Literature and Theology - Advance Access

The Paradox of Spiritual Matter and The Spiritual Matter of Paradox in Seamus Heaney and Robert Boyle

Rizzo, S. — 2008-04-21

By examining the convergences between Seamus Heaney's oeuvre and Robert Boyle's 1669 treatise ‘The History of Fluidity and Firmness’, this essay shows that the Irish Poet Laureate has more in common with his famous seventeenth-century countryman than he does with the postmodernists with whom so many of today's critics wish to associate him. Most postmodernists—handicapped as they are by strictly materialist philosophies—flounder in the apparent contradictions lying at the surface of natural phenomena, and thereby conclude that meaning is unknowable or nonexistent. Heaney, on the other hand, investigates natural processes like erosion and petrification, dissolution and crystallization, with the keen eye, open mind, and Biblically enlightened spirit of the natural philosophers. Consequently, like Boyle, Heaney pushes deeper into the mysteries of nature and discovers spiritual truth in material paradox.

The Wreath, the Rock and the Winepress: Passion Iconography in Milton's Paradise Regain'd

Hillier, R. M. — 2008-04-21

Readers of Paradise Regain'd have been perplexed by Milton's preference for the Gospel temptation narratives over the Passion narratives in describing the Son's regaining of Paradise. The article argues that, in explicitly laying down the pattern of a Christian hero in the character of the Messiah, Milton enriches his brief epic with a subtle Passion iconography. Milton's brief epic defines exemplary heroic martyrdom by re-appropriating and transfiguring the Messianic icons of the thorny wreath and the immovable rock from William Marshall's frontispiece to Eikon Basilike. Furthermore, in his winepress simile, Milton adopts a traditional conceit highly evocative of the Son's Passion within the Christian imaginary. Milton's treatment of the wreath, the rock and the winepress suggests that the atonement is of greater moment for Milton's theology, politics and poetry than some of his readers have supposed.

Reflection and The Aesthetics of Grace in Villette

Freedman, L. — 2008-04-15

This article is a reading of the aesthetics of grace through the Pauline theology in Villette. Divine grace is given as a gift and is fulfilled only in death. I discuss the Pauline theology which underlies the novel and argue that the structures of giving and withholding are central to Lucy's sense of her own salvation. I explore the connection between surveillance and the Pauline idea of ‘seeing through a glass darkly’ and argue that the aesthetics of grace are ultimately tied to the book's status as a reflected narrative.

Crucified by God: Kazantzakis and The Last Anfechtung of Christ

Podmore, S. D. — 2008-04-03

Christ's struggles in Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation against temptations of the flesh and trials of the spirit can be read as a post/modern analogy of the differentiation—as formulated by Martin Luther and reaffirmed by Søren Kierkegaard—between earthly ‘temptation’ [Versuchung] and divinely instigated spiritual trial [Anfechtung]. Moreover, Kazantzakis's novel enriches previous literature on Anfechtung by vividly and appositely illustrating how Anfechtung and temptation may coexist antagonistically within the same trial of Christ. Through this Kierkegaardian-Lutheran lens, Kazantzakis's novel may thus be read as evocatively transcribing a humanistic rendition of the angefochtene Christus which implicitly collapses the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between humanity and divinity so essential to Kierkegaard's own modern rehabilitation of the archaic notion of Anfechtung.

‘God himself is crucifying him!’¹