The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Literature: Metaphor within a Simile

A line from Dickinson: “the nerves sit ceremonious like tombs.”  This is an extremely complex literary device, or set of devices.

First, personification: The nerves “sit” like people, and sit in a particular way, ceremoniously.

Second, the personification spreads out to evoke a scene.  Ceremonious sitting takes place in church, at weddings, or, as in this poem, at funerals.

Third, the personification itself is encompassed and somewhat canceled by another device, the concluding simile.  The whole scene of nerves-sitting-ceremoniously is compared to “tombs.”

Fourth, this creates a scene change: The ceremoniously sitting nerves are now tombstones in a cemetery.

In sum: Nerves are people.  But the people are like tombstones.  So nerves are people who are tombstones.

And all in six words.

Literature Theology - Liturgical: Dickinson’s baptism

A student, Heather Denigan, is working on Emily Dickinson, and pointed me to this remarkable poem about baptism:

Literature: Waugh’s Fourth Century

Evelyn Waugh’s Helena (Loyola Classics) doesn’t get Constantine quite right, but he has some very sharp observations on other fourth-century personalities and events.  His description of the effect of Constantine’s conversion on Lactantius captures the euphoria of the moment: “in that unique springtide there was no escape from change, not even in Treves, most polite of cities, not even for Helena, most excluded of women.  The huge boredom, which from its dead center in Diocletian’s heart had saddened and demented the world, had passed like the plague.  New green life was pricking and unfolding and entwining everywhere among the masonry and the ruts.  In that dawn, reflected Lactantius, to be old was very heaven; to have lived in a hope that defied reason; that existed, rather, only in the reason and in the affections, quite unattached to common experience or calculation; to see that hope take substantial and homely form near at hand and on all sides, as a fog, lifting, may suddenly reveal to a ship’s company that, through no skill of theirs, they have silently drifted into safe anchorage; to catch a glimpse of simply unity in a life that had seemed all vicissitude – this, thought Lactantius, was something to match the exuberance of Pentecost; something indeed in which Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost had their royal celebration. . . .

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Literature: Irony

Yale’s David Gelernter reviews Martin Amis’ Pregnant Widow in the current issue of The Weekly Standard, and uses the occasion for reflections on the state of culture.  A few money quotes:

“This postmodern era is the Age of Irony. Irony implies detachment. Detachment is invaluable, up to a point. But when irony tyrannizes your thinking, you are in danger of being detached from everything—of being a barge adrift, with nothing to tug or push you forward. You are going nowhere (nothing moves you) and are passionate about nothing (nothing moves you). You have shot the albatross; you are dead in the water. Self-love and self-hate are the only emotions that thrive. That is postmodernism, the age of irony: going nowhere, moved by nothing.”

Where did this irony come from? he asks.  And his answer:

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Literature: Dostoevsky, Comedian

Dostoevsky is not usually thought of as a comic writer, but he was a great comedian and satirist.  When Grandma shows up unexpectedly at the casino in The Gambler, the novel takes a sudden Woodhousean turn.  Feodor Karamzov is disgusting, but hilariously so.  His greatest comic creation was perhaps Karmazinov in Demons, a satire on Turgenev.

Dostoevsky’s narrator describes the egoism at the heart of Karmazinov’s writing, his tendency to ignore the victims of suffering and concentrate instead on the horrors he has to endure: “A year before, I had read an article of his in a review, written with an immense affectation of naive poetry, and psychology too. He described the wreck of some steamer on the English coast, of which he had been the witness, and how he had seen the drowning people saved, and the dead bodies brought ashore. All this rather long and verbose article was written solely with the object of self-display. One seemed to read between the lines: ‘Concentrate yourselves on me. Behold what I was like at those moments. What are the sea, the storm, the rocks, the splinters of wrecked ships to you? I have described all that sufficiently to you with my mighty pen. Why look at that drowned woman with the dead child in her dead arms? Look rather at me, see how I was unable to bear that sight and turned away from it. Here I stood with my back to it; here I was horrified and could not bring myself to look; I blinked my eyes—isn’t that interesting?’” Dostoevsky didn’t have the word, but if he had, he would have called this kitsch – which, as Milan Kundera has noted, is not the tear shed for the suffering or the beautiful, but the second tear shed for the feelings one feels when one is a witness to suffering or beauty.

