade of polish, a barbaric world of violence and conict. 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 creators 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 Jobs problem, mute before
his God. That was Blakes question, How do you know?17
17
Thomas, Autobiographies, p.78.
67
There are echoes too in this questioning of the earlier poet Keatss lines: I saw
too far / Into an eternal erce 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 Gods 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 Pauls 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 Thomass
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, Thomass path reects or follows that of Yeats a poetic fathergure also to be rejected in favour of more gritty gures, Sanders Lewis among
them; but the rst line of Yeatss Byzantium, The unpurged images of day
recede, sets the tone for this phase.20
So as Allen Tate was oering 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 oering a bridge between both. Something
like this can be seen in operation in some of Thomass prose works, as well as
in the poetic. For example, the short essay Dau Gapel (Two chapels), actually
published before Tates essay but understandable in similar terms, describes
18
19
20
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: 19882000 (Highgreen, UK:
Bloodaxe, 2004), p.68.
W. B. Yeats, Byzantium, The Collected Poems, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1950), p.280.
68
Hester Jones
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 ineable. 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
identies as being particularly Welsh, and suggests he actually prefers it to the
other: Because I am only human? Because of the weakness of the esh? I dont
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
nds 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 identication 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
21
22
23
R. S. Thomas, Selected Prose, ed. Sandra Anstey (Bridgend, UK: Poetry Wales Press, 1983), p.45.
Thomas, Selected Prose, pp.45, 4647.
Thomas, Selected Prose, p.53.
69
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 dierentiate 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 ne 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
nds 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 cant 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 sheeps 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 reect the sun as it goes down. Nonetheless, in chief:
This is to know a mountain; to inch ones way up it from ledge to ledge; to
break ones 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
ssure. 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 esh upward. Rare owers 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 gure, she leads the mountain by a rope. It
will not try to master her again?25
24
25
Thomas, Selected Prose, pp.97106 (p.97).

70
Hester Jones
A Dantean, Beatrice-like gure, perhaps, but one oering 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 sh in them; no birds feeding at the brim. Barren
and cold and deep: terrible wounds the water has lled 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 reects, who lives in the dripping house
under the falls? and answers, silent people. Likewise, the sh 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
26
27

71
are indeed echoes, in which the same questions, objections, diculties

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 Thomass 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 languages 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 airs window, and fearful spaces, within stanzas, whose sinewy
elegance and suppleness echo the grace of W. H. Audens 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 imsy word God, enclosed like the
28
R. S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems, p.60.
72
Hester Jones
speaker in safely inverted commas. It falls, however, like a stone into this other
dimension, beyond the speakers and the worlds 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 Lears last scene, perhaps (undo
this button), and the speakers 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.
Thomass 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. Theres dark, self-mocking irony here, even an echo of the God of Psalm
139 known in the wings of the morning. The supporter of Cranmers
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 o, and
correspondingly, Thomass 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 innite changes wrongfoot the speaker, who ees from the discomfort of nding the sea both the
same and dierent.
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 reection:
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
73
assurances he possessed. He was too insignicant 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 seas turbulent extensiveness, and by association, Gods depth; even the
denite article, the sea, excessively limits it, as the move to the indenite a
recognizes, seeing this perhaps as a version of the sea. Other less shallow and
dislocating words then open up the eld; rst 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 Berrymans 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 oers
passing sh 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 selfgiving 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 oer something of the divine, yet also
containing its own ambushing dangers. Once again, Thomas yearns in part for
29
30
Thomas, Collected Later Poems, p.70.

John Berryman, Collected Poems 19371971, ed. Charles Thornbury (London: Faber and Faber,
1989), p.141 and note p.148.
74
Hester Jones
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
supercial, 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 poems 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 speakers 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 / ew 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 19091991). Previously, the rst person plural pronoun has
referred to the voice of the church, as in the rst 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:
organs whirlwind follows
upon the still, small voice
31
R. S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems, p.183.
75
of conviction, and he is not

in it. Our marriage
was contracted in front
of a green altar in technologys
childhood, and light entered
through the plain glass of
the woods window as quietly
as a shepherd moving among his ock.32
While thoughts ew 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 woods 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, gured through
contemporary, distasteful mutations of faith.
The last section, as the rst, reverts to three-line stanzas, but where the rst
used ve, the last uses six. Again it res o 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 ag / is a star receding
from us / at lights 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
poets departed wife and perhaps to Miltons beautiful sonnet on his wifes
death; it is as if the image of surrender expressed through the white ag 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
32
33

76
Hester Jones
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 Larkins 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 crucied, 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
77
78
Belief and Imagination1

Graham Ward
Christ Church, University of Oxford, UK
In John 12.2730 we nd the following event. Jesus is praying publicly:

Father, glorify thy name. Then came a voice from heaven saying, I have both
gloried 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 Johns 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 dierent 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 nally Jesus
and the Johannine narrator hear the voice of God a voice that, on Jesuss
statement, was available for all to hear since it was a voice for others, not
himself. It is not a dierence in interpretation that separates the three
understandings of what had occurred, rather it is a dierence in perception; a
This essay began as a lecture given to the Department of Theology at the University of
St. Andrews, UK.
79
80
Graham Ward
dierence 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 signied 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 ineable 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
Belief and Imagination
81
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 rst reason for taking the
novel as the object of my analysis is that reading is a conditioned practice. The
cultural eld 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. Its a gross, instrumental word but it describes practices of
subjectication 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 aectivity have conrmed 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 novels 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).
82
Graham Ward
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 conguring 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 nave
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 nal 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
arm an analogy between creation as Gods own writing (through the Logos)
and the authors 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
3
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).
83
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 novels
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 oered as readers then we cannot enter into that
structure of believing. Imagination is the porthole into participation. This is
what I personally nd with most science ction 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 dierent contexts which not only distinguish dierent
types of believing but also dierent 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,
regures 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
4
Graham Greene, The Honorary Consul (London: Vintage Books, 2004), p.30.
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Graham Ward
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 Maurices experience following the bomb blast that Sarah believes has
killed him, in Greenes The End of the Aair. Their love aair has been intense
and recripocal, but following the bomb incident Sarah leaves his at and has
no more contact with him until a chance meeting two years later. The pattern
5
Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (London: J. M. Dent & Sons,
1986), pp.840.
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.144.
85
of Maurices 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 Maurices bomb-torn home is, You
neednt be so scared . . . love doesnt 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
Sarahs movements. These reports then trigger another set of imaginative
recreations that attempt to explain Sarahs behaviour. All the fermentation of
these surmises evaporate when Maurice steals Sarahs 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 Maurices
existential despair is in fact his inability to believe the truth of Sarahs words to
him. Believing what she said would not have minimized the pain of their
separation, the end of the aair, 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 Greenes 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 intensication 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
7
Grahame Greene, The End of the Aair (London: Vintage Books, 2004), p.73.
86
Graham Ward
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
Gods 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 nite of the innite 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 hadnt awoken, Greene writes. That was his strength. He
couldnt see through other peoples 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 ve-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 clichs, 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
9
10
David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Innite: The Aesthetic of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI:
William B. Eerdmans, 2003) p.147.
Hart, The Beauty of the Innite, p.186.
Grahame Greene, Brighton Rock (London: Vintage Books, 2004), p.47.
87
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, terried 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 [Spicers in hiding]. I dont 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.
Hes drunk. He says hes in Hell.
Dallow laughed. Hell. Thats good.
Youre a fool, Dallow.
I dont believe in what my eyes dont see.
They dont 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 Greenes novels the governing question is not what
is known but what is believed; though frequently, the truth is out to a certain
11
12
Grahame Greene, The Power and the Glory (London: Vintage Books, 2004), p.129.
Greene, Brighton Rock, p.231.
88
Graham Ward
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,
condence 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 exemplied; the very act
of writing literature itself, the implicit contract between the novelist and his
readers, creates a space for the performance and reection upon the
performance of such themes. The world, for Greene, and the ctional world for
Greenes characters and Greenes 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 Condential 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 recongured. How
could they shoot at you in the street here? What about the police, the noise,
the neighbours? . . . I dont believe it. I wont believe it. Dont you see that if
things like that happened life would be quite dierent? One would have to
begin over again . . . Prove it. Prove it, she said ercely. D manages to dig the
bullet out of the wall. Oh, God, she said suddenly, its true. 14 The Oh God
may seem like a throwaway expletive Rose professes no religious conviction
and D in a moment reecting 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
13
14
Grahame Greene, The Condential Agent (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1963), p.9
Greene, The Condential Agent, p.59.
89
much misery concludes with he hadnt that particular faith.15 But the Oh God
is employed both colloquially and expressively. It correlates with Roses
recognition that certain forms of seeing-as demand radical transformation
of ones 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 reective 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 Greenes 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 briey 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
transgured in the closing pages into an English Theresa of Liseaux. The priest
in the confessional Rose enters nally asks her, Pray for me, my child, to which
she answers, Yes, oh yes.16 Sarahs harrowing and adulterous love, in The End of
the Aair, 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.
15
16
Greene, The Condential Agent, p.118.

Greene, Brighton Rock, p.269.
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Graham Ward
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 priests 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 erce, 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
ake and splinter, and doubt, conjecture and surmise overpower knowledge.
Bunyans 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
17
18
Greene, The Power and the Glory, p.220.

Greene, The Honorary Consul, p.149.
91
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
innite, inconceivable suering.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 sacrice.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 ourishes. In the language of Cliord Geertz it is both a model of and a
model for reality23; in the language of Mircea Eliade it concerns paradigms for
19
20
21
22
23
Georges Sorel, Reections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
Christopher Flood, Myth and Ideology in Thinking Through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives
(London: Routledge, 2002), p.186187.
Sorel, Reections on Violence, p.29.
Greene, The Honorary Consul, p.234.
Cliord Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: HarperCollins, 1973), pp.9395.
92
Graham Ward
all signicant human acts.24 Myths 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 o
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 o 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 o.
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 Greenes description of the Virgins supposed act of diusing 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 Greenes storytelling is itself implicated within
this politics.
If I had space I would develop Sorels analysis of myth in Rexions sur la
violence (as a signicant political category) in terms of Greenes fascination
with politics (leftwing, rightwing, and centre). It would proceed along lines
opened recently by Lawrence Grossbergs work on ideology and aect and
Sianne Ngais 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 dicult, and so uncovers the secret power of the political:
Aect is the missing term in an adequate understanding of ideology, for it
oers the possibility of a psychology of belief which would explain how and
24
25
26
Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p.18.
The Honorary Consul, pp.143144.
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p.49.
93
why ideologies are sometimes, and only sometimes, eective. . . . It is an

aective 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 aective 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, aective
investment, and myth that operate, nally, 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 eects of his prayer were public. Furthermore, to acknowledge that
God spoke is the denitive political act the appeal to a transcendent and
all-embracing sovereignty.
27
Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1992), p.83.
94
Literary Apologetics beyond Postmodernism

Duality and Death in Philip Pullman and
J. K. Rowling
Alison Milbank
It is now over twenty years since MacIntyres Giord 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 conicts, 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 conict, in
which a central responsibility of higher education would be to initiate
students into conict.1
The vision of Lord Giord 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 noncommensurable 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.230231.
95
96
Alison Milbank
the genealogist is to nd 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 elds 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 Nietzsches denial of any truth-as-such in favour of truthfrom-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 inuenced by liberal Protestantism, especially by Bonhoeers
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 Becketts 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 OConnor 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
2
3
4
MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, pp.3940.

MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, p.36.
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.3554.
See Dietrich Bonhoeer, Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Reginald Fuller and Frank Clark,
Enlarged edn (London: SCM, 1971), pp.280282.
97
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 ts 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 eighteenthcentury 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 nds a way to defamiliarize conventional expectations, so that
a devil describes the diculties of temptation, while the outskirts of heaven
are more solid and real than hell.7 More characteristic of Lewis and Tolkien,
however, despite the latters own purgatorial allegory in Leaf by Niggle, is the
creation of other worlds in fantasy or science ction. 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 Tolkiens Middle-earth being our own planet
at some very early historical period.
Although doubly ctional 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 aect is partly due to the amount of detail
needed to describe a dierent world but chiey the metaphysics that underpins
such a project. In order to create an alternative ctional 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).
C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (London: Collins, 2012; rst published 1946); C. S. Lewis, The
Screwtape Letters: Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil (London: Collins, 2012; rst published
1956).
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Alison Milbank
order for the narrative to work. In that way, fantasy writing moves beyond the
purely postmodern, although the world that is ctionally created may itself
bear all the features of a late-capitalist mode of postmodernity. Tolkiens
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 suer 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 MacIntyres 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 nd 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,
9
10
Alison Milbank, Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (London: T & T
Clark/Continuum, 2007), pp.1821.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King (London: HarperCollins, 1993; rst
published 1955), pp.11331137.
99
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 ction 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 Commedias 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 Dantes 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 Fredericks 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 oer a genealogical account of the will-to-power as itself a
ction, disguising the corruption of the will. Thomas thus can unmask
Nietzsche.
If one accepts MacIntyres account of three dierent construals of truth, this
suggests a new model for apologetics in the form of literary contest and
conict. There is indeed incommensurability between a theological and a
Nietzschean account of truth and to converse must involve conict. The way
forward, however, is rst, 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, Thomass own dialectical method, which itself mediates
between Augustinianism and Aristotelianism, already performs such a
11
12
13
14

100
Alison Milbank
procedure. In the rst 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
conict. 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 dierent 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 ction in order to
demonstrate the power of a new mythos a creation mythology that
aestheticizes evolution.15 Following in Bradley and Tates 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, Pullmans
is the richer and more literary material, but I hope to demonstrate that
Rowlings oers a more substantive and successful anthropology and
metaphysics, which can reveal the limitations of Pullmans heretical project.
Rowlings 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 Pullmans
Northern Lights/The Golden Compass there is the same assumption that death
15
16
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.1011.
These words form part of the inscription on the tomb of Harrys parents, taken from 1 Corinthians
15: 26, see J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p.268.
101
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
Lyras world, dust is not equated with the usual physical stu 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 cant see anything without wanting
to destroy it, Lyra. Thats original sin. And Im going to destroy it. Death is
going to die.17 Despite attributing dust to the Fall, Asriels response is not
repentance but a Promethean gesture of refusal and an attempt by force to
trace the source of sins and deaths eect 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 rst 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 rst volume of Pullmans 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,
oers a decidedly unfallen interpretation of death, which is actually benecent.
The witch Serana 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 nal
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
17
18
Philip Pullman, Northern Lights (London: Scholastic, 1995), p.377.

Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (London: Scholastic, 1997), p.41.
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Alison Milbank
Roger, Lord Asriels victim at Svalbard. The descent of Homers 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 Dantes 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 Dantes
Paradiso, where body and soul will be united and achieve their full expression.
In Dantes poem the bleeding trees and harpies are the eect of a hatred and
rejection of physical life in all its joys and sorrows.
What Pullman does by a sleight of hand is apply Dantes 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 faiths belief
in a nal 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 dierent from
Dantes system, since it is not for a particular act that the damned are conned
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
19
20
21
Homer, Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray, 2 vols (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), Book
11, Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, 16, 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).
Homer, Odyssey, Book 11: 556558.
Dante, Inferno 3: 18.
103
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 Miltons 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 innity, 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 gment of the imagination, it is the former that
must be correct, and yet the novel wishes to arm 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, Ill welcome it, because it wont be nothing. Well
be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; well be falling
in raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; well 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 veried 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
Pullmans prose, which can be so precise and evocative in its description of
the gaunt erceness of the arctic or the humid lushness of Mrs Coulters
Himalayan redoubt, here becomes diuse and sentimental in employing the
clichs 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? Wordsworths pantheist
vision in the 1799 lyric A slumber did my spirit seal is much more robustly
22
23
24
Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London: Scholastic, 2000), p.286.

Pullman, The Amber Spyglass, p.287.
Pullman, The Amber Spyglass, p.325.
104
Alison Milbank
physical as the dead person is Rolled round in earths 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 Dennetts
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 Pullmans 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 nality 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 therell be all the
time in the world to drift along the wind and nd the atoms that used to be
Hester, and my mother in the badlands, and my sweethearts all my
25
26
27
See Philip Pullmans remarks in The Observer, July 7, 2002 on Max Velmans Understanding
Consciousness (London: Routledge, 2002).
D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems, Phoenix Edition, 3 vols (London: Heinemann, 1957), 3, p.179.
Lawrence, Complete Poems, 3, p.181.
105
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 dicult 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 aect characters only briey, as for
example, Lyras move into the new world immediately after the death of her
dear friend Roger, and Wills swift response to the witch who murders his
father at the point of their reunion. In that sense, Lord Asriels claim to destroy
it is fullled. Mrs Coulter indeed, fears the nullity of death: I cant 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, wouldnt 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 Lyras safety in
28
29
30
31
Pullman, Amber Spyglass, p.344.

