Theology and Literature After Postmodernity-Bloomsbury Academic

7/24/2019 Theology and Literature After Postmodernity-Bloomsbury Academic

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Teology and Literature aferPostmodernity

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T & T Clark

Religion and the University Series

Series editors

William J. AbrahamGavin DCosta

Peter Hampson

Zo Lehmann Imfeld

Editorial Advisory Board

James Arthur Oliver Crisp

Celia Deane-Drummond Eamon Duffy

Mike Higton Jeffrey KeussIan Linden David McIlroy

erence Merrigan Francesca Murphy

Simon Oliver Andrew Pinsent

racey Rowland Linda Woodhead

Frances Young

Volume 3:

Teology and Literature afer Postmodernity

Religion and the University Series

TeReligion and the University Series aims to acilitate a creative and imaginative

role or the Christian theological perspective within the university setting, working

rom 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 urther inormation at http://www.bloomsbury.com/

uk/series/religion-and-the-university/

Teology and Literature afer 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 exempliy theological readings o 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

ollowing postmodernism and postmodern literary criticism. It demonstrates the

scope and interpretive power o theological readings across various texts andliterary genres, and challenges the assumed dominance o (postmodern) literature

when considering these two disciplines.

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Teology and Literature aferPostmodernity

Edited by

Zo Lehmann Imeld

Peter Hampson

and

Alison Milbank

Foreword by

Stanley Hauerwas

Bloomsbury & Clark

An imprint o Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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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

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

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No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refrainingfrom action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or

the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: 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

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Foreword Stanley Hauerwas vii

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction 1

Hospitable Conversations in Teology and Literature: Re-opening a

Space to Be Human Zo Lehmann Imeld, Peter Hampson, andAlison Milbank

Part 1 Pedagogy

1 Religion, History, and Faithul Reading Susannah Brietz Monta 15

2 Teology, Literature, and Prayer: A Pedagogical Suggestion

Vittorio Montemaggi 35

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

Hester Jones 57

Part 2 Teological and Literary Reconstructions

4 Belie 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 o Shakespeare

Johannes Hoff and Peter Hampson 115

7 Te One Lie within Us and Abroad: Pathetic Fallacy

Reconsidered Gavin Hopps 137

8 Love Among the Ruins: Hermeneutics o Teology and Literature

in the University afer the wentieth Century Jeffrey Keuss 163

Contents

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vi Contents

9 Trashing between Exoneration and Excoriation: Creating

Narratives in We Need to alk About Kevin Zo Lehmann Imeld 179

10 Te Shakespeare Music: Eliot and von Balthasar on ShakespearesRomances and the Ultra-dramatic Aaron Riches 195

11 Fictioning Tings: Gif and Narrative John Milbank 215

12 Language, Reality and Desire in Augustines De Doctrina

Rowan Williams 253

Index 269


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

very least it means I should want to do theology i 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. Weare 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 orce thoughts otherwise unavailable. Tese remarks are my way o indicating

why this book, Teology and Literature afer Postmodernity, is such a welcome

intervention in the world o theology. It is so because the essays in this book dey

disciplinary boundaries, helping us glimpse intimations o what Christianity

might or should look like, as well as how theology should be done.Appeals to the imagination are ofen quite unimaginative. But the essays in

this book plunge conventional assumptions about theology. Tey present and

then challenge those pictures o 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. Tis is

a prooundly humanistic book. It is so because these writers recognize that

Christianity creates a world at once beautiul and rightening.Although Teology and Literature afer Postmodernity still must use the

conjunction in the title, these essays do not reproduce that and. Tat and, afer

all, has been produced by the arbitrary disciplinary divides that constitute

modern university curricula. Tis book has essays o theology written by

literary scholars, and literary essays written by theologians. We should not be

surprised that this is the case i, as these essays make clear, theology and literary

criticism are not two isolated disciplines but rather they each represent efforts

that aim to help us better say what is true.

Finally, this is a book o immense significance or current discussions about

the character o the university. Just as it is not at all clear what Christianity

ForewordStanley Hauerwas

Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

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viii Foreword

might look like, it is equally unclear what the university should look like.

Without being overly polemical, these essays justiy an alternative way o

conceiving the university in a manner that defies contemporary standards.

Teology and Literature afer Postmodernityis a book o gentle generosity thatpacks a punch that hopeully will lead to its being read and appreciated widely.


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Notes on Contributors

Peter Hampson (editor and contributor) is a Research Fellow at BlackriarsHall, Oxord, Emeritus Proessor, University o the West o England, andAdjunct Honorary Proessor o Psychology, NUI Maynooth, Ireland. Hispublications include (with Peter Morris) Imagery and Consciousness

(Academic Press, 1983) and Understanding Cognition(Blackwell, 1996), andtwo earlier volumes in the Religion and the University series (with editorsMervyn Davies, Oliver Crisp and Gavin DCosta): Teology and Philosophy:Faith and Reasonand Christianity and the Disciplines: Te ransormationo the University (& Clark, 2012). His research interests include moralpsychology and theological anthropology, religion and the public square,and theology and literature.

Johannes Hoff is Proessor o Systematic Teology at Heythrop College,

London, and previously taught at the Universities o Wales and bingen.His research specializes on perormativity and the return o apophatictheology in postmodernity, as well as in the similar upheaval periodso the Early Renaissance (fifeenth century) and Early Romanticism(eighteenth/nineteenth century). Tis research eeds into his collaborationwith representatives o contemporary art. Recent publications include TeAnalogical urn: Re-thinking Modernity with Nicholas o Cusa(Eerdmans,2013); and Mystagogy Beyond Onto-Teology: Looking back to Post-

modernity with Nicholas o Cusa. In: Arne Moritz (Ed.), A Companion toNicholas o Cusa(Brill, 2014, orthcoming).

Gavin Hopps is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Teology, and Director othe Institute or Teology, Imagination and the Arts at the University oSt Andrews. He is editor o Byrons Ghosts: Te Spectral, the Spiritual and theSupernatural(Liverpool University Press, 2013) and author o a monographon the singer-songwriter Morrissey,Morrissey: Te Pageant o his BleedingHeart(Continuum, 2009). He is currently working with Jane Stabler on a

new six-volume edition o Byrons complete poetical works, and twomonographs to be published by Routledge in the Longman AnnotatedEnglish Poets series, one on the levity o Don Juan, and another entitledRomantic Enchantment: Fantasy, Teology and Affect.

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x Notes on Contributors

Hester Jones is Senior Lecturer in English at the University o Bristol, andbeore this was a lecturer at the University o Liverpool. She completed herPhD, on treatments o riendship in the poetry o Pope and Swif, in 1993,

and was a Research Fellow at rinity College, Cambridge rom 1991 to1994. She is currently completing a monograph, Deep Calls to Deep:wentieth Century Poetry and Christian Belie, or the Liverpool UniversityPress Poetry series and has recently published articles in Literature andTeology, Symbolism and in other edited collections on poetry andChristianity.

Jeffrey Keussis Proessor o Ministry, Teology and Culture and Director othe University Scholars Program at Seattle Pacific University. His researchand writing on religion and contemporary culture includes Te Sacred andTe Proane: Contemporary Issues in Hermeneutics(Ashgate, 2003), Freedomo the Sel: Kenosis, Cultural Identity and Mission at the Crossroads(Pickwick,2010), Your Neighbors Hymnal: What Popular Music eaches Us About Faith,Hope and Love(Cascade, 2011) and Blur: A New Paradigm or UnderstandingYouth Culture(Harper Collins, 2014). He is the North American Editor orLiterature and Teology(Oxord University Press) and the co-chair o thePaul Ricur Section o the American Academy o Religion.

