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The Literary Avatars of Christian Sacramentality, Theology and Practical Life in Recent Modernity

by Ioana Zirra (Volume editor) Madeleine Potter (Volume editor)
©2016 Edited Collection 169 Pages
Series: Dis/Continuities, Volume 13

Summary

Twelve Anglicists (from France, America, Poland, and Romania) who met in Bucharest to debate Religion and Spirituality in Literature and the Arts at the ACED Conference in June 2015 join their voices in demonstrating the vitally spiritual power of Christianity in the recently modern world (in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and society). Poetry (by Eliot, Yeats, Heaney, David Jones, Hill, G.M. Brown) and fiction (Henry James, Lodge, Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Rose Macaulay and Ron Hansen), interpreted with (Thomist and more recent) theology (J.H. Newman’s, Paul Tillich’s, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s, De Certeau’s) and philosophy (from Plato to Gadamer) in mind, give heartening suggestions for transcending, along Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox lines, the modern secular ethos.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Table of Contents
  • Introduction: The Literary Avatars of Christian Sacramentality, Theology and Practical Life in Recent Modernity
  • Back to Faith and Theology through the Paradoxical Modern Gate
  • A Plea in Favour of Guilt
  • Poetic Kairoi in “Lapis Lazuli” and “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” by Yeats and in Seamus Heaney’s “A Snowshoe” (Shelf Life VI)
  • Moving Against the Grain of Modern Secularisation. Modernism Before and After
  • Turning Away from Modern Secularisation: T. S. Eliot and His Poetic Space for a Metaphysical Quest
  • C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot: Christianity through the Looking Glass
  • At the Heart of the Matter – Theology and Sacramentality in Recent Modernity
  • A Blood that Is Wise: Flannery O’Connor and the “Nouvelle Théologie”
  • Does Art Imply Theology?: Henry James, Hans-Georg Gadamer, David Jones and Hans Urs von Balthasar
  • Moving beyond Ekphrasis: Sacramental Transference of Being in the Arts
  • The Long Catholic Modernity in the Twentieth Century
  • Aspects of Catholic Spirituality in the Poetry of George Mackay Brown
  • “New wine in new bottles”: Some Aspects of the Twentieth-Century English Catholic Novel
  • Patterns for the Persistence of Christian Faith in the World of Today
  • “The Church… I suppose it really is out to stop war”: Christianity and Peace Activism in Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916)
  • Religion as Philosophy and Art in the Work of Lucian Blaga
  • Empirical Religion vs. Secularisation in Postcommunist Romania
  • Notes on Editors and Contributors
  • Index

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Ioana Zirra

University of Bucharest

Introduction: The Literary Avatars of Christian Sacramentality, Theology and Practical Life in Recent Modernity

The conference on Religion and Spirituality in Literature and the Arts that took place in the University of Bucharest, the English Department, in June 2015 has been the occasion for witnessing a number of ways in which literature remains in contact with the Christian sacramental tradition in recent modernity, when regarding the latter primarily as an episode in the history of (Western) secularisation. We follow the (practical and contemplative) directions capable of showing that literature, as a form of intimate human communication, can remain faithful to Christianity and translate its practices through creative, socially efficient practices in unexpected places and manners. All this shows that the understanding of religious matters and the advance towards the numinous remain relevant for modern civilization even after the turn of the nineteenth century (which saw the appearance of Darwinism, Agnosticism and Marxism), in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Many of the cases studied in this volume owe their closeness to Christian matters to the strength of the Catholic tradition (see Maria Fengler, “Aspects of Catholic Spirituality in the Poetry of George Mackay Brown” and Aleksandra Słyszewska, “‘New wine in new bottles’: Some Aspects of the Twentieth-Century English Catholic Novel”), but others are the product of creative individuals’ struggle for ordering the world by reaching beyond the wall of institutional, disciplinary conventions or entrenched mentalities so as to remain in contact with the realm of the sacramental. Most of the arguments proposed here rest on interesting connections made between theological, poetic, political, and/or philosophical/aesthetic lines of thinking that underwrite modern history of ideas. Some of the contributors move more obliquely in identifying strategies, concepts and filiations that are decidedly Christian ways of solving the conundrums of modern existence. The power to transcend anonymity, anomie and guilt in crowded cities, and living at the mercy of alienating institutions and political decisions is addressed from various angles: mainstream Christian authors writing in English are met with in Prof. Anna Walczuk’s and Roxana Paula Trandafir’s studies of T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis, ← 7 | 8 → while older canonical voices are recalled in connection with unexpected recently modern creations (Prof. Adrian Grafe). Mutually enlightening literary texts are invoked to situate the literary avatars of Christian sacramentality, theology and practical life in recent modernity; they advance in stages with the contributions grouped into five chapters: Back to Faith and Theology through the Paradoxical Modern Gate; Moving against the Grain of Modern Secularisation: Modernism Before and After; At the Heart of the Matter – Theology and Sacramentality in Recent Modernity; The Long Catholic Modernity in the Twentieth Century; Patterns for the Persistence of Christian Faith in the World of Today. In order to avoid a circular demonstration of the case and for doing justice to the paradoxes of modernity, the editors have organized the contributions so as to approach the subject from the angle of more recent and striking manifestations, in both fiction and poetry, of Christian themes and sentiments, situating them next in a wider literary-canonical perspective and simultaneously moving towards the heart of the matter, in theological and sacramental terms.