When Karmazinov gives what he claims is his final public reading before he lays down his pen, Dostoevsky pulls out all the stops.

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Literature: Hamlet and the Altars

Elizabeth Watson reads Hamlet through the lens of Eamon Duffy’s classic “stripping of the altars” thesis.  In the play, altars are replaced by tables, the arras, the bed, and the stage spectacle takes the place of Catholic liturgical spectacle: “it is not the specific theology but the way in which change is negotiated that matters in Hamlet. Prince Hamlet must negotiate between the old and the new in many ways, religion being only one of them, and verbal playfulness is a part of this back-and-forth movement. Shakespeare deftly suggests a number of religious positions without really endorsing any of them; yet what is not clear is whether secularization is being embraced or questioned in the play. In the urban spaces outside the playhouses, secular ritual, decorative structures, and national myths shaped Lon don’s open-air ceremonials. While the religious establishment’s iconoclasm was being countered by the civic establishment’s determined secularization of ritual, the stage served as an unofficial and unsanctioned site for the same process. The movement from Roman Catholic religious spectacle to Elizabethan theatrical spectacle was another form of iconoclastic displacement necessary to the effective functioning of Protestant religious practice, which also resembles the shifts and suppressions.”

There is a parody of the Catholic ritual in some scenes, she thinks, but the parody may express the longing of Protestant England for its traditional Catholic rites, now maimed by Reformation:

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Literature: Intentional Fallacy

In 1881, Edward Payson Vining wrote an innovative book that promised to unravel The Mystery of Hamlet.  When Vining had weighed all the evidence, he came to the only reasonable conclusion: Hamlet was a woman.

Not, mind you, that Shakespeare conceived of a female prince: “It is not even claimed that Shakespeare ever fully intended to represent Hamlet as indeed a woman.  It is claimed that in the gradual evolution of the feminine element in Hamlet’s character the time arrived when it occurred to the dramatist that so a woman might act and feel, if educated from infancy to play a prince’s part.”

This is taking suspicion of the intentional fallacy a bit far.

Literature: He Murdered Us

When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play questions with Hamlet in Tom Stoppard’s inversion of Hamlet, Rosencrantz says that the score was “Twenty-seven-three.” “He murdered us,” he adds, and then says it again for good measure.

As Marjorie Garber notes in her Shakespeare and Modern Culture, Stoppard wants us to remember the original play, twice.  ”Twenty-seven-three” is precisely the score in the question game in Shakespeare’s play (Act 2, scene 2, when R&G first show up).  Stoppard counted.

Plus, that “He murdered us” plays a dual role.  Hamlet trounces them in questions, but then he also murdered them.  The past tense is important for Stoppard’s play, obsessed as it is with stage death.  Rosencrantz doesn’t say that Hamlet will murder, but that he has murdered.  So he has, in the just previous performance of Hamlet, and in the one before that, and in the one before that, back to the first performance.

Literature: Hamlet, Ritual, Modernity

De Grazia still, summarizing Lacan’s claim that Hamlet is about mourning: “‘I know of no commentator who has ever taken the trouble to make this remark . . . from one end of Hamlet to the other, all anyone talks about is mourning.’  It is no coincidence that Hamlet’s problem is also that of ‘modern society.’  The truncated and furtive rites of mourning in the play (the death of King Hamlet without final unction, Polonius’ ‘hugger-mugger’ burial, Ophelia’s abbreviated service) all gesture toward the present abandonment of the rites and ceremonies by which loss was once compensated.  Death, when not repair by rituals, leaves a gap or ‘hole in the real’ that activates the ‘scar of castration,’ the primary oedipal loss of the phallus.  The mourner tries in vain to patch the loss with imaginary projections or mirages (signifiers, images, symbols, embodiments), but it can never make good.”

Literature: Barbaric Shakespeare

In her ‘Hamlet’ without Hamlet, Margreta de Grazia shows that Hamlet was not always considered a harbinger of modern subjectivity.   On the contrary, Restoration critics and playwrights considered Shakespeare and Hamlet to be retrograde and rude:

“In the ‘refined age’ of the Restoration, Hamlet, like all Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, belonged to the cruder previous period or ‘last age’ before the great interregnal divide separating Charles I from Charles II.  English letters during this period were deemed backward or even barbarous, as Samuel Johnson noted: ‘The English nation, in the time of Shakespeare, was yet struggling to emerge from barbarity.’  Shakespeare, according to David Hume, was the product of such benighted times: ‘born in a rude age, and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction, either from the world or books.’”