Zo Lehmann Imfeld(editor and contributor) is a Lecturer in Modern EnglishLiterature at the University o Bern. A student o both literature andtheology she combined both o these disciplines in her doctoral thesisentitled Te Ghost o God: Teology in the Supernatural Stories o ArthurMachen, M. R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and Henry James (2014). Teproject was unded by the Marie Heim-Vgtlin Grant (SNF). She haspublished and presented on theological readings o Victorian literature, aswell as the relationship between theology and the disciplines.

Alison Milbank(editor and contributor) is Associate Proessor o Literatureand Teology at the University o Nottingham, where she researches inpost-Enlightenment literature, especially the Gothic and the aesthetics othe grotesque. She is the author o Daughters o the House: Modes o theGothic in Victorian Fiction (Palgrave MacMillan, 1992), Dante and theVictorians(Manchester University Press, 1998), Chesterton and olkien asTeologians: Te Fantasy o the Real(Continuum, 2007), and is working on

a theological history o horror fiction.

John Milbank is Research Proessor o Religion, Politics and Ethics at theUniversity o Nottingham, and Director o the Centre o Teology and


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xiNotes on Contributors

Philosophy. A selection o his books includes Teology and Social Teory:Beyond Secular Reason (Blackwell, 1990), Te Future o Love: Essays inPolitical Teology (Cascade Books, 2009), Beyond Secular Order: Te

Representation o Being and the Representation o the People (Blackwell,2013) and with Slavoj iek, Te Monstrosity o Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?Ed. Creston Davis (MI Press, 2009).

Susannah Brietz Monta is the Glynn Family Honors Associate Proessor oEnglish and editor o Religion and Literature at the University o NotreDame. She is the author o Martyrdom and Literature in Early ModernEngland(Cambridge University Press, 2005, paperback 2009) and co-editoro eaching Early Modern English Prose(MLA, 2010). She is completing a

scholarly edition o Anthony Copleys A Fig or Fortune (1596), the firstpublished response to Spensers Faerie Queene, or Manchester UniversityPress. She has published articles on history plays, early modern womenwriters and patronesses, martyrology, hagiography, and devotional poetryand prose.

Vittorio Montemaggi is Assistant Proessor o Religion and Literature inthe Department o Romance Languages and Literatures at the University oNotre Dame, where he is also Concurrent Assistant Proessor in theDepartment o Teology and Fellow o the Medieval Institute, the NanovicInstitute or European Studies and the Notre Dame Institute o AdvancedStudy (Spring 2013). His publications include Dantes Commedia: Teologyas Poetry (University o Notre Dame Press, 2010), co-edited with Matthewreherne.

Aaron Riches is Lecturer in the Institutes o Philosophy Edith Stein andTeology Lumen Gentium, at the General Seminary o Granada, Spain. He

completed his doctorate at the University o Nottingham, as a member othe Centre o Philosophy and Teology. He is the author o Ecce Homo: Onthe Divine Unity o Christ(Eerdmans, 2015, orthcoming) and has publishedin various journals including Communio, elos, andModern Teology.

Graham Wardis the Regius Proessor o Divinity at the University o Oxord,and ormer Head o the School o Arts, Histories and Cultures at theUniversity o Manchester. Among his books are Cities o God(Routledge,2000), Cultural ransormation and Religious Practice (CUP, 2004), rueReligion (Blackwell, 2002), Christ and Culture (Blackwell, 2005), and TePolitics o Discipleship(Baker Academic, 2009). Along with Michael Hoelzl,he is also the translator o two o Carl Schmitts works: Political Teology II(Polity, 2008) and Dictatorship (Polity, 2013). His latest book is entitled


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xii Notes on Contributors

Unbelievable(I.B. aurus, 2014) on the biopolitics o belie. Currently he isengaged in a three-volume work entitled Ethical Lie to be published byOxord University Press.

Rowan Williams, the Right Revd and Right Hon the Lord Williams oOystermouth is Master o Magdalene College, Cambridge. From 2002 to2012 he was the 104th Archbishop o Canterbury. He is a Sitara-e-Pakistan,Fellow o the British Academy, Fellow o the Royal Society o Literature,Knight Grand Cross o the Royal Order o Francis I and a lie peer.Teologian, poet, bishop, and cultural commentator, his numerous booksinclude Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement( & Clark, 2000),Grace and Necessity: Essays on Art and Love(Continuum, 2006), Dostoevsky:

Language Faith and Fiction (Continuum, 2010), and Faith in the PublicSquare (Bloomsbury, 2012). Recent publications include Resurrection(Darton, Longman and odd, 2014), Te Poems o Rowan Williams(CarcanetPress, 2014), and Being Christian(SPCK, 2014).


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1 See, or example, Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square(London: Bloomsbury, 2012). For anearly debate see Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square: Te Place oReligious Convictions in Political Debate(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).

IntroductionHospitable Conversations in Teology

and Literature: Re-opening a Spaceto be Human

Zo Lehmann Imeld

University o Bern, Switzerland

Peter HampsonBlackriars Hall, Oxord, UK

Alison MilbankUniversity o Nottingham, UK

Contested spaces

An important contemporary debate concerns the role o religion in wider

society.1 Religions public place has been challenged at times in the name o 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 whichgenuine, truth-seeking, meaningul conversations are conducted; vigorously,

agonistically perhaps, but always respectully and hospitably. Such

conversations, however, need space, time, and reedom rom ear to flourish;

without these prerequisites they may be compromised or rendered diffi cult.

Tere is, then, concern among many who see theology as perorming a valuable

contribution to that conversation, that unless the agora and piazza are

reclaimed or such genuine debate, and secured rom unhelpul intolerance

1


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Zo Lehmann Imeld, Peter Hampson, and Alison Milbank2

2 In continental Europe, related discussions have been conducted in a public sphere moreaccustomed to serious academic debate and less influenced maybe (?) by the knock-me-downcelebrity antics o new atheism. On 14th January 2004, or instance, there was a discussionbetween the then Cardinal Ratzinger and Jurgen Habermas at the Catholic Academy o Bavariain Munich later published as Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, Te Dialectics oSecularization: On Reason and Religion(San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2006). Both uture Popeand methodological atheist agreed that religious conviction and secular reason had much to offereach other, and sought to engage with the others world view, without belittling it or watering downtheir own. Conducted sensibly, an agonistic, but still hospitable debate on these issues is clearly

possible.3 Gavin DCosta, Teology and the Public Square: Church, Academy and Nation (London: Wiley,2005). See also Stanley Hauerwas, Te State o the University: Academic Knowledges and theKnowledge o God (New York: Wiley, 2007); Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy and theUniversities: A Selective History o the Catholic Philosophical radition (London: Rowman andLittlefield, 2009).

and aggressive conrontation, serious questions o value, meaning, purpose,

and the common good, issues vital or a flourishing democracy, may be

increasingly side-lined, and our public spaces lef vulnerable to sequestration

by the orces o capitalism, techno-rationality, and consumerism.2

Some o this wider background inorms Gavin DCostas Teology in the

Public Square,3 a book that specifically explores what he calls the Babylonian

captivity o theology in the modern university, and the possible need or aith-

based institutions in which theology and other subjects can be studied in their

ull connectivity. It was this book that first suggested the series, Religion and the

University,some seven years ago, a series concerned with the revitalization o

religious culture through university education. Te series urther aims todemonstrate a creative and imaginative role or the Christian theological

perspective within the university setting. wo volumes have been published

thus ar, Teology and Philosophy: Faith and Reason, which, as its title suggests,

looks at ways in which theology and philosophy can mutually inorm, and

Christianity and the Disciplines: the ransormation o the University, whose title

is also to some extent sel-explanatory, and which looks to the various possible

relationships between theology and other disciplines in the modern academy.

