Literature and Theology as a Grammar of Assent

David Jasper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317104315
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Examining the roots of the relationship between literature and theology, this book offers the first serious attempt to probe the deep theological purposes of the study of literature. Through an exploration of themes of evil, forgiveness, sacrament and what it means to be human, David Jasper draws from international research and discussions on literature and theology and employs an historical and profoundly personal journey through the later part of the last century up to the present time. Combining fields such as bible and literature, poetry and sacrament, this book sheds new light on how Christian theology seeks to remain articulate in our global, secular and multi-faith culture.

Part I
The Durham Conferences

Chapter 1
Humanism and Belief in Literature: Seeking a Grammar of Assent

On 23-25 September, 1982, the first National Conference on Literature and Religion was held in the University of Durham. It was from this event and its successors in the biennial series of conferences that continue to the present day that the journal Literature and Theology was born, although even by then, only five years later, the literary and the theological climate in Britain was beginning to change. The papers that were later published from the 1982 conference might seem to us now, in many ways, to belong to another world both in their language and in their frames of reference. Their authors were largely, though not exclusively, Christian, clerical and male, speaking and writing in what one of them, John Coulson, quoting Cardinal Manning, who was speaking rather disparagingly of J.H. Newman, called 'the old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone'.¹ It was naturally assumed then that each day of the conference should begin with prayers or a Eucharist in the college chapel. This was a time before the advent of continental theoretical thinking in literary, cultural and later theological studies, and both literary and theological references in the essays are to an older generation of scholars, redolent of a Catholic and Christian humanistic spirit that has its roots in the nineteenth century in the prose works of Coleridge and Newmans Grammar of Assent (1870), and behind them to Pascal and, eventually, Erasmus. Contemporary English poetry then seemed to have reached its peak in The Four Quartets, and behind Eliot lay the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets, Shakespeare, Virgil, the Greek tragedians, and, of course, the Bible, a book which still, for such scholars, 'found them' at the very root of their being.² Yet F.W. Dillistone, the chair of the conference, conveys some sense of the innovative nature of the proceedings when he writes in his Introduction to the published essays of the 'hesitation, even suspicion in academic circles in this country when attempts have been made to suggest that theology and English Literature have much to contribute to one another and to learn from one another',³ though he admits that this was not entirely the case in the United States, where the powerful voice of Nathan A. Scott Jr, among others, could be heard in an interdisciplinary programme in the University of Chicago that was civic and Tillichian in its preoccupations and owed much to particular readings of Matthew Arnold. The Durham conference was only what Dillistone called 'a welcome and promising beginning' and a 'withdrawing of blinds',⁴ yet from the start, in England, there were two differences from the Chicago programme. First, it was more precisely theological, indeed, liturgical in its nature, drawing on its nineteenth century Tractarian roots. Second, it was, in some respects, more strictly philosophical. Neither of these notes in the study of literature and theology sound so clearly and in the same way in current studies in the field. In 1982, it was the presence of the Wittgensteinian philosopher D.Z. Phillips that intellectually braced the conference, demanding what Phillips called strict 'grammatical requirements', and if we infringe them, 'we shall soon find ourselves engaged in trivialities or nonsense. The most common infringements come about by trying to sever a concept from the conditions of its application'.⁵

There was little here of abstraction but there was a deep learning in and respect for the texts of literature. What was particularly significant about this moment in England in the early 1980s? The study of the humanities was soon to change radically and adopt the new language ('jargon' it would then have been called by the older generation of scholars) of postmodernity and deconstruction, while theology and the Church were very much part of wider debates in society which, after Bishop John Robinson, still listened seriously to what it was to be honest to God.⁶ But the Durham conference was a meeting of generations. The five senior figures to whom I shall return in more detail shortly – EW. Dillistone, John Coulson, Martin Jarrett-Kerr, Ulrich Simon and Peter Walker – were men who, in different ways, had been deeply involved in the bloodbath that was mid-century Europe, in the armed forces, in the struggle in South Africa, in the horror of the Holocaust, or had been taught theology at first hand by Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and the Niebuhrs. At the other end of the age spectrum were younger scholars, myself included, who had no such memories and looked forward to a different world which was less particular and perhaps less devout. It was a meeting point that found, in different ways and for various reasons, a common language for religion and theology in literature.