Restoration writers considered Elizabethans backward because “the English stage had largely lacked the civilizing canons of Aristotle, Horace and their sixteenth-century Italian and seventeenth-century French redactors.”  Without these models, Elizabethan playwrights were “gothic.”  Plus, Shakespeare was writing plays for the masses, instead of refined poetry for the courtly elites.  Some believed Shakespeare could have written a classical Hamlet, had he not been driven by a base desire to satisfy popular tastes.

Literature: Gobbo, Jessica, Shylock

Two members of Shylock’s household escape his house during Merchant of Venice.  Lancelot Gobbo leaves in order to become a servant to Bassanio, and Jessica leaves to be with her lover Lorenzo.  The parallels between the two are brought out by the juxtaposition of the plots in Act 2: Scene 1 is at Belmont, where Portia is talking with Morocco.  Then we shift to scenes in Venice, the first involving Lancelot and his father Old Gobbo, and the second involving Jessica and Lancelot.  In 2.4, Lorenzo makes his plants to steal away Jessica from her father’s house, and in 2.5 Shylock prepares to go out to dinner, which gives Jessica an opportunity to escape in 2.6.  After another scene in Belmont, we return to Venice where the men of Venice are mocking Shylock’s lamentations over his departed daughter (2.8).

Beyond this interweaving of scenes, the parallels are brought interestingly to light in 2.5.1ff.

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Literature: Flesh for Flesh

Why does Shylock insist on getting his pound of flesh?  He stands for law, for justice, and as a Jew his justice is the lex talionis, eye for eye.  He wants flesh because flesh has been taken from him.

When?  ”My daughter is my flesh and blood” he laments when she escapes his house (3.1).  Salarino is incredulous: “There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory; more between your bloods than there is between red wine and rhenish.”

Jessica, Shylock’s flesh, is taken long after her father has made his “merry bond” with Antonio.  That doesn’t damage the thesis.  Shylock’s becomes imperious about his bond when his house is plundered.  He wants his pound of flesh because he has been robbed, not so much of his ducats as of his daughter.

Salerio says that Shylock has lost stones, ducats, and daughter, no doubt using a crude pun: He’s been unmanned by Lorenzo.  That’s the extremity of Judaism to which Paul urged the Judaizers: “Cut it all off.”  And in revenge for this hyper-circumcision of his flesh, Shylock intends to perform a Christian “heart circumcision” on Antonio.

Literature: Two Dionysians

In his book on Dostoevsky, Nicholas Berdyaev sets up a series of comparisons and contrasts between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.  Both recognize that man as he has been conceived in earlier ages is dead.  Both know that man is “terrible free.”  Both know that Humanism has self-destructed precisely in its deification of man – the creation of the man-god, counter to the God-man of orthodoxy.  Both, in fact are Dionysians.

But Dostoevsky is a Christian Dionysian, and that makes all the difference.  Berdyaev writes:

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Literature: Russian Fantasy

Chernyshevsky’s 1863 What Is To Be Done? – described by Joseph Frank was “one of the most successful works of propaganda ever written in fictional form,” inspiring Lenin among others – describes a romantic triangle between two medical students and their love, Vera Pavlovna.  Not long before Turgenev had written his Fathers and Sons, whose tragic protagonist Bazarov cannot escape the net of contradictions between his rationalistic philosophy and his desires.  Chernyshevsky’s novel refutes Turgenev.  As Frank summarizes:

“whereas Bazarov is destroyed when his fatal attraction to Mme Odintsova proves strong than his will, the opposite occurs to Chernyshevsky’s characters.  Since they follow the precepts of ‘rational egoism,’ they are able to untie the woefully tangled love knot without a quiver of the outdated romantic Weltschmerz that undoes Bazarov, or even a trace of such primitive emotions as resentment or jealousy.”

No wonder Chernyshevsky’s book drove Dostoevsky’s Underground Man to such raving mockery.

