LITERARY APOLOGETICS AND CHRISTIAN POETICS
A Case Study
by David Barratt
Apologetics has had a bad press over the last hundred years. The confidence of Christians in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the existence of God could rationally be proved had, in fact, medieval roots in the uprightness of reason to point towards the ultimate truth that must be God. The typical form of Victorian apologetics became increasingly scientific, and then increasingly frenetic with the growing gap between itself and geological and evolutionary time, with their self-enclosed explanations. LaPlace’s eighteenth century scepticism that ‘God is a theory of which we have no need’ seemed to be born out, and Christians retreated from apologetic debate into inner experience (Testimony), or into trimming back Christianity to fit the new facts. Of the first category, Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua is a significant moment: the term ‘apologia’ now being used in the sense of St.Augustine’s ‘confessions’.
Although
apologetics per se never disappeared in the twentieth century, it scored
few successes, even among Catholic theologians, where Thomism lingered long,
the main support of the continuing tradition. One of the most distinguished
successes was that of an Oxford don, whose field was English Literature – C.S.Lewis. His success was partly due
perhaps to an avoidance of science, and partly due to addressing real questions
asked by ordinary people, even if the wartime setting gave them extraordinary
urgency. For example, The Problem of Pain and the attempt at theodicy; the
possibility of divine intervention in Miracles; and the commonsense questions
answered in Mere Christianity. His strengths, however, did not derive
from his literary background, but from his first choice of career, philosophy.
His literary theory, in fact, was not significantly apologetic, perhaps the
most significant piece being that directed against Leavisite notions of close
reading, which anticipates in a tentative way reader-response theory – An
Experiment in Criticism. His one piece of literary apologetics is the
slight, if very readable, The Pilgrim’s Regress, firmly based on
Bunyan’s allegorical form, and which could be seen as apologia as much
as apologetic.
However,
when we turn to Christian poetics, we see something very different: a growing
confidence, even among evangelicals. The publication of The Discerning Reader
is a minor landmark of the latter in the U.K., where evangelical publishers
have been very slow to publish anything literary, much slower than their U.S.
counterparts. Ruth Etchell’s A Model of Making (1984) being one of the
few examples. I do not blame evangelical British publishers: I suspect there
was very little to publish, and even fewer to read. But in North America, the
systematic development of Reformed thought within specific institutions has
led, over the last twenty-five years, to a number of significant attempts at
Christian poetics, as well as renewed attempts at apologetics – one thinks of
Francis Schaeffer and his colleagues. I recently read one such offering, by the
Canadian scholar David Lyle Jeffreys, People of the Book (1996), to which
I shall be making passing references later.
In the U.K., outside of evangelicalism, there has also been a growingly confident Christian poetics stemming from the recuperative work in the 1930’s and 1940’s of such people as T.S.Eliot, J.R.R.Tolkien and Dorothy Sayers, though with the latter literary apologetics became mixed with poetics. I say ‘recuperative’ since, as Jeffreys and others remind us, there has actually been a long tradition of Christian poetics from Augustine, through Sidney, Milton and Coleridge, which needed reclaiming from the kidnapping attempts of Arnold, Lawrence and Leavis.
From
then, respected Christian academics such as A.E.Dyson, Harry Blamires, Helen
Gardner and David Daiches, laid a firm foundation. The work of the Durham
Conference in more recent years and the acceptance by secular publishers, such
as Macmillan’s Literature and Theology series, serve as further signs of such
growth of confidence. To my mind, the publiction of Michael Edwards’ Towards a
Christian Poetics has been specially significant, as being the most fully
fledged British Christian poetics to emerge. And now with Valentine
Cunningham’s In the Reading Gaol, we have clear evidence of a Biblically
orientated literary theory being received by the academic areopagus , certainly
in terms of secular publication, and hopefully in terms of secular reception.
Far from patting ourselves on the back as evangelicals of fellow-travellers, we
should be assessing, if not what has been achieved (too early days), but at
least whether the routes taken are the right ones, so that a momentum can be
maintained in the right direction.