Teology and Literature afer Postmodernity

Teology and Literature afer Postmodernityis the third volume in the Religion

and the Universityseries. Its compilation was motivated by the series editors


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Introduction 3

desire to deepen and broaden the scope o the series, effectively opening it up

or other disciplines to explore issues local and pertinent to their own scholarly

interests and contexts. But it is also inormed by the wish o Zo Lehmann

Imeld, Peter Hampson, and Alison Milbank, the current book editors, toacilitate a principled volume illustrating various aspects o the ruitul

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 or now, save to say that

we assumed this was an opportunity or a variety o voices to be heard in this

local and potentially global debate, voices inormed by pre-modern as well asmodern and late-modern rationalities, and also well situated in the literary

tradition, and or 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.

Tese conversations allow both literature and theology as disciplines torespond to the inheritance o postmodernity in the spirit o reconstruction.

Te pluriorm disciplines o the theology and literature are, o course,

already long established as scholarly traditions in the academy, the church, and

the wider culture, and hence already in ruitul dialogue. But this has not always

been an easy relationship. At times, or instance, a certain disciplinary one-up-

manship has arisen as theology attempts to trump or even baptize literature,

while at the same time lacking literary nuance, or literature tries arbitrarily todepict the religious, maybe with insuffi cient respect or the theological, or

critical theory blithely deconstructs both, sometimes with little respect or or

lived appreciation o either. By contrast, hospitality, a key to understanding the

present volume, requires not simply discursive space or different voices to be

heard the literary, the theological, the critical theoretical but, in an arguably

wiser post-postmodern climate, implies space that permits reconstruction

beyond deconstruction, and where what is said is to be taken seriously andrespectully heeded.

It is worth noting that Luke Bretherton has developed a sophisticated

account o hospitality as a social and political practice rooted in Christian


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

5 Bretherton, Hospitality as Holiness, p. 148.

theology, which involves welcoming the vulnerable stranger to the table. Tis

he sees as central to shaping relations between the church and its neighbours,

and, he claims, has implications or disputes involving moral diversity and

value-laden issues.4 He is keen, however, to preserve a commitment tostandards o worth, and to distinguish hospitality rom tolerance. Tus, 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 o 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 powerul or most persuasive voices insuch conversations are necessarily the ones to be most heeded; we do not

preclude lively but respectul disagreements, even while all share ideas at the

same table in the common search or understanding. Tere is, then, throughout

this volume a genuine honouring o and commitment to the co-operative, and

a mutual search or meaning and truth. And this goes hand in hand with an

appreciation o standards o worth. Tere can be better or worse arguments,

better or worse or at least more comprehensive or coherent readings, deeper ormore shallow reader engagements. Hospitable debate can and at times must be

carried out agonistically, as a lively debate between riends, but never in a

dismissive, cynical, or ad hominemashion. Never, that is, i it is to be productive

or Christian.

Hence, Teology and Literature afer Postmodernityaims to deploy theology

hospitably in a reconstructive approach to contemporary literary criticism. It

seeks to validate and exempliy theological readings o literary texts as acreative exercise. It engages in a dialogue with interdisciplinary approaches to

literature in which theology is alert and responsive to the challenges ollowing

postmodernism and postmodern literary criticism. It demonstrates the scope

and interpretive power o theological readings across various texts and literary

genres, and challenges the assumed dominance o (postmodern) literature

when considering these two disciplines. It is not strongly wedded to just one


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Introduction 5

theological stance either, though common and converging theological themes

do at times emerge across quite different genres as we shall see. Moreover, there

are situations in which literature clearly affords a common conversational

space or the search or (potentially shared) religious meaning, starting romquite different theological suppositions, as the contributions by Graham Ward

and Jeffrey Keuss demonstrate or instance. Additionally, the volume offers

a broader academic perspective, drawing as it does rom experience o

institutions worldwide o both a secular and ecclesial variety; as such it speaks

to a variety o audiences in a variety o educational settings.

Tere are twelve chapters in all, divided into two sections. Part 1, comprising

the first three chapters, reers explicitly to pedagogy and the university contextsin which we teach and research literature and theology. Susannah Monta

explores the opportunity (and responsibility) to configure literary study in

relation to, not in competition with, theology, in such a way that religion is not

treated merely in a fideistic way; she offers useul models in which a variety o

relationships can be examined. Hester Jones approaches related issues but

rom the setting and assumptions o a secular institution with particular

reerence to the concept o depth in a sophisticated discussion o the poetry oR. S. Tomas, showing how this can serve as a common teaching ocus in

postmodern secular and theologically inormed contexts. Vittorio Montemaggi

looks at the role o prayer in theology and literature, in a ascinating study o

texts rom Gregory the Great, Dante, and Shakespeare, and how this (nowadays)

unusual relationship might shape our perception o the value o teaching in

the field. We wanted our book to be dual acing, and to be o use to staff and

students in religious studies and theology, andliterary 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. Tey offer new engagements between

literature and theology ofen by the recovery o themes and concepts that have

been lost or buried, yet they remain sensitive to the challenges o the late

modern. As such, we believe these chapters provide a welcome, much needed,

alternative to ontologically reductive critical approaches. Included in Part 2 arereprints o two seminal papers. In the opinion o the editors these deserve as

wide an audience as possible as they have had a big influence on the field. One

is Fictioning Tings by John Milbank (Religion and Literature, 2005), which


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6 Jeffrey McCurry, owards a Poetics o Teological Creativity: Rowan Williams Reads Augustinesde Doctrinaafer Derrida,Modern Teology, 23.3 (2007), 415433, p. 421.

7 McCurry, owards a Poetics, pp. 418419.8 McCurry, owards a Poetics, p. 418.

offers a rich account o a theophanic, enchanted world; the other is Language,

Reality and Desire in Augustines De Doctrina by Rowan Williams (Journal o

Literature and Teology, 1989) on word, sign, and signification in Augustine, an

essay that Jeffery McCurry recently described as being Afer Derrida: Aninflected interpreted perormance.6 Both already fit the aims o our volume

and we are delighted to rehouse them. Milbanks because it is a well-known

tour de orcecelebrating many o themes that repeatedly arise in the present

volume including poesis, participation, the theophanic, and the narrative

power o literature as a whole. Williams chapter because, as McCurry notes:

Williams writes Derridas theory o diffranceinto Augustines theology o

reading scripture and contemplating creation in order to make it new or

todayand not new or the sake o novelty, but new or the sake o letting

Augustines texts teach, interrogate, and console us in a time very different

rom 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 Doctrinaas a

text whose meaning cannot and should not be passively received but rather

which calls or the creative and constructive contribution o the reader in the

production o meaning.8 Both Milbank and Williams remind us o the co-

creative power o literature, and the potentially participatory act o reading.

We eel that the ten chapters written specifically or this volume are enriched

by their understanding and utilization o the themes laid out by Milbank and

Williams. A skilul marriage o literature and theology beyond postmodernity

prevents premature closure but also protects against meaningless countereits

and idolatry as it delivers us humbly into mystery.