Literature: Shakespeare on Chastity

The always insightful Anthony Esolen has a superb piece on the First Things page today defending the controversial theses that Shakespeare was “a profoundly Christian playwright” and that he was a rigorous advocate of male chastity, for Shakespeare “as near to an absolute value as it is possible for a virtue to be.”

That second thesis sounds counterintuitive.  We’ve all been told about Shakespeare’s bawdy humor, even if we don’t get it.  But Esolen makes a remarkably thorough case for the thesis in a small space.  Comparing Shakespeare to both pagan and Renaissance writers, Esolen argues that “Nothing in Shakespeare corresponds to the reveling in sensuality that we find in these poets (much less in such scabrous writers as Pietro Aretino), and that is all the more remarkable given his earthiness and bawdy humor. But the acid test is not so much his exaltation of chaste young women and faithful wives, though that is never subjected to even a shade of irony, as his surprising admiration for male chastity, and the severity with which he treats sins against it.”

See the whole thing here: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/05/desires-run-not-before-honor

Literature: Self-Interpreting Texts

Marjorie Garber argues that our view of Romeo and Juliet has been altered by contemporary trends and events.  Romeo has become the standard American high school Shakespeare play, and some of its themes and sensibility were taken up by the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s.

As a result, the play ends up being part of the framework for our interpretation of the play: Romeo affected our conceptions of love, especially young love, and our conceptions of generational differences, and we now read the play in the light of those conceptions.

Do all influential texts become self-interpreting in this fashion?

Literature: Remaking Gogol

Joseph Frank (Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time) makes the intriguing argument that Dostoevsky’s use of Gogol (especially “The Overcoat”) in Poor Folk is parody, but parody that strengthens rather than undermines the central thematic thrust of Gogol’s work.  He writes:

“Gogol’s narrative technique works to create a comic distance between character and reader that defeats emotional identification; Dostoevsky counteracts the purely satirical features of the model by taking over its elements and, through his use of the sentimental epistolary form, reshaping them to accentuate Devushkin’s humanity and sensibility.  There is no term known to me that quite fits this process of formal parody placed in the service of thematic reinforcement.  Far from being the antagonistic relation of a parodist to his model, it more resembles that of a sympathetic critic endowed with the creative ability to reshape a work so as to bring its form into harmony with its content.”

Literature: Justification of the ungodly

David Bentley Hart writes somewhere about the revolutionary character of the gospel’s depiction of the tears of Peter after his denial of Jesus.  Ancient pagan writers, Hart argues, could only have seen the tears of a fisherman as material for parody, not pathos.

This was explicitly the aim of Victor Hugo’s work:

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Literature: Radcliffe and the novel

The Gothic romance of Ann Radcliffe are still in print, but who reads them besides students taking courses in the early English novel or specialists in English literature?  Yet, Radcliffe has some claim to being the proto-inventor of the modern novel.

Austen read Radcliffe and laughed; her only Radcliffesque work was a parody. But Austen learned lessons about atmospherics, suspense, and setting from Radcliffe that played into her mature novels.

When Dostoevsky was too young to read, he would listen to his parents read aloud from Radcliffe’s novels, which left him “agape with ecstasy and terror.”   Joseph Frank suggests that “Dostoevsky would later take over . . . features of the Gothic technique and carry them to a peak of perfection that has never been surpassed.”

Needless to say, a writer who can inspire such diverse readers as Austen and Dostoevsky must be doing something remarkable.

Literature: Living Word

“Let Romamti-ezer bless with the Ferret-The Lord is a rewarder of them, that diligently seek him,” Smart writes in Fragment A of the Jubilate.  The association is not accidental, but turns on the pun of the verb and noun “ferret” and “ferret out.”

Daniel Ennis elaborates: “For Smart, the diligent do not act like ferrets: they become ferrets. The pun works because ferret can be both noun and verb, but the pun is a microcosm of Smart’s view of all language. The verb ‘ferret’ (q.v. ‘to ferret out’) is as alive as the actual breathing animal. That same power that gave the ferret (n.) life at the Creation animates language (ferret [v.]). Thus, not only is the sign the signified, but they both have an existence beyond the arbitrary realm of language/reality. Linguistic constructs, for Smart, live.”

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