Abstract
This collection of essays on theology and literature addresses questions emerging in the past 30 years in the growing European dialogue between these two disciplines. What is the religious imagination? How can secular and religious literature interact? What is the role of spiritual experience in poetry? Michael Kirwan, S.J., of Heythrop College in London, begins the volume with an overview of the religion–literature dialogue since 1987, when the journal Theology and Literature began and the Oxford Handbook of Literature and Theology appeared. Kirwan reviews the century-old tension between Matthew Arnold’s prediction that poetry would replace religion, and T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis’s replies on behalf of a religion–literature dialogue. K. then notes the rise of major theological literary critics such as Nathan Scott, Jr., William Lynch, Thomas Altizer, John Coulson, Terence Wright, and currently Terry Eagleton, David Jasper, and Robert Derweiler. K. also emphasizes Northrop Frye’s role in using biblical patterns in criticism, Frank Kermode’s exploration of quasi-biblical themes, and George Steiner’s anti-deconstructive defense of literature “underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence.” K. favors a more sacramental theory of criticism and a more playful conversation between the disciplines. In contrast, German critic Georg Langenhorst reviews the continental approaches of Romano Guardini, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Paul Tillich, and Karl Josef Kuschel, with special praise for Kuschel’s method of “dialogue by concentrating on mutual questioning and challenging.” Neither essay mentions recent work by David Jeffries or Mark Knight.
After this overview of literary criticism, Michael Paul Gallagher, S.J. introduces five essays on “the religious imagination” in Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, and Wallace Stevens. Gallagher uses ideas from John Henry Newman, Paul Ricoeur, Bernard Lonergan, William Lynch, and Charles Taylor to provide criteria for the “reverent” imagination in literature: its openness to self, others, world, and transcendence. He also provides an illuminating reading of Terence Malik’s film Tree of Life. Later essays in this volume provide close readings of spirituality in the poetry of Henry Constable, Rainer Maria Rilke, Eliot, and Denise Levertov. Some original ideas emerge in other essays on “reading poetry as” lectio divina, spiritual transformation, or active contemplation.