Literature and Theology, a quarterly peer-review journal, provides a critical non-confessional forum for both textual analysis and theoretical speculation, encouraging explorations of how religion is embedded in culture. Contributions should address questions pertinent to both literary study and theology broadly understood, and be consistent with the Journal's overall aim: to engage with and reshape traditional discourses within the studies of literature and religion, and their cognate fields - biblical criticism, literary criticism, philosophy, politics, culture studies, gender studies, artistic theory/practice, and contemporary critical theory/practice.
Vol. 22, no 1 (mars 2008)
Martha M. Daas
From Holy Hostess to Dragon Tamer: The Anomaly of Saint Martha
The official version of the life of Saint Martha depicts her as Christ's hostess and one of his first followers. Her popular appeal, however, stems less from her biblical role, than from her position in medieval legend. In the Middle Ages, Martha is reinvented as a Gallic saint whose most celebrated feat is taming a dragon. It is this legend that has often displaced Martha's original role, both in text and in iconography. Unlike most depictions of female saints, Martha's power derives from her soul, not from her body. The denial of corporeality as the source of holiness defies the traditional role of the mulier sancta. Martha, as depicted in the texts of the Middle Ages, is a holy person, not a holy vessel. In this article, I am positing a third ‘category' of female saint: one not defined by her corporeality, that is, her virginity or her physical martyrdom, but by her character, which I claim is indicative of the influence of popular spirituality on the more formal teachings of the Christian church.
Stephen Bullivant
A House Divided Against Itself: Dostoevsky and the Psychology of Unbelief
This is a study of Dostoevsky's writings in light of the work of several twentieth-century theologians who affirm the possibility of there being ‘pseudo-atheists, who believe that they do not believe in God but who unconsciously believe in Him' (Maritain). In particular, the portrayals of three of his most famous atheist characters will be examined: Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment), Kirillov (Demons) and Ivan Karamazov (The Brothers Karamazov). Despite these characters' explicit unbelief, Dostoevsky's use of dreams, visions and gratuitous actions suggests that at a deeper level (that of their inner double) they possess a profound and insuperable faith in Christ. As will be demonstrated, this interpretation of them as ‘pseudo-atheists' or ‘anonymous Christians' both illumines Dostoevsky's religious thought, and has fruitful implications for modern theology.
Aakanksha Virkar-Yates
The Heart's Bower: Emblematics in Gerard Manley Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876)
This article considers Gerard Manley Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876) in the light of the emblematic practice of the seventeenth century. It examines Hopkins's poem as a meditative and mystical text, composed with deliberate reference to the School of the Heart emblems seen in both Francis Quarles's Emblems (1635) and, more particularly, Henry Hawkins's The Devout Heart (1634).
Suzanne Hobson
‘The Angel Club': Allen Upward and the Divine Calling of Modernist Literature
This article focuses on Allen Upward's plans to form an Angel Club or an Order of the Seraphim as described in articles published in the New Age and the New Freewoman in 1910 and 1913. It interrogates the significance of these plans to a Modernist movement that is often assumed to be secular in outlook and reveals that, despite retaining some of the angel's traditional attributes, this figure is absolutely of its time, representing an unlikely alliance of art with Nietzschean philosophy and Modernist theology. Among the questions discussed in detail are the ethical distinction that Upward makes between his own artist-angel and Nietzsche's Overman, the role of R.J. Campbell's The New Theology in suggesting an evolutionary basis for the idea that man might evolve into an angel and the echoes of Upward's Angel Club in Ezra Pound's Order of the Brothers Minor and D.H. Lawrence's Order of the Knights of Rananim.
Dennis Costa
¿Cuanto falta para Jerusalén?: Lorca's Apocalyptic and the Paradigms of Peace in Poeta en Nueva York and El público
Many of Federico García Lorca's best readers have noted a distinctly apocalyptic tone in Poeta en Nueva York and drawn inaccurate conclusions from it. This article maintains that a specific set of images from the Apocalypse—constituting an ‘irenic' discourse concerning peace in the midst of violence—is Lorca's measure or paradigm for what can be said to be most true. What can be said to be most false is any image or reality that confusingly mimics such paradigms of peacefulness. Like the Johannine ‘revelator', Lorca unveils not only the world's violence but also the curious stance of those who are enduring patiently in the midst of it. Lorca's verse exists so that such people—blacks, impoverished immigrants, dying children at the moment of their deaths—may be envisioned as taking the measure of everyone else.
I identify a class of adverbs in these poems (echoing adverbials in Revelation) that seek to give the lie to a universally accepted norm according to which New York's Harlem could never be considered to anticipate the ‘new Jerusalem'.
Lorca's imaginative project of a ‘theatre underneath the sand', announced in the unfinished play El público, requires that genuine community, like the primitive Christians, go underground in order to ‘play'. The verbs sostenir (to endure) and resistir (to resist, to parry), taken from the irenic lexicon of Revelation, define how the actors must play their parts, enacting ‘an incalculable love' at the risk of their own lives.
Harumi Osaki
Killing Oneself, Killing the Father: On Deleuze's Suicide in Comparison with Blanchot's Notion of Death
Deleuze appropriates Blanchot's notion of the second death, the pure form of the event, which never happens. Hence Colombat interprets Deleuze's suicide as an act of joining this pure form. But, if we consider Deleuze's difference from Blanchot, the importance of the first death, an incident which actually happens, stands out. Deleuze's thought of the inseparability of the two deaths illuminates the necessity of his suicide. His suicide is their junction, which resists both their separation and the reduction of the second death to the first. Revealing the former in the midst of the latter, his suicide turns out to be the act of killing God as the Father and Deleuze himself as the father of his philosophy of life, in order to free the multiplicities of life from unifying paternal authority.
William Franke
Edmond Jabès, or the Endless Self-Emptying of Language in the Name of God
The work of Jabès calls to be read in a tradition of apophatic discourse that reaches back to Neoplatonic sources on the ineffable One, as well as to the tradition of reflection on the Name of God as the Ineffable par excellence that one finds in the Kabbalah. Such modes of thinking and writing prove to be key to the significance of Jabès's project as a whole. His oeuvre is exemplary of new forms that this type of discourse can assume in its revival underway today. Jabès contemplates ineffability in language in the first instance in the Name of God. But all language is engendered by the divine Name, and consequently language in general proves in Jabès's work to be inhabited by a silent instance that it cannot name or say. The Name of God thereby emerges as the vanity of language in the heart of every word.