Anne Lamott

I have been reading two wonderful books by Anne Lamott:

Bird by Bird - a terrific book about writing;

and her spirutual memoir

Traveling Mercies.

I won't review them or anything: but they are books to change your life by.

Iris Murdoch

Just a note this morning:

I have been reading the excellent novels of Iris Murdoch. They are shot through with her post-God attempt to find a moral ideal, a conception of the Good that will be tenable in the contemporary world. The themes? Well, love, sex, God and death of course! What else is worth talking about? It reminds me that the best moral thinking these days is done by novelists. The narrative form is such an advantage.

I have read thus far:
The Bell
Bruno's Dream
A Severed Head (read it ages ago)
The Time of the Angels

and I am reading

The Black Prince.

Next: Henry and Cato
and then -

The Sea, The Sea.

Black Watch

In a comment on a previous discussion, Drew alerted me to a very recent play, Black Watch. The play follows in the tradition of Journey's End, and The Long and the Short and the Tall, stage plays which described the horrors of war. Black Watch, based partly on interviews with real soldiers, does it for the current Iraq war.

Towards the end, one of the officers offers a monologue including this comment:

We in the West have failed to understand the logic of suicide terrorism. The choice to become a religious martyr is the outcome of a struggle to establish an identity in adolescence. The possibility of death, once accepted, presents an alternative idea of the self as a religious warrior. They're looking for glory, and they seem to be finding it in martyrdom. Glory, however, is something which my boys are very unlikely to emerge with. The controversy around this war means there'll be no victory parade for us... (p. 58)

I am interested that this text connects some of the themes of my study. Interestingly, the play is about the struggle for identity and an idea of self in the young soldiers on the Western side...Of course, I think Christian martyrdom evades this characterisation. This comment is revealing as to the extent that martyrdom is understood as a flashpoint... it's the possibility of death. In the West, it isn't accepted that this could present an alternative and valid idea of the self...

Ricoeur on Literature & Ethics

A moment of clarity looms up through the fog:

There is no ethically neutral narrative. Literature is a vast laboratory in which we experiment with estimations, evaluations, and judgments of approval and condemnation through which narrativity serves as a propaedeutic to ethics. Oneself as Another, p. 115

[propaedeutic = 'a prelimary body of knowledge or rules necessary for the study of some art or science']

John Donne: The Reformed Soul

Not a review, but a recommendation:



John Stubbs' book John Donne: The Reformed Soul is a biography from the top draw. Thoroughly enjoyable. Stubbs casts Donne as both genuinely a man before God and someone who at the same time changed with the political weather in order to survive and thrive.


Thankyou, Exiled Preacher for recommending it to me!

Of the use of literature in theological work

In my doctoral work I have made a use of TS Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral as a framing device and a stimulus to theological and scriptural reflection.

This strategy could be objected to on the grounds that:

• Eliot was at best an amateur theologian (he himself used this term)- and, in fact, had some heterodox tendencies (for example, the influence of Eastern non-Christian mysticism is evident even in his later work).
• His purpose was aesthetic rather than theological - this isn't serious theology
• in fact, there is a long Christian tradition of suspicion of drama

To which I reply:

• the tradition of Christian theological reflection includes quite a number of literary/aesthetic works, and should not exclude them. In fact, exclusion of them would greatly impoverish the tradition of Christian thought.
• a number of significant contemporary philosophers are using literary narratives and plays in their work. Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty are but two examples. Narratives necessarily embedd discussion of human life in relationships with others and in time - ie, they enable a complex discussion of the human situation.
• what is more, serious theologians - Hauerwas for example, and Rowan Williams and Paul Fiddes and David Ford - are using literary works in precisely this way. They do so not merely in a 'literature and theology' mode, but to enrich their discussion of theological concepts - ie in 'serious' theology.
• imaginative works have always had an influence on Christian theological thought and it is just a kind of academic snobbery to exclude them, or to question their place in the debate.
• in fact, narratives of imaginative power have a capacity to do what abstract theological work cannot. They are perhaps more suited to the business at hand - because they deal with humans in the midst of life, under the eye of providence etc.
• And, the obvious point: the Bible is more 'literary' than it is 'philosophical'!

Northrop Frye and literary criticism

Northrop Frye's 1964 article 'Criticism, Visible and Invisible' contains much wisdom that a couple of generations of postmodern theory has alas greatly erased. He starts with the Platonic distinction between nous, or knowlegde of things, and dianoia, knowledge about them. The problem for the teacher of literature and the critic is that they are limited to teaching about literature - if there is some principle that can link the knower and the known in an essential relation is indedmonstrable. It is only to be accepted as an act of faith, or something like it. There is also much wisdom for theology here: especially vis a vis the parlous state of biblical criticism...

A person who is absorbed whilly by knowledge about something is what ordinarily mean by a pedant. Beyond this is the experience of literature itself, and the goal of this is somthing that we call vaguely the cultivated man, the person for whom literature is a possession, a possession that cannot be directly transmitted, and yet not private, for it belongs in a community.