Te editors set our contributors the brie to discuss a wide variety o texts

and genres, and the brie was more than met, with chapters including Dante,

Shakespeare, Gregory the Great, Nicholas o Cusa, Wordsworth, Ruskin,

modernist novelists such as Graham Greene, postmodern writers like Lionel

Shriver, and young-adult literature. In the process, a telling range o human

activities is covered. Tis is hardly surprising given the scope o theology,


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Introduction 7

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 belie, and Graham Ward introduces evil as imaginativeprivation; Alison Milbank looks at issues underlying the communication o a

religious perspective when deploying apologetics, in a reflection on death in

contemporary antastic literature; and Johannes Hoff and Peter Hampson

reflect in a co-authored piece on pre-reflexive doxologically driven praise, a

theme also explored by Vittorio Montemaggi in his chapter, and resonating

with Aaron Riches chapter. Praise and prayer allow us to recognize the

praiseworthy as good, true, and beautiul, and, in the case o literature, eroticallyengages the reader with the text. Forgiveness and the power o narrative

reconstruction to co-create being is contextualized in and through an otherwise

stark novel o a school shooting discussed in Zo Lehmann Imelds chapter.

Te hermeneutics used or this reconstructive reading are urther unpacked

by Jeff Keuss, and, through readings o Shakespeares last plays, Aaron Riches

explores the power o orgiveness to take us beyond death and tragedy into the

ultradramatic and the deeper mystery o redemption rom death and error.Tis is both relevant and timely, and in marked contrast to the sublime

postmodern alternative, which promotes a movement beyond tragedy in the

orm o nihilist absurdity.

What do these ways o reading have in common? It is probably too

obvious and revanchist to identiy any single, high-level, meta-narrative

beyond the simple Christian one that we are finite, created, but also teleological,

grace-dependent creatures in a flawed world, or whom questions o meaning,truth, relationship, and ultimacy in aiming at the good, true, and beautiul

repeatedly surace. But, to go beyond this, it is useul to examine what, i

anything, cross-chapter comparisons reveal about re-imagining the human

condition. Intriguingly, this turns out to offer the possibility o becoming

more ully human through a (requently) pre-reflexive doxological engagement

with and relational participation in a theophanic world (see or example

Montemaggi; Hoff and Hampson; Hopps; Alison Milbank; Ward); beingvulnerable to damage and destruction through contingency or the embrace o

countereits yet open to narrative or ultra dramatic reconstruction (Lehmann

Imeld; Keuss; Riches); open to gif exchange, love, and eschatological hope


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(John Milbank; Hoff and Hampson; Lehmann Imeld; Montemaggi; Ward).

Imaginative belie then becomes possible again in human transcendence in

immanence, paradoxically uniting finitude and surplus, word and sign, and

obviating the oscillation across the cultural aporia (Hoff and Hampson;Lehmann Imeld; Hopps; Alison Milbank; John Milbank; Ward; Williams).

A key notion here is the scope or participating again in an enchanted or

theophanic cosmos that paradoxically allows us to hold our finitude and

vulnerability, and potential or transcendence together. Tis idea, and its

associated themes o being and becoming, emerges in various places,

quintessentially in John Milbanks work o course, but also in Johannes Hoff

and Peter Hampson on beauty, and Vittorio Montemaggi on honest writing. Itis especially apparent in Gavin Hopps account o why the pathetic allacy need

not be so allacious afer all, but, based on a lesser known, alternative reading

proposed by Ruskin, may instead be a catachrestic attempt to figure the

perception o a oreign luminosity that is communicated by but mysteriously

exceeds the created order. In such cases, the animistic envisioning o nature

ceases to be a decorative or deceptive ancy and is more like a literary ashioning

o icons. Being and becoming also figure in Zo Lehmann Imelds examinationo the reconstruction o sel and other through meaningul narrative, capably

elaborated by Jeff Keuss in his discussion o hermeneutics.

In the process we gain or deepen being when we aim at, and allow ourselves

to be taken over by, the beautiul excess o reality in an open or porous ashion,

a ashion marked by gratitude and gif exchange. Or we diminish in being

when we grasp at countereit gods, narcissistically or otherwise. Te possibility

o a mediated redemption and recovery is clearly indicated, however, withorgiveness and acceptance o vulnerability predicated on appreciation o our

common, embodied humanity through a loving relationality and the power o

narrative.

Various chapters signal high degrees o awareness o the penultimacy and

parodoxicality o human endeavour, though this does not end in the endless

deerral o the postmodern but, as rooted in a docta ignorantia, a learned

ignorance that accepts that ends in the apophatic where explanation andunderstanding, meaning and truth, finitude and infinity converge and are

exceeded. Indeed two o the chapters are explicitly post-Derridean in this

ashion, Hoff and Hampsons on critical theory and Nicholas o Cusa, but most


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Introduction 9

9 William Desmonds metaxological description o the in between has significantly inormed ourunderstanding o this hospitable space. See God and the Between(Malden MA: Blackwell, 2008).

notably the seminal chapter by Rowan Williams on word and sign in Augustines

De Doctrina.

Appreciation and celebration o paradoxicality as part o this, then, allows

us to avoid alse aporiabetween literalism and metaphor (Hopps talks o theiconic as lying between these); alse dichotomies o subject and object, nature

and grace (John Milbank); imagination and world (Ward); time constrained,

contingent and atemporal infinite (Hoff and Hampson), and so on. Paradox

and apophatic penultimacy taken together signal a hospitable space in the

between where people can flourish.9

Recovering the between: a space to be human

In traditional exitus-reditus ashion we now return to the start to envision a

public space o a different sort, a space demarcated by a re-imagined human

situated in a recovered, magical place. Standing at the edge o a landscape afer

postmodernism, this is a conceptual and emotional space marked not by a

rantic oscillation rom materiality to idealism, rom the reductive inra humanto the ungrounded, disenchanted, post human, or rom the scientistic univocal

to the social constructivist equivocal, but by a stable i 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 o what Charles aylor calls the porous sel. We

believe, supported by evidence rom chapters in Teology and Literature afer

Postmodernity, that it is a space urgently in need o urther triangulation,mapping, and cultivation or it to become the rich and ertile environment where

urther 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 o the possibilities and pitalls o

postmodern, critical approaches, and aid the engaged and skilled reader.

In act such a process has already begun. Demonstrating urther its heuristic

value and productivity, Zo Lehmann Imeld has already creatively elaborated


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10 Zo Lehmann Imeld, Te Ghost o God: Teology in the Supernatural Stories o Arthur Machen,M. R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and Henry James (PhD thesis, University o Bern, 2014).

the idea o 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 ully explored theologically, in her case the

nineteenth-century ghost story, but also how literature in general allows or aproductive and ruitul exploration o the suspended middle, the re-humanized,

re-divinized between, ree rom reductions, oscillations, or aporia. It is a space

that is open to participatory reader engagement, and which renders the amiliar

strange and the strange amiliar (Hoff and Hampson; Ward; Williams).

Which brings us to a hidden benefit we had not ully anticipated when we

first planned our volume. Here we have a space not simply where literary

critical and theological investigations can be conducted, but also one wherenew artistic products and works o literature can be born, dwell, and flourish.

Why? Simply because each turn o the cultural wheel has typically spun off its

distinctive literatures, indeed has been partly defined by them, not just in the

case o the romantic movement, modernism and postmodernism, say, but also

more recently meta-modernism. Te process continues. So, our recovered

iconic space is ready and waiting, like a new or newly conserved eco-system,

or resh literary species to arrive.We started with a contested space; we leave the reader to imagine a

welcoming space o uture possibilities reclaimed by theology and literature.

Art, as well as religion, it appears, can help to recover the public square. As

editors we are grateul to our learned contributors or all their hard work and

invaluable insights in helping realize this vision. Teir scholarly expertise and

compassionate understanding have allowed these vistas and many other

ruitul ideas to emerge.