To do this, I want to distinguish the routes taken in terms of literary apologetics and Christian poetics by Edwards and Cunningham. I do not know whether Cunningham actually saw himself writing apologetically, but In the Reading Gaol is pre-eminenty treatable as such. Apologetics is, as I stated, arguing against a disbelief in God towards the reasonableness, the rational possibility of belief. A literary apologetics would therefore argue against disbelief in literary texts or theory, or claims made that literature is in itself a religion – as per Matthew Arnold, with the new priesthood of literary critics- and argue towards the (necessary) existence of Christian presence in text and theory. This could be expressed in terms of revelation, transcendence, or as in Cunningham, of the Bible as Ur-text.
Apologetics
seeks to take as many people with its arguments as far as possible. It therefore
begins very openly, seeking common ground with others, perhaps by attacking the
worst excesses of unbelieving theory. By the sheer force of logical argument,
it seeks to keep as many people on board till some form of Christian truth
hoves into sight. Christian poetics, on the other hand, begins from stated
Christian truth, and then seeks to apply it to the field of literature. It will
only seeks to take Christians or sympathisers with it, in its search for how
far they can get in a directed or open journey of exploration. The openness
comes much more at the conclusion, not at the beginning. The movements of the
two forms are thus exactly opposite, and one would therefore predict that at
some point, they must cross.
Given
such a description, however simplistic, it should become obvious why I have put
In the Reading Gaol in the category of apologetic. As such, does it go in the
right direction? Does its initial openness and point of attack allow it that,
and does its internal logic keep most people on board? Another quality of a
good apologist is to be something of a polymath. Outgunning and outmanoeuvering
one’s opponents is of the essence: one simply needs to know more than they, as
well as out-think them. Cunningham would appear to have such qualities: he is
never outfaced or outfazed. His quickness of wit, boldness and confidence are
marks of the true apologist, expressing themselves here in his punning style.
My only concern would be that performance masks stance.
Several
approaches lie open to the apologist. One is the debunking mode; another is the
recuperative, ‘all truth is God’s truth’ mode, which Jeffreys traces back
beyond Augustine to Ambrose of Milan. In his first chapter Cunningham appears
to be going for the former, with an all-out attack on deconstruction. However,
what in fact is happening is a ‘mock mockers after that’ attack. It is rather
academic politics, trendies and toadies, and band-waggoners that are being
attacked, the greatest villain being J. Hillis Miller, that well-known turncoat
from orthodox criticism. It is an Emperor-with-no-clothes approach. It is also
a good Johnsonian commonsense approach behind all its stylistic pyrotechnics,
the captured guns of the enemy being turned back on them.
What
emerges is much more the second approach: pare away the externals and the worst
excesses of Derrida, and there is much to be recuperated from deconstruction.
This brings Cunningham closer to John Schad and Kevin Mills in The Discerning
Reader. The enterprise then becomes a veiled attempt to show how, ultimately,
the untenability of rigid anti-logocentrism and deconstructive methodology are
actually witnesses to the Biblical text. The Judeo-Christian tradition of
logocentrism remains valid, actually supporting deconstruction. This is the apologetic,
on the Psalm 76:10 principle.
Comparison
with Jeffreys’ People of the Book illustrates very well the difference between
aplogetic and poetics. Jeffreys, too, is concerned to refute the debunking of
logocentricism in Derrida, which he sees as ultimately anti-theologocentric.
But this is stated in his first chapter from a specifically Christian position.
A historical and traditional Christian poetics is then reconstructed to counter
Derrida, and to show the invalidity of Derrida’s supposed understanding of
logocentrism. The latter emerges from the dialectic redefined, but in
possession of the field. Cunningham’s Christian credentials, by comparison,
only emerge at the end, and even then not very explicitly, in the use of
Biblical reference.