Without positing any religious revivals or substitute modern faiths, as the nineteenth century was prone to do for countering the fear of modern challenges that made risk/threats the underside of material development and progress, twentieth- and twenty-first century texts, whether fictional or sacramentally poetic, or more directly theological in inspiration, show that they are capable of engaging in viable dialogue with the (late or recent) modern canon from positions of (Christian) faith.

To illustrate these observations, the volume opens with one of the Bucharest conference invited speakers, Professor Adrian Grafe’s demonstration about “how fruitful a faith-informed guilty conscience can be in literary terms” (see infra, p. 15). Amazingly, after a canonical but inspired detour through the Scriptures, Saint Augustine and George Herbert, Graham Greene and Geoffrey Hill, a rich context is created for analyzing the American writer Ron Hansen’s most recent novel, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (2011) (see “A Plea in Favour of Guilt”). The centrality of religious motifs in the creative crucible of the great Irish poets Yeats and Heaney is translated into theological terms also by Ioana Zirra’s contribution, “Poetic Kairoi in ‘Lapis Lazuli’ and ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ by Yeats and in Seamus Heaney’s ‘A Snowshoe’ (Shelf Life VI) ”. The topical answers provided by Paul Tillich’s systematic theology to some problems of modern humanity (the effects of space exploration on contemporary man’s condition and stature, the decline of the crucially modern idea of progress and the ways of restoring its validity) and his insistence on the fact that theology can provide nuanced, timely answers to these problems enable a comparison between poetry and theology. What identifies ← 8 | 9 →kairoi as felicitous moments in the history of the West (which Tillich extends to the Mediterranean cradle of Christianity) regarded in a theological light is also what sustains kairoi poems, poems that circumscribe moments of fulfilled time in Yeats’s modernist poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century and Heaney’s in the later twentieth century, also.

By remaining close to the modernist hub of the twentieth-century canon, Anna Walczuk follows T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage towards the transcendent wherein the ultimate meaning of human existence is located (see “Turning Away from Modern Secularisation: T. S. Eliot and His Poetic Space for a Metaphysical Quest”). The second paper in the same area deals with Eliot in tandem with C. S. Lewis, pleading for the surrender of the natural self to God as the essential act of faith at the core of Christianity (see “C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot: Christianity through the Looking Glass” by Roxana Paula Trandafir).

The shift from the moral to the sacramental heart of Christianity in the recent modern age is effected by approaching major twentieth-century theological writing, in the works of the Catholic thinkers Michel de Certeau and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The application of De Certeau’s nouvelle theology to Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel Wise Blood (in Joseph Kuhn’s “A Blood that Is Wise: Flannery O’Connor and the ‘Nouvelle Théologie’”) also opens the series of lived Christian sensibility case studies based on literature. They testify to the two directions in the orientation of twentieth-century preoccupations with Christianity: the direct and the oblique ones. The former can be traced in the contribution titled “‘New wine in new bottles’: Some Aspects of the Twentieth-Century English Catholic Novel”, analysed by Aleksandra Słyszewska, and “Christian Spirituality in the Poetry of George Mackay Brown”, by Maria Fengler. These are as compelling as the connection between literature, philosophy and theology made in Martin Potter’s text “Does Art Imply Theology?: Henry James, Hans-Georg Gadamer, David Jones and Hans Urs von Balthasar” and in Madeline Potter’s “Moving beyond Ekphrasis: Sacramental Transference of Being in the Arts”. Quite originally, she makes a plea for introducing the concept of μετάπαρουσία (metaparousia) as a way of discussing “the deeply mimetic character [of ekphrasis]” so as to argue “that a process similar to it, but theologically-grounded, and which moves beyond mere description and imitation” causes literature to enter, together with various art media, in “the field of sacramental representation of presence” by “a real transference of being – understood in Thomist terms” (see infra, p. 93). For all its declaration of only four names in the title, Martin Potter’s paper, compellingly traces and joins several Thomist, neo-Thomist, Kantian and neo-Aristotelian lines of thinking in order to situate the work of two writers crucial for the development of literary ← 9 | 10 → modernism, Henry James and David Jones; the paper manages to situate literary representation and interpretation in a constellation of modern thinking landmarks in both philosophy and theology (Kant, Habermas, MacIntyre, Hans Urs von Balthasar).

Details

Pages
169
Year
2016
ISBN (PDF)
9783653063097
ISBN (ePUB)
9783653955675
ISBN (MOBI)
9783653955668
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783631668887
DOI
10.3726/978-3-653-06309-7
Language
English
Publication date
2015 (December)
Keywords
Religion Spirituality Secularisation Fiction Poetry
Published
Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2016. 169 pp.

Biographical notes

Ioana Zirra (Volume editor) Madeleine Potter (Volume editor)

Ioana Zirra teaches Victorian and twentieth-century modernity and postmodernity in the English and Irish literary canon at the University of Bucharest. Madeline Potter is carrying out research at the British Cultural Studies Centre, University of Bucharest.

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