Pullman, Amber Spyglass, pp.3132.
106
Alison Milbank
the future. Since, however, destroying Metatron means plunging with him into
the abyss, which is an explosive rupture in space/time, Lyras 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 terried at the thought of falling in:
[Y]our poor ghost would go on falling and falling into an innite gulf, with no
one to help [. . .] forever conscious and forever falling.32
So every time death is a possibility in Pullmans ctional world, something
is said or done that prevents pure annihilation. Moreover, in a multiverse,
every act produces other worlds in which a dierent choice was made. Will
may have snued out like candles, as if theyd 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 gure who dies in the novel apart from Metatron is God,
the Almighty, who has been reduced to a somewhat pathetic gure, 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 Nietzsches 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 o 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
32
33
34

Pullman, The Subtle Knife, p.11.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science with a Prelude in Rhyme and an Appendix of Songs, trans.
Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1974), section125, p.181.
107
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 Lyras world remains the same.
The Almighty had not been an active reality in Lyras 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 intensies such an operation. But they
do so without the Madmans guilt.
In contrast to the Nietzschean mastery of death in Pullman, J. K. Rowlings
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 rst 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
gure 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 Pauls tripartite self
of soul, spirit, and body.35 Unlike St Pauls dynamic and conicted subject,
however, the Dark Materials humans are remarkably unitary. The device of the
animal daemon is not employed eectively to allow a depth of characterization.
The animal Panatalaimon, for example, may urge caution occasionally to Lyra
but is mostly an amiable intensication 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 conicted 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
35
108
Alison Milbank
contrast to the dialectic between self and emanation in Blakes mythological

dramas, which are one of Pullmans principal inspirations.
Lyra may have the voice and something of the appearance of Joan Aikens
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 declass 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 rst,
Harrys sense of remorse may be for infringing rules and letting people down:
[Harrys] 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, Rowlings character is negatively aected 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. Siriuss
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 mothers 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 Voldemorts curse when he was a baby, he is signed with
36
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p.99.
109
death itself. The scar marks the moment of Harrys mothers sacricial
interference between Voldemort and her child, as well as the point of
connection with his would-be murderer. Harrys 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 Blakes Gothic
mythology, whose origin is a kind of active negativity or mini black hole
eect. Where Pullmans 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 Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings who, in a living death,
sni life and fear and wound psychically as well as physically. Frodo will never
fully recover from the wound they inict 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. Harrys 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 Christs
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 fathers 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 briey 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
37
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p.42.
110
Alison Milbank
Lyra has the patronage and support of witch, bear, Gyptians, scholars and
nally 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 Voldemorts 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. Harrys 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 Harrys duality is highly problematic and more productive than
Pullmans 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 Kierkegaards knight of faith, whose origin is in one, absurd
interpretation of the story of Abrahams sacrice of his son Isaac in the
philosophers Fear and Trembling.39 There Abraham himself entertains a
paradoxical impossibility that God will provide, even while Abraham carries
on the process of sacricing his beloved son as that same God has commanded.
Dumbledore is the more Abrahamic gure, 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-sacrice of Harrys mother
entered his own blood when he took Harrys to rebuild his body, so that his
body keeps her sacrice alive, and while that enchantment survives, so do you
and so does Voldemorts one last hope for himself .40
38
39
40
Rowling, Deathly Hallows, p.555.

Sren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, trans. Edna and Howard Hong, Writings of
Kierkegaard 6 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p.50.
111
Harrys mothers 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 nds himself in a great white dome, a mystical
version of Kings Cross Station, where he encounters Dumbledore, and despite
everything loves him still. There Dumbledore begs Harrys 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 Pullmans ction, 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 Kings 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
Dumbledores choosing of death for himself by Snape, and in Snapes own
actions, which were to be faithful to his love for Harrys mother, Lily. Voldemort
just laughs. He is only truly shocked when Harry oers him a way out: Its
your one last chance [. . .] its all youve got left . . . Ive seen what youll 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 oers 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 oer
ctions in which a moral realism undergirds an imaginary universe. The series
also follows the earlier fantasies in oering a world in which Christianity and
transcendence are made good to think rather than explicitly preached. In
oering a reality with deeper layers of experience and meaning, the stories
open the religious sense of connectivity with the theological virtues of love,
41
42
43

112
Alison Milbank
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 stu 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 Pullmans
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 xed identity at puberty, when humans just begin to
change and develop, and Pullmans 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-fullment and reunion: an actual
vol-de-mort, or ight from deaths reality. Harry Potter reveals this ight from
death as itself part of the will-to-power.
Pullmans novel does wish to oer a vision of virtuous life in cheerfulness,
and not harming others. Yet the genealogical method by its very nature can
oer 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 Harrys 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 Diotimas 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
44
45
Plato, Socrates Defence (Apology), The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntingdon
Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p.17.
Plato, The Symposium, Collected Dialogues, p.555.
113
So, in the end, Harry Potter reveals a lack of true duality in the subjectivity
of Pullmans imaginary universe, as well as a ight 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 dierent sense from that intended by JeanFranois Lyotard to wage a war on totality; let us be witness to the
unpresentable; let us activate the dierences and save the honour of the name.46
Fantasy writing may seek to present a wholly material universe or, like Neil
Gaimans 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
46
47
Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geo Bennington
and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp.8182.
Rowling, Philosophers Stone, p.297.
114
Cusa
A Pre-modern Postmodern Reader of Shakespeare
Johannes Ho
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 classication, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a
very ne camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water
pitcher, (n) that from a long way look like ies.1
Michel Foucaults 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 signicance of critical
theory for literary textual hermeneutics.2 Critical theory oers to put such
apparently strange taxonomies on an equal footing with the more familiar. It
challenges us to nd technical and ethical ways to render the other as familiar,
however strange it rst seems, and the familiar as strange, however rational it
rst appears.
Such late-modern sensitivity to the hidden coherence of cultural-linguistic
narratives chimes with the wisdom-grounded rationality of pre-modern
1
Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions: 19371952, trans. Ruth L. Simms (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press, 1966), p.108.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge,
2002), XVI.
115
116
traditions such as those based on Aristotle and Aquinas: sapientis est ordinare.3
The wise person is like an artist nding 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 (nem 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 Unbersichtlichkeit4 (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 dierence, 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 dierences: it seems to
exclude the celebration of dierences that make a signicant dierence. 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 dierences that make a dierence.
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.
Jrgen Habermas, Die Neue Unbersichtlichkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985).
Cusa: A Pre-modern Postmodern Reader
117
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, Cusas unerring but by no means sectarian or dogmatic
philosophy of praise with regard to the manifestations of the beautiful, the
true, and good might oer 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 aected
critical theory and literary criticism, we will outline potential Cusan responses
in an expository manner, and nally demonstrate the scope and versatility of a
Cusan approach to literary criticism using as a textual example a well-known
Shakespearean sonnet.
Epoch and the exploration of limits

Scientically rigorous late-modern thinkers (in the sense of Edmund Husserl)6
like Foucault and Derrida might have agreed with Taylors conclusion that
[t]here is no reason to believe that [. . .] the dierent art forms of a given
culture should all be of equal, or even of considerable, value.7 It was not that
they judged all dierences to be of equal signicance; instead, they suspended
our inclination to judge. To suspend judgement is not the same as neutralizing
value dierences.
To understand their caution, consider Husserls concept of epoch.8 In
everyday parlance we associate epoch 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
5
6
7
8
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. 2574,
quotations from pp.7273.
Edmund Husserl, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft (The Hague: Springer, 1984).
Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, pp.7273.
Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phnomenologie, Husserliana II (The Hague: Springer, 1950,
originally published 1907), pp. 510, 43.; also: Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen
Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie. I. Buch: Allgemeine Einfhrung in die
reine Phnomenologie, Husserliana III (The Hague: Springer, 1950, originally published, 1913),
pp.6474.
118
premature closure or enactment of their implications. Antiquity had already

conceptualized such a habit of suspending judgement () as a spiritual
practice, one characteristic of philosophical forms of life.9 In the poststructuralist response to what Husserl labelled The Crisis of European
Sciences10 this quasi-spiritual practice became an epochal focus of attention
in its own right. Hence, the postmodern era might be called the epoch of
epoch.11
In the wake of Ferdinand de Saussures structuralist semiotics, Foucault and
Derrida interpreted Husserls epoch semiotically, i.e. by focusing not on
appearances but on signs.12 This semiotic turn was accompanied by a
radicalization of Husserls concept of epoch 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
justied 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 epoch 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 unscientic fantasy worlds of a traditional but
unenlightened civilization we need to nd out what context might have made
it appear as meaningful. (2) But, unlike Husserl, we are also required to bracket
the assumption that the encyclopaedias 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
10
11
12
Hans P. Sturm, Urteilsenthaltung oder Weisheitsliebe zwischen Welterklrung und Lebenskunst

(Mnchen: 2002).
Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis des europischen Menschentums und die Philosophie (The Hague:
Springer, 1954), pp.314348.
Johannes Ho, Dekonstruktive Metaphysik. Der Beitrag der Dekonstruktion zur Erschlieung des
Archivs negativer Theologie, in Geistergesprche zwischen Philosophie und Theologie, eds. Peter
Zeillinger, Matthias Flatscher, Kreuzungen and Jacques Derridas (Wien: Turia & Kant, 2004),
pp.138168; the following paragraphs build on this essay. For a more comprehensive discussion of
the discourse analytical hermeneutics of Foucault and Derrida see Johannes Ho, Spiritualitt und
Sprachverlust. Theologie nach Foucault und Derrida (Paderborn, Germany: Schningh, 1999).
Jacques Derrida, La Voix et la Phnomne. Introduction au Problme du Signe dans la Phnomenologie
de Husserl (Paris: Quadrige Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), Jacques Derrida, Le Problme de
la Gense dans la Philosophie de Husserl (Paris: 1990); and Jacques Derrida, Writing and Dierence,
trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge 2001), pp.193212.
119
and the metaphysical prejudgement that it is ultimately meaningless. A

rigorously scientic philosophy has to remain open to both the eventualities.
This is precisely where Derrida merges Husserls scientic spiritual practice of
epoch with what might be called the spiritual practice of modern literature,
culminating in writers like Georges Bataille and where Derrida inaugurated an
epoch of the epoch of meaning.13
This too is where a kind of studied ignorance comes into play for poststructuralist philosophers like Foucault and Derrida, seemingly going beyond
the docta ignorantia of the mystical tradition (including Cusas).14 Building
on Bataille, Derrida calls for a relation of knowledge to an unknowledge
that will be scientic, 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 Derridas philosophy in
particular has been frequently either rejected as a kind of (Jewish) variation on
Heideggers neo-pagan mysticism (as in Jrgen Habermas)16 or embraced
and celebrated as a kind of negative theology (as in John Caputos).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
13
14
15
16
17
18
Derrida, Writing and Dierence, p.339.

The writings of Foucault and Derrida dier considerably from each other in terms of their research
foci and their approach to the topics under consideration. However, with the benet of hindsight it
is easy to see that they never signicantly diverged. Cf. Johannes Ho, 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.213242.
Derrida, Writing and Dierence, p.339f.
Jrgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Zwlf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1985), p.217.
See, for example, John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
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), 171184; see also Derridas response to Certeau in:
Jacques Derrida, Nombre de oui, in ed. Luce Giard, Michel de Certeau (Paris: Centre Georges
Pompidou 1987).
120
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
zurckzuschauen19 [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 oered an escape from this, by
making available the possibility to deconstruct any residual sectarian
attachments. Following Cervantess role model in Don Quixote,20 the mystical
desire for the innite plenitude of life turned into a ctive 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 Derridas 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
oscillate25 between a plurality of irreconcilable positions. These in turn are
well exemplied 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
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
Certeau, La Fable Mystique I, p.411.

Foucault, The Order of Things, pp.5154.
Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of my Death, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, Foucault, Blanchot. Maurice Blanchot, the Thought from
Outside, trans. Jerey Mehlman (New York: Zone Books, 1987).
Jacques Derrida, Ulysse Grammophone. Deux Mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galile, 1987).
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Diacritics 25.2 (1995), pp.963, 32.
Derridas 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), 114. As for Derridas Romantic
sensitivities, cf. Jacques Derrida, Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism, in eds. Simon
Critchley, Jacques Derrida, etal., Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London and New York: Routledge
1996), pp.7788.
121
Jewish father who was also called, as is life itself, Hayim.26 Derridas
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 indierent agnostic multiculturalism, or a nave scientic
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 Cusas mystagogical science of praise

Nicholas of Cusa (14011464) 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 oers 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
dierence on the other. Cusa indicates an analogical middle route based on a
condence 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,
26
Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, p.20.
122
lived engagement with the reality of its narratives and symbols. We suggest,
following Cusa, that such a pre-reexive 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 noncoercively, 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
intellects joyous pursuit, joyous because the pursuit itself, mirroring that
which it seeks, is good, great, true, beautiful, wise, delightful, perfect, clear,
equal and sucient.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 eld 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 Cusas worldview. As Gerard Manley Hopkins
would write much later, the world is charged with the grandeur of God / it will
ame out, like shining from shook foil,30 and Cusa maintains the world
27
28
29
30
Nicholas of Cusa, De Venatione Sapientiae, 16.46. Translations of Cusas works by Jasper Hopkins,
available from http://jasper-hopkins.info/VS122000.pdf (accessed 27 May 2014).
Cusa, De Venatione Sapientiae, 18.51.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gods Grandeur, in ed. W. H. Gardner, Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley
Hopkins (London: Penguin, 1953, reprinted 1985), p.27.
123
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 Gods praise, as
Shakespeare the poet resonates with his beloved since what ist but mine own
when I praise thee.31 Also, the one who ever-praises God makes progress
continuallyas a cithara-player makes progress in playing the citharaand
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-reexive basis for his subsequent
metaphysical analyses.
That said, Cusas 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 (Acts17:28), and this provides
both meaning and purpose, indicating the goal of our restless strivings.
These ideas aord 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
31
32
33
34
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 39. All quotations from the Sonnets are from Helen Vendler, The Art
of Shakespeares Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 8.
Cusa, De Sapientia, I.25.
124
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 poets 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 innite 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
35
36
37
38
Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), pp.118.
Cusa, De docta ignorantia, II, 6, 124125.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 17.
Ho, The Analogical Turn, p. 152. Conversely, in his rst encyclical, Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis
approvingly cites Bubers denition of idolatry as arising when a face addresses a face which is not
a face, LF, 13.
125
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, reection, or dialectical
interaction of the divine in or with our created mode of being (as in Hegel, and
his postmodern successors like Slavoj iek). 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 unaected 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. Briey, 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 esh nor eshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it xity,
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
39
40
41
Ho, The Analogical Turn, p.135.

T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, The Four Quartets, II, (London: Faber and Faber 1944, reset edition 1979),
p.5.
Ho, The Analogical Turn, p.136.
126
the no longer, the not yet, and the now is a nite image of the innite triunity
of God. Ironically and poignantly, however, only through time time is
conquered.42 We can only be re-enfolded in and through time. Eliots 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, Gods 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 Griths 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?
Shakespeares 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, nonpropositional attitude with respect to its subject matter. This attitude relies
crucially on the doxological dimension, which repeatedly (in a non-identical
42
43
44
45
Burnt Norton, II, p.6.

Cusa, De Dato Patris Luminum, 1, 94
Cusa, De Dato Patris Luminum, 2,97.
Paul Griths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar (Washington, DC: The Catholic
University of America Press, 2009), p.62.
127
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 aords. 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 insuciently
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 oers highquality, prototypical examples of modern criticism and close reading. Our
reading draws on Vendlers analysis. Holding together the sonnets 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 dierence;
of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with
46
47
Vendler, The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets, p.11. As Coleridge writes, A poem contains the same
elements as a prose composition; the dierence therefore must consist in a dierent combination of
them, in consequence of a dierent object being proposed, Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia
Literaria, vol. II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907; rst published, London: Best Fenner, 1817),
p.8.
Vendler, The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets, p.4.
128
the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar
objects48 is the mark of the poetic power.
Nevertheless, readings such as Vendlers 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 dierent metaphysical context. We maintain
that a detailed Cusan reading, even of such well-known works as Shakespeares
sonnets, can both de-construct and intensify, without negating, such highquality 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 summers day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summers lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmd
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or natures changing course untrimmd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owst,
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderst in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growst:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 18s standard interpretation, typied by Vendlers, contrasts the

temporality of physical existence and the eternity of verse.50 Earthly transient
48
49
50
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p.12.

Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1957), p.73.
129
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 summers day.52 Yet this beauty is granted durability by
being held in the eternal lines of a poem; intelligibilia, the stu of the intellect,
endure and are immutable even though sensibilia, things sensed or experienced,
change. In the couplet, however, the poems 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-nite), contrasting privative innity with the negative innity
of God.55 His pre-modern, theocentric concept of salvation as deication
focused on the unmixed and unaltered unity of the latter, negative innity
(God), with our unique being as contracted (corralled) embodied creatures.56
A privative innity 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 Apostles 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.
51
52
53
54
55
56
We adopt Vendlers convention of italicizing quotations from verse and use Q1, Q2, Q3 to refer to
the three quatrains of a sonnet.
Vendler, The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets, p.121
Cusa, De docta ignorantia II, 1, 97.
Ho, The Analogical Turn, pp.152.; and Johannes Ho, Kontingenz, Berhrung, berschreitung.
Zur philosophischen Propdeutik christlicher Mystik nach Nikolaus von Kues (Freiburg im Breisgau,
Germany: Alber, 2007), pp.436.
130
We acknowledge, too, the important claim that the deepest insights57 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 rst 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 poems language use as doxological, as
working through the created order to the eternal, and as reecting 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 rst oered a
comparison of earthly beauties: the beloved and a summers 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 beloveds 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 couplets 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) innity 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 summers day and
57
58
59
60
61

131
thy beauty. Rather thy eternal beauty refers to a manifestation of the simplicity
of innite beauty in a unique creature, namely to the unadulterated and
straightforward unity of a nite creature with the (negative) innite, which
transcends all comparative relations and distinctions, including the distinction
between the nite and the innite.62 Yet how can the two, the nite and the
innite, be united, but still poignantly dissociated in the couplets nal
deationary 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 owst. It is generally
noted that owst can be read as ownest or owest.63 If created beauty is owed,
this ts comfortably with thy summers possession of the same, which exemplies
being and beauty on loan, owed to or descended from the transcendent
(Cusas Father of all gifts).
The subtlety of Q3 culminates in its last line and helps answer the question
of the nal deationary 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, gures, shapes,
proles or features of contingent creatures. Thus, the innite 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) innite. On this
reading, which intensies the standard one, no longer are the eternal lines . . .
potentiated only by a . . . succession of human readers.65 Nevertheless, the
62
63
64
65
Quoniam ex se manifestum est innti ad nitum proportionem non esse. [It is self-evident that there
is no comparative relation of the innite to the nite.] Cusa, De docta ignorantia I, 3, 9; cf. VS, 26,
79.
See for example, William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and A Lovers Complaint, ed. Jack Kerrigan
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), p.196.
Cusa, VS, c. 21 n. 6567; see also Gerda von Bredow, Der Gedanke der Singularitas in der
Altersphilosophie des Nikolaus von Kues. In Mitteilungen und Forschungsbeitrge der CusanusGesellschaft 4 (Mainz: Matthias Grnewald, 1964).
Vendler, The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets, p.122 (our emphasis).
132
power of the poetic lines to reveal the ephemeral lines of the beloved can be
strengthened by repeated reading thou growst 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 reects and transmits what he has received via the lines of his
poem to the repetitive lines of his readers. Such gifting testies to the eternal
quality of seeing and being seen, and owst then denotes indebtedness for the
actualization of beauteous life that growst through such a gift in eternal lines.
With this emphasis, the expansive quality of Q3 builds throughout. With
delicious irony, it pregures 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 oers his verse to the beloved he
acknowledges the temporality of this (line 14, rst mention) written gift, yet it
is this (line 14, second mention) very giving, the giving of the gift itself, the
poems 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 nite
realities exist only by gift and virtue of the (negative) innite 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 Cusas work.68
However, it is abundantly clear that Shakespeare was writing in precisely the
66
67
68
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 fullment in time, rather than escape
from time. John Spencer Hill, Innity, Faith and Time: Christian Humanism and Renaissance
Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997), p.100.
Although there are strong indications that a genealogical link can be made with Shakespeare via the
Cusa-inuenced 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.
133
same Augustinian tradition as Cusa.69 Hence, we maintain that Cusa is well

suited as Shakespeares 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 epoch, marked by hyper-reexivity
and an accompanying sceptical or ironical attitude with regard to passionate
commitments. Second, our contemporary world typically oscillates between
the ction 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 nd it dicult to dwell
in the metaxu, the paradoxical space between, where the hyper-determination
of the present moment exceeds our reexive 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 Cusas doxological
epoch, this pre-reexive commitment is not less but even more radical than
the sceptical spirituality of a phenomenological or postmodern epoch.70
Cusas doxological approach does not build on dogmatic, preliminary,
foundational decisions about the beauty and perfection of Gods 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, Cusas epoch builds only
on the basic insight of every science of praise: We do not praise something
69
70
Hill, Innity, Space and Time, pp.104126, especially p.126, and with regard to Cusas Augustinian
concept of temporality, p. 74. We do not agree, however, with Hills reading of Augustines (and
mutatis mutandis Cusas) concept of time as the correlative of mental activity (p.82). For a concise
account of Augustines anything but spiritualised concept of time, and its roots in the pre-reexive
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.297316.
Johannes Ho, 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).
134
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 Cusas unbroken attachment to this pre-reexive 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 aws of modern scientism, but also the spiritual aws of the
postmodern epoch of epoch.
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 nd 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 neer touched earthly faces
Instead, he continues, beautys true rights will be termed a poets rage / And
stretchd meter of an ntique song. Even so, and countercultural though it
might seem, Cusas full-blown epistemic, ontological, and metaphysical attitude
might be required of us as Shakespeares readers if we wish to enter fully into
the world of his sonnets. We might need, in other words, to bracket our latemodern, stoic habits, and disciplines of detachment, to pre-reexively engage,
and ally ourselves with the poets speech acts, and, by extension, with his
receptive reader, before we can grasp the full import of the text.75
71
72
73
74
75
Ho, The Analogical Turn, 16; cf. Cusa, De Sap, 20 and 35; and Ho, Kontingenz, Berhrung,
berschreitung, pp.406.
See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2007) for a discussion of the buered self, especially pp.3742.
See Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece (London: Reaktion, 2001); and Ho, The Analogical
Turn, p.129.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 17, Q2.
See Hill, Innity, Faith and Time, p.126 for a related suggestion that just such an engagement is
needed to appreciate fully The Winters 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,
135
If we choose to follow this interpretative route, we are left reecting on

Cusa:
Only the impossibility of accounting for the gift to be one can account for
our ability to discover in nite 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 nite 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 dierence
between identity and dierence 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.
76
77
78
M. Bortolussi, A. Chesnokova, and J. Auracher, Directions in Empirical Literary Studies (Amsterdam:

John Benjamins, 2008); Don Kuiken, Paul Campbell, and Paul Sopck, The Experiencing
Questionnaire: Locating Exceptional Reading Moments Scientic Study of Literature 2.2 (2012),
243272, doi 10.1075/ssol.2.2.04kui; Shelley Sikora, Don Kuiken, and David S. Miall, Expressive
Reading: A Phenomenological Study of Readers Experience of Coleridges The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 5.3, (2011), pp. 258268. doi: 0.1037/
a0021999. We thank Dr Connie Svob for drawing our attention to this work.
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 bankers
mind). Ho, The Analogical Turn, p.253, Fn. 114.
Ho, The Analogical Turn, p.177f.
Genuecting to Wittgensteins Tractatus, Derek Mahons 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.
136
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 Heavens command, to eye and ear,
And speak to social reasons inner sense,
With inarticulate language.1
John Ruskin believed in the mediatorial ministries of nature and his writings
are lled 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
signicance of literary depictions of nature. That critical notion is pathetic
fallacy. In this chapter, I want to reconsider what might be signied 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 Ruskins work and to show how this alternative theological model
opens up fresh ways of reading Romantic literature.
Wordsworth, The Excursion, IV, 12041207. Except for The Prelude, all references to Wordsworths
poetry are taken from The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, eds. E. de Selincourt and Helen
Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19401949). 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).
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, Ruskins God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.34. For
Ruskins discussion of the ordinance of the rmament and its mediatorial ministries, see Modern
Painters, vol. IV, The Firmament.
137
138
Gavin Hopps
Ontological scandal
At rst 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 reect 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 denitions.
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
articial, etc.4 Salient examples of such work include: Donna Haraways
feminist appropriation of the cyborg as a destabilizing hybrid or boundary
creature5; Bernard Stieglers reections on the prosthetic exteriorization of the
human and technics as the pursuit of life by means other than life6; the
baroque heterogeneities of Deleuze and Guatarris assemblages and
becomings, which challenge traditional notions of subjectivity and being7; the
As Jerey 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 personication 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.
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).
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.
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and
George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.17.
See, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi
(New York: Continuum, 1980).
139
unhomely betweens of Derridean spectrality and hauntology, which muddle

the categories of the living and the dead8; Silvia Bensos Levinasian account of
the faciality of insentient things9; Mario Perniolas 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; Agambens ruminations on bare life, the anthropological machine
or the indenite being of the Muselmann11; and the lyrical meditations of
Michel Serres on Hermes gures, parasites and the angelic ows of information
that subvert the distinction between the animate and inanimate.12 In spite of
their manifest dierences, 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 arms
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
9
10
11
12
13
14
Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International,
trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Silvia Benso, The Face of Things: A Dierent Side of Ethics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000).
Mario Perniola, The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic: Philosophies of Desire in the Modern World, trans.
Massimo Verdicchio (New York: Continuum, 2004), p.76.
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.
See Serres, Atlas, trans. Steven Connor (Paris: Julliard, 1994) and Angels: A Modern Myth, trans.
Francis Cowper (Paris: Flammarion, 1995).
Gregory Castle, The Literary Theory Handbook (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p.270.
Elaine Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), p.11.
140
Gavin Hopps
that paradoxically is and is not its own.15 What kind of ontology does this
entail? At stake here is an altogether dierent 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 ame out, like shining from shook foil [. . .].
(Gods Grandeur, 12)16
Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of mens faces.
(As Kingshers Catch Fire, 1214)
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 inux 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 isnt simply the selftranscending 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, innite and eternal or in excess of being, and if our only means of
representation are nite, how can we depict this excess?
15
16
17
In his reading of Augustines 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).
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).
Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York: Meridian, 1953), p.127.
141
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 rst
answer he gives in the great defence of natural theology that ensues prepares
the way for his personication 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 owers, 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
Augustines 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 world20 steers a middle course between
gnosticism and idolatry, though it also sets in motion an ontological ickering
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 claries Augustines 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
18
19
20
21
M. H. Abrams has compared Augustines colloquy with nature to Wordsworths 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.
Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Con (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961), p.211.
Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), p.170.
Augustine, Confessions, p.212.
142
Gavin Hopps
presents us with a more in nature that in some sense is and is not its own
(since creation doesnt 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 Augustines colloquy
with nature in which he reects 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
ickering 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 falsication 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
Maritains 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 doesnt 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 ction 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 reects its transcendent
Creator, then intimations of animacy or personhood will not necessarily be a
22
23
24
25
26
See Jean-Louis Chrtien, The Call and Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport (New York: Fordham
The phrase foreign luminosity is borrowed from Michel de Certeaus 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.
Graham Ward, Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000), p.81.
Williams, Grace and Necessity: Reections on Art and Love (London: Continuum, 2005), p.18.
Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III, p.164.
143
matter of ction. Rather, they may be an attempt by way of non-naturalistic

gurations to depict an otherwise inexpressible reality. It would therefore be a
mistake to label such gurations pathetic fallacy.
The distinction I am attempting to tease out between dierent uses of
animistic gurations may be claried with reference to Jean-Luc Marions
account of the icon and the idol. Very briey, 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 gurations that metaphorically refer to certain realities
(or, in presenting a distorted vision, reect a psychological truth) but do not
aspire beyond the plane of nitude, and those that serve an iconic function, in
pointing catachrestically towards that which is without being. (Orthodox icons
similarly employ alogical forms, non-naturalistic gurations 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 transgured 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 gurative language, but
he does in a number of separate discussions outline a positive variant of
27
28
Marion, God without Being: Hors Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991).
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.
144
Gavin Hopps
pathetic fallacy that is consonant with the foregoing iconic model.29 We nd

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
inuence of Wordsworths 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-o, 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 r 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 ne, 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 hearers
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 isnt always apparent and depends upon
a certain condition of mind that needs to be articially 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-o, wild, and dreamy images. Thus, it seems, not only are radical
gurative distortions justied in representations of nature, they are in Ruskins
view paradoxically necessary as a matter of ontological delity in order to
depict things as they are. How representative of Ruskins views is this account?
29
30
It is also worth noting that Ruskins more general Romantic contrast between imagination and
fancy converges towards Marions distinction between the enclosed immanence of the idol and the
innite 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.)
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.
145
We nd 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 rst 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 fullled, 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
owers 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 qualication 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
31
Modern Painters, vol. III, p.324.
146
Gavin Hopps
revelatory act that attempts to depict the ultimate nature of things.32 Manifestly,
this ultimate reality cannot be represented without a gurative swerve, as the
advertised stammering of seem all, in a sort suggests. Yet what this second
account of animistic gurations also makes clear is that, for Ruskin, nature is
in fact strangely animated by a divine presence its just that custom has
bedimmed its lustre. Thus, according to Ruskin, what tends uniformly to be
identied as pathetic fallacy may in some circumstances turn out to be a form
of apocalyptic impressionism or transcendental realism.33
Whilst the fame of Ruskins 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 Ruskins thinking. Indeed, we nd 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 personication,
which shall more deeply enforce them; and even the act of refreshing the mind
32
33
34
35
Jonathan Bate has also drawn attention to the way in which The Moral of the Landscape qualies
Ruskins chapter on pathetic fallacy. In this extraordinary analysis, he writes, Ruskin puts God
back into nature, in deance 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.
The rst phrase is used by Harold Bloom to describe Ruskins 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.
Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III, pp.4950.
147
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,
rstly, 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
gurations of the immaterial which may require the use of allegory, simile,
or personication are considered by Ruskin to be fallacious. On the contrary,
gurative 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 nd a parallel distinction, already
adumbrated in The Stones of Venice (18511853), 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 dierence
between the factual and the ctional, but is drawn according to dierences in
the manner of imagining (Ruskin illustrates his point by distinguishing
between true and false grins) which once again makes clear that for
Ruskin not all excessive gurations are fallacious. What this adds to the earlier
discussion, though, is a sense that certain realities, by dint of their nature,
can only be signied catachrestically, by means of allegory, simile, or
personication. 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
, 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 magnicent use, or so colossal a grasp of sacred
truth.39
36
37
38
39

148
Gavin Hopps
Ruskins unusual collocation eventful truth points us towards another

important feature of the grotesque namely, its aective 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 eort
of the mind to unweave the riddle, or to the sense it has of there being
an innite 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 eort 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 objects representation paradoxically becomes
part of the signifying process. More specically, 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, 335336). 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,
Ruskins preference for the term grotesque idealism reveals his religious
inection 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
40
41
42

Alison Milbank,A Fine Grotesque or a Pathetic Fallacy?: The Role of Objects in the Autobiographical
Writing of Ruskin and Proust in Ruskins Struggle for Coherence, eds. Rachel Dickinson and Keith
Hanley (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006), p.92.
The foregoing construal of the grotesque shadows Kants analytic of the sublime, which he
summarily denes 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.
149
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 eld of the telescope most when it reaches farthest.43
In Ruskins 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 Ruskins 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 nd 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 irrational46; and (iii) a parallel complementary account of intimations
of immanent excess, which are by contrast held to be truthful and are justied
in theological terms. Thus, if we read the account of pathetic fallacy in the
context of Ruskins 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 Ruskins only
43
44
45
46
Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 2 (London: George Allen, 1900), pp.198199. 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).
Ruskin emphatically arms this point in Modern Painters II: Of no other sources than these visible
can we, by any eort 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).
Speaking of mans 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 aection for it; Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III, p.285.
150
Gavin Hopps
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 Ruskins own writings on the subject. In this nal
section I want to consider, in a summary fashion, what dierence 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 reects 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.
47
48
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.
151
Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And tis my faith that every ower
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 Natures holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
Exhibited in this short poem are a number of Wordsworths 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 armed 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 poets 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
49
50
Wordsworth, Expostulation and Reply (1798), 24.

Cf. The Prelude, I, 3345.
152
Gavin Hopps
nature (though the phrase also dilates the souls capacity, as the use of far in
the Boy of Winander passage attributes innities to the human heart).51
Following this summary statement of his creed, the poet oers us a vision of
nature, which conspicuously involves what is typically seen as pathetic fallacy:
And tis my faith that every ower / 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 nonhuman nature?
On the face of it, there would seem to be two options available: either it
is a literal statement of belief that owers 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 gurative distortion. How does
this aect our reading of the poem?
An iconic interpretation might begin with the poems central intuition
of something excessive in nature. To speak of things in this abstract manner
may appear to remove us from the poets 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. Wordsworths 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
51
52
53
I am alluding to De Quinceys famous commentary on Wordsworths lines; De Quincey, Articles

from Taits Magazine and Blackwoods Magazine, 183841, ed. Julian North (London: Pickering and
Chatto, 2003), p.75.
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 Darwins Zoonomia underlies the faith of
Wordsworths doctrinal poems , which include Lines Written in Early Spring; Matlak, The Poetry
of Relationship: The Wordsworths and Coleridge, 17971800 (Basingstoke, UK: MacMillan, 1997),
p.114.
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.
153
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 armations: 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 poets circumspection appears to abide alongside rather than
exist at the expense of his countervailing boldness. (In Coleridges 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 lld55 the
intuition is retroactively cordoned o as a hypothesis and pushed out of being
by its subjunctive positing.) Alternatively, the advertised hesitancy of
Wordsworths claims might be a way of signalling the simultaneous operation
of two consciousnesses56 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 eld. (58)
54
55
56
The Prelude, II, 429430; VIII, 626630. 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 Wordsworths 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).
Coleridges Poetry and Prose, eds. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano (New
York: Norton, 2004), p.18, n. 6.
The Prelude, II, 32.
154
Gavin Hopps
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 ones 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 Ruskins 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 reects a problem of
perception. Instead, the poets 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 Wordsworths 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 were58 would
seem not to reect 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 icons advertised evasions of naturalistic
gurations. (An alternative strategy employed by Wordsworth for exhibiting
the inadequacies of language in the face of the ineable as part of a
performative attempt to signify the transcendent is the kind of predicative
intoxication we nd in his apocalyptic vision after crossing the Alps,59 in which
57
58
59
Potkay, Wordsworths Ethics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2012), p.83.
This rendering of the Greek (hs) 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.
The Prelude, VI, 556572.
155
superuity 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
poets wounding of his own articulacy seems to exemplify the principle
underlying Ruskins theory of the grotesque namely, that certain truths must
suer 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 ction are intertwined such that the
poet half-creates what he senses to be there, and gurative 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 poets 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 gurative
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
gurative 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 Wordsworths descriptions of celestial light and a
60
61
62
63
Earlier on in Book II of The Prelude, Wordsworth speaks of aniconic intimations by form / Or

image unprofaned (325326).
John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001), p.58.
In his illuminating study of Wordsworths poetic thinking, Simon Jarvis teases out a laudable
counterpart to the pejorative bestowal of moral meaning that is pathetic fallacy; Simon Jarvis,
Wordsworths Philosophical Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.46.
Woodman, Wordsworths Crazed Bedouin: The Prelude and the Fate of Madness, Studies in
Romanticism, 27.1 (1988), pp.329.
156
Gavin Hopps
visionary gleam are metaphorical and therefore a spell, conjuration or

delusion.64 Whilst a detailed engagement with Woodmans 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
gurative (dened as a perfect cheat), which structures the whole of
Woodmans 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 whats real, whats 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 gurative language with deception, which even
leaving the religious aside ignores huge swathes of everyday experience, such
as the connoisseurs speech about wine, in which gurative 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 gurative language
attempts to snu out its religious signicance. More positively, in upholding
the ability of gural 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 signicance
(though there may be an inchoate stirring of wonder or sense of a foreign
luminosity in nature signalled in conventional uses of the gure). 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
64
65
66
Woodman, Wordsworths Crazed Bedouin, pp.115117.

See Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
For an extended discussion of how gurative 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).
157
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 gurations 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 ctional 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 becomingarticulate 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 ction
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 Wordsworths case, as he is anxious to show
us that he is engaged in an open and on-going process of trying to work out
67
68
Alison Milbank, A Fine Grotesque or a Pathetic Fallacy?, p.93.

Ruskin, Modern Painters, III, p.167.
158
Gavin Hopps
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 reard
By observation of anities
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 transferrd
My own enjoyments, or, the power of truth
Coming in revelation, I conversd
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 overowing soul
I had receivd so much that all my thoughts
Were steepd in feeling; I was only then
Contented when with bliss ineable
I felt the sentiment of Being spread
Oer all that moves, and all that seemeth still,
Oer all, that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart,
Oer all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings,
Or beats the gladsome air, oer 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. (401430)
Wordsworth advertises the unforeclosed agnosticism of his ruminations in the

ors that stipple the rst part of this passage: the ecstatic intuition of the one
life is either a projection (I transferrd / My enjoyments) or it is a moment of
privileged vision, ascribed to the exceptional mind of the beholder (the
observation of anities / In objects where no brotherhood exists / To common
159
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 identied 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! (191197)
As a result of the line-break after knew, it is, as Ricks astutely observes, with a
gentle shock of mild surprise [that we nd] knew was not as in savoir but as in
connatre. 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 nd
a reversal of this miniature elegiac drama:
I mean to speak
Of that interminable building reard
By observation of anities
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 doesnt exist, and that what appeared
69
70
71
The poet similarly holds open a range of options in Book III of The Prelude: To every natural form,
rock, fruit or ower, / Even the loose stones that cover the high-way, I gave a moral life; I saw them
feel, / Or linked them to some feeling (130133).
For a general discussion of this phenomenon, see Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into
the Syntax of English Poetry (London: Routledge, 1955).
Ricks, Wordsworth: A Pure Organic Pleasure from the Lines, in Essays in Criticism, vol. XXI
(1971), p.27.
160
Gavin Hopps
to have been wistfully rescinded is in fact restored the other side of the linebreak. 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 Wordsworths verse doesnt just reinforce what
is explicitly said. Instead, the formal patterning of the poems syntax has an
eventfulness of its own, which is involved in the evocation of its speakers
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
suciently convinced to venture the assertion.
We should register, nally, two further complications of the poets giving or
creative perception. In the rst place, we should note that his agnosticism with
respect to causality is folded into a superordinate armative 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 innitude (VI, 538539). What this means in
terms of our general discussion is rstly that the poets 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
72
73
74
II, 381; 382; 387.

II, 382; 384. See also lines 328329, in which he speaks of the visionary power that came
strengthened with a superadded soul, / A virtue not its own.
Signicantly, the poet repeatedly refers to his soul in the preceding lines (II, 233; 244245; 337; 351
and 371372).
161
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
isnt a decorative or deceptive fancy but is instead an iconic fashioning of a
foreign luminosity that suuses 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 OConnor describes it, a distortion that reveals.75 The poet can
arm this, on the one hand, because the created order is of its nature selfgiving 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
whats there; and, on the other hand, because the poets giving turns out to
involve a form of receiving namely, the gift of being more than we are, by
virtue of the innite 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.
75
Novelist and Believer, in Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), p.162.
162
Love Among the Ruins

Hermeneutics of Theology and Literature in the
University after the Twentieth Century
Jerey Keuss
Seattle Pacic University, WA, USA
Consider the following two citations by Paul Ricur 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. Exemplied within the twentiethand twenty-rst-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
1
Paul Ricur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967),
p.350.
Paul Ricur, The Task of Hermeneutic, in Paul Ricur, Hermeneutic and the Human Sciences:
Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp.4362, especially p.45.
163
164
Jerey Keuss
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 Ricur and his call for a universal, evaluative conception
of the subjects 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 nd as our neighbour. As a restorative rather than
deconstructive thinker, Ricur is poised to look beyond the ruins of latetwentieth-century disciplinary dierentiation and post-structuralist rhetoric
by dening 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 testies 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 Ricur originally described as a second
naivet 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 concern5 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
4
5
For discussion of his method of attestation, see Paul Ricur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen
Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp.2123, 298302; and The Just, trans. David
Pellauer, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p.24.
Ricur, The Symbolism of Evil, p.351.
To recollect Paul Tillichs use of the phrase in reference to that which is of highest good and
meaning.
Je Keuss, The Poetics of Jesus: The Search for Christ Through Writing in the Nineteenth Century
(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002).
Hermeneutics of Theology and Literature
165
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 denition of Christs
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 t 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 dont
believe as much as a statement for certain beliefs. The poetics thereby make
claims that overturn the very denition 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.
166
Jerey Keuss
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 exemplied 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
denition.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 Eliots 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 eect 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
9
10
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 dierent medium, since dierent 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.3638.
167
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 eect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labours it may
at last x 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 Christianitys
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 esh and then being released into ineable meaning-making through the
preaching, teaching, and singing of Gods 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 rst 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 ction 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
11
12
13
George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study in Provincial Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; rst
published 18711872), pp.406407.
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.
Douglas A. Templeton, The New Testament as True Fiction (Sheeld, UK: Sheeld Academic Press,
1999), p.37.
168
Jerey Keuss
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 Acts17 and St. Pauls 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 nd 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 Ospring) 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
aorded such a title. Yet fast-forwarding to the present, we nd a dierent
reality than St. Paul. Theology is now understood as a disciplinarily specic
and overly described area of concern that largely negates the permeability
14
Dennis MacDonald, ed., Mimesis and Intertextuality in Antiquity and Christianity (Harrisburg, PA:
Trinity Press International, 2001), p. xi.
169
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 denes theology in
this way:
Theology is an oce 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 sanctied by the Holy Spirit and made into the
communion of the saints. Theology is under the Churchs authority because
it is a positive science, a mode of reasoned inquiry which has been given a
denite 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 Churchs protection because what
safeguards theologys truthfulness is not the exercise of critical scruple but
the fear of the one who is the Churchs Lord.15
Now return back to our reection on St. Pauls uses of pagan poets as key to
his theological grammar and his method of mission to and with the Athenians.
How does Websters denition hold up? I may be a bit anachronistic in applying
Websters modernist thought to the rst 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 Websters 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 Ricur and the Reguring of Theology makes the
astute observation that:
15
John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), pp.23.
170
Jerey Keuss
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 lled with technical jargon (although, again, it frequently
suers from those maladies), or even that it lacks signicance and value.
Indeed, theology is meaningful and helpful to a good number of folk; some
nd 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 (martyre) to
these things and has written (graph) them, and we know (oidamev plural
perfect active indicative: to know) that his testimony is true (alths). 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 (graph).17 Johns 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 (arch) was
the Word (logos) and now ending with the instrumentation of that logos in
graph (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 Gods 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
16
17
James Fodor, Christian Hermeneutics: Paul Ricur and the Reguring of Theology (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995), p. vii.
John 21.24, 25.
171
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 signicant 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 Scharlemanns The Being of God and the Experience of
Truth, Klemm employs Scharlemanns tripartite strategy of authentic meaningmaking 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
18
19
20
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.712.
David E. Klemm, Hermeneutic Inquiry. Volume I: The Interpretation of Texts (Atlanta, GA: Scholars
Press, 1986) p.2.
Klemm, Hermeneutic Inquiry. II, pp.2627.
172
Jerey Keuss
some way contesting how best to render an authentic balance and clear
articulation of conceiving, perceiving, and understanding.
Conservative approaches to hermeneutics are dened 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 reect the authors
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 scientic 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 dened 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
21
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).
173
via media is forged in which neither the text nor community has exclusive
rights to dominate or control the ow 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. Dierent points of view on the meaning of a text cannot always
be resolved, and may be the basis of acceptable but dierent 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 xity of certainty. As David Tracy
explains:
So deeply into ones 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 selfaggrandizement 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
22
23
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.
174
Jerey Keuss
is now termed Critical Hermeneutics arises in the mid-twentieth century

as an outgrowth of the Frankfurt School and a commentary upon Max Webers
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,
Jrgen Habermas sees aspects of Gadamers 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, Gadamers approach to hermeneutics is ultimately a treatise
seeking to bridge the humanities and social sciences where he chose to
concentrate his eorts on exposing and criticising the hermeneutic principles
which underlie the humanistic disciplines in their actual history and presentday manifestations.24 In this way a critical approach to hermeneutics is
ultimately engaged in the way humanities and social sciences provide sucient
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
exemplies the turn toward a radical approach to hermeneutics in the late
1970s and into the twenty-rst 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
24
25
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.
Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997).
175
what a center might mean26 that is to be deconstructed. In Hyppolites 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 Derridas answer was
as follows: I dont mean to say that I thought of approaching an idea of the
center that would be an armation.28 The center of which he speaks is not a
certain place, as we shall see, not a place to be armed 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 dierent forms or names and we ultimately lose that which we
seek. Derridas denition of center constitutes abstracted denitions of a
communally concerned identity: The center, which is by denition 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 specically a critique of any attempt to nd 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).
26
27
28
29
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.265. 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.
See footnote 26.
See footnote 26.
Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences in Writing and
Dierence (London: Routledge, 1978), p.279.
176
Jerey Keuss
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 nd a humble repose with one another. As the twenty-rst 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 nd 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-rst 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 Arnolds 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 re
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
ssures 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 ourishing is to point and reference the innite
depth of meaning in the structure of literary, philosophical, or for that matter,
scientic hermeneutic as an outsider that is also of the heritage of all these. In
177
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
innite ground of thought and experience found in writing and the reception
of texts, or by making explicit the implicit ultimate presupposition of the
innite 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 oer a fullment 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
innite ground of all meaning and name God in the text. Second, a poetics
of Melchizedek can interpret signicant symbols that stand for the element of
the innite ground within the manifest structure of the plot such as the
Christological element that arises. Third, it can interpret the ways in which
specic linguistic symbols or gures of speech combine with structural
elements to produce thought of the innite 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.
178
Thrashing between Exoneration

and Excoriation
Creating Narratives in We Need to Talk About Kevin
Zo Lehmann Imfeld
University of Bern, Switzerland
Lionel Shrivers 2001 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin follows Eva
Katchadourian as she reels in the aftermath of the actions of her fteenyear-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, Kevins mother Eva attempts to understand Kevins actions, and
indeed Kevin himself. She writes:
I have reected 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. Its the same solid steel wall that inserts itself between a knife and
my wrist even when Im at my most disconsolate. So how was Kevin able to
raise that crossbow, point it at Lauras breastbone [the rst 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 Kevins childhood, and indeed her own life before it, in an attempt
at emplotment and conguration 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: Serpents Tail, 2003), p.443.
179
180
Zo Lehmann Imfeld
This chapter will understand the narrative process depicted in We Need to

Talk About Kevin through Paul Ricurs 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 Evas narrative
demonstrates an attempt at a hermeneutical process through which she
and the reader can come to terms with both Kevins humanity and the
inhumanity of his actions. Evas epistolary narration is one of conguration
and reconguration in which she attempts to bring Kevin into being
by searching for him within a post-hoc narrative. By doing so Eva conrms
Hans-Georg Gadamers recognition that our way of being in the world is
irreducibly hermeneutical.2
Ricur describes a narrative arc which, through the mimetic process of
preconguration, conguration, and reconguration, shows the self to be
embedded in the story of ones 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 reply4 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, Ricur shows identity to be comprised both of sameness and
dierence. While through idem we identify through sameness to a group, ipse
describes selfhood. Ricur writes: The dierence between idem and ipse is
nothing more that the dierence 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. Ricur
emphasizes that we are mutually vulnerable, and that self-esteem, preceding
4
5
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.
Paul Ricur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1992), p.143.
Ricur, Oneself as Another, p.147.
Paul Ricur, Time and Narrative: Vol.3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), p.276.
Narratives in We Need to Talk About Kevin
181
self-respect, relies on reciprocity. Ricur calls this solicitude.6 The normative

process that develops from this fundamental solicitude will be discussed
further below, as Kevins actions are shown to demonstrate the devastating
consequences of its absence.
Meanwhile, however, Evas attempt at a reconguration of her own and
Kevins narrative reveals a tension between the hermeneutic circle of mimesis
and the dependency on another in Ricurs narrative arc. In Time and
Narrative, Paul Ricur describes a hermeneutical cycle of narrative made up of
a threefold mimesis. This cycle is begun by a preguring of the plot (mimesis1)
which is followed by conguration (mimesis2) and reconguration (mimesis3).
Ricur draws heavily on Aristotles Poetics for his construction of mimesis, and
Aristotles 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 Laiuss kingship is to understand his
fear of a prophecy of his downfall. As Ricur 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 conguration, comes the unity of emplotment, 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 Ricur in understanding Evas narrative, the process of conguration mediates the paradox of
temporality in a story. To follow a story is to have imperfect knowledge of it,
6
7
Ricur, Oneself, p.190.

Paul Ricur, Time and Narrative: Vol.1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p.57.
Ricur, Time and Narrative, p.65.
182
Zo Lehmann Imfeld
but the conclusion to that story allows it to be perceived as a unied whole. Of

this end point, Ricur 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 fulls this congurational 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 recongure 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 Ricur
claims, that the traversal of mimesis reaches its fulllment.12
This actualization is crucial to Evas narrative. To Ricur, mimesis2 is the
pivotal point of the hermeneutical cycle, as at mimesis3 the narrative is given
over to the reader. Reconguration, 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) Evas hermeneutical process of
conguration and reconguration allows her not only to start to understand
Kevin, but to bring herself and her family more fully into being, even after the
9
10
11
12
13

David Parker, The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2007), p.175.
Shriver, Kevin, p.385.
183
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 Ive felt compelled to weave
some thread of connection between the otherwise meaningless dishevelment
of that backyard [where Eva nds the bodies of her husband and daughter]
and the nest in the man I married.14
Evas 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 rstly, to describe Shrivers novel as a thinly-veiled Christian
apologetic, which it clearly is not, and secondly, to do an injustice to Ricurs
own careful disentanglement of philosophy and theology in his own writings.
This is not, therefore, a reading in which Ricurs hermeneutic should be
subordinated to narrative theology. Rather, I hope to describe an instance in
which a hermeneutical reading after Ricur can be fully realized through a
theological anthropology.
In an eort to strengthen the dialogue between Ricur and certain strands
of theology, Boyd Blundell takes care to acknowledge Karl Barths dierentiation
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, Ricur 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
14
15

Boyd Blundell, Paul Ricur between Theology and Philosophy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2010); Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol 3, eds. Georey William Bromiley, Thomas F.
Torrance and G. T. Thomson (Edinburgh, UK: T & T Clark, 1977; originally published in 1936),
III/2 p.71.
184
Zo Lehmann Imfeld
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 Kevins

narrative, Evas 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 ones own
narrative. Evas narrative is one in which she recongures herself and Kevin
from phenomenal human beings to human creatures.
If Evas narrative is to be a beginning, however, rather than a conclusion, it
must involve a pre-conguration, 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 rst
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 Franklins approach to fatherhood,
for instance, Eva writes to him: There was a persistently generic character to
your adoration that Im 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 reect the metamodern friction between a
univocal identity construct and total equivocity.19 The decision to have a child
16
17
18
19
Ricur, 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.
The couples conversations before Kevins 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 signicance that is absent in Franklins American heritage: You care
about your last name just because its 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).
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 dene metamodernism as a
discourse that oscillat[es] between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony.
185
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 signiers 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 elds and caring for elderly
parents), love, story, content, faith in the human thing the modern
incentives are like dirigibles, immense, oating, and few; optimistic, largehearted, even profound, but ominously ungrounded.22
Ricur writes that the destruction of any genuine sense of tradition and
authority [. . .] amounts to an increase of forgetfulness, especially that of the
past suerings 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
suering on which to congure 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:
20
21
22
23
24

William Desmond, God and the Between (Chennai, India: Blackwell, 2008), p.21.
Ricur, 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).
Cf. Ricur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1969), p.8.
186
Zo Lehmann Imfeld
I learned studying anthropology at Green bay that its important to observe

cultural rituals.
Just so long as theyre 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 congure 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 mans capability to turn away from
God and towards nothingness, but in this novel, Kevin is blindly eeing 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
25
26
27
28
29

Cf. Ricur, Symbolism of Evil, pp. 79, 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 mans knowledge of himself. [Original italics.] Ricur 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.
Desmond, God and the Between, p.63. [Original italics.]
187
overdrive of the endeavour to be,30 anticipates the dissymmetry between what

one does and what one does to another, which Ricur identies as powerover.31 This exercise of power-over, in its opposition to the armation of
solicitude, can, by Ricur, be held to be the occasion par excellence of the evil
of violence.32 Indeed, it is against the thereness of Kevins forced actuality that
Evas interpretative process struggles throughout the novel.
In her visits to the juvenile prison where Kevin is held, Eva comes to see that
Kevins 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 kid33 to his father), Kevin announces to Eva
that now, as a notorious killer, Im not playing a part. I am the part.34 Unlike his
mother, however, he has not begun to congure 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 conguring the events of Thursday and
reconguring 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 signies the tension at the point between storyteller and reader,
so too she signies the point at which the being of culprit and being of victim
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
Desmond, God and the Between, p.21.