In
fact, in his first chapter Cunningham would appear to be attacking Derridaism
from a historicist rather than from a Christian position. He praises cultural
materialists as Alan Sinfield and especially Stephen Greenblatt. All stand for
the ‘scandal of history’ or ‘the scandal of referentiality’, echoing
Christianity’s ‘scandal of particularity’; but not strongly enough to sound
some warning bells. Apologists need all the allies they can get, but with
allies like Alan Sinfield, I wonder who needs enemies? (v. my extended review
of Sinfield’s Literature in Protestant England 1560-1660 in The Glass, 3).
The
more fundamental question, however, is: does an apologist need a stated
theoretical position, or, as here, can he be allowed to jump from a historicist
to a modified deconstructionist to a Christian (or Judeo-Christian) position as
it suits him? There is a further point: aplogetics needs a common language and
terminology, even if not a common philosophy, between Christian author and
non-Christian reader. But such terminologies and philosophies are likely to
change with every generation. Rookmaaker and Schaefer spoke out against
modernism; Cunningham against postmodernism. Who next? What next? Wheareas the
Christian poetic enterprise does not seem to be in such a bind. Jeffreys’
approach suggests he is writing in an enduring Christian tradition, which will
need modifying in later years, but not re-writing.
In
other words, we are talking about community for poetics, but what for
apologetics? Cunningham is very much the solo act. Almost no references are
made to the tradition of Christian poetics, not even the activity of such.
Potential Christian allies have to be hidden. As with David against Goliath,
such solo acts of such elan and dexterity are hard to follow. What can we, as a
community of Christian scholars, do with or follow up on what Cunningham has
achieved?
To
return to the question of stated Christian position: Cunningham does touch
base, but overtly only very occasionally. One such moment is in ch.5(ii), where
the incarnation is referred to as the sign for the word/world nexus. Lancelot
Andrewes’ Christmas sermon is the text, T.S.Eliot’s rewording of it somewhat
dismissively treated. Eliot is a potential Christian ally Cunningham does not
want around, in absolute contrast to Michael Edwards: at most it is George that
is wanted, not T.S. But then, Cunningham sticks strictly to prose, whereas
Edwards much prefers the poetic stuff.
This
incarnational grounding is almost taken for granted, a shorthand sign of a
common, a typical Christian poetic grounding. In his last chapter Cunningham
repeats the centrality if the incarnation for him: ‘the centerpiece of
Christian theology and the master-trope of all logocentric thinking about real
presences in the world’ (p.380). But he does no work on this. The grounding is
slight.
I
am perhaps as concerned with the Eliot/Eliot dilemma. The inclination to use
nineteenth century realist texts to show the word/world nexus is, at source, a
historicist one. It is not so difficult to show, as Cunningham has brilliantly
done, that such texts have a self-awareness, a ‘knowingness’ of textuality and
identity that makes Derrida’s dismissive claim seem simplistic. But if a
non-believer refuse the historicist reading, does a Christian claim fail? More
problematic would have been a mixed text like The Water Babies. Cunningham’s
historicist exposition of this elsewhere, as a fable over Victorian sanitation,
seems to me reductionist, even bizarre (v. my article in The Glass, 7). I personally
would not want to rely on it to refute a Derridean charge of
self-referentiality.
To
expand: the historicist approach finds transcendence difficult: the timeless
moments of the other Eliot, the epiphany. And yet transcendence is such a key
term in this debate. There is only one reference to the ‘transcendental
signified’ in the index; there are none to ‘transcendence’, though I found four
in the text (two quoting Kant; one quoting Derrida). At the very least, it
would seem this apologetic needs completing in terms of drama and poetry, in
terms, say, of Donne’s ‘the body is his book’ and the moments of transcendence
in his ‘The Ecstacy’.