In memoriam

During the closing stages o editing this volume, our Bristol colleague, and

Religion and the Universityseries editor, Mervyn Davies, died. Mervyn was a

Newman scholar, a committed ecumenist, a skilled and much-loved university


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Introduction 11

teacher, but overall one o the most hospitable riends and colleagues anyone

could hope to have. Even while struggling with his illness, he was always the

first to suggest a lunch, or to propose a meeting o his inormal theology book

club, and was animatedly discussing academic matters with one o us only aew days beore his death. Friendship and scholarship went hand in hand or

him. Mervyn was also a staunch supporter o our volume, resonated intuitively

to many o 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 or the repose o his soul, and with his amily. 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.


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1

Religion, History, and Faithul Reading

Susannah Brietz MontaUniversity o Notre Dame, IN, USA

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

States constitutional separation o church and state meant sequestering

religion as personal, not pertaining to public, or classroom, discourse. When I

taught passages rom the Quran in a medieval literature course, one o my

students a practising Muslim tiptoed careully: some would say, he would

offer, 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 o

Notre Dame, a private, religiously affi liated institution, the separation o church

and state no longer applied. In the first course I taught there, an honours

humanities survey, I assigned books 10 and 11 o Augustines Conessions, in

which Augustine reflects on time, memory, and eternity, and offers a dazzling

phenomenology o mind. One student, a member o the universitys ootball

team, responded enthusiastically, explaining to his somewhat beuddled

colleagues that Augustine thinks time is a distention o human consciousness.

(I note that distentiois the word Augustine uses.) My student stated that hedworked hard to understand the text because it answers a question Ive always

had. Augustine mattered not only or the history o autobiography, or

philosophy, or theology, but or his lie; Augustine spoke to him now, addressing

his concerns about time and eternity. My students position vis--vis the text

was not studied neutrality but thoughtul receptivity.

Contrast this students reading with a scene rom Shakespeares welfh

Night, in which the character Malvolio perorms bad literary criticism. Malvoliohappens 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 perorming impossible passages o

15


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Susannah Brietz Monta16

1 Much scholarly effort has been expended on these letters. For one reading, and a survey o others,see Peter J. Smith, M.O.A.I. What should that alphabetical position portend?: An Answer to theMetamorphic Malvolio, Renaissance Quarterly 51.4 (1998), pp. 11991244. Citations o welfhNight are to Te Complete Pelican Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller (NewYork: Penguin, 2002).

grossness (III.ii.64). Beore finding the letter, Malvolio indulges in grandiose

daydreams o the power that a marriage to Olivia would bring. Te letter

seemingly confirms his antasies: M.O.A.I. doth sway my lie (II.5.106).

Malvolio sees himsel in these letters, but the reflection is imperect; as henotes, M begins his name, but the other letters do not ollow in sequence.1

Still, our interpreter is not deterred: yet, to crush this a little, it would bow

to me, or every one o these letters are in my name (II.5.1323). Malvolios

sel-absorption rides roughshod over the texts ambiguities. His is an error,

partly, o positioning: the positioning o the reader above the text, here in

nearly violent terms (crush this a little). Is it possible to attend to literatures

implications or the here-and-now, as my student did, while avoidingthe distortions o sel-absorbed textual crushing? And what might readers

positionings reveal about the study o religion and literature in the

contemporary academy?

In this essay, I suggest that literary studies habit o placing religion at a sae

historical remove rom the one who reads has affected our relation to the

material we study and, paradoxically, our ability to read historically, or at least

to read as our predecessors typically did. I first offer a brie account o ways inwhich religion has been configured in relation to literary study, ocusing

especially on the methods o historicism that have dominated US literary

study over the past ew decades. I then return to welfh Night, a play whose

characters use religious language to talk about relation itsel. Te play has

much to teach us about relating to the texts we study ingoodaith, 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 o religion and literature was housed

rom the 1950s in programmes such as the Ph.D. in Teology and Literature at


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Religion, History, and Faithul Reading 17

2 Larry Bouchard, Religion and Literature: Four Teses, Religion and Literature 41.2 (2009),pp. 1220.

3 Nathan Scott, Literature: Religious Dimensions o Western Literature, in ed. Mircea EliadeEncyclopedia o Religion(New York: Macmillan, 1987), p. 5477; cited in Bouchard, p. 12.

the University o Chicagos Divinity School and a similar program within the

University o Virginias Department o Religious Studies. Larry Bouchard

explains the two very different rationales behind these programmes. Te first

was that o comparative cultural history: as a matter o historical act, religiousand literary histories intersected with one another, so that proper study o

religion entailed literary study, and vice versa. Te second was that o a literary

phenomenology o religion.2 Tat is, even when modern literature has thrown

off the religion o its past, it may, to quote Nathan Scott, by the very radicality

o its unbelie, awaken sensibilities o a contrary order, and become an

instrument o religious recovery.3 Such scholarship ofen disclosed literary

texts religious dimensions Christ figures, prodigal son narratives in orderto elaborate Christian ideas. Tis scholarships theology was robust, its

interpretations sophisticated. Yet it was accused o subordinating imaginative

texts literary eatures to its theological and apologetic aims.

In a later generation, scholarship continued in this vein but met a counter-

current. Teologians such as David Jasper and John Caputo put theology into

contact with literary theory, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy. Tis

work tended to use literary theory as a solvent on reified dogma, openingtheology to lively, speculative orms o writing. Te sense o the literary

became either broadened or diffuse, depending upon ones point o view; close

readings were traded or theological and philosophical discussions ocused by

literary texts, including biblical literature. Tere is considerable precedent or

such an approach; Kierkegaards excursus on the near-sacrifice o Isaac in Fear

and remblingis but one prominent example.

Neither approach made many inroads into the US academys languageand literature departments, the primary settings or literary study. Te relative

impermeability o mainstream literary studies to religion and literature

scholarship stems rom a long-standing, i now weakening, assumption that

secularity was tantamount to objectivity, and that objectivity in literary study

is both possible and desirable. Gerald Graff argues that American literary

studies valued secularity and objectivity rom the start o its institutional


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4 Gerald Graff, Proessing Literature: An Institutional History(Chicago: University o Chicago Press,1989).

5 Quoted in Graff, Proessing Literature, p. 68.6

McMurtry, quoted in Graff, Proessing Literature, p. 66.7 racy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature(Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

8 Jackson, ranscendence Hunting, Religion and Literature41.2 (2009), pp. 169177.9 Branch, Te Rituals o Our Re-Secularization: Literature between Faith and Knowledge, essay

orthcoming in Religion and Literature.

lie.4 In 1883, at the first meeting o the Modern Language Association, the

dominant American association or literary study, H.C.G. Brandt claimed that

a scientific basis dignifies our proession.5 At Harvard in 1876, the philologist

Francis James Child introduced a course on Shakespeares plays and anotheron our major British writers: Chaucer, Milton, Dryden and Francis Bacon.6

Bacon presumably lent the prestige o scientific empiricism to literary study.

Te preerence or objectivity and secularity has ideological, even religious,

roots. As racy Fessenden has argued, efforts to elevate particular orms o

Protestant identity drove the gradual secularization o the American public

sphere.7 Propriety and public decorum seemed to require separating religious

enthusiasms rom intellectual pursuit. Until airly recently, what Ken Jacksonand others have called Whiggish secularity has governed, ofen silently, literary

study in the American academy.8 Tis paradigms dominance exacts a price:

Lori Branch maintains that the privileging o objectivity and secularisms

supposed neutrality cuts short literary studies own insights about the

contingent, constructed nature o language. I we took those insights to their

logical conclusions, Branch argues, we would acknowledge that the use o

language always requires belie, in acts o interpretation, in the construction omeaning, and in relation to others.9

Within the American academy, there have always been scholars who have

studied literature in relation to historical maniestations o religion Donnes

devotional lyrics alongside Calvinist teachings about grace and election, or

example. Yet the latter part o the twentieth century was, notoriously, not a

ruitul time or the study o religion and literature within mainstream

literature departments. Te dominance o a hermeneutics o suspicion whereby religion masks ideologies o oppression meant that religion was

most ofen read as undamentally about something else: power, economic


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10 See or instance Jonathan Dollimores Radical ragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Dramao Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 3rd edn. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), influentialon both sides o the Atlantic.