Shriver, Kevin, p.216. The theme of Kevins acting to his fathers 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 reconguration develops that she comes to see her own view of
a sociopathic child as just as much a constructed identity.
Shriver, Kevin, p.287. [Original italics.]
Ricur, Time and Narrative 1, p.75, quoting Wilhelm Schapp.
188
Zo Lehmann Imfeld
meet. Evas 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 Ricurs recognition of evil as two heterogeneous categories, the doing of
evil and the suering 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 Ricur, 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 nds Eva in an existential limbo, isolated
from those around her and living in a sparsely furnished apartment. She writes:
This tremulous little house it doesnt feel quite real, Franklin. And neither do
I.40 Through storytelling, Eva realizes that her conguration 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 transgures her experiences by reading
herself in the narrative. In forensically retelling Kevins 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 Id felt whole, and like Kevin Khatchadourians real mother. I
felt close to him. I felt like myself my true, unexpurgated self and I felt we
were nally communicating.41 Though still unreconciled at this stage in the
novel, and arguably unconvincing if the scene is read as a justication, Evas
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 Id
38
39
40
41
Ricur, 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.
Ricur, Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology, p.250.
189
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, Evas internal hermeneutic circle can open out to (and for)
Kevin. As Ricur writes:
This is perhaps the supreme test of solicitude, when unequal power nds
compensation in an authentic reciprocity in exchange, which in the hour of
agony, nds 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 conned to one single deed
from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its
consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerers 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 Ricur and Arendt see in forgiveness the
possibilities for beginning, in which both culprit and victim can be freed from
the act committed. Shrivers novel, however, illustrates the complexity of the
process of forgiveness, arming that it is a process, one in which both culprit
and victim must participate for it to have meaning.
Evas isolation is punctuated with social interactions in which she faces the
world as Kevins mother: Its still dicult for me to venture into public. [. . .] No
one in this community shows any signs of forgetting, after a year and eight
42
43
44
45

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p.237.
190
Zo Lehmann Imfeld
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 diculties in
responding to a woman who is both within and without that community. Evas
encounters with the community demonstrate the fractured nature of their
responses to Thursday. Amongst incidents of impotent vengeance (such as
when Eva nds her eggs broken in her shopping trolley), Eva records
the communitys attempts to reach reconciliation, and nds 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
Evas response reveals that such forgiveness is unconvincing because the

culprit, Kevin, is essentially absent from it. Aside from Kevins 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 re on
his schools 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 ve, but judging from
the cheek-turning memorial services and merciful banners in classroom
46
47
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 re on the schools prayer group, killing
three students and injuring ve.
191
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 congure the narrative language with
which to enable Kevins confession and penance; she is the only one able to
receive that penance, and thus complete it with genuine forgiveness. Evas
process from lament to confession and penance is not one in which she absorbs
Kevins 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 conrms Ricurs
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 Kevins
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 Kevins act might be part of
her narrative, it is not her story. Instead, Evas 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 Evas weekly visits
to Kevin, during which she seeks to challenge Kevins 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 aord forgiveness. Eva sees this in the
attempts by others to reassign Kevins guilt to the circumstances surrounding
his actions: Kevin has received dozens of letters oering to share his pain,
49
50
51
52
53

192
Zo Lehmann Imfeld
apologizing for societys 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, Kevins
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 lm of the shootings:
And while were on that, I wanna complain that Miramax and everybody
should be paying me some kind of fee. Theyre stealing my story, and that
story was a lot of work. I dont think its legal to swipe it for free.
But its against the law in this state for criminals to prot from
Again, Kevin swung to the camera. My story is about all I got to my name
right now, and thats why I feel robbed. But a storys a whole lot more than
most people got.55
In their nal 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 Kevins
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 oering him the potential tools for
his own confession. For the rst time, Kevins 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 Im not so sure.57 It is clear
that Kevin has begun his own process not simply of telling a story, but
of conguring his narrative and thus reconguring his myth of self. For
Kevin, writes Eva, progress was deconstruction. He would only begin to
plumb his own depths by rst nding himself unfathomable.58 From here,
Kevins own process of confession and penance can (potentially) begin,
and the novel ends with a bedroom ready for him in his mothers serviceable
apartment.
54
55
56
57
58

193
In Fallible Man, Ricur 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 arms Gadamers claim that a

hermeneutic existence is necessarily pre-judicial.60 An act of evil must be
congured 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 conguration of narrative (though perhaps dicult
enough in such an event as Thursday) is necessary in making intelligible the
events, the narrative also requires reconguration, in which meaning can be
revealed.
Narrative theologians ascribe this recongurative task to Biblical narrative.
The stories are universal narratives of a people, in which sin is made universal,
as is suering. 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 eect 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 congures and
recongures her own narrative, acknowledging Kevins 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, Evas narrative of reconciliation reveals the possibility for
59
60
61
62
63
Ricur, 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.
194
Zo Lehmann Imfeld
modes of being that transcend social or moral constructs. Evas 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
Evas narrative, her gift of story, is ultimately just such an act of faith. Through
her narrative process, Eva is able to deconstruct rst the constructed identities
that she and her husband have imposed on Kevin, then those that he has
imposed on himself. Evas hermeneutic journey is actualized not by a narrative
arc that submits, ultimately, to a reader, but by its fullment in an anthropology
that is recognizably theological. This is an anthropology not of ontological
autonomy, but, as Ricur 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 Kevins guilt and Kevin as himself can begin.
64
65
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), pp.114115.
Ricur, Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology, p.260.
10
The Shakespeare Music

Eliot and von Balthasar on Shakespeares
Romances and the Ultra-dramatic1
Aaron Riches
Instituto de Teologa Lumen Gentium and Instituto
de Filosofa Edith Stein, Granada, Spain
But, hark, what music?

.......................................
The music of the spheres!
.......................................
Most heavenly music!
It nips me unto listening . . .
Shakespeare, Pericles (21.211221)2
In the prolegomena to the Theodramatik, Hans Urs von Balthasar singles out
Shakespeares late so-called romance plays as unique realizations of the
Christian drama of forgiveness.3 According to Balthasar, Pericles, Cymbeline,
1
I owe a great debt of gratitude to the late Mrs. Valerie Eliot, for rst granting me permission (many
years ago) to read her husbands unpublished lectures on Shakespeare. I would also like to thank
Padre Ricardo Aldana, SDJ, of the Instituto de Teologa Lumen Gentium, for fruitful comments on
an earlier draft of this essay and for conversations on Balthasar and tragedy. Finally, I thank Alison,
Zo, and Peter, for their valuable editorial suggestions.
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 Winters
Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans.
Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1989), pp.135140. 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 signicance of Shakespeares later plays, see Raphael
Lyne, Shakespeares Late Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Frank Kermode,
Shakespeares Language (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2000); various of the essays in Anne
Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kiernan
195
196
Aaron Riches
The Winters 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 Shakespeares
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
Shakespeares 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
reied non-meaning into a xed 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
7
8
Ryan, Shakespeares Last Plays (London: Longman, 1999); Ruth Nevo, Shakespeares Other Language
(New York: Methuen, 1987); and Alison Thorne, Shakespeares 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 Kings 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.138154.
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 Dierence of Theology (London: Routledge, 2002).
Cf. Slocombe, Sublime, p.107: Shakespeares King Lear (1605) . . . may end on a note in which Alls
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.
Eliot and von Balthasar on Shakespeare
197
and is realized by, a reexive nihilism for which now even the absolute quality
of non-meaning and death are radically questioned. Thus reexive nihilism
opens up a vision of the unencompassability of meaning and reality, predicated on a negative mystery, which forces us to see the whole world with fresh
eyes by turning ourselves inside out .10
The reexive 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 dierent kind of mystical
vision, one that preserves the drama of tragedy now in an overow of meaningas-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 Shakespeares last plays. Setting it against the backdrop of the reexive
nihilism of the sublime postmodern, it oers 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 Shakespeares late plays. The
essay is divided into three sections. The rst 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
10
11
12
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.1215).
David R. Morgan, And Now the Void: Twentieth Century Mans Place in Modern Tragedy,
Contemporary Review 234 (1979), pp.315320, p.320. Cited in Slocombe, Sublime, p.107.
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.
198
Aaron Riches
focuses on Eliots reading of Shakespeares 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 nal section explores Balthasars reading of Shakespeare
and the World Stage, and how Shakespeares 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 Winters 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 Winters Tale, having accused his wife of indelity only then to suer
(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 suered 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
13
14
Cf. Russ McDonald, You speak a language that I understand not: listening to the last plays, in The
Cambridge Companion to Shakespeares Last Plays, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp.91112, at p.91.
Nevo, Shakespeares Other Language, p.6.
199
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 oenders, 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 nds
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 purication (catharsis) of those destructive or
painful acts17 is also based on the dramatics of recognition and reversal.18
Aristotle argued that the nest 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 puried by the tragic action, Balthasar clearly construes
15
16
17
18
19
20
T. S. Eliot, Introduction to G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London: Methuen, 1961; rst
published in 1930), p. xx.
Aristotle, Poetics (1449b). Quotations from Aristotles poetics follow George Whalley, Aristotles
Poetics, eds. John Baxter and Patrick Atherton (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University
Press, 1997). All square brackets in Aristotle quotations are Whalleys; curved brackets are mine.
Aristotle, Poetics (1452a).
Aristotle, Poetics (1449b).
200
Aaron Riches
it as productive of the purication of the spectator.21 Specically 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 nite being who is yet animated by desire for the innite; 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 pacied Yes that has collected together with care all the
21
22
23
24
25
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.391411, at p.398.
Balthasar, Tragedy, p.398.
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.724.
201
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
arming against everything the meaning of human existence and the value
of human action. Against this backdrop, the dramatic novum realized in
Shakespeares 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 ngers 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 Shakespeares late plays, as
we shall now see.
Eliots reading of Shakespeares last plays

In the Edinburgh lectures of 1937, Eliot recapitulated signicantly what he
had already expressed in his fourth Ariel poem, Marina (1930), in which
he realized a ne poetical interpretation of the recognition scene of
Pericles.28
Shakespeares 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 (18.2729). This is how we nd Pericles when his ship comes to Mytilene,
where the governor, hearing of the grief of Pericles, sends Marina, who has
26
27
28

Cf. Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Charter and Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984),
pp.157179.
202
Aaron Riches
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
Oerbear the shores of my mortality
And drown me with their sweetness! (To Marina) O come hither,
Thou that begattst him that did thee begat,
Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tarsus,
And found at sea again! (21.179186)
In the Edinburgh lectures, Eliot insisted that this is the nest 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 lial begetting. To any student of Dante, Thou that begattst him that did
thee begat could only have sounded like an echo of the Marian line of the
Paradiso: glia del tuo glio.32 The paradox of the fathers liation 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 Eliots poem: Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?33
29
30
31
32
33
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?
203
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 t of madness provoked by the goddess Juno. Eliot wrote of the epigraph
that he intended a criss-cross between Pericles nding alive, and Hercules
nding 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 nite 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, 5.1.221225).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 innitely
greater complexity of dramatic reality irreducible to death. And so just as
the resurrected Christ bears forever the wounds of his death and crucixion,
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 Eliots Marina is a poetic commentary on the recognition motif
in Shakespeares late plays, we can here pinpoint the epigraph as signalling
the new cathartic reality of ultra-dramatic recognition. The recognition of
Hercules exemplies a classical recognition scene that conrms 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
34
35
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.
Bush, A Study in Charter and Style, p.167
204
Aaron Riches
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 veried in
This form, this face, this life / Living to live in a world of time beyond me
(2930).
Having recognized his daughter and put on fresh clothes, Shakespeares
Pericles begins to hear the music of the spheres (21.216), a Most heavenly
music that nips me unto listening (21.220221). 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 Eliots 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 Eliots 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 speakers hope, the new ships (32). All of this signies, in
36
37
38

Eliot, Introduction to Knight, The Wheel of Fire, p. xix.
Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), p.87.
205
poetical form, how Eliot understood Shakespeare to have moved into the
drama of an experience of encounter that lies beyond the nameable, classiable
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
Balthasars reading of Shakespeare and the World Stage

Balthasars similar understanding of Shakespeares 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 Jaquess All the worlds a stage (As You Like It,
2.7.139143) and in Macbeths 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 5.5.2428).
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 Gloucesters declaration in King Lear: As ies to wanton boys are we to th
gods; / They kill us for their sport (15.3536). At the core of the veiled mystery
of the relation of human suering 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
39
40
41
42
43
44
Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, p.86.

Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, pp. 135257. For an overview of the ve volumes of Balthasars
Theodramatik, see Aidan Nichols OP, No Bloodless Myth: A Guide Through Balthasars Dramatics
(Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2000).
Most commonly loosely translated as All the worlds a stage.
Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 1, p.162, and cf. n. 28.
206
Aaron Riches
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 nitude and yet discover and
know that he possesses an innite 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 nitude, 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 Jephthahs 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 armed even in his whole nitude 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 gure 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 oered 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 fullling them in itself. And it fulls the contraction
of the existence (ex-sistentia) that emerges in ekstasis into the divine
darkness, not by dissolving the contradiction but by bearing that armation
of the human situation as it is through a still deeper darkness in nem, to the
45
46
47
48

Balthasar, Tragedy, pp.393395.
207
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, Gods 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 conrms 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 transgures 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 nding dead and Pericles
nding 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 suering, or the injury of sin, it transgures 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.
49
50
51
52
53
54

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.8384.
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.
208
Aaron Riches
For Balthasar, the truth of the Christian World Stage was realized in the
theatre above all by Pedro Caldern 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 Caldern articulates in the clearest way the theo-dramatic reality of the
World Stage, it is Shakespeare who dramatizes the newness of the theodramatic gesture of the rarer action: the dramatist of forgiveness is and
remains Shakespeare.57 And so if Caldern 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 postguration 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 identies 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.
55
56
57
58
59
Cf. Christian Andrs, La metfora del theatrum mundi en Pierre Boaistuau y Caldern, Criticn
91 (2004), pp.6778.
Do good, for God is God.
209
Prosperos original power is magnicently realized in Peter Greenaways

lm adaptation of The Tempest, Prosperos Books (1991). In Prosperos Books,
Greenaway has Prospero speak the lines of every character, reducing in this
way the dramatic action of the play to the power of Prosperos 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 Prosperos acknowledgement of the theatricality
of his magic (cf. 4.1.148156). In Prosperos 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, nds its full meaning in Prosperos resolve to break my sta, /
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth (5.1.5455), 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 (5.1.333334). In this way Prosperos 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 Eliots 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 suering-death:
60
In this paragraph I am indebted to Emma Smiths lecture on The Tempest, delivered as part
of her Oxford University series on Approaching Shakespeare (http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/
approaching-shakespeare).
210
Aaron Riches
I have hope to see the nuptial

Of these our dear-belovd solemnizd;
And thence retire me to my Milan, where
Every third thought shall be my grave. (5.1.308311)
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 . . . nding alive, and . . . nding dead the two extremes of the
recognition scene62 is internal to the vision of The Tempest in a way that
unsettles the possibility of a sentimental reading of the plays 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 Prosperos 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 Briey 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. (510)
Putting these words into the mouth of Shakespeares Prospero, Auden helps us
to see how the magicians 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 Shakespeares
61
62
63
64
Cf. Nevo, Shakespeares Other Language, pp.130152.