Lastly,
I would like to mention the Jewishness of the Cunningham apologetic in his
final chapter. If the tablets of the text were given and then broken in Exodus
32:19 (overt and then secret again), we need to read on to Exodus 34. Here was
a revelation much more open than before given to Moses. In Exodus 24:17 God
‘was like a consuming fire’; here, in 34:6 ‘He passed in front of Moses’, so
that (34:29) ‘his (Moses’) face was radiant because he had spoken with the
Lord.’ This is where the veil is given, referred to on p.398. But is it not
this radiance also that of the transfiguration and of Pentecost? A
transcendence coming from a rewriting? In other words, is Cunningham not giving
away too much to the Jewish in order to find common ground with Derrida?
Obviously, an apologist has to fight on the ground where he finds his enemy,
not necessarily on ground of his own choosing. But in fighting on Jewish
Midrashic hermeneutics, what happens to the Greek and Christian elements of his
claimed ‘Graeco-Judeo-Christian’ tradition? His tradition, it seems to me, turns out to be an Aristotelian-Midrashic/wilderness-(weakly)
Christian/incarnational one. Plato, the Christian Platonic tradition, and the
prophetic/revelatory/Pentecostal aspects of Christianity have been written out.
I would suspect that Cunningham is really writing about a tradition of
spirituality.
Clearly
apologetics is a much riskier business than constructing a poetics. For all my
queries, I have no doubt that the task Cunningham has engaged in is a noble
one, and nobly done. Much has been recuperated, enough to expect of any
champion. And what has not been done, can be done by a successor.
I have mentioned community. Perhaps I need to modify what I have written: Cunningham does stand in a community, that of the postmodernists, especially of the deconstructionists and the cultural materialists – a strange, uneasy community perhaps, but one that Cunningham sojourn in easily as salt and light. When we look for Edwards’ community, we are at a loss. As I have said, Jeffreys, more typically, finds historic community in the tradition of Christian poetics. But Edwards claims no such dwelling place. If his mentor is T.S.Eliot, he does not share Eliot’s sense of tradition. Clearly he is at home in poetry, and that would seem to be his immediate practitioner community, his fellow-poets, French or English. But a Christian poetics, as I have suggested, needs to find a Christian community, as fellow-pilgrims at the very least. Partly because Edwards, as we all do in the U.K., lives in secular academia, his sense of Christian community is much weaker than for those Christian scholars living in North America. His Christian colours are to be clearly seen, his witness uncompromised (e.g. his chapter on John’s gospel in the last of his trilogy On the Writing of Many Books), yet we do not immediately see Edwards as our spokesman, one that we dialogue easily with. And maybe this is why.
In
fact, the L.S.G. last dialogued with Edwards over ten years ago, shortly after
the publication of Towards a Christian Poetics. Since then he has completed a
trilogy, Poetry and Possibility (1988), and Of Making Many Books (1990). Both
these are collections of essays, the former similar to A.E.Dyson’s Between Two
Worlds in its format: a chronological analysis of various texts to carry a
thesis, the thesis here being derived from the Poetics, that poetry helps mend
the Fall, giving us possibilities of seeing the world transcended. The latter
volume engages more with a postmodern agends, applying the poetics to questions
of anxiety, origins, self and textuality.
In
re-reading Edwards’ paper to the L.S.G.. those ten plus years ago, it becomes
more evident why Edwards feels little kinship with traditional Christian
poetics, even though his covert Platonism
might seem to line up with it. It is in the foundational placing of
theological loci in the enterprise. Edwards places one locus in the Fall and
the loss of Eden, whilst Sidney, for example, as also recent Christian poetics
(e.g. Dorothy Sayers, Ruth Etchells), places that Ur-locus in Creation. For
Sidney, our ‘wit’ is still capable of conceiving the ideal, prelapsarian world.
Others, as Coleridge or Tolkien, hold too that man as creator or sub-creTator
is functioning in the full image of God as per Genesis 1. Edwards’ construct is
triadic or ternary, loosely based on Hegelian dialectic. The major triad is
Creation – Fall – Re-creation: the focus for him therefore moves towards the
redeemed Re-creation, which he explores very fully in Poetry and Possibility.
