Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry

Austin Farrer's The Glass of Vision With Critical Commentary

Robert MacSwain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138279407
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317058625
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book offers a critical edition of arguably the greatest work of English theology in the 20th century: Austin Farrer's Bampton Lectures published as The Glass of Vision in 1948. Farrer was an interdisciplinary genius who made original contributions to philosophy, theology, and biblical studies, as well as to our understanding of the role of imagination in human thought and Christian doctrine. According to Farrer, the three primary themes of these lectures are 'scripture, metaphysics, and poetry,' individually and in relation to each other. The lectures defend his famous theory of divine revelation through images rather than propositions or events, a provocative account of the place of metaphysical reasoning in theology, and a literary approach to the Biblical text that was decades ahead of its time and is still controversial. The Glass of Vision has generated a rich and interesting interdisciplinary conversation that has lasted for decades, starting with commentators such as Helen Gardner and Frank Kermode. In addition to Farrer's full text, this critical edition also contains an introduction to the significance and context of Farrer's thought, and a selection of thirty-years' worth of commentary by leading British and European theologians and literary scholars: David Brown, Ingolf Dalferth, Hans Haugh, Douglas Hedley, David Jasper, and Gerard Loughlin. Of interest to literary and biblical scholars, theologians, and philosophers, this book holds particular value for those exploring the nature of imagination in contemporary thought and scholarship.

PART I
Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision: Bampton Lectures for 1948

Preface

The lectures which follow are no more than a modest attempt to state what I do, in fact, think about the relation borne to one another by three things – the sense of metaphysical philosophy, the sense of scriptural revelation, and the sense of poetry. Scripture and metaphysics are equally my study, and poetry is my pleasure. These three things rubbing against one another in my mind seem to kindle one another, and so I am moved to ask how this happens. I would not dream of undertaking to give an adequate treatment of such a question. Perhaps, after each of the three subjects of my interest had claimed a great volume to itself, a fourth volume (but I should have broken down long before) might begin to draw them into relation with one another. If we were never to say anything unless we said everything, we should all be best advised to keep our lips sealed: but we are all vain enough to think that if we express within a limited compass what in fact interests us, it may have the luck to interest our indulgent friends. The limited compass is happily prescribed to me by the course of eight lectures allowed to a Bampton Lecturer. Here is a conveniently narrow vessel in which to mix together my three ingredients. Since any interest the experiment may have consists in a combination of things we have often considered apart, the smallness of scale may be a positive advantage – the unity will be less likely to get lost in the detail.

I fear that in touching so many and great themes with the boldness of treatment required for a lecture, I have produced something unscholarly and impressionistic. It is not only that the style may be rhetorical, for as to that, perhaps the reader will remember that lectures are, in fact, rhetoric. It is much more that there are many inconsistences in statement between one lecture and another, and it seems too much to ask of the reader that he should imagine for himself how I would have reduced them if I had written a full-scale scholastic treatise.

But I am most penitent of all for the seeming arrogance with which I have pronounced on the form of scientific and metaphysical thought, when I am very ignorant of the first, and too entramelled in the second to get it into focus. What I have said I have only said to give a broad impression relevant to the purpose I had in view: to speak of scientific thinking only in an aspect of it which contrasts with metaphysical thought; and then, no doubt, with gross exaggeration of the contrast. To generalize about the form of natural science is really absurd; every science must be allowed its own form: at the most we could arrange the sciences in a sort of scale, from the more rigidly mathematical at the one end, to the more humane and historical at the other. Let me repeat, then, that I say what I say about the characteristically scientific procedure for no other purpose but to raise a discussion about metaphysics by way of contrast. I am more concerned to say that metaphysics is not this than to say that any particular scientific procedure is just this.

In the third lecture I have used by way of illustration the Trinitarian symbolism of St John’s Revelation. The reader who is acquainted with the commentaries on that book will know that a different account of these symbols, and especially of the Seven Spirits of God, has often been preferred, and so he will be likely to complain that my citation is a piece of arbitrary and unsupported dogmatism. I would not have dogmatized if I had thought that the interpretation was open to serious doubt. I have defended it at length in a study of the Apocalypse which will be published, I hope, not long after these lectures appear.¹

My debts are to such obvious sources for the most part that there will be no real fraud in leaving them unacknowledged; but I would like to mention M. Gabriel Marcel, from whose Être et Avoir I have lifted the distinction between problems and mysteries repeated, I dare say with much distortion, in my fourth lecture.²

It is the privilege of the Bampton Lecturer to commemorate from the pulpit before every lecture the Reverend John Bampton, Canon of Salisbury; recalling, it may be, with some awe the river of good doctrine which through so long a time has flowed into learned ears from that munificent source. Now here are the exact provisions of his testament:

… I give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford for ever, to have and to hold all and singular the said Lands or Estates upon trust, and to the intents and purposes hereinafter mentioned; that is to say, I will and appoint that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford for the time being shall take and receive all the rents, issues, and profits thereof, and (after all taxes, reparations, and necessary deductions made) that he pay all the remainder to the endowment of eight Divinity Lecture Sermons, to be established for ever in the said University, and to be performed in the manner following:

I direct and appoint that, upon the first Tuesday in Easter Term, a Lecturer be yearly chosen by the Heads of Colleges only, and by no others, in the room adjoining to the Printing-House, between the hours of ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, to preach eight Divinity Lecture Sermons, the year following, at St Mary’s in Oxford, between the commencement of the last month in the Lent Term and the end of the third week in Act Term.

Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecture Sermons shall be preached upon either of the following subjects – to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, and to confute all heretics and schismatics – upon the divine authority of the holy Scriptures – upon the authority of the writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the faith and practice of the primitive Church – upon the Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ – upon the Divinity of the Holy Ghost – upon the Articles of the Christian Faith, as comprehended in the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds.

Also I direct, that thirty copies of the eight Divinity Lecture Sermons shall always be printed, within two months after they are preached; and one copy shall be given to the Chancellor of the University, and one copy to the Head of every College, and one copy to the Mayor of the city of Oxford, and one copy to be put into the Bodleian library; and the expense of printing them shall be paid out of the revenue of the Land or Estates given for establishing the Divinity Lecture Sermons; and the Preacher shall not be paid, nor be entitled to the revenue, before they are printed.

Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be qualified to preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless he hath taken the degree of Master of Arts at least, in one of the two Universities of Oxford or Cambridge; and that the same person shall never preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons twice.

Not again, says the wise testator. But, O si melius!³

Oxford
June 1948

¹ It was published the following year: Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St John’s Apocalypse (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1949).

² Original French edition published in 1935; Farrer’s wife Katharine translated the first English version, which likewise appeared the year after The Glass of Vision: Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, translated by Katharine Farrer (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1949).

³ ‘If so, it would have been better!’

Lecture I:
The Supernatural and the Natural

That which may be known of God is manifest among men, for God hath manifested it unto them. For his invisible attributes since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and deity.

Romans, I.19

The subject of these lectures is the form of divine truth in the human mind: and I begin today with the distinctive character of supernatural and revealed truth. For the truth of which I have principally to speak is not simply truth about God, it is revealed truth about God; and God himself has revealed it. So we believe: and in so believing we suppose that we exalt this truth, as something above what our faculties could reach; as something we could not know unless God himself declared it. Our intention is not to make truth as narrow as the Church which professes it, but as high as the God who proclaims it. There is indeed, we say, a truth about God which human reason can discover; and man might have supposed it to be the highest he could know, had it not been that God himself had spoken a higher truth to him.

Since revealed truth is exalted by comparison with natural truth, we are disconcerted to hear some Christian philosophers attack the whole basis of distinction between the two, equating revelation and reason, so far as either is able to speak truly of God. The instinct of our faith reacts against such an equation, and inclines us to look into its credentials. The equation of reason and revelation is, we find, supposed to be proved by two propositions.

The first is this: if we believe in God at all, it is absurd and impious to imagine that we can find him out by our own reason, without his being first active in revealing himself to us. Therefore all our discovery of him is his self-manifestation, and all rational theology is revealed theology.

And this is the second proposition: if God does reveal himself to us, we cannot acknowledge or master what he reveals without the use of our reason. Therefore all his self-manifestation is also our discovery of him, and all revealed theology is rational theology.

The first proposition, assuming reason, proves revelation: the second, assuming revelation, proves reason. We are intended to add the two together and establish the joint conclusion that, wherever there is knowledge of God, both factors operate: man reasons, and God reveals. We need not of course conclude that the proportion between the two factors is everywhere the same. In the wide and continuous field of human experience we shall find places at which God’s operation appears more personal and more striking, and man’s ‘reason’ has more the character of simple recognition. Again we shall find places at which God’s operation is less evident or less clear, and man’s reason must be consciously strained in the effort to apprehend or to interpret it. Such differences there are admitted to be, but they are not admitted to be differences of principle. Indeed, to distinguish between natural and revealed theology is positively misleading; it would be better to substitute other distinctions: say the distinction between a theology based on God’s action in the general laws of nature, and a theology based on God’s action in particular historical fact – in the lives, let us say, of prophets and saints. It would be more significant on this shewing to call Christianity an historical religion than to call it a revealed religion.

Such is the argument. In proceeding to discuss it, we begin by observing that the two propositions on which it stands are flat platitudes, which can scarcely have been ever contested. Who has supposed that God can be found out without his own previous act of willing self-manifestation? Or who has supposed that revealed truth can be acknowledged without any use of our rational faculties? Is it really likely that a pair of incontrovertible truisms have strength to overthrow a doctrine long maintained by philosophers and saints? One would hesitate to think so. It is not, in fact, the substance of traditional doctrine that the two propositions assail, but simply the title by which it has been frequently and infelicitously called. ‘Reason and Revelation’ is a current description, but a bad description, for the antithesis we have to discuss. We ought to say ‘Natural Reason and Supernatural Revelation’, and we ought to throw the emphasis on the adjectives rather than upon the nouns. We have not to distinguish between God’s action and ours, but between two phases of God’s action – his supernatural action, and his action by way of nature. It is difficult to see how anything resembling Christianity can survive the denial of this distinction. For Christianity is faith in Christ, and Christ is God acting not by way of nature, but supernaturally. If you reduce Christ to a part of God’s natural action, is he Christ any longer?