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.
See Harry Berger, Jr, Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeares Tempest, Shakespeare Studies 5
(1969), pp.253283.
W. H. Auden, The Sea and Mirror: A Poem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; rst published in
1944).
211
ultra-drama. That the tragedy of death is only overcome in the ultimate

renunciation of self , conrms and conforms to the gesture of Jesus himself,
who is the rstborn of the dead (Rev. 1.5). The recognition and reversal of
death that issues from the Paschal Mystery of the Son, nally, 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 Shakespeares 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 overowing abundance of the grace of forgiveness.66 And yet
what is crucial in this overowing of grace is that the costliness of mercy is
never undervalued. Shakespeare does not abandon the order of justice.67 All
this leads to Balthasars nal judgement of Shakespeares 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 nal passage into forgiveness can no less
negate justice than can the passage beyond tragedy negate death; to the
contrary, the nal 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 condent
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
65
66
67
68
69

212
Aaron Riches
aware that the cost of forgiveness . . . must be a rarity if it is to have its full
eect.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 lifes miracle: the human gesture of
renouncing oneself for an other.
Conclusion
In Le Thtre et son Double, published two years after Eliots 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 o one image that
will shake the organism to its foundations and leave an ineaceable 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 ecacy strong
enough to make us forget the very necessity of speech.73
In some respects the programme of Artaud nds a correlate in Eliots
understanding of Shakespeares 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
70
71
72
73

Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), pp.7677.
Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, p.108.
Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, p.108.
213
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 Shakespeares late plays are crucial because they
dramatize, in the rarer action, an embodied gesture of esh 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 Sacrice 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 ngers the knot of tragedy to reveal the deeper mystery of the rarer
action.
214
11
Fictioning Things
Gift and Narrative
John Milbank
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 inuence. And yet, through
the medium of childrens 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 reection 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. Knoepmacher, The Complete Fairy
Tales (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1999).
215
216
John Milbank
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, Pullmans ethical prescription remains
a theological one of a sort he oers a kind of materialist Gnosticism as an
alternative to orthodox Christian faith.
The fact that it is now possible and respectable to oer 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 ctional critique
in the shape of D. P. Taylors Shadowmancer3 unfortunately a work that is well
conceived but poorly executed, though little more so than the latter part of
Pullmans trilogy, which severely degenerates, perhaps because of its
mythopoeic incoherency, after the unsurpassed brilliance of the rst volume
(especially the rst half). And of course the Harry Potter sequence so much
better in the lms 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 reection 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
ctionalized 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
Eland in Orthodoxy (London: The Bodley Head, 1957), pp.66103.
Taylor, D. P., Shadowmancer (London: Faber and Faber, 2003).
Fictioning Things: Gift and Narrative
217
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 ctional imagination? Can there be in any sense a realist understanding
of this literatures 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 ctional 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
suciently 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 neopaganism, 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 nd 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 nally 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 reection. 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
218
John Milbank
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 rst 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
reection 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 selfsacrice.
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 sacricial suering and preparedness to
die. This is not however to say that Christianity identies childish innocence
with Adamic innocence; that would be the post-Christian Rousseauian
modication 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.198205, 222231,
232251, esp. 223: It is innocence that is full and experience that is empty, etc.
Milbank, John, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), pp.126.
219
a corrupted habitual tendency and so an adult travail to be gone through,

which necessitates self-sacrice and the preparedness to die oneself rather
than inict 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 eects 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 reection whatsoever. It is clear, as I have
already suggested, that for Christian doctrine Gods 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 rst 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, suered, 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).
220
John Milbank
integrity of ones 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 crucixion.
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 Pullmans 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 nally 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 oer a Gnostic account of the need for transgression
and of loss if we are to grow up. In George Macdonalds work however, there is
something like a Blakean sense that if the sexual eld 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 oered in the shape of
7
Peguy, Charles, Basic Verities, p.223.
221
ones sexual partner, and its seless excess to the contrast between sacrice 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 guratively, 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 ctional 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 nite things, including in a sexual sense.
As with his friend and contemporary Lewis Carroll and with Chesterton later
on, Macdonalds 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 specic 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
ctional 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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John Milbank
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 Princesss tears fall rst
through joy when the Prince is resurrected from his sacricial death. In this
way a Gnostic or Hegelian message that all spiritual reality must suer 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 suering of which her levity
remains autistically oblivious, but rather through her rebirth into genuine
humanity including the capacity for sympathetic suering 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 Pullmans critique is unable truly to come to terms
with. One could say something similar about Pullmans key theme of selfreection, self-consciousness and the acquiring of a determinable identity
when ones daemon takes on a xed 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
dierent 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 full it will automatically follow
. . . this is true of Joan Aikens Dido Twite, who remains very much a child and
on whom it seems to me Lyra may be somewhat based. Adolescent selfconsciousness, 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 Lyras character does not seem to alter suciently and
223
her adolescent experimentation is too confused with a childish and

uncomplicated directness.
Moreover and more decisively, the reduction of ones daemon to one xed
shape, since it occurs under the aegis of an insecure adolescent trying-on of a
specic front, is surely both more unstable and less nal than Pullmans ction
imposes? One could argue that such a reaching for xity 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-reection within a certain forgetting of self in order to re-engage with the
world, and where also one steps somewhat back into a exibility of role-playing
in the surer knowledge that ones 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-reection is correlated with the realization that, if the individual
mind uniquely reects the world, then also certain aspects of the world are
thereby reected 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 signicance, 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-reection is also an induction into the world reecting 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,
8
See Lewis, C. S., Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life (London: Georey Bles, 1955).
224
John Milbank
attached to ones 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 dierent 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 selfconscious 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 childs 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 ones 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 dening 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 dierent
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
congurations. Perhaps the great British-Irish literary theme from the
225
hero-tales and the Mabinogion through to Brian Merriman (the eighteenthcentury 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 rst learn is the pregnant essential, the entire
grammar, including linguistic grammar, within whose innite 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 rst oer to the uninitiated. Since
children rst 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 rst 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 childrens literature has
See in particular, Kipling, Rudyard, Puck of Pooks 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.
226
John Milbank
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 oer 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 childrens 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 oered foundational narratives, then
one might say that this is because childrens 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 personication. But in all three instances,
claims Detienne, the critical turn against myth failed to reect 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
10
Detienne, Marcel, LInvention de la mythologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), pp.1587.
227
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 Detiennes 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 conicting answers were supplied.
Myth was proto-science (Comte); it was language without abstraction (Tylor);
it was the deceit of metaphor (Max Mller); it was the trace of the subconscious
(Freud); it was the detritus of an archaic humanity which confused subject and
object (Lvy-Bruhl), or it was rather the work of a strictly rational classication
and grasping of contradictions, albeit in concrete terms (Lvi-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.
11
12
Detienne, LInvention de la mythologie, pp.1550.

For an excellent summary of this history, see Segal, Robert, Myth: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
228
John Milbank
Now, on the whole, I suspect that Detienne is right. Nevertheless there are
three ways in which one might defend a certain specicity of myth after all,
building on some of Detiennes own observations.
First of all, he himself notes that in terms of written culture there is a great
dierence 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 oce. 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 xing in the public
realm certain exemplary key laws, narratives, and prophecies. But Detienne
fails to reect 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 dierences 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
13
Detienne, LInvention de la mythologie, pp.155224.
229
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
puried religious belief and practice free of all myth, with Plato, who seeks
rather to re-tell myth in a puried form. At rst in The Republic, this seems to
be a matter of an lite 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 justication
for this but there might indeed be so. One can take mythos in the Greek sense
14
15
16
Milbank, John, Pleonasm, Speech and Writing, in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language,
Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp.5584.
Derrida, Jacques, On Grammatology trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1976).
Detienne, Marcel, The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: The
Humanities Press, 1977), pp.155190; see Plato, Laws, X, 887 c8el; XII 966 c5.
230
John Milbank
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 rst 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
Virgils 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 anity 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 Cinderellas 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
gure like Cinderellas fairy-godmother. So, for example, in the Scottish tale
The Land of Green Mountains the helper-gure clearly knows in advance that
the hero will violate the ban on touching anything in the princesss bronze
castle because, prior to this violation, he has already ensured that the hero
17
This task has been carried out by Graham Anderson in his Fairytale in the Ancient World (London:
Routledge, 2000).
231
secure for himself the friendship of a giant and the king of the sh, 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
sacrice, as in the Vedas. Often, in consequence, the ritual relation to myth
concerns a sacricial 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-sacricial donation of the good, true,
and beautiful. His reformation of myth in eect constituted an intellectuallyled 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 xed
graphic boundaries whether with other cultures or with myth whose
institution may be conceived as unilateral, arbitrary, violent. Plato in eect
projects the inner reality of oral culture also onto its margins and onto its
18
19
The Land of Green Mountains in Scottish Fairy Tales, ed. Donald Mackenzie (New York: Dover,
1997), pp.6492. See also The Rider of Grianaig and Iain the Soldiers Son in Popular Tales of the
West Highlands, vol 2, comp. and trans. J. E. Campbell (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1994), pp.212239, for
a similar story in which the sender-helper gure is a raven.
See Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet
Lloyd (New York: Zone, 1990), esp. pp.4985.
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John Milbank
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 Dumzil and A. J. Greimass 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 dierent 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 deepdown things. By contrast, following Greimass 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 minigrowth 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
20
21
22
23
Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis, pp.155190; see also Pickstock, Catherine, After Writing: On the
Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp.347.
Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis, pp.209210; also see Greimas, A. J., Les Acquis et les projets, in
ed. J. Courts, Introduction la semiotique narrative et discursive (Paris: Hachette, 1976); Greimas,
A. J., La Littrature Ethnique, in Smiotique 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.316, and 63105.
Tolkien, J. R. R., On Fairy-Stories, in Poems and Stories (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980),
pp.75113.
See Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis.
233
says, one can reduce the fairy-tale actors to the status of mere occasional
sources for the shifting positions of signicant 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
gures 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
fullment of subjects, whereas while subjects move the mythical plot,
nevertheless all plot and purpose is nally 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 Brynhilds curtain of
wavering ames, 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, Brynhilds female rival Gudrun who is already married to Sigurd
24
25
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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John Milbank
(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 ames 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 rings 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 Shakespeares Alls
Well that Ends Well.
The tale has the opposite implication (one could add to Doniger) to that of
Poes 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 Queens 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-identication is but a moment within the chain of
signication of the symbolic order that escapes any subjective control and
always moves towards at least temporary public disclosure.
26
See Lacan, Jacques, The Purloined Letter, trans. J. Mehlmann in Yale French Studies, 48 (1972),
pp.3872.
235
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 identiers 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 princes 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
identies him or her in their noble and honourable status. The magic of the
object nally 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 Lacans 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 Poes 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 ctional. 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 deciency of meaning. The mere
story of such an event, on the other hand, possesses a symmetrical deciency
of the real, and yet the very telling of the story brings it back within the real
historical framework of actual oering in which the tale itself is oered 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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John Milbank
perpetual deceptive outrunning of the subject by the signier. 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
signier, 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 nally, 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 oating 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 rst 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
237
order to imaginary self-delusion itself depends (as The Purloined Letter

shows) upon an actual material act of subjective concealment which can never
be nal because every hidden thing is always through this very hiding
dangerously exposed to view, since all space is nally public space. In
consequence, the never-foreclosed realm of signication 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
oat 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 ction itself: because ctions, in order to be
transmitted, must be really oered as gifts, it is a transcendental condition of
their very preservation in time that historical actors might be able to catch up
with ctional meanings and actually realize their utopian import. One could
say that drama is the middle term here: on stage ctions are made more real;
remove the convention that drama is only pretend and ction itself is returned
to history. Because a ction is also an objective gift, and is in excess of a signsystem precisely because it narrates the exchanges of (semi-material) gifts and
not just the exchanges of meanings, its rst 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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John Milbank
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 conict, 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
uid: in The Land of Green Mountains the magical objects of transport a
ship, a horse are provided by the metamorphosis of the sender gure himself;
yet unlike a tragic nymph or hero sacricially 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 rst 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 fairys 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
Greimass 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
27
28
29
See Greimas, Comparative Mythology, in On Meaning, pp.316.

See Battle of the Fairy Kings, in ed. Donald Mackenzie, Scottish Fairy Tales (New York: Dover,
1997), pp.17.
See Greimas, Elements of a Narrative Grammar, in On Meaning, pp.6383.
239
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 identied a
stick, a call, a ower, 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 identied by what he possesses, seizes, gives
or receives. (According to our topological interpretation, the various displacements 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
30
31
32
See Greimas, Problem of Narrative Semiotics: Objects of Value, in On Meaning, pp.84105.

See Greimas, Elements of a Narrative Grammar and Problem of Narrative Semiotics: Objects of
Value, in On Meaning.
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.206208.
240
John Milbank
of Cinderella, for example, she is identied and re-identied 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 oering of food to the fairygodmother in return for the magical items.33 At the meta-narrative level in all
fairy-stories, objects receive valuation from the other fairy realm (identied
by Georges Dumzil 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 gure 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 oering
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
ferique. 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.
33
34
35
See Courts, Joseph, Une lecture semiotique de Cendrillon , in Introduction la smiotique

narrative et discursive (Paris: Hachette, 1976), pp.100137.
See Greimas, A. J., Preface, in ed. Joseph Courts Introduction la smiotique narrative et discursive
(Paris: Hachette, 1976), p.25.
Greimas, A Problem of Narrative Semiotics: Objects of Value, in On Meaning.
241
However, one can criticize Greimass 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-tales
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 dierentiate 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 Greimass 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
36
37
See Milbank, John, The Gift of Ruling: Secularization and Political Authority. New Blackfriars
85.996 (March 2004), pp.212239.
Pwyll, Lord of Dyfed, in The Mabinogion trans. Jerey Gantz (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin,
1966), pp.4566.
242
John Milbank
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 rst 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 reexive, we tend to
forget that it has its source in an identication with objects. The grain of
truth in Lvy-Bruhls theory of pre-logical participation is perhaps that less
reexive peoples have not yet lost the sense that form as the location of
meaning necessarily circulates between people and things.39 Indeed, LviStrausss idea that savage peoples classied 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 Lvy-Bruhl) if there were this relatively dierent 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 identied and active in and
38
39
40
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).
See Levy-Strauss, Claude, La pense sauvage (Paris: Pion, 1962).
243
through things which are themselves contingently given to us and can take us
by surprise. Myths of origin, by contrast, seem to project personages reectively
free of objective entanglement. Concomitantly and paradoxically, they appear
also to project a more purely impersonal objective world, indierent 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 congured as rupture,
sacrice, violence, and xed contract all linked to a notion of how things
arbitrarily are and always will be. Reection 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 dierent cultures (for
example, the Scandinavian) might more project an oral-gift element onto all
of reality, while conversely a sacricial 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 reections of the foregoing section permit us to approach in a new way
the question of why the Macdonald tradition should have recongured
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 nally 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
41
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1992), pp.4381.
244
John Milbank
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 conict 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 rst 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 ones fate and over life and death. Cain and Abel
were not doomed to quarrel; rather Cains 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 indierent 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 nally more detailed self-identication 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
42
Leskov, Nicolai, The Enchanted Wanderer, The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Tales (Moscow:
Progress Press, 1974), pp.85239.
245
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 submission 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 eect 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 n Senrach (an account of
St. Patricks 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
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, Jerey, trans. The Mabinogion (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966).
246
John Milbank
For previously, they were chained by objective fate, bound in the end to suer
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 fullment. 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 salvic 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 Greimass point
that the role of the fairy sender-helper gure 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
44
45
46
See Pickstock, Thomas dAquin et la qute eucharistique.

See Lewis, C. S., The Longaevi, in The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1964), pp. 122138; 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.139.
Lewis, The Longaevi, pp.137138.
247
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 rst 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 unied 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
signicance of this folkloric consequence which is clearly focused upon gift
rather than sacrice 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.
47
48
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).
Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985), pp.143147.
248
John Milbank
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, oers a very Christian ctional 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 oers 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: rst of all, if human thought is a psychic and not just a material
reality, then how can it act on reality and be inuenced by things? How can the
subtly diering inections of the wind aect my mood? Or a pattern of
shadows, or the interplay between sea and sky? Inversely, how is it that words
49
Tolkien, J. R. R., Preface to the second edition, The Silmarillion (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1983), pp. xxxiv; and Tolkien, J. R. R., Ainulindal: The Music of the Ainur, The Silmarillion
(London: George Allen and Unwin 1983), pp.1522.
249
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
ineable, magical inuence? (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 reection
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-reexivity of matter, like the Pearl in
the medieval poem, better reects the simplicity and non-reexivity 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
rst 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 reections, 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-reexivity giving
50
See Trouillard, Jean, La Mystagogie de Proclos (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1982), esp. pp.4453.
250
John Milbank
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-sacrice 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 unied beauty and the recognition of this beauty by
mind? Is it not magical in the precise sense that the blending of the dierent
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 eect? One has here irreducibly
ineable 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 Aquinass participatory analogy of attribution which concerns
just such an ineable 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
51
52
Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, trans. Emma Clarke etal. (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature,
2003).
Proclus, The Theology of Plato, Book Four, Chapters XIXXXI, pp.265272; Proclus, The Elements
of Theology, trans E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), propositions 100, 108, 110,
139, 185.
251
(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 fteenth
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 nally disenchanted Newtonian
53
54
Pico della Mirandola, Heptaplus, Sixth Exposition: of the Anity of the Worlds with each other and
with all Things, in trans C. G. Wallis etal. On the Dignity of Man/On Being and the One/Heptaplus
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), pp.139147.
See Kieckhefer, Richard, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
pp.817.
252
John Milbank
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 scientic and technological interaction with nature
we need to infuse Tolkiens 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 identied as the fairy realm. (The most astonishing
example of this is the Presbyterian minister Robert Kirks neoplatonic and
Biblical presentation of Scottish fairy-belief in his 1692 treatise, The Secret
Commonwealth.56)
Perhaps then, the ctionalization of Christianity in imaginative childrens
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
rst 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.
55
56
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 Brunos relevance to thought
in our own time; Gatti, Hilary, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
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.77107.
12
Language, Reality, and Desire

in Augustines De Doctrina
Rowan Williams
Magdalene College, Cambridge, UK
Rowan Williams, Language, Reality and Desire in Augustines De

Doctrina, Journal of Literature and Theology 3.2 (1989), pp.138150.
Copyright Oxford University Press.
De Doctrina Christiana, Augustines treatise on Christian education (not

doctrine in the modern sense), has been called the rst 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 eects of specialized forms of language in the life of
a religious community, of how this aects 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. Augustines 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
253
254
Rowan Williams
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 saints 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 prole some features of Augustines 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,
rst 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 rst
sight, a very sophisticated picture. There is an obvious problem with the notion
of denable 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
1
2
E.g., Conf. I.8.