11 Cox, Introduction, Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith (Waco, X: BaylorUniversity Press, 2007).

12 Debora Shuger, Habits o Tought in the English Renaissance(Oakland, CA: University o CaliorniaPress, 1991).

13 See or instance Michael omko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History,

and National Identity, 17781829(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), and Lori Branchs chapteron Wordsworths Ecclesiastical Sonnets in Rituals o Spontaneity(Waco, X: Baylor University Press,2006).

14 On religion-and-literature scholarship as speculative theology, see William Franke, Beyond theLimits o Reason Alone: A Critical Approach to the Religious Inspiration o Literature, Religion andLiterature41.2 (2009), pp. 6978.

substructures, gendered hierarchies, etc.10 John Cox has argued that the

hermeneutics o suspicion occluded the act that or many early modern

authors, including Shakespeare, suspicion and scepticism were in the service

o and derived rom, not opposed to, aith.11 At its ounding, a leadingorganization o 1990s vintage, the Group or Early Modern Cultural Studies,

asserted a ocus on race, gender, class, and sexuality. Note what is missing

(remarkably or a group studying the Reormation era): religion. In 1991,

Debora Shuger wrote that religion was not simply about politics but also about

matters o the soul (ofen in relationto, but not reducibleto, politics), and that

we do early modern people a disservice not to read their religious discourses

in earnest, as i they knew what they were talking about. Te shock waves werepalpable.12

In the 1990s, a shif began, one presaging a broadening and deepening o

literary scholars engagements with religion. Witness the turn to religion in

continental philosophy and literary theory, entailing a study o the Pauline

epistles or their implications or contemporary ethics, or the reinvigorated

study o historical orms o religion in fields that long distanced themselves

rom traditional religion, such as English Romanticism.13 Tis is not to say thatliterary 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 o religion and literature in

culturally specific maniestations and the more speculative mode o reading

literature or the ways it helps us thinktheology and reflect on ultimate things,

ultimate questions.14 For that speculative work to gain credence in literature

and language departments, it must do its historical homework. And that


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15 Susan Felch, Cautionary ales and Crisscrossing Paths, Religion and Literature 41.2 (2009),p. 104.

16 Barbara Newman, Coming Out o the (Sacristy) Closet, Religion and Literature 42.12 (2010),p. 282.

homework need not be anti- or a-theological. Te Gospel o Johns vertiginous

opening asserts that the Word has come in words particular to a certain place

and culture; the opening o Luke 2 locates the incarnation in place, time, and

circumstance. Te Bibles revelations are mediated by the genres, grammars,and vocabularies o specific cultures. Tus in Genesis 3, amously, two Hebrew

words offer a play on cunning (arum) the characteristic o the snake and

naked (arumim): Adam and Eve think they will gain cunning by eating the

ruit, but instead realize only their nakedness.

Te 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, witnesseso the God we seek. Careul historical contextualization may thus be deeply

theological. It also adds ballast to speculative readings tendency to drif

towards vague abstractions that, as Susan Felch tactully writes, do little to

cultivate literary sensibilities.15 Historical scholarship has moral dimensions as

well. When I teach the details o Reormation 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 ully aspossible.

Yet there is potential danger in separating too firmly other worlds rom 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 or training.

Religion was to be studied as a eature (i an unortunate one) o the past; its

relation to literary study was to be mediated through history. Indeed, literary

studies has ofen used historicism as a shield against religions ultimate claims.I distinguish historicism rom the practice o writing historically inormed

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 o history to

relativize tradition. While many would invoke the terms Nietzschean legacy,

Pelikans work highlights the historicizing at work in the Reormation era, as


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17 Jaroslav Pelikan, Te Vindication o radition: Te 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (NewHaven, C: Yale University Press, 1984); discussed also in Newman, Coming Out o the (Sacristy)Closet.

18 See as one example Eamon Duffys Te Stripping o the Altars(New Haven, C: Yale, 1994); or agentle criticism o Duffy, see Kieckheer, odays Shocks, Yesterdays Conventions, Religion andLiterature42.12 (2010), pp. 259262.

19 Walton, Te Lives o Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert . . .(London, 1670), p. 81.

20 James Simpson, Not Just a Museum? Not so Fast, Religion and Literature 42.12 (2010),pp. 141162.

Christian groups ought to relativize and discredit those parts o inherited

tradition they ound erroneous. On Pelikans account scholarly historicism

extends that Reormation legacy.17 It is entirely possible to write history deeply

sympathetic to the religious subjects one studies. Leading scholars have doneso in ways that engage, implicitly or explicitly, their own aith commitments;

their work proves that the commitments o the one who studies do not

necessarily impede rigorous study o the past.18 But literary studies use o

historicism to isolate, relativize, or confine religion ofen proceeds rom a

stance o critical superiority, or at the least o pseudo-objective distance or

separation rom the literature under study.

At the conclusion o his hagiographic biography o John Donne, IzaakWalton hopes one day to see Donne reanimated.19 What do we reanimate

when we attend to religion as something more than a historical eature o a

particular culture? James Simpson notes the impasse at the end o pure

historicism: a historicism that attempts to understand religious texts rom the

past exclusively in their own terms risks a necessarily imperect repetition o a

past world we can (according to historicisms own procedures) never ully

understand. Yet an enthusiastic, zealous presentism worries him more: it maydevalue the distinctness o the literature we study in avour o current identities

and agendas, or, a ortiori, the merely narcissistic study o ourselves. For

Simpson, the assumption that past and present are continuous with respect to

religious belie, practice, and culture risks reanimating the pasts destructive

religious passions. Simpson proposes the Enlightenment museum as a model

or the study o religion: a space in which religion is presented through artiacts

distanced rom passions past and present.20

Yet in sealing off religion andliterature rom the present, we may calciy the literary past into mere

antiquarianism, and o course the temporal continuity o living tradition is

never simply repetition. Te imposition o a sacrosanct distance between the


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21 Kirkpatrick, Te I in Question, Religion and Literature44.2 (2012), pp. 116125.22 Kirkpatrick, Te I in Question, p. 117.23 C. S. Lewis,A Preace to Paradise Lost(Atlantic Publishers, 2005), p. 62.24 Alan Jacobs,A Teology o Reading: Te Hermeneutics o Love(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001).25 Kirkpatrick, Te I in Question, p. 121.

