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The Priest as Artist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Richard Barrett
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It is 1429 and in the Chateau of Vaucouleurs, Joan of Arc is being interrogated by the menacing Robert de Baudricourt. Joan claims to hear heavenly voices telling her to raise the siege at Orleans:

de Baudricourt: How do you mean? voices?

Joan: I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God.

de Baudricourt: They come from your imagination.

Joan: Of course, that is how the messages of God come to us.

Joan claims to say something not only about herself but about the way God communicates to human beings in general. If this is true then it has a lot to say about the role of the imagination in discoursing about God. But, you will object, is this not the role of theology?

It seems a truism to say it, but professional theologians are not the only kinds of people who discourse about God; there are others who theologise in an indirect way—but sometimes just as effectively. Among these must be counted authors from the literary world who, either implicitly or explicitly, through the medium of the novel, short story or poem, mediate aspects of the religious sensibility in human experience. In their work we can discern signs of anonymous theology? Random examples may include C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Brian Moore’s The Colour of Blood, Morris West’s The Devil’s Advocate, Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes. In these works as in many others one can detect a sifting through the debris of human experience and a concern to view it through the prism of an implicit faith in God.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 79 , Issue 924 , February 1998, pp. 84 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 SHAW, G. B., St. Joan (London: Longmans Green, 1966), 66‐7Google Scholar.

2 LACOSTE, J.‐Y., “Theologie anonyme et christologie pseudonyme. C. S. Lewis, les Chroniques de Narnia,” in Nouvelle Revue Theologique 112 (1990): 381‐3Google Scholar.

3 I recall a remark of Kevin Condon: “Gentlemen, there are three things you need to be a good scripture scholar: respect for the text, the ability to detect the obvious, and most of all, imagination.” There was perhaps much more in this than his students realised: Cfr. COLERIDGE, M., “The Necessary Angel: Imagination and the Bible, ” in Pacifica 1 (1988): 171–188CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 EVDOKIMOV, P., Teologia della Bellezza (Roma: Edizione Paoline, 1971): 13Google Scholar.

5 From the Kontakion of the feast of Triumph of Orthodoxy. Cfr. EVDOKIMOV, op.cit. preface.

6 NICHOLLS, A., “The horos in Nicaea II: A theological re‐appropriation,” in Analectica Historia XX, 1;2, 1988,1,71‐181Google Scholar.

7 op.cit., 172.

8 OUSPENSKY‐LOSSKY, , The Meaning of Icons (London: 1979)Google Scholar: Introduction.

9 “Ad pulchritudinem tria requiruuntur. Primo quidem integritas, sive perfectio: quae enim diminuta sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt. Et debita proportio sive consonantia. Et iterum claritas, unde quae habent colorem nitidum, pulchra esse dicuntur.” (Cf. THOMAS AQUINAS, S. T. la, q. 39, a. 8). Also UMBERTO ECO, Il problema estetico in Tommaso a “Aquino (Milano: Bompiani, 1956, rpt. 1970)Google Scholar. For a comparison of the aesthetic theory of Aquinas and Joyce see ECO, The Middle Ages of James Joyce (London: Hutchinson, 1989): 14‐22Google Scholar.

10 BALTHASAR, H. von, Truth as Harmony (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989): 1‐20Google Scholar.

11 WILDE, O., Selected Essays and Poems (London: Butler & Tanner, 1954): 167Google Scholar.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 CHESTERTON, G. K., Orthodoxy (London: Bodley Head, 1909): 296Google Scholar.

17 See the new promise of the 1990 Ordination Rite for Presbyters, which imposes a ministry of intercession on the priest.

18 I must mention the work of a British writer, P. PARRINDER, whose James Joyce (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1984) seems to misinterpret Joyce's rejection of the Catholic Church, effectively rendering Joyce as merely any other post‐christian modernist (note the literary sense of the latter term).

19 Gebler Davies comments: “The works of James Joyce are a fine introduction, for those who do not know it, to the Roman Catholic religion. He is very sound on matters of doctrine, having taken the trouble to master many of the more esoteric dogma. His hellfire sermon would do very well as a textbook for novice priests, containing, as it does, no instance of heresy” (cfr. DAVIES, S. GEBLER, James Joyce–A Portrait of the Artist [London: Granada, 1975, repr. 1982]: 41Google Scholar.

20 ID., op.07.34

21 R. ELLMANN, James Joyce; 66.

22 By an epiphany is meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of a gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself (Stephen Hero: 211). The notion was taken from Walter Pater's “Conclusion” to his Studies in the History of the Renaissance which begins–significantly–with a quotation from Heraclitus. For Pater the epiphanisation of reality is something which is elusive and endured only for moments, producing what moderns refer to as “peak experiences” but in Joyce it is a stable and objective given. This he bases upon his system borrowed from Thomas Aquinas, (cfr. U. ECO, op.cit. 23‐25).

23 Joyce's translation, cfr. S. GEBLER‐DAVIES, op.cit. 57.

24 Stephen Hero, 80.

25 Ibid.

26 U. ECO, The Middle Ages of James Joyce (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989): back cover.

27 Ibid. 4.

28 p. PARRINDER suggests Joyce is an atheist (cfr. James Joyce [Cambridge: C.U.P.]: 3). A closer reading of his work seems to suggest that we are not dealing with mere disbelief in God, but with his rejection.

29 G.K. CHESTERTON'S well known reference to the self‐consciously modern rejection of Christianity which borrows the furniture of greater minds to deck out the considerably smaller universe of subjectivism. Cf. Orthodoxy, “The Suicide of Thought.”

30 “Are you not weary of ardent ways, Lure of the fallen seraphim? Tell no more of enchanted days” J. JOYCE, A Portrait, 197. And again: “But Mammon places under ban The uses of Leviathan And that high spirit ever wars On Mammon's countless servitors” Leviathan here refers to the author. Cf. JOYCE, J., “The Holy Office” in Pomes Penyeach (London: Faber & Faber, 1988): 37Google Scholar.

31 “So distantly I turn to view The shamblings of that motley crew, Those souls that hate the strength that mine has Steeled in the school of old Aquinas. Where they have crouched and crawled and prayed 1 stand the self‐doomed, unafraid, Unfellowed, friendless and alone, indifferent as the herring‐bone, Firm as the mountain ridges where I flash my antlers in the air” JOYCE, J., Pomes Penyeach (London: Faber & Faber, 1988): 38Google Scholar.

32 “With symbolist reticence, hunter and deer are not named but their attendant metaphors are heavy with the Artist's manifest hubris” Cf. ELLMAN, R., James Joyce (Oxford: O.U.P., 1983): 145Google Scholar

33 J. JOYCE, A Portrait, 216.

34 R. ELLMAN, op. cit.: 298.

35 This image is very strong in both A Portrait and Ulysses, in the former ending with the prayer to the “old father, old artificer” as he leaves the quayside, in the latter Stephen emerging into Burke's pub, the author not so much reconciled to his father as to himself, now his own monarchial principle of self‐generation. (Cfr. A Portrait 228; Ulysses 373‐374).

36 R. ELLMAN, op.cit. 145.

37 AUGUSTINE, Contra Epistolam Parmeniani III, 24, which in Finnegan's Wake is rendered “Securest jubilends albas Temoram.” Cfr J. JOYCE, Finnegans Wake, 593.

38 AQUINAS' hymn Adoro de devote, latens Deitas.

39 THOMAS, R.S., Collected Poems (London, Phoenix 1995), 198Google Scholar.