The seminal study is R. A. Markus, St Augustine on Signs, Phronesis I.I (1957), pp. 6083. See
also R. Lorenz, Die Herkunft des augustinischen Frui Deo, Zeitschrift fr Kirchengeschichte 64
(195253), pp.3460, and O. ODonovan, Usus and fruitio in Augustine, de doctrine Christiana I,
Journal of Theological Studies, n.s.33 (1982), pp.361397.
It is outlined in de magistro IV and VIII. Markus, St Augustine on Signs, pp.6063, summarizes the
classical debates about signs, and notes Aristotles denition of the sign as something that involves
in its being the being of something else.
He is eager to avoid the Stoic doctrine that signs are a natural eect 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.33. points
this out, though considers that Augustine refuses to follow the path he himself opens up. This is
Language, Reality, and Desire: De Doctrina
255
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 dened. 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 nal 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, aair, involving the
subject for whom signs signify. We cannot miss the point that discussion of
signication 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 ressignum 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, conned 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 esh (xixiii). By Gods
5
6
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 Milbanks paper, Theology Without
Substance: Christianity, Signs, Origins, in Literature and Theology Pan I, Vol.2, No.1 (March, 1988),
pp.117, Vol.2, No.2 (September, 1988), pp.133152, for discussion of Ecos views.
Markus St Augustine on Signs, p.72, brings this out with exemplary clarity.
On its possible sources, see Lorenz, Die Herkunft des augustinischen Frui Deo, and, much
qualifying Lorenzs conclusions, ODonovan, Usus and fruitio in Augustine, de doctrine Christiana
I, pp.365367.
256
Rowan Williams
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-sucient 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 diculties
have been often noted. But we must be careful to avoid a supercial reading.
Augustine is consciously playing here with a notion both ambiguous and
challenging. Our last end is to enjoy self-sucient 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 dened in terms of us (we, rather, are dened 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 Augustines) 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 nite 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 ODonovan, Usus and fruitio in Augustine, de doctrine Christiana
I, pp. 383.: 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 objects 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.
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, 3334.
Conf. IV.49 sets out the traps of loving other human beings as if their ultimate meaning and ones
own were mutually denitory.
257
no such cessation of desire is legitimate in relation to nite 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 rst book of DDC therefore oers a denition 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 nality, 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
worlds history, yet they are signum in a unique sense: they are Gods speech,
and so, like our speech, dened 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 Augustines
critique of the Platonists in Confessions VII, which echoes closely so much of
DDC I on the incarnation). The Words taking of esh 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-nality, 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 nalities
within the created order, ways of blocking o 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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Rowan Williams
The coming of the Word in esh establishes, we might say, the nature of
eshly being as word, as sign, the all-pervasiveness of use. That is to say, we
live in a world of restless uidities 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 rst 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 tting to
a vehicle that is carrying us forward eciently (xxxv). It is thus the supreme
signum after Christ, and Book II reects 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 signicant 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 diculty pervade it? The
main point of Augustines reply is that we do not properly value what we
10
It is the point that must lead us to qualify Ecos 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.
259
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 dont
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
o from their errors (II.vi) alluding to the allegorical interpretation of
a passage in the Song of Songs, Thy teeth are like ocks 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 diculty, and these words
of his were to be a charter for later generations attempting to defend the
legitimacy of diculty, of polysemy and metaphorical uidity 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 eld 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 diculty 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 Augustines
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
diculty of Scripture is itself a kind of parable of our condition. We cannot
properly enjoy what we swiftly and denitively 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 Platonists search for unattended moments of ecstasy, as Augustine
describes it elsewhere. A language which indenitely postpones fullment 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 eective vehicle for the journey home, and its purpose is to
11
E.g., Gregory Nazianzen, Second Theological Oration (Or.28), 12.
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perfect that unqualied 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 diculty of the sacred text oers 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 denitively 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 indel
reader may be simply put o (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 oends our taste (we may recall Thomas Mertons remarks13 about
the diculty of the writings of Thrse of Lisieux a very considerable
challenge to the young Mertons 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 nal 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
Augustines own exegesis all this does not amount to a self-indulgent
12
13
Origen, de principiis I.praef. 3 and 8 sets out the principles on which his allegorical readings are
based.
Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (New York, 1948; London, 1975), pp.353354.
261
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 x 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 nal 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 nal, the humility signied in the passover
narrative by that insignicant plant, hyssop. Rooted and grounded in this
humble and accepting love, we see the scope of Christs 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 Christs 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 rst 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 inrma divinitas of
Confessions VII. 18, the weak God lying at our feet. It is the void in worldly
terms of Christ incarnate and crucied that establishes the dierence of
God; it is this emptiness of meaning and power that makes Christ supremely
signum. He is Gods 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-sucient 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 eect in the formation of the Church, speaks of absolution or recreation, 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 rst 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 purication. 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 eected by encountering the utter dierence, 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-nality 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
14
For a brilliant interpretation of the tensions in Augustine between Platonic metaphysical resolution
and questioning faith, see Joseph S. OLeary, Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in
Christian Tradition (Minneapolis, Winston Press, 1985), ch.4.
263
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 uidity of utterance itself, a play of
words that is also the modication and re-forming of a relationship between
material persons, so indicates or rather embodies its own unnishable nature
that it expresses or introduces the irreducible dierence of God.
There is no absolute knowledge but rather a textual innite, an interminable
web of texts or interpretation (Georey 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
Augustines treatment of reality and representation as moving in this direction.
In the sense that no worldly res is securely settled as a xed object meaning
itself, or tied in a xed designation, that no worldly state of aairs 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,
Augustines scheme in DDC certainly has anities 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, innite, 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
crucied and only so.16 The central displacement of xed concepts involved
15
16
Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), p.202.
Well delineated in M. Pontet, Lexgse de s. Augustin prdicateur (Paris, 1945), esp. pp.377. La
croix donne le sens mme de lEcriture (p.377).
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here God, esh, 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, xed material
symbols for a xed immaterial object or set of objects (when you know the
code, you read o the content). When Augustine in DDC III.vx 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 Augustines 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 Gods 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 nally
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
denitive sign appears that draws together all law, all rites, all images, is to turn
the old order of signs into something dierent, 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 oered by the nal 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
265
want to propose as a focusing or denitive 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 signs 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 eect dened 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 Gods
otherness from the realm of representation. Only the God who is irreducibly
dierent in this way (non aliud, not another in a series or class) can nally
open up desire to the dimension of caritas, love which is both passionate
(engaged, actively committed, exposed) and disinterested, self-forgetful.
To know the dierence between res and signum is, for the Christian believer,
to know the dierence of God, and so to be equipped for life in Gods 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 dele 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 purication 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
unnishable nature of discourse: the Other is inescapable, in that, once
anything has been said, its incompletion, silences or embarrassments require
a dierent 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 languages pressure to self-purgation. This is a theme that needs careful
17
18
Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, p.249.

Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, p.260.
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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 unnished and uid 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 Augustines 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, Augustines own concern is not to secure such a residue, but to
understand how language in its uidity 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
Augustines 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 sacrice, 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 uid 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 Tailles 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-reexive pattern of play than is human being itself. The
19
Basil, adversus Eunomium 1.1.6,11.4, Gregory of Nyssa, contra Eunomium X, etc.
267
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 Beatic
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 crucied 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 nishing, 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
signicance 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 arm and then transgure
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 Gods face; but by denition 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 n Senrach 245
accommodation, and truth 149
act of faith 90
actualization process 182, 184, 188, 194
adolescence 2223
Aeneid 230
Aeterni Patris 1879 98
Agamben, Giorgio 139
agape, and love 194
Aiken, Joan 222
Alls Well that Ends Well 234
Alternative Service Book 62
Amber Spyglass, The 1012, 103, 105, 106,
107
American Gods 113
American literature, post-1960s 58
anagnorisis 181, 2034
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, 989, 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, 1412, 157,
25368
authors 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,
199200, 204, 20512
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/lial 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 923
and imagination 80, 83, 87, 89
and language 18
making it believable 90
and meaningless 58, 59, 60
269
270
and novels 83
in postmodernism 59
religious 24
believing
act of 80
conditions for 82
reconguration of 88
and seeing 79
structure of 88
without belonging 58
Benso, Silvia 139
Berryman, John 73
Bible(s)
Corinthians 67
Genesis 20, 1001, 177
Geneva Bible 26
John 20, 79, 170
King James Bible 26, 63
Luke 20
Mark 26
New Testament 167, 244, 245
Old Testament 2067
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
Bonhoeer, 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, 867, 89
Bronte, Charlotte 247
Brown, Walter 144
Bruner, Jerome 193
Bruno, Giordano 251
Bultmann, Rudolf 84
Byzantium 67
Index
Caldern de la Barca, Pedro 208
Calvin, John 26
Caputo, John 17
caritas 261, 264
Carroll, Lewis 221
catechesis 217
categories, universal and general 1234
catharsis
and forgiveness 199
of misericordia 197, 198210
narrative as 188
recognition scenes as 203
Catholic Church, modernization of 62
Catholic imagination, contemporary 645
Catholic novels 89
Certeau, Michel de 119, 120
Cervantes, Miguel de 120
charitable reading 22
charity, faith founded in 28
Chesterton, G. K. 967, 221
Child, Francis James 18
childhood, and narrative 21526
children, role of fairy-stories/play 225
childrens literature
and culture 2256
ctionalization 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 Ricur and
the Reguring of Theology 16970
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
eect on literature 245
and fairy-tales 2437
ctionalization of 217, 252
imperative of 20
as literary movement 167
and magic 24752
and narratives/symbols 217, 244
re-imagination of 252
religionless 96
as universal religion 244
church
and state 15
vocation of true ction in the early 167,
168
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 80, 86, 87, 127,
153
comedy, as folkloric 231
Commedia 467, 48, 53, 99
commentary, value of 389
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
Condential Agent, The 889
conict, as mode of enquiry 100
consciousness, and poiesis 85
contemplation, in Gregorys works 37
contracted universals, humans as 124
contradiction, of human life 2067
Corinthians 67
271
cosmos, as theophanic 122

Council of Chalcedon 166
Cox, John 19
Cranmer, Thomas 62
created order, relationship with the divine
1413
created phenomena, otherness of 140
creation
aggression against 186
as a divine work of beautiful art 250
doctrine of 58
and God 123
as Gods writing 82
having no meaning in itself 257
mediating the divine 139
mythology 100
relationship with Creator 1413
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 1512
creeds 1656
Crisis of European Sciences, The 118
criss-cross, of life and death 2023, 207,
210, 213
Critias 228
critical theory 115, 120
criticism, interpretive tradition of 127
cross
anti-representation of 2612
as scriptural sign 266
standing for discipleship 261
cult of childhood 220
cultic basis
of drama 206, 212
of tragedy 2001
cultic leading to the liturgical, in
Shakespeare 2015
cultural-linguistic narratives 11516
cultural technologies 81
culture(s)
as Babel 71
British 58
and childrens literature 2256
and Christianity 57
oral 227, 228, 2312
272
recreation of 69
and religious studies 57
as site of meaning 96
Welsh 60, 68, 69
written 228
Cupitt, Don 216
Cymbeline 1956, 198
dance, rituals of 2245
dancing still-point 126
Dante Alighieri
Commedia 467, 48, 53, 99
De Vulgari Eloquentia 22
Inferno 102
Paradiso 418, 52, 53, 102, 202
symbolic imagination of 64
vision of 65
Dau Gapel (Two chapels) 678
Davie, Grace 58
DCosta, Gavin 2
de-Christianization 216
De Dato Patris Luminum 126
De Doctrina Christiana 25368
De Venatione Sapientiae 122, 123
De Vulgari Eloquentia 22
dead, reunion with the 109
death
Harry Potter novels 10813
His Dark Materials trilogy 1007
and love 111
meanings of 10013
as means of rebirth 204
renunciation to 209, 21011
turned inside out 196
and Twelfth Night 32
debate, hospitable 4
deception, and gurative language
1556
deconstruction, notion of 1745
deconstruction of texts, and radical
hermeneutics 175
deep, symbol of 601, 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 3940, 45, 46, 47
on Mercy 51
depth, idea/symbol of 601, 62, 66, 67, 69,
71, 73, 74
Derrida, Jacques 59, 116, 118, 119, 1201,
139, 156, 1745, 229
Descartes, Ren 85
desirability, of the good and true 122
desire, open/and uid language 266
Desmond, William 185, 186, 189
Detienne, Marcel 226, 229, 232
dialectical method, accounting for truth
99
Dierence and Repetition 601
dierence, 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 1413
found in poetic language 65
mediated by creation 139
divine truth 41, 45, 48, 53
divine will 445, 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 1967
dramatization, of forgiveness 196, 199, 209
Drysalter 57
Dumzil, Georges 232
Dynamics of Faith 194
Eagleton, Terry 58
early church 167, 168
Echoes Return Slow, The 701, 72
ecumenical creeds 1656
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,
2015, 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 Aair, The 845, 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
epoch
Cusas doxological 133
and exploration of limits 11721
Erasmus 29
eros, and love 194
erotic desire 11920
eternal
and everlasting 129, 130
and temporal 131
Eucharist, the 244, 245, 246
Eutycheanism 166
eventful truth 1478
everlasting, and eternal 129, 130
evil 122, 188, 193
Face of the Deep 601
fairies 246
fairy assistance 240
fairy realm 239, 241, 252
fairy-tales
Christian narrative as 252
and Christianity 2437
and gift-exchange 240
273
and myth 22643