Criticims cannot make this act of possession for the student; what it can do is weaken those tendencies which within criticism that keep the literary work objective and separated. Criticism, in order to point beyond itself, must be more than merely aware of its limitations: it needs to be actively iconoclastic about itself.

The end of criticism and teaching...is not an aesthetic but an ethical and participating end: for it, ultimately, works of literation are not things to be contemplated but powers to be absorbed.

The piling up of commentary around the major writers of literature may in itself simply be another way of barricading those writers from us.

All poet or critic can do is to hope that somehow, somewhere, and for someone, the struggle to unify and to relate, because it is an honest struggle and not because of any success in what it does, may be touched with a radiance not its own.

A martyr? who can say?

Robin Grove certainly is not convinced by Eliot's Thomas:

‘…he sweeps forward thourgh temptations progressively more inward, until the victory is gained…We know, because he says so. Or maybe, the doubt springs up, he has conformed God to his will, and chosen martyrdom vaingloriously after all.
There is simply no way anyone could tell. Whatever Becket’s motives, an audience can never be sure of them; only God can see his heart… Having directed us towards a light into which we cannot peer, the drama leaves un simultaneously exalted (God has given us ‘another Saint in Canterbury’) and pleasureably skeptical (the pious have been taken in by another holy fraud…).’

Perhaps the Knights are right after all? Whatever the case, Grove’s insight is that the true action of the drama, which is the nature of Thomas’ final choice and the divine verdict on it, has become ‘inaccessible to view’; and the spectators themselves become the subject of judgement by the play. Grove seems to find this turn to the audience quite unpleasant.

Robin Grove, "Pereira and After: The Cures of Eliot's Theatre " in The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, ed. Anthony David Moody, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 170.

Herbert on Humilitie

I am preaching next week at St Ebbe's on 1 Peter 5, the theme of which is humility (stop laughing family members!). Anyhow found this poem by George Herbert, who is one of my favourites. It takes a bit of looking at: he describes a scene where the Virtues are presented with symbols of submission by a series of animals.

Humilitie.
I Saw the Vertues sitting hand in hand
In sev’rall ranks upon an azure throne,
Where all the beasts and fowl by their command
Presented tokens of submission.
Humilitie, who sat the lowest there
To execute their call,
When by the beasts the presents tendred were,
Gave them about to all.

The angrie Lion did present his paw,
Which by consent was giv’n to Mansuetude.1
The fearfull Hare her eares, which by their law
Humilitie did reach to Fortitude.
The jealous Turkie brought his corall-chain;
That went to Temperance.
On Justice was bestow’d the Foxes brain,
Kill’d in the way by chance.

At length the Crow bringing the Peacocks plume,
(For he would not) as they beheld the grace
Of that brave gift, each one began to fume,
And challenge it, as proper to his place,
Till they fell out: which when the beasts espied,
They leapt upon the throne;
And if the Fox had liv’d to rule their side,
They had depos’d each one.

Humilitie, who held the plume, at this
Did weep so fast, that the tears trickling down
Spoil’d all the train: then saying, Here it is
For which ye wrangle, made them turn their frown
Against the beasts: so joyntly bandying,
They drive them soon away;
And then amerc’d2 them, double gifts to bring
At the next Session-day.

1 Mansuetude = Gentleness, meekness.
2 amerced = With a penalty of the amount expressed.

In short, without humility the other virtues fall easily prey to passions. But why humility?

Harry Potter released in Oxford (no spoilers)

So, Simon and I braved the rain and the crowds (my goodness, the crowds!) to pick up the last Harry Potter at midnight last night. (We are dressed as wizards in case you didn't pick it).

A couple of thoughts about things Potter:

• Rowling really isn't a great writer and she writes with no ear for how words sound. The Potter books are really quite tough to read aloud (and I should know) compared to classics like the Narnia series. This to me is a test of the quality of children's literature. She writes in choppy uneven paragraphs and uses quite colourless bland language. But that isn't her gift: her gift is her sheer inventiveness with characters and ideas to fill the world she has imagined. Like Dickens, there is always something new around the next page, some new brilliantly conceived person or thing. Like Dickens (at his worst) she sometimes uses this technique to keep the plot going when it is flagging.
• The Potter books are incredibly nostalgic. Remember Enid Blyton? She channels Enid Blyton half the time: the private school setting, the two-gendered friendships, the resourcefulness of the child heroes and what have you. Have you ever read The Naughtiest Girl in the School? And Quidditch resembles Lacrosse, which is the game the Naugtiest Girl plays. Potter harks back to that British children's literature which deals with upper middle class children in schools that no-one can actually afford.
• I always like to ask kids 'what kind of a hero do you think Harry Potter is? What makes him heroic?' It isn't actually his magic that does anything. It is his courage. I think he is a very courageous person rather than a talented one. To me it is interesting that Harry Potter and his friends always are prepared to break the rules if circumstances demand it - and are rewarded for doing so.