Let us first consider God’s self-revelation by way of nature. To a theist, everything which happens in the world reveals God acting through his creatures, or, to put it otherwise, it reveals the creatures acting as themselves the effect of the Creator’s act. For this reason the creatures have traditionally been called ‘second causes’, and God the ‘first cause’ of every action. The creatures, all together, make up the realm of Nature. Human minds, being themselves creatures, are parts of Nature in the sense here understood. It is particularly necessary to observe this, because German idealism has popularised the distinction between Nature and Spirit, a distinction which exempts the human spirit from the realm of nature. Let every man use words in the way best suited to make his meaning plain. For our present purpose we define Nature in such a sense that the activities of human spirit, of intellect, that is to say, and will, are parts of nature. For intelligence and voluntary choice are certainly the natural endowments of man. Without them human nature would not be human nature, but some other thing.

By Nature, then, we mean the universe of creatures or the sum of second causes, including man. By including man in nature we do not subject him to the iron rule of natural law, or otherwise pretend that he is something lower than he is. For us, nature is not a machine operated by divine controls; it is a multitude of interplaying forces, sustained in being by the Father of Life. Some natural activities operate in close accord with fixed patterns, others more freely. Nature is not natural because it is bound; it is natural because it is the real operation of second causes, whether they are bound or free. Men are free, or rather, they are just as free as they discover themselves to be; but their actions, in being free, do not cease to be natural; it is their nature to be free, and in exercising their freedom they express their nature. Not that a man is free to be anything you like: he cannot exercise the activities of an angel, nor even the activities of an eagle. He can only exercise his own, those, that is to say, which belong to his nature, and to his place in the total nature.

When we speak, therefore, of God’s operation by way of nature, we refer to those activities which he, their first cause, enables the multitudes of second causes to perform, in accordance with the various natures he has assigned them. What happens, then, when man knows God by nature, by his natural reason? We must answer that both the object and the subject of such knowledge are supplied by God; by God, that is, working in the way of nature. Any example will serve to make this plain. Let us take the most hackneyed of all – Aristotle reasoning his way from stellar motions to his Prime Mover Unmoved. (It may well be that his reasoning is wholly invalid: it will still serve for our example.) The object he studies is the stellar motions, and these motions are the activities of second causes, of the energies which compose the bodies of the stars. And they, in moving, express the activity of their first cause, God. So much for the object of Aristotle’s study. As to the subject, it is Aristotle’s own mind; itself a second cause, exerting a power of speculation continually derived from God, the first cause and archetypal mind. Aristotle, who had, indeed, scarcely the rudiments of what we call theistic belief, chose to concentrate his attention on the activity of God revealed in the stars he studied, rather than upon the activity of God revealed in his own mind as he studied the stars. But in principle either path can be taken. We can ascend from second to first cause either on the side of the subject or of the object. Aristotle was himself aware that the human subject, speculating as he speculated, was exerting an act not so much human as divine.

What do we learn from the example we have taken? That the most aridly theoretical speculation, the typical case of rational theologising, is to be attributed to the divine initiative: to God working by way of nature, God who wills to display himself in the stars, God who wills to elevate a philosopher’s mind along the paths of astral contemplation. There is no question of the philosopher’s finding God out, as a child may find his father out, unwilling or unaware. God may be in some sense a jealous God, but his jealousy is not this. He is not unwilling to be known, but only (if so) unwilling that, knowing him, we should attribute the achievement to ourselves. In apprehending the Creator through the creature, the philosopher has no cause to boast: he simply consents not to frustrate a principal purpose of his natural being, when the way has opened for him to fulfil it.

But if, in the case we have taken, there is no question of denying the divine initiative, equally there is no question of asserting an action of God outside the bounds of nature. The stars and the philosopher were both exerting their proper forces. There is nothing supernatural about Aristotle’s enlightenment.

There are, I know, many people who will listen to a discussion such as this with some impatience. ‘When’, they say, ‘the religious mind insists that God is not to be known without his revealing initiative, it is not to be put off with philosophic generalities about the universal operation of Deus sive Natura.¹ To tell us that what we call nature can be called God achieving his ends by way of nature, really alters nothing. What we mean is that God is not to be known by us unless he reveals himself personally. Aristotle was, you say, quite unaware of God’s personally communicating to him anything. Very well: in that case we shall be inclined to say one or other of two things. We are willing to suppose that Aristotle’s mind responded to no personal...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘The form of divine truth in the human mind’
• Part I Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision: Bampton Lectures for 1948
• Part II Commentary
• Selected Bibliography
• Index