Literature and Theology

New Interdisciplinary Spaces

Heather Walton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409400110
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351921947
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

This book explores current trends in the interdisciplinary study of literature and theology - an area of academic activity that has developed dramatically in the past twenty years. The field of study originated from the impetus to embrace the richness of imaginative resources in theological reflection and was stimulated by the re-emergence of the sacred in contemporary theory. Since the mid '90s critical theory has undergone a number of significant transformations, theology has become a subject of public concern and the boundaries between sacred and cultural texts have become increasingly unstable. This book brings together the work of leading scholars in the field with that of emerging voices. Offering an important resource for the growing number of postgraduate courses exploring the relation between religion and culture in the contemporary context, this book delineates current trends in interdisciplinary debate as well as tracing emerging configurations.

Chapter 1
Interdisciplinarity in Impossible Times: Studying Religion through Literature and the Arts

David Jasper

The only possible future for theological thinking in the Western context is through an interdisciplinary approach. Furthermore, contemporary critical thought can only be deeply hermeneutical, and this essay will pursue the future of an interdisciplinary hermeneutics after postmodernity, its implications for reading texts from Scripture to contemporary poetry and fiction, and the impossibility of any systematic theology in a time of the unsystematic and aphoristic.

Even as late as the 1970s, academic study in the interdisciplinary field of literature and theology generally looked backwards with a degree of religious nostalgia and a sense that things still could be as they always seemingly had been. For many people, on the one hand, there was still a rootedness in the essentially Victorian perspective that literature can illustrate the truths of religion – meaning, by and large, Christianity and that poetry was, as John Wesley described it, the ‘handmaid of Piety’.¹ Literary critics were asking what a specifically Christian form of literary criticism might be like in its assumed task of translating the concerns of writers and artists into terms readily understandable by Christians. Many such people still worked with the requirement, which was set down by T. S. Eliot as long ago as 1935, that it is necessary for ‘Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards’.² In North American academia, things were a little more critically relaxed, and one standard text that appeared in 1979, Giles Gunn’s The Interpretation of Otherness, extended the critical perspective on religion and literature to ‘the anthropological rather than the theological, the broadly humanistic rather than the narrowly doctrinal’.³ Yet, despite their differences, for many students of literature and religion the enemy was perceived as the then still dominant Marxist and post-Marxist forms of literary criticism. People like Terry Eagleton, at that time dismissed anything like ‘religion’ with the scant attention due to a view of life that had had its day and been superseded, culturally, at least, by the insights of a secular culture and its arts. Few people in religious studies outside the specific study of art history back in the 70s and 80s took the visual arts more seriously than as illustrations of religious truths and narratives. Religious art was limited only to art specifically about religious subjects – an age old assumption that has its roots in the Protestant Reformation and its inherent suspicion of the artist and the mystery of artistic creativity.⁴

Things changed radically in the early 80s. This was the great age of literary theory and its sibling enterprise, cultural theory. The problem with the great era of so-called deconstruction, as Eagleton expressed it, was its irresponsibility and that ‘it allow[ed] you to drive a coach and horses through everybody else’s beliefs while not saddling you with the inconvenience of having to adopt any yourself’.⁵ Still, at the same time, it was an age when critically the poet and the creative writer were given the credit of writing in what might be called a ‘primary language’ – that is to be taken seriously as a creative writer whose work could not simply be translated into the truths of religion, anthropology or any other kind of secondary discourse. What constituted religious art then became more difficult to define, and we took to reading not simply ‘religious’ poets like George Herbert or ‘Christian’ novelists like Graham Greene because they were Christian, but writers more generally because they were great poets and writers. In the visual arts, scholars in the field were also becoming dimly aware of the great abstract canvasses of the Abstract Expressionist school of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock, powerful precisely because there was no ready Christian or religious language to interpret them. Rather, they were moving beyond boundaries of articulation into worlds that could only be described as religious because there was no vocabulary that could embrace them or tie them down into any traditional religious discourse.

Here is an example of this new ‘religiosity’ from some words of the now almost cult figure of the video artist Bill Viola, written in 1979 as he worked on a video piece which he was making in the Sahara Desert.

I want to go to a place that seems like it’s at the end of the world. A vantage point from which one can stand and peer out into the void – the world beyond … Where all becomes strange and unfamiliar … Standing there, you strain to look further, to see beyond, strain to make out familiar shapes and forms. You finally realize that the void is yourself. It is like some huge mirror for your mind. Clear and uncluttered, it is the opposite of our urban distractive spaces. Out here, the unbound mind can run free. Imagination reigns. Space becomes a projection screen. Inside becomes outside. You see what you are.⁶

‘Imagination reigns.’ You see here how we have moved beyond any possible conventional religious formula and we see the artist ‘thinking theologically’. That is a phrase that is drawn from the philosopher Heidegger’s notion of Denken, or ‘thinking’, distinct from any thinking of theology or religion, but actually thinking theologically.⁷ When that happens, and when we begin to read and interpret literature and art in such a manner, we have moved beyond anything like a specific ‘Christian criticism’, to something that is more difficult, more elusive and often recognized only in glimpses – and which acknowledges the deep and original seriousness of the artist in his or her vocation.