But the locus of such re-creation is not the more typical one of Incarnation,
but of Redemption/Pentecost – not that he disregards the Incarnation. More
specifically, Pentecost undoes Babel, of which Cunningham makes so much, since
it is the redemption of language itself. Edwards even parts company with Eliot
in that whilst Eliot is looking for re-creation (and Edwards’ essay on The Four
Quartets titled ‘Rewriting the Waste Land’ in Of Making brilliantly expounds
this) as an order, ‘an order which is already there if only we could see it’,
Edwards believes a Christian poetics deals with possibilities, becomings and
therefore hope above all. A fallen world must be changed; a Christian poetics
must deal with futurity, not nostalgia, not archeology. It would seem then
that, in his own way, Edwards is as lone a voice as I have made Cunningham out
to be. Ultimately, as I take it, this is because they are pioneers in their
chosen field of a Bible –centered Christianity.
I
would characterise Edwards’ poetics as systematic, a term he uses in his L.S.G.
paper, likening it to systematic theology, as well as signalling his own
awareness of the dangers of all systematisation, an insensitivity to the text
and a closing down of its possibilities – dangers which without doubt he
avoids. In fact, the strength of his poetics, for me, is that it opens up, it sensitises
me to the multivalency, the polysemy of the texts he looks at, in the same way
that Cunningham does.
The
systematic derives from the Pascalian dualism of the grandeur et misere of man
and therefore of his works. The privileged figures of such a poetics are
therefore paradox and oxymoron. Its methodology is dialectic, and its programme
fourfold:
i.
to look at
specifically Christian matters as related to writing
ii.
to look at
fundamental moves of literature, and to illuminate them from a Christian
perspective (e.g. about the self, the world, the word)
iii.
to explore genres
to find their Christian significance
iv.
to open up the
great book, the sacred text.
We
might want to question (iii), derived as
it is from neoclassical theory as mediated particularly by another Christian
systematic poetics, that of Northrop Frye. Otherwise, the programme must seem
unexceptional.
If
the poetics is to be assessed and challenged within the Christian community, it
must be in terms of its foundational theological loci, and the use of dialectic
structures. The only challenge I have yet seen here is the brief one by Paul
Fiddes, a theologian, in his Freedom and Limit (1991). He suggests that the Old
Testament refuses to turn to Eden (or the expulsion), or to any such pattern,
though he accepts the dialectic structure, preferring Kierkegaardian terms to
Pascalian. Whilst it seems to me the Old Testament certainly does not refuse pattern
or place, it is true that Eden is understated. But in the New Testament, the
Fall certainly is not, nor our fallenness. However, there may be a theological
challenge that needs making here.
The
poetics also needs to be tested in terms of practical criticism. It is
interesting to note that the resonant triads all but disappear in the two later
books, and thus would appear to be less than useful in practical analysis. And
as Edwards only writes on poetry, it is not clear how he would apply the
poetics to other genres, for example the realistic novel that Cunningham
concentrates on. Between them, drama is absolutely marginalised, Shakespeare
included. Edwards’ interest lies almost entirely with the Sonnets. However,
given the genre chapters in A Poetics, I see no reason why these genres should
not be fruitfully susceptible to such a dialectic criticism.
If, as I said earlier, apologetics and poetics move in opposite directions, we could predict that the end of one, in Eliotesque fashion, should be the beginning of the other. With Jeffreys’ book, I have shown this to be so. His first chapter squares up at once to the Derridean charge of logocentrism in regards to the Bible. However, the move is not succesful: it shows all the marks of having been added later, and sits uneasily with the flow of the succeeding chapters.