The ground for that common language was initially the nineteenth century, and above all the intellectual heritage of S.T. Coleridge. It was no accident that the second Durham conference in 1984 should focus on Coleridge and Schleiermacher, both of whom died in 1834. Behind the theological movements broadly represented in the United States by Tillich, and in England by Anglican clergymen like John Robinson, which regarded theology from 'the bottom upwards', lay an understanding of language which primarily regarded it not as analytic but as, in Coulson's word, 'fiduciary'.⁷ For Coleridge words are energetic, living things and language a living organism which resists any tendency towards reductionism into what he calls 'a Chaos grinding itself into compatibility.^'8 Rather, by a process of 'de-synonymization', meanings should be kept distinct and from such careful diversity the life and vitality of metaphors have their being. In this way the language of poetry cannot be reduced or replaced by any 'literal' equivalence. At the same time for Coleridge, the poet, whose vision may be characterized as a 'unity in multeity', must be 'impelled by a mighty inward power under whose "obscure impulse" the poetry reveals "a bright, and clear, and living Idea'".⁹ It is to the imagination that this Idea alone can become apparent, closely related to what Coleridge describes in The Statesman's Manual (1816), speaking of the language of the Bible, and above all the writings of the prophets, as a symbol, that is as making possible the revelation of the universal in the particular which is a living part of the whole which it represents.¹⁰ In the theology of the Tractarians and the work of J.H. Newman, such an understanding of symbol is taken up into a sacramental theology that, for Coulson, finds its deepest literary expression in Newman's Grammar of Assent, which he summarizes succinctly in describing the claims of his own book entitled Religion and Imagination (1981): 'T he chief contention or grammatical principle of this book is that religious belief originates in that activity we call imagination, and that its verification thus depends now, as in the past, upon its first being made credible to imagination. The phrase (and claim) are Newman's Throughout the careful distinctions made in Newman's book, of which the deepest concerns are theological in the defence of Catholicism, between assent, inference, certitude and the nature of the 'Illative Faculty', he continually employs literary methods and examples. Newman returns repeatedly to the plays of Shakespeare and particularly in a lengthy discussion of whether an early text of Henry V is corrupt (the question being how do we establish the 'real' Shakespeare?) – he concludes that 'if the text of Shakespeare is corrupt it should be published as corrupt.'¹² The truth, for Newman, lies in the concrete' and lively text as we have it before us and this is always to be preferred to that which is strictly 'correct'. This is not to say in the least that we should abandon the rigours of careful attention and scrutiny in the understanding of texts or in reasoning. Rather, in a sentence that well would characterize the critical spirit of the 1982 conference, Newman writes:

Reasoning in concrete matters ... does not supersede the logical form of inference, but is one and the same with it; only it is no longer an abstraction but carried out into the realities of life, its premisses [sic] being instinct with the substance and the momentum of that mass of probabilities which carry it home definitely to the individual case ...¹³

The later Coleridge of Aids to Reflection (1825) is referred to in and permeates the Grammar of Assent, not least in the establishment of the nature of the Illative Sense whereby (Newman is drawing closely also on Bishop Joseph Butler) assent arises from the accumulation of probabilities. This is despite the Cardinal's declaration in extreme and forgetful old age that he 'never read a line of Coleridge'.¹⁴

Aids to Reflection also permeated at a deep unconscious level the spirit and thought of the Durham conference of 1982. If in many respects Coulson was the conferences intellectual guide, it was Ulrich Simon's lecture on Job and Sophocles that was its brilliantly dark and feeling centre. Simon was Professor of Christian Literature at King's College London. He was born in Berlin in 1913 into a cultivated Jewish family (his father was a noted concert pianist and composer) which gave him opportunities to meet Thomas Mann and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a near contemporary at school. His father was a victim of Auschwitz and almost certainly his brother died under Stalin, the background to his profound sense of evil. Escaping to London Simon was baptized in 1934, and later ordained as a priest into the Anglican Church. Simon never minced his words. He described Honest to God (1963) as a 'mean little book' wherein John Robinson 'acted as a kind of catalyst for the religious dishonesty towards God which Bultmann's demythologization had begun'.¹⁵ He vehemently hated what he regarded as the jargon of theory. Hie opening of Ulrich's lecture at the conference, later published as an essay in the proceedings, is utterly characteristic.

Comparisons in literature are as common as they maybe either odious or boring, or both. Despite Virginia Woolfs scathing caricature in To the Lighthouse we are still compelled to listen to learned papers on the Influence of Someone on Someone else. Perhaps there is some justification for this procedure, for it is not a wholly sterile endeavour to find out, say, for example, where Shakespeare got his material for Troilus and Cressida and why he departed from the conventional treatment.¹⁶

What then follows in his lecture are penetrating close readings of the Book of Job and Sophocles' Philoctetes as dark tragedies, brushing aside the claims of George Steiner for the death of tragedy in our time.¹⁷ From the depths of tragic literature Simon gives his answer to the 'hopeless superficiality of contemporary Christian trends...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Study of Literature and Theology – A History since 1982
• PART I THE DURHAM CONFERENCES
• PART II THE LOSS OF AND THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY
• PART III THEMES AND THE WIDER WORLD
• Brief Bibliography
• Index