Abstract
In this book I deal with relationships between religion and literature. Throughout, I confine myself to Christianity, which I view from a perspective afforded by the rise of modern, secular literary studies. An interpretation of what it means to be a person is basic to how I engage this main topic, and although I do not pursue the implications of my argument for the increasing global awareness of religious pluralism or for the theoretical vindication of literary studies which is much in fashion today, I hope to offer an assessment of the person that illuminates both of these areas.
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Notes
In a commentary claiming that Ernst Bloch’s philosophy ‘makes religious and irreligious reading at the same time’, Jürgen Moltmann says that what emerges ‘is a kind of tertium genus hardly known as yet’. See Ernst Bloch, Man on His Own. Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, trans. A.B. Ashton (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970), ‘Introduction’, pp. 19–20. My position here is not identical with Bloch’s or Moltmann’s, but I am indebted to both for the notion that I later refer to as a tertium quid, in process of emergence and scarcely nameable.
In theological terms, this is what is meant by being ‘in the Spirit’, if this phrase is understood not as an invitation to escape from history but to transform it. See John V. Taylor, The Go-Between God. The Holy Spirit and the Christian Mission (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 18, 8, 150.
The Teaching of English in England (London: HM Stationery Office, 1921). Page numbers are cited in the text. In the following pages I draw on the following books on the rise of English studies: D.J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies. An Account of the Study of English Language and Literature from its Origins to the Making of the Oxford English School (London: Oxford University Press for the University of Hull, 1965)
Margaret Mathieson, The Preachers of Culture: A Study of English and its Teachers (London: Allen & Unwin, 1975)
Brian Doyle, ‘The Hidden History of English Studies’, ed. Peter Widdowson (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 17–31
Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983)
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory. An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983)
Bernard Bergonzi, Exploding English. Criticism, Theory, Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment. The Training of Critical Awareness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933), pp. 32, 93.
David Holbrook, ‘F.R. Leavis and the Sources of Hope’, ed. Denys Thompson, The Leavises. Recollections and Impressions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 153–70, deals with the much-observed phenomenon of Leavis’s avoidance of philosophy, and suggests that there is a philosophy implicit in Leavis’s criticism.
Literature and Personal Values (London: Macmillan, 1992). For arguments along similar lines, to which I am indebted, see Northrop Frye, Words With Power. Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature (New York: Viking, 1990)
George Steiner, Real Presences. Is there anything ‘in’ what we say? (London: Faber & Faber, 1989)
A.D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis. Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality (London: Methuen, 1983).
I am using ‘Great Commandment’ in the singular, even though there are two commandments (one about God; the other about our neighbour). As Daniel Patte says, ‘They are not separable. Together, they are the “great commandment”’. Yet, as Patte goes on to say, the ‘two commands remain distinct. They should not be identified with each other. Loving God should not be reduced to loving one’s neighbour! Loving God is an act of Love distinct from loving one’s neighbour, and vice versa.’ See Daniel Patte, The Gospel According to Matthew. A Structural Commentary on Matthew’s Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), p. 314.
The single-twofoldness of the great commandment is of much interest in itself, and in referring to it in the singular I do not wish to overlook the twofoldness. For an interesting treatment of the point I am making about the Great Commandment, see John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion. Human Responses to the Transcendent (London: Macmillan, 1989), ‘The Universality of the Golden Rule’, pp. 309 ff.
See Richard Swinburne, ‘Personal Identity: The Dualist Theory’, in Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne, Personal Identity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 8 ff., on the ‘memory-and-character’ theory, based on Locke’s association of memory and consciousness.
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modem Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Kathleen Wilkes, Real People. Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
Noam Chomsky, review of B.F. Skinner, Verbal Behaviour, in Language 35 (1959), 26–58.
The issues are clearly and engagingly set out by Charles B. Daniels, ‘Personal Identity’, ed. Peter A. French and Curtis Brown, Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Problems. A Reader for Introductory Philosophy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), pp. 49–63.
This is argued by Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), vol. I, Stoicism in Classical Latin Literature, pp. 364, 389.
Justin Martyr, Apology, 1, 46, trans. G.J. Davie, The Works Now Extant of S. Justin the Martyr (Oxford: J.H. & T. Parker, 1861), p. 35.
Boethius, A Treatise Against Eutyches and Nestortus, edited with facing translation by H.F. Stewart and E.K. Rand, in Boethius. The Theological Tractates; the Consolation of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 92–93: ‘rationabilis naturae individua substantia’.
Arno Borst, Medieval Worlds. Barbarians, Heretics and Artists in the Middle Ages, trans. Eric Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 37 ff. Further page numbers are cited in the text.
The imago Dei is itself a useful means of approach to the idea of the person, but not the one I have chosen here. For thoughtful ideas on the topic, see Lars Thunberg, ‘The Human Person as Image of God. I. Eastern Christianity’, and Bernard McGinn, ‘The Human Person as Image of God. II. Western Christianity’, ed. Bernard McGinn, John Meyendorff and Jean Leclercq, Christian Spirituality. Origins to the Twelfth Century (N.Y.: Crossroad, 1989), pp. 291 ff.
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© 1994 Patrick Grant
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Grant, P. (1994). Introduction. In: Spiritual Discourse and the Meaning of Persons. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23297-0_1
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