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 or scholarly

laziness nor a source o embarrassment.Robin Kirkpatrick considers the implications o such presentism or 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 or inward-turning scholarship or mere

personalism: he takes seriously Dantes insistence in De Vulgari Eloquentiathat

it is more human to be understood than to understand, because our very

selves are . . . ounded upon our linguistic interdependencies, and so not at allupon some personal capture o a truth (think o 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 o cultural superiority. In his powerul account o a theology o reading,

Alan Jacobs argues that the Christian scholar should read charitably with aull, respectul engagement o literary work andexercise the responsibility o

discernment.24 I Christians were to take seriously his call, we would be unable

to adopt a disengaged position o supposedly secular (and implicitly superior?)

objectivity as we read, study, and teach. Similarly, Kirkpatrick insists that what

a robust Christian aith ought to contribute to scholarship is not rigidity or an

attitude o superior conviction but a confident humility beore an inconceivable

All, and a willingness to acknowledge and a reusal to violate strangers asthey emerge rom the uture as well as the past.25

Underlying these discussions is the question o the place o personal

commitments in humanistic study. Nathan Scott was an ordained Anglican

minister and made no bones about the act. But by the time I got to graduate

school, the not-always-unspoken message was that those with religious


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26

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, introduction to Something Fearul: Medievalist Scholars on the Religiousurn, Religion and Literature42.12 (2010), p. 6.27 Daniel Boyarin, Nostalgia or Christianity: Getting Medieval Again, Religion and Literature42.12

(2010), pp. 4976.28 Fatemeh Keshavarz, Faith in the Academy: A Visit to Where Fearul Tings Are , Religion and

Literature44.3 (2012), pp. 153163.

commitments had best keep quiet about it. Even as other orms o neutrality

were called into question or scholarship on gender, race, class, or sexuality,

it remained a desideratum or scholarship on religion. May a humanistic

scholar deploy the ull range o her commitments and belies may she beully human without slipping into apologia, or blurring scholarship with

devotional writing, or reviving old antagonisms and exclusions as Simpson

(not unreasonably) ears, or undermining her own credibility? My field evinces

both cautionary tales (sectarian passions uelled Reormation studies scholarly

battles or decades) and ull engagement without smugness (see the work

o Debora Shuger and John Cox, among others). A recent issue o Religion

and Literature edited by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Jonathan Juils boastsexamples o work inormed and shaped by acknowledged convictions

(including agnosticism and atheism). Tis issue o Religion and Literature

explores how to realize or even just handle the language o belie in modern

scholarship responsibly, how modern continuities o religious practice

cast unexpected light (cognitive, intellectual, or spiritual) . . . upon historical

sources or problems.26 Tus in that issue, Daniel Boyarin uses painstaking

philology to challenge scholarly myths that block Christian-Jewishunderstanding.27

Fatemeh Keshavarz applauds these efforts to complicate the opposition

between historically contextualized and aith-based readings, pointing out

that or the Sufi mystics she studies, such an opposition would have been

nonsensical.28 In my field, there are parallels. When early modern people read

devotional lyric, they did so not only to appreciate verbal wit, or to wrestle

intellectually with diffi cult doctrines, but also to assist their devotion, thinktheology in applied, subjective, worded orm, and voice their prayers. Teology

understood narrowly as intellectual propositions to which one does or does

not assent has always been visible within early modern literary studies, my

sliver o the academy. Literary scholars readily engage with theology as


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

Sonnetsor Shakespeares plays to one conessional position or another. Tis

understanding o religion translates well into disembodied intellectualism. But

o course the reduction o religious belie to propositional statements is animpoverishment. Scholars have been comparatively reluctant to think about

the theological dimensions o orm; or o reading communities past, present,

and continuous; or o canon, genre, and living traditions; or, most undamentally,

o the position we take relative to the literary text.

For work in literary studies to engage ully and richly with theology, it must

breathe large, not limit itsel, or example, to the careul elucidation o literary

and religious communities in 1580s Oxordshire valuable as such painstakingwork is but to consider also the theological dimensions inherent in models

o community, language, canon, genre, and scholarly positioning. Tat

positioning may be the most powerul way o bringing a Christian perspective

into literary study: neither to occlude the text with your own sel Malvolios

crushing nor to give over all judgement; neither to appropriate the text or

modern agendas nor seal it off rom any claim on the reader, so that the I who

reads never risks change in hersel even as she subjects the text to herinterpretation. Insoar as such an approach yields humane, responsive,

imaginatively capacious readings, it may be one that both Christians and non-

Christians can endorse.

Perorming relation

Its dangerous in this context to turn to a literary text. No single reading can

match the liveliness o classrooms and scholarship dedicated to studying

literary texts historical particularities and theological dimensions. Aware o

this, and perhaps a bit oolhardy, I turn to welfh Night, a play taught regularly

in American surveys o British literature or many reasons, not least that the

Norton anthology includes the play, alongside King Lear, as its selection rom

Shakespearean drama. welfh Nights characters do not talk extensively aboutreligion, but they use religious language to characterize what they do talk

about. Tis act has prompted studies o religion in the play, such as Donna

Hamiltons detailed reconstruction o the religious politics o Englands court


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29 Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics o Protestant England(Lexington, KY: University Press oKentucky, 1992).

30

Roughly hal o those usages are oaths: i aith is one o Aguecheeks avourite expressions. But therecurrence o the oath may be significant, sensitizing the audiences ears to the word.31 Richard McCoy, Introduction, Faith in Shakespeare(Oxord: Oxord University Press, 2013).32 Keshavarz, Faith in the Academy, pp. 154155; Sufism would lose hal o its major figures i we

were to take out those who questioned every principle o their aith and practice . . . to many Sufis,aith was alive only i it remained vulnerable to death like all organic lie orms.

at the time o the plays first recorded perormance (early 1602); she finds in

the dramas religious language intricate allusions to contemporary affairs.29

While I admire and have learned rom this scholarship, there are other ways o

thinking about religion in and withthe play, enriched by but not limited to itshistorical moment. Te plays characters use the word aith some twenty-one

times.30 Teir invocations o aith invoke questions o ones relation to others

and their lived realities, as well as to theatrical fictions. Te plays habit o

thinking about relation through the language o aith is illuminated by

sixteenth-century thought about aith and theatre. It rewards historical

homework. But the play also invites us to implicate ourselves in its reflections

on relation.Recently Richard McCoy argued that Shakespeares plays secularize the

language o aith so as to emphasize both the theatres illusory nature and its

persistent power.31 McCoy posits a narrow, modern conception o religious

aith as intellectual certainty, unshakeable conviction. McCoy contrasts that

orm o aith with the much more modest, ofen compromised aith Shakespeare

invites in his imperect theatrical illusions. Yet as Keshavarz argues, despite

literary scholars commitment to the malleability o human thoughts, culture,and eelings, many o us are still bound to a reading o [aith] which assumes

an inherent and ontological conflict with change and, I would add, with

doubt.32 Te academic ear o aith presumes aiths rigidity, its potentially

toxic certainties. But that is not the understanding o aith that Shakespeare

nor many late medieval and Reormation Christian writers typically propose.

A more nuanced and historically accurate view would see aith as changing,

living, doubting, and responsive. Shakespeares sense o mixed aith in thetheatre, a aith encompassing belie, doubt, and the struggle to believe, may

not be secularizing. It is rather quite in line with much discourse about

religious aith.


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33 I discuss this model o aith at greater length in It is requird you do awake your aith: Belie inShakespeares Teatre, in eds. Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson Religion andDrama in Early Modern England(Burlington, V: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 115138.

34 Institutes o the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,

1960), p. 561.35 William Perkins,A reatise ending unto a Declaration Whether a Man be in the Estate o Damnation(1590), pp. 266267; Richard Hooker, A Learned and Comortable Sermon o the Certaintie andPerpetuitie o Faith in the Elect(1587); Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxerianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester(London, 1696), pp. 127128. See also Shugers discussion o Hookers sermon in Faith andAssurance,A Companion to Richard Hooker(Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2008), pp. 221250.

In the Gospel o 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 or those who believe. Te ather offers a poignant

response: I believe! Help thou my unbelie. Tis mix o aith with doubt,belie with unbelie, recurs in pastoral conceptions o aith in the period.

In Elizabethan Englands dominant Protestant soteriology, aith is a gif rom

God; saving aith does not waver, it does not doubt. Yet pastoral theology,

written or a ministers practical use, posits a model o aith in which belie

and unbelie 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 aith. Te gloss defines unbelie as the eblenes, and imperectiono my aith. Such imperection may imply intellectual doubt or simply a lack

o confidence that the Bibles redemptive promises apply to one personally.