In
Edwards’ case, there is a pause, a period before we see any crossing over with
Cunningham, which, when it does come, is on the discussion over Babel. This is
referred to in In the Reading Gaol in the last chapter, p.374f., re. Derrida on
Joyce on p.378, and the section beginning p.381. These references can be
paralleled in A Poetics on pp.107, 125, which are expanded on in ch.7
‘Translating’, a topic Cunningham also deals at length with in his last chapter
(pp.381-6, 394-5). However, it is not till the end of his first book that
Edwards most obviously crosses with the apologetics of Cunningham, on the site
of the Bible. By waiting till then, Edwards has had a chance to lay his poetics
firmly; ch.6 particularly prepares the way, not only for this move, but for the
two later books. Like Cunningham, Edwards makes no attempt to refute Derrida,
but to situate him. In fact, Edwards
finds him ‘hygienic’, threatening only a ‘pseudo- Christian philosophy unaware
of itself’….Edwards thus appears to share Cunningham’s ‘all truth is God’s
truth’ approach. The false philosophy is that which takes no account of the
Fall at all. The Fall, it can be predicated, has made presence problematic (not
at all like Descartes’ confidently doubting self), as also the word/world
relationship. In other words, deconstruction recognises man’s misere, but only
seems to offer him silence or logorrhea (both cite Finnegan’s Wake). This false philosophy also denigrates the
body, stressing the immortality of the soul rather than the resurrection or
re-creation of the body. In terms of writing, the Bible privileges neither
speech nor writing.
It
would seem, then, that both writers can accommodate deconstruction. But because
apologetics works from secular to sacred, it needs to deploy the secular to
prove the sacred, hence the importance of the parasitism argument of
Cunningham, since it is a ‘secular’ sort of argument. Christian poetics,
working the other way round, merely needs to assert distortion, partial
understanding, seeing through glasses darkly on the part of secular theory.
Maggots, however parasitic they may be, can also be used for hygienic purposes.
Elsewhere
in the other two books, Edwards is more disinclined to engage directly with
contemporary secular poetics, overtly marginalising them to asides and
parentheses. It is not so obvious, then, where else he touches Cunningham’s
apologetics going in the opposite direction. Thwe marked difference of genre
preference exacerbates this. But two places do stand out sufficiently to prove
the point, I believe. One is at both mid-points (taking the trilogy as a unit).
Edwards’ chapter on Wordsworth in Poetry and Possibility touches Cunningham’s
chapter 6 and his discussion of Middlemarch. The actualities of place – the
Lake District, the Midlands- become crucial to the arguments over word and
world. But the arguments are in reverse order. Edwards argues that place needs
poetry (or language or the word); Cunningham that word needs place (or world).
It is not that they are denying each other; it is that the arguments are being
made in a mirror image. Edwards follows this by a chapter on Yves Bonnefoy, where
he briefly explores the God who hides himself, though this never becomes
central to Edwards’ argument, whereas it does for Cunningham.. Edwards’
structure is confusing here, since he orders his material chronologically,
though his thesis is synchronic. Interestingly, Cunningham is much more
diachronic, though he makes no attempt at chronological arrangement! Edwards is
moving away from a silent God towards revelation of a transcendent God;
Cunningham moves towards a silent God as being better than no God at all.
The
second place of crossing- Edwards’ end as Cunningham’s beginning- is more
marked. Although Of Making eschews deconstructionist references, its agenda, as
I have mentioned, is very much set by deconstructionism. Its first chapter
picks up the modernist and postmodernist angst about origins, texts and
textuality. Its second chapter appears to accept the figurative argument, going
further to accommodate Derrida than does Cunningham. For example, in arguing
Shakespeare’s sonnets, he claims that the W.H./ young man is a hermetic
irrelevance; the textual construct is ‘thou’, the second person singular, a
grammatical construct. His ground for saying this, however, seems to me
Platonic, not Derridean, whose approach treats ‘the poem as an autistic child’
in his view. And then he goes on to make this statement, which seems to me a
very real crossing point:
We can
represent Shakespeare as saying that his young person
Was made
so as to end in a beautiful poem. I am adapting a famous
Boutade
of Mallarme…to the effect that the world itself was
Made to
end in a beautiful book…(This) could imply that the
Random
thereness of the world enters intelligently by
Entering
an order of words. The word is necessary to the world;
It is,
in that sense, the world’s end. But one might also say that
The word
is good for the world only insofar as it is not the end, but
The
stage on the way back to the world….’