and narrative structure 23940
objects 248
plot of 230, 2334, 240
role of 225
structural perspective 242
understandings of 2323
faith
as approach to literary studies 33
as arcane and inert 57
in Christ 264
in Christ and salvation 42
diculty in speaking of 57
false 289, 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
Fallible Man 193
false faith 289, 30, 32
fantastic imagination 215
fantasy
and imagination 87
literature 215
witing 978, 113
Fear and Trembling 17, 110
fear, of faith 25
Felch, Susan 20
Fessenden, Tracy 18
ction
sign-system of 237
and truth 478, 53
vocation of true ction in the early
church 167
ctionalization, of Christianity 217, 252
gurative language 1556
nal judgement 42, 102
274
nite, and the innite 131
Fodor, James 16970
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 1901
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 18990, 192, 193
recognition of need for 51, 52
and Shakespeare 4852, 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, Cliord 91
genealogical mode, of rationality 96, 97
Genesis 20, 1001, 177
Index
Geneva Bible 26
gift circulation, and oral circulation 243
gift-exchange
and fairy-tale plots 240
and narratives 239
spiralling 2412
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 2356
globalized societies, and complexity/
confusion 116
Gnosticism 91, 216, 220
God
under attack 75
Christs 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 1223, 135
as res 255, 256
truth as 54
Golden Compass, The 1001
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 1678
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
Gra, Gerald 17
Graham, Elaine 139
Grail stories 246
Index
Great Divorce, The 97
Greenaway, Peter 209
Greenblatt, Stephen 32
Greene, Graham
Brighton Rock 82, 867, 89
Condential Agent, The 889
End of the Aair, The 845, 89
England Made Me 89
Honorary Consul, The 823, 90, 91
and imagination 878
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 Dantes Paradiso 47, 52
moral dimensions of 37
Moralia in Iob 3641, 45, 48, 52, 545
and Trajan 42, 46
Greimas, A. J. 232, 233, 238, 239, 240, 241,
246
Griths, 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, Flix 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, Jrgen 174
Hamilton, Donna 24
Hanby, Michael 141
Haraway, Donna 138
Harry Potter novels 100, 107, 10813, 216
Harsnett, Samuel 31
Hart, David Bentley 86
Hartman, Georey 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 1634, 1717, 183
high hero tales 232
His Dark Materials trilogy 1008, 109, 110,
112, 113, 21516, 2223
historical scholarship, moral dimensions
of 20
historicism
literary studies use of 21
pure 21
religion studied through 201
term 20
history
comparative cultural 17
written 227
Holmes, Wendell 142
Holy Sonnets 24
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet 73
Homer 230
Honorary Consul, The 823, 90, 91
Hooker, Richard 26
Hopkins, Gerard Manley 122, 140, 232
hospitable space, and universities 176
hospitality 34, 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
2389
human life, contradiction of 2067
human personality, and objects 242
human thought 2489
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 3940, 45, 46, 47
as gifts of God 126
and goodness 40
phenomenal and real 183
relation to divinity 206
humility
in Moralia in Iob 3641
and passover narrative 261
and pride 38, 40, 42, 467
and theological reection 54
Hungerford, Amy 58, 59
Husserl, Edmund 11721
hyper-activism 185
Hyppolite, Jean 174
Iamblichus 250
icon, and the idol 143
iconic interpretation
of foreign luminosity 161
of poetry 1523
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
identication, through objects 240
identity(ies)
construction of 1845, 194
disruption of 185
idem and ipse 180
narrative 1801
objects necessary for subjective 2445
Protestant 18
Welsh and R. S. Thomas 60, 68
ideology, and psychology of belief 923
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 1678
and Graham Greene 878
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, gurations of 147
improbable ction, and anti-theatricalists
31
incarnation, as sign/trace of maker 257
Inferno 102
innite, and the nite 131
innity, privative/negative 129
Inklings group 96
innocence 21820
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
1701
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 11718
Juilfs, Jonathan 23
justice
and forgiveness 212
and mercy 208, 211
Kant, Emmanuel 80, 834, 85
Kate, Laurens ten 59
Keats, John 67
Keller, Catherine 601
Index
kenosis 59, 60, 63, 67
Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn 23
Kermode, Frank 82
Keshavarz, Fatemeh 23, 25
Kierkegaard, Sren 17, 110
King James Bible 26, 63
King Lear 205
Kirk, Robert 252
Kirkpatrick, Robin 22
Klemm, David 170, 171, 176
Knapp, Jerey 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 2301,
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
gural 156
gurative and deception 1556
uid/and open desire 266
liturgical and depth 74
narrative structure of 2389
poetic 64, 65, 70
power of liturgical 71
purication of 265
reform of liturgical 62
religious 30, 63, 66
revelatory function of gurative 155
and signs 255
as source of division and conict 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
Lvi-Strauss, Claude 242
Lvy-Bruhl, Lucien 242
Lewis, C. S. 22, 96, 97, 111, 216, 223, 246
Lewis, Sanders 67
liberal arts, interpretative exploration/
meaning-making in 1701
liberal Protestantism 96
Light Princess, The 2212
limits, exploration of 11721
Lines Written in Early Spring 1503, 155
literacy diculty, prizing of 259
literary
sense of the 17
and the theological 82
literary contest and conict 99
literary criticism 45, 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 1718
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 post1960s 58
childrens 215, 2256, 252
Cusan approach to 12635
discipline of 3
eect of Christianity on 245
fantasy 215
Gothic 96
278
Index
and here-and-now 16
mode of enquiry through conict 100
and religion/disciplinary contexts
1624, 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, 634, 65, 71, 74,
756
liturgy, supreme art as 250
living hope, and divine will 445
Logic and Existence 174
Logos, the 86, 218, 219
Lord of the Rings, The 98, 109
love
in Dantes Paradiso 418
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 2567
and prayer 45, 47
scope of Christs 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
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 1701
meaningfulness, of ideas 53
meaningless
and belief 58, 59, 60
metaphysical prejudgement as 119
meaning(s)
culture as site of 96
of death 10013
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 1667
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
mind
and the body 81
and soul 856
mirror, metaphor of 65, 66, 67
misericordia 203, 207, 209, 211
catharsis of 197, 198210
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 3641, 45, 48, 52, 545
mortality, and wisdom 267
Mountains, The 6970
Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt 173
mystagogical science, of praise 1216
mystical tradition 11920
mysticism, neo-pagan 119
mythic, and the folkloric 230, 237
mythological culture, of Egypt 229
mythological, the 903, 97, 2267
mythology
creation 100
279
invented by writing 230

Scandinavian 238
mythos, in Greek sense 22930
myth(s)
of the community 186
and fairy-tale 22643
Greek refusal of 229
making 191
and oral culture 227
and oral narrative 2267
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 1801, 183
narrative identity 1801
narrative structure
and fairy-tales 23940
of human language 2389
and sentence structure 239
narrative traditions 189, 192, 193
narrative(s)
as catharsis 188
and childhood 21526
Christian 244, 252
and Christianity 217, 244
cultural-linguistic 11516
and gift-exchange 239
oral 2267, 230
self-actualization within ones own 184
natural magic 251
natural theology 141, 157, 265
nature
animated by divine presence 146
attribution of life to 1456, 149
and Augustine 157
depictions of as pathetic fallacy 137, 152
falsication of 142
ontological surplus in 157
representations of 1447
sacramental vision of 140
Wordsworths vision of 15760
280
Neb 63, 66
negative innity 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 1656
Nicholas of Cusa 117, 1216, 1323
Nietzsche, Friedrich 95, 96, 99, 106, 111
nihilism 155, 186, 197
nihilistic absurdity 1967, 203
non-being, evil as a futile state of 122
Northern Lights, The 1001
novelists 82
novels
and belief and imagination 82, 83
Catholic 89
New Atheist 100
since 9/11 100
objectivity, and secularity 1718
objects
fairy-tale 248
and folkloric tales 235
and human personality 242
identication/re-identication through
240
of love 2567
in mode of art 248
necessary for subjective identity 2445
rule of 245
as signs of promise 232
world of 98
oblivion 104, 105
obscurity 259, 260
OConnor, Flannery 96, 161
Oedipus Rex 181, 182, 199
Old Covenant, people of 264
Old Testament, tragic motif in 2067
On Fairy Stories 232
On The Logic of the Social Sciences 174
ontological scandal, of pathetic fallacy
13843
opposition, between internal and external
66
oppression, and religion 18
Index
oral circulation, and gift circulation 243
oral culture 227, 228, 2312
oral-gift culture, and folk-tales 238
oral narration 228, 229
oral narratives
and myth 2267
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 418, 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 1456
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 13843
problem with 157
theological reading of 1567
transcendental realism 14350
patience of being 189
Pearl 219
Index
Peguy, Charles 220
Pelikan, Jaroslav 201
penance
process of 192
perceiving, pre-modern way of 134
perception(s) 7980, 84
performance, causing pain 31
Pericles 1956, 1989, 2014
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
Philosophers Stone, The 113
philosophy 19, 225, 227
physical existence, temporality of 1289
Pico della Mirandola 250
piety, practices of as political 93
Plato 225, 228, 229, 230, 231, 249
Platonism 262
play, rituals of 2245
plot 181, 182
of fairy-tales 230, 2334, 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 1523
281
of the idea 127

moral world of 127
power to hold beauty 129, 132
of the words 127
poets, giving of/and receiving 1601
poiesis, and consciousness 85
political
practices of piety as 93
secret power of 923
politics, as moment in education 229
politics of dierence 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 1967
postmodernity
belief and loss of certainty in 59
as blurring of boundaries 138
and celebration of dierence 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 923
power-over 187
Powys, J. C. 249
praise
of God 1223, 135
and growth 132
mystagogical science of 1216
and prayer 50
science of 1334
speech-acts of 133
Praise of Folly 29
prayer
and divine truth 53
282
and divine will 45
and love 45, 47
and praise and applause 50
and truth 53
value of 389, 46
prayerfulness, in the classroom 54
prayers, as divine truth 45, 53
pre-modern traditions 116, 134
Prelude, The 148, 154, 155, 15860
presentism 22
pride
and humility 38, 40, 42, 467
liberation from 262
and truth 39
privative innity 129
Proclus 249, 250
profane, and sacred 61
Prosperos Books 209
Protestant identity 18
Protestantism, and faith 26
Psalm 139 72
puer aeternus 223
Pullman, Philip 1008, 112, 215, 220, 222,
223
Puritans, anti-theatricalism 30
Purloined Letter, The 234, 2367
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 15061
of Scripture 25860
skilful, close literary 128
theology of 22
reality, performance competing with 31
reasoning 83, 84
rebirth, dying as means of 204
recognition and reversal 1989, 213
recognition scenes 202, 203, 204, 213
Index
Redemption 75
redemption, mediated 8
reection, on prayer and truth 53
Rexions sur la violence 92
reexive nihilism, of the sublime
postmodern 197
reform, liturgical 62, 634, 65, 71, 74, 756
Reformation Church, and Anglican liturgy
62
Reformation era 20
rejecting aesthetic, dangers of 65
relationship
creation and Creator 1413
between human and God 5960
religion
literary phenomenology of 17
and literary study 16
and oppression 18
performing relation 2433
role of in society 12
and sense of the self 186
studied through historicism 201
the turn to 19
Religion and Literature 19, 23
religion and literature, disciplinary
contexts 1624, 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, 21011
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 1989, 213
revision, and creation 72
Reynolds, J. H. 67
Ricks, Christopher 159
Ricur, Paul 163, 164, 1805, 187, 188,
189, 191, 193, 194
Index
rituals, of play and dance 2245
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 15061
Romanticism
criticism from within 150
English 19
and imagination 84
Rowling, J. K. 100, 107, 112, 216
rumour 229
Ruskin, John 137, 139, 142, 14350, 155,
157
Sachs, Nelly 120
sacred
and profane 61
rehabilitation of 61
sacred text, diculty of 260
salvation
as deication 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 1334
Scott, Nathan 17, 22
Screwtape Letters, The 97
scriptural symbolism 264, 266
Scripture
interpretation of 2634
learning from 259
pagan sources canonized into 168, 169
reading of 25860
as self-conscious symbolic awareness 265
as signum 258
283
sea
imagery of 66
and R. S. Thomas 723
Sea and the Mirror, The 210
Secret Commonwealth, The 252
secular pluralism, and doctrinal belief 59
secularity, and objectivity 1718
secularization
of American public sphere 18
of language of faith 25
seeing
and believing 79
and knowledge 87
seeing-as 89
self
conguration 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 1801
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 eld, re-envisaged in original
innocence 2201
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
Alls Well that Ends Well 234
cultic leading to the liturgical 2015
and Cusa 1323
Cymbeline 1956, 198
and faith 25
and the imagination 80
King Lear 205
late plays of 205
284
Macbeth 205, 208
Pericles 1956, 1989, 2014
plays of 24, 25
recognition scenes 204, 213
romances 199, 211
sonnets 123, 124, 12635
Tempest, The 4852, 53, 55, 196, 198,
199, 208, 20910
and time 126
tragedies 211
Twelfth Night 1516, 245, 2733
ultra-dramatic reality 199
Winters Tale, The 196, 198
and the World Stage 20512
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 ction 237
signication, realm of 237
signifying 255
signs
central metaphor for 267
and gifts 2356
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 1967
slumber did my spirit seal, A 1034
Smith, Stevie 623
Index
social sciences, and humanities 174
society, role of religion in 12
Socrates 112
solicitude 181
sonnets, Shakespeares 123, 124, 12635
Sorel, Georges 901, 92
soul, and mind 856
space(s)
the between 911, 133
to be human 911
contested 12
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
subjectication, technologies of 81
sublime, and grotesque 149n.43
sublime postmodern
and cultic origin of tragedy 200
and negation of meaning 197
reexive nihilism of the 197
Index
submarine music 204
Subtle Knife, The 101, 106
suspension of disbelief 80, 82, 83, 90
suspension of judgement 11718
suspicion, and faith 19
Symbol of Chalcedon 166
symbolic imagery
of the deep 601, 64, 66
of depth 601, 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 645, 67
Tate, Andrew 100
Taylor, Charles 9, 11617
Taylor, D. P. 216
technologies
cultural practices as 81
as sinister magic 248
of subjectication and governance 81
Tempest, The 4852, 53, 55, 196, 198, 199,
208, 20910
Templeton, Douglas 167
temporal, and eternal 131
temporality of physical existence, and the
eternity of verse 1289
texts, honest interpretation of 164
textual crushing 16
theatre 32, 212, 213
Thtre et son Double, Le 212
theatre of cruelty 212
Theodramatik 205
theological, and the literary 82
theological debate, and childrens literature
215
theological discourse 40
theological hermeneutics, new vision for
1767
285
theological reading, of pathetic fallacy

1567
theological reection, and humility 54
theology
dened by John Webster 169
discipline of 3, 36, 1689
and literary theory 17
and literature 48, 54, 176
natural 141, 157, 265
negative 59, 119
as propositional content 234
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, 6376, 99100
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 1534
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 2001
drama of 1967
and human life 206
as mimesis of an action 199
newness beyond 196
Pagan 200
tragic motif, in Old Testament 2067
tragicomedy, as folkloric 231
Trajan, salvation of 427
286
transcendental realism, pathetic fallacy
14350
transgression 11920
Trinitarian life 126
truth
and accommodation 149
construals of 99100
and distortion 155
divine 41, 45, 48, 53
eventful 1478
and ction 478, 53
as God/love/mercy 54
and literary ction 53
of our dependence 54
poetic 67
and poetic fancy 155
and prayer 53
and pride 39
universal nonperspectival theory of 96
Twelfth Night 1516, 245, 2733
two consciousnesses 1534
ultra-dramatic 196, 197, 199, 202, 203
uncertainty
and postmodernism 59
recognition of 58
understanding
and perception 80
symbolic 181
unfettered, and privative innity/negative
innity 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 Chicagos Divinity School 17
University of Virginias Department of
Religious Studies 17
US academy, language and literature
departments 17
uti, language of 256
value, of prayer and of commentary 389,
46
Velman, Max 104
Vendler, Helen 1279, 130
verbal gift-exchange, folkloric tales as 231
Index
verse, eternity of 1289
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 2334, 235, 236, 2378
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 17980,
1823, 18494
Weber, Max 174
Webster, John 169
Whiggish secularity 18
White, Paul Whiteld 27
will, divine 445, 46
will-to-power 99, 112
Williams, Charles 64, 65
Williams, Rowan 6, 142, 225
window, metaphor of 66
Winters Tale, The 196, 198
Winterson, Jeanette 57, 612
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 1556
Wordsworth, William 103, 144, 148,
15061, 15760
world, and the stage 51, 52
world-making, and perceptions 84
World Stage
Christian 208
cruelty of 213
idea of 205
and Shakespeare 20512
written history 227
Xenophon 229
Yeats, William Butler 67
287
288
289
290
291
292

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Theology and Literature after

Theology and Literature after

Bloomsbury T&T Clark

Bloomsbury T&T Clark

Susannah Brietz Monta

2 Theology, Literature, and Prayer: A Pedagogical Suggestion

3 Bleak Liturgies: R. S. Thomas and Changes Not to His Liking

Part 2 Theological and Literary Reconstructions

5 Literary Apologetics beyond Postmodernism: Duality and

6 Cusa: A Pre-modern Postmodern Reader of Shakespeare

7 The One Life within Us and Abroad: Pathetic Fallacy

8 Love Among the Ruins: Hermeneutics of Theology and Literature

9 Thrashing between Exoneration and Excoriation: Creating

10 The Shakespeare Music: Eliot and von Balthasar on Shakespeares

11 Fictioning Things: Gift and Narrative

12 Language, Reality and Desire in Augustines De Doctrina

I am a theologian. That means Im allegedly someone who does theology. In the

Peter Hampson (editor and contributor) is a Research Fellow at Blackfriars

Hester Jones is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, and

Philosophy. A selection of his books includes Theology and Social Theory:

Unbelievable (I.B. Taurus, 2014) on the biopolitics of belief. Currently he is

Zo Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson, and Alison Milbank

and aggressive confrontation, serious questions of value, meaning, purpose,

Theology and Literature after Postmodernity

Zo Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson, and Alison Milbank

theological stance either, though common and converging theological themes

Zo Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson, and Alison Milbank

oers a rich account of a theophanic, enchanted world; the other is Language,

In other words, Williams uses postmodern critical techniques to recover and

Zo Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson, and Alison Milbank

(John Milbank; Ho and Hampson; Lehmann Imfeld; Montemaggi; Ward).

Recovering the between: a space to be human

Zo Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson, and Alison Milbank

Religion, History, and Faithful Reading

I began my career in two American public universities, where the United

Susannah Brietz Monta

grossness (III.ii.64). Before nding the letter, Malvolio indulges in grandiose

Religion, History, and Faithful Reading

Susannah Brietz Monta

Religion, History, and Faithful Reading

Susannah Brietz Monta

homework need not be anti- or a-theological. The Gospel of Johns vertiginous

Religion, History, and Faithful Reading

Christian groups fought to relativize and discredit those parts of inherited

Susannah Brietz Monta

Kirkpatrick, The I in Question, Religion and Literature 44.2 (2012), pp.116125.

Religion, History, and Faithful Reading

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, introduction to Something Fearful: Medievalist Scholars on the Religious

Susannah Brietz Monta

propositional content as in the many studies attempting to link Donnes Holy

Religion, History, and Faithful Reading

Susannah Brietz Monta

In the Gospel of Mark, chapter 9, appears a story about a healing. A man

Religion, History, and Faithful Reading

Susannah Brietz Monta

potential for abuse (as in Malvolios imprisonment) as well as growth (as in

Religion, History, and Faithful Reading

If the Duke suers from self-centred isolation, Viola is improvisatory. Her

Susannah Brietz Monta

character who takes advantage of situations before her, self-aware enough to

Religion, History, and Faithful Reading

Susannah Brietz Monta

disguise to a sense of performance as having a competing power of its own, to

Religion, History, and Faithful Reading