Calvin amously insisted that those who have aith must be assured o their

salvation. Yet he acknowledges that aith is inevitably flawed: Surely, while

we teach that aith 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 perpetualconflict with their own unbelie. Far, indeed, are we rom putting their

consciences in any peaceul repose, undisturbed by any tumult at all.34 Mark

9:24 is ubiquitous in early modern pastoral theology; writers rom the

Calvinist William Perkins to the conormist Richard Hooker to the

nonconormist Richard Baxter reflect upon the verse to offer the standard

Reormation assurance that, in Perkinss words, they are but unreasonable

men, that say they have long beleeved in Christe without anie doubting o theirsalvation.35 Faith is not rigid, unshakeable conviction, but mixed with doubt

and shot through with longing; thus Baxter writes that no Petition seemeth


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36 Reliquiae, p. 128.37 Bacon, Novum Organum, trans. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denan Heath, in

Te Works o Francis Bacon, vol. III (Boston: aggard and Tompson, 1863) p. 78.38 Stephen Gosson, Playes Conuted in Five Actions(London, 1582), B8r.39 Gosson, Playes Conuted in Five Actions, F3v.40 Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeares ribe: Church, Nation, and Teater in Renaissance England, (Chicago:

University o Chicago Press, 2002); Paul White, Teatre and Reormation: Protestantism, Patronage,and Playing in udor England(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

more necessary to me than Lord, increase our Faith: I Believe, help thou my

unbeliee.36

It may seem perverse to discuss welfh Night in the context o religious

aith, or in the sixteenth century, true aith was ofen contrasted withtheatricality. In discussing Idols o the Teatre Francis Bacon complains

about systems o belie that are but so many stage-plays, based simply on

tradition and credulity.37 As its title makes clear, welfh Night invokes

carnival and estivity, and sixteenth-century anti-theatricalists commonly

linked carnival with theatrical excesses. Stephen Gosson complains that

Maygames, Stageplaies, & such like, can not be suffred among Christians

without Apostacy, because they were suckt rom the Devilles teate, to Nurseup Idolatrie.38 For Gosson and other anti-theatricalists, the stage operates

as McCoy imagines religious aith to do: as total absorption, complete

conviction. Te stage is dangerous because audiences lose any sense o distance

between themselves and its fictions. Gosson writes that theatres dazzling o

eye and ear carries us beyond our selves.39 Shakespeares metadramatic habit

o puncturing his own illusions may offer a different model o audience

engagement, one in which belie in theatre is mixed with discerning distanceand doubt. Te aith welfh Nightendorses is a dramatic aith: it demands

respect or, belie in, and reaction to others, in all o their weaknesses and

potentialities. As with religious aith, dramatic aith is always imperect, but

perhaps that is the appropriate model or aith this side o eternity.

As Jeffrey Knapp, Paul Whitfield White, and others have shown, reormers

and Catholics alike used the stage to deend aith.40 In addition to such

historical studies, we might also consider ways that contemporary thoughtabout aith undergirds dramatic practice, or reflect upon the theological

dimensions implicit in dramatic orm. welfh Night is ull o anti-theatrical

language. Yet the play also invites a mixed aith in theatre, acknowledging the


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41 Michael Schoeneldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness inSpenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

42

Paul Dean notes that Violas vocation is to bring Orsino and Olivia rom illusion to reality in Comortable Doctrine: welfh Night and the rinity, Te Review o English Studies, 52.208(2001), pp. 500515; I characterize reality as relation, something Dean addresses throughrinitarian theology.

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

Orsinos development). Te aith the play asks us to have in theatre is, to use

Jacobss language, ounded in charity in its modelling o charitable responses

to others and in discernment through staging the characters many ailuresto perorm charity. We are asked to have aith in theatres illusions, but the play

never demands the total absorption Gosson attributes to the stage. Te plays

model o theatrical aith does not absorb, erase, or crush the sel so much as it

seeks to bring the sel into charitable relation.

Te play offers many orms o alse aith. In Orsinos first lines, his obsessive

gastronomical metaphors never ail to appal my students; those lines tell us

quickly that he is interested not in Olivia but in himsel-in-love. As MichaelSchoeneldt has taught modern would-be Freudians, in the early modern period

the physical locus o the psychological sel was not the genitalia but the

gastrointestinal tract.41 Orsinos repeated reerences to digestive processes suggest

a orm o neurotic sel-obsession. Tus Orsino takes his companions question

about hunting an invitation to conversation, and to an activity requiring that he

move out, both outdoors and outside himsel and turns it inward. Yes, he will

hunt the hart, he says: his own heart (I.1.18). Te story o Diana and Acteon, othe hunter pursued and elled by his own hounds, is encompassed within Orsino.

He is hunter and hunted; his own desires, like ell and cruel hounds pursue him

(I.1.23). His interpretive practice imprisons all mythologies within the sel. Only

Viola, in her guise as Cesario, will induce him to unclasp the book even o [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 o this

relationship.42

As Cesario tells Orsino the story o his sisters passionate love ora man, the Duke responds to the moving fiction. Te Dukes question But died

thy sister o her love, my boy? (II.4.119) represents his first interest in anothers

story, in the sufferings o someone other than himsel.


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I the Duke suffers rom sel-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 oolFeste, she holds her own. Her soliloquy praising Feste stresses the importance

o his timing, responsiveness, and spontaneity, a perormers most important

qualities. By the plays end, the Duke arguably becomes a little like her. In

the final scene, she and Sebastian piece together their amily history: they

are raternal twins, their identities crystallized or 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 tothe wrack or shipwreck she suffered just beore the play opens: he reacts to

the scene beore him and seizes the opportunity or reciprocal love. At the

plays beginning, his sel-absorption prompts his tautological characterization

o imagination: So ull o shapes is ancy/Tat it alone is high antastical

(I.1.1415). By his last line, he admits someone else into his ancy: Viola will

be his ancys queen (V.1.381). His insistence that he must see Cesario as

Viola, in her womans clothes, might also be read as his newound aith inperormance: what she isis what she perorms; his ancy alone cannot work

transormation. (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 aith, one based both on scripted

dialogue (a catechism) and a measure o trickery. His catechizing o Olivia,

that good madonna (he catechize(s), I.5.58), emphasizes that excessivemourning or a soul in heaven is oolish, a sentiment indebted to Erasmuss

Praise o Follyand in line with moralists o the day. Like Erasmuss book, the

play insists that olly ministers to our railties. Feste has been away rom Illyria

and Olivia, an absence to be understood broadly: while he is away, estivity, too,

goes missing (he enters with a good lenten answer (I.5.8) and proceeds to

good ooling (I.5.30). Olivias anger at his absence quickly cools afer his

catechizing begins to mend her (I.5.70), bringing her out o mourning andinto the plays estive world.

For most o my students, Olivia is more appealing than Orsino, at least in

the plays first hal; she quickly develops into an improvisatory, reactive


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43

Kristen Poole, Saints Alive! Falstaff, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging o Puritanism, ShakespeareQuarterly46:1 (1995), pp. 4775.44 Tis includes publicly rebuking Olivia or his supposed mistreatment. Malvolio is not wrong, as

David Schalkwyk shows, to believe that a servantmaster relationship could oster love, butMalvolio exempts himsel rom the mutual care that should characterize such relationships (Loveand Service in welfh Nightand the Sonnets, Shakespeare Quarterly56:1, 2005, pp. 76100).

character who takes advantage o situations beore her, sel-aware enough to

realize that by alling in love at first sight she behaves somewhat ridiculously:

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Theology and Literature After Postmodernity-Bloomsbury Academic