(pp.32-3)
The wor(l)d of Cunningham, is it not? Of his first chapter.
After
further work on the word/world, Edwards proceeds to the self, the not-I. What
he is doing here is apologetics; he is making a defence of Christianity and the
Biblical notions of the self over and against postmodernist notions. What we
are seeing is a natural emergence of literary apologetics out of poetics, but
necessarily a very different sort to Cunningham’s. It is defensive and overt.
Its force lies in the work already done in the poetics. For Cunningham, it is
covert but combatative. Its force lies in the intense work (performance, one
might say) done on deconstruction and the re-interpretation of historical texts
that will undermine or modify a hostile poetic to make a re-statement of a
Christian position possible.
The
last item on the postmodern agenda for Edwards is that of re-writing. By
returning (for the third time) to T.S.Eliot, he is able to use Eliot’s
rewriting of The Waste Land as The Four Quartets as explicit Christian
rewriting, to make a fuller defence of Christianity than anything seen
hitherto. So he goes beyond where Cunningham starts from (or finishes at). His
defence moves into areas that C.S.Lewis’s apologetics go, or Eliot’s. This may
not be to make reasonable: it is, perhaps, to make sense. Edwards concludes
that a Christian lives not in, but ‘between two worlds’. We remember A.E.Dyson
again. And Cunningham: ‘This is the logic of the betweenness of writing, of
works of art….The word is always in-between.’ (p.60). Cunningham, in fact, has
his own triad: name/antonym/betweenness. So literary meaning arises in the
‘overlap’. I am reminded, too, of a book by Jean Darnall, Life in the Overlap.
This is it, is it not? Not ‘between’ as an absence, a vaccuum, but an
‘overlap’, a presence where we can live dynamically. Would it be too much to
say that this locus, too, is the overlap of Christian poetics and literary
apologetics?
Some final questions, then. Does a full-blown literary apologetic need to be undergirded by some philosophical or theological substructure, explicit, even if somehow covert, too? The Bible itself is not philosophy and does not posit one. Cunningham seems to make heavy weather without such substructures, but perhaps his attraction to a heavily Midrashic Judaistic reading in his last chapter is really part of his need for such a substructure that can still be shared by deconstructionists. In fact, Cunningham claims that theology needs deconstruction as much as vice versa. The challenge of deconstruction, he says, is not different from the challenge of theology. To Jeffreys, this is dangerous gnosticism. Is there a way ahead? I note that most Catholic apologists swork from a (neo-)Thomist foundation, a basically Aristotelian substructure still in good working order, as any reading of Alasdair MacIntyre will demonstrate.
Conversely,
does a Christian poetics have to engage with current secular thinking, which
may, after all, be passed away in five years time?
Can a Christian poetics not help becoming
apologetic in the end? I see this in both Dyson and Edwards. And if so, does it
actually generate the sort of apologetics that will convince non-Christians, or
will it merely give Christians ‘answers’ and confidence in a secular world
(where, God alone knows, they need it)?
Does
a Biblical realism find sufficient grounds in notions of creation and
incarnation? Do they of themselves not lead all too easily to a historicism
very little different from the cultural materialists, or, the other way, to New
Age thinking? Do we not need Edwards’ more complex picture of Fall and
Redemption, of God’s transcendence (‘My thoughts are not your thoughts’); of
being between two worlds but moving towards re-creation?
Who
will speak for fantasy? For drama?
Cunningham, Valentine.In the
Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts and History. (Blackwells, 1994)
Dyson, A.E. Between Two
Worlds: Aspects of Literary Form (Macmillan, 1972)
Edwards, Michael. Towards a
Christian Poetics (Macmillan, 1984)
Poetry and
Possibility: a Study in the Power and Mystery of Words (Macmillan, 1988)
Of Making Many
Books: Essays on the Endlessness of Writing (Macmillan, 1990)
Jeffreys, David Lyle. People
of the Book (Eerdmans, 1996)