Other things also began to happen. The later decades of the last century saw the rapid and seemingly unstoppable decline of institutional religion in the Christian West. Churches seemed to be falling apart, losing members even though they obstinately refused to abandon their sense of self-importance and their belief in the power of their ecclesial structures in society. At the same time, in schools and colleges the study of religion became properly extended to other great traditions, from Islam to Buddhism, Hinduism and other world faiths. In some ways the students of today are much better educated in religion than we were in the early 70s and before. But then, as the twentieth century died, so also the great enterprise known as literary theory began to come apart at the seams also. It was partly political as the intellectual élite of literary critics, who trained under the shadow of varieties of Marxism and the heady days of 1968 in Europe, watched the Eastern Block disintegrate. But even more than that, perhaps as they, and as we, began to grow older, ethical questions began to return to the agenda – we had to relearn take our responsibilities seriously in the end. Thus, for example, in 1992, a book, with the title The Ethics of Deconstruction, was published by the philosopher Simon Critchley, and slightly nervously recommended itself with the following defence:

In opposition to the polemics claiming that the work of Jacques Derrida is a species of nihilistic free play that suspends all questions of value and is therefore immoral and politically pernicious, this book argues that Derridean deconstruction can and indeed should be understood as an ethical demand …⁸

It was not entirely convincing, even at the time, as such ethical demands seemed finally to take us back to precisely such religiously based ethics that hardly seemed to work any more: ethics, yes – but what kind of ethics and morality in this now largely post-ecclesial age? What did religion and what did Christianity now exactly mean in this critical context? Much later, in 2003, a new-look Terry Eagleton wrote a rather jolly but still serious book called After Theory, in which he said:

For a long time cultural theorists avoided the question of morality as something of an embarrassment. It seemed preachy, unhistorical, priggish and heavy-handed. For the harder-nosed kind of theorist, it was also soppy and unscientific. It was too often just a fancy name for oppressing other people. Morality is a question of what our parents believe, not what we think.⁹

The language he uses is significant. Morality was ditched by the theorists because it was about belief, not about thinking. It was therefore not to be taken seriously – it preached at us: that is, it did all the things that religion did in the past. But how, now, in this new age, was it possible to be moral or ethical? Eagleton’s book also has chapters with titles like ‘Death, Evil and Non-Being’, and ‘Truth, Virtue and Objectivity’. It seems, then, that after theory, we have become again preoccupied with the ancient concerns of people whom we would once have called religious – but there is no going back to the old days of faith, no going back to T. S. Eliot in 1935 as our literary guide.

This is the point to which this essay so far has been leading up to. To be autobiographical for a moment, for the last 25 years or so, while I have been teaching both literature and theology to students at university, I have remained a practising Anglican priest – and yet I would not take back a word that I have been saying. And I have often asserted that I do not really know now how to ‘do’ theology any more except through literature and art, in which I can recognize the faith and wisdom of the past – and perhaps read in a new way the ancient texts of the Christian tradition that I once studied in a very different, perhaps more dogmatic and historical, manner. It was not so long ago that a New Testament scholar at Edinburgh University, Douglas Templeton, wrote a book called The New Testament as True Fiction: Literature, Literary Criticism, Aesthetics (1999), a title with whose serious humour I find myself resonating; and, as I read this book, I remain haunted by the words of the poet to whom I devoted my own doctoral studies, S. T. Coleridge, when he described ‘poetic faith’ as constituted by ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment’.¹⁰ The ‘willin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributor Biographies
• Introduction
• 1 Interdisciplinarity in Impossible Times: Studying Religion through Literature and the Arts
• 2 Discipline Beyond Disciplines
• 3 When Love Is Not True: Literature and Theology after Romance
• 4 Two (and two, and two) Towers: Interdisciplinarity, Borrowing, and the Limits of Interpretation
• 5 Silence, Rupture, Theology. Towards a Post-Christian Interdisciplinarity
• 6 Female Genius: Jane Leade (1624–1704)
• 7 Re-imagining the Sacred in Caribbean Literature
• 8 Theological Aesthetics and Beauty as Revelatory: An Interdisciplinary Assessment
• 9 The Sublime and the Beautiful: Intersections between Theology and Literature
• 10 Touch and Trembling: Intimating Interdisciplinary Bodies
• 11 A Story of Love and Death: Exploring Space for the Philosophical Imaginary1
• 12 The Devil in Disciplines: The Hermeneutic of Devil-hood in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters
• 13 Interdisciplinary Poetics: S. T. Coleridge and the Possibility of Symbol-Making After the Word
• Index