Renascence

As a way to gain insight into the phenomenon of religious faith, this essay classifies the Abraham story as a comedy, and contrasts it with the tragedy of Sophocles’s Oedipus. In keeping with the psychologist William James’s “Will to Believe,” faith is usefully conceived as itself an action, one on which actions in the world are predicated. Analyzed thus, the Abraham story patterns a “Jamesian commitment of the will to determined and determining action in an otherwise uncertain world.” The etymology of Isaac, “laughter,” expresses the principle carrying Abraham through his tribulations; “at the very brink of tragedy, the surrogate ram affirms a comedy that can withstand any predicament. ‘Isaac’ lives.” Oedipus and Jocasta, however, meet tragedy in their effort to disbelieve.

Proposing to reconcile the opposing camps of interpretation of Chaucer’s poem, with love’s irrationality condemned on one side and love’s mutuality celebrated on the other, this essay offers a balanced reading of Troilus and Criseyde. The poem’s exemplarity lies not in a systematic application of principles: “we must experience Troilus and Criseyde’s love on its human terms.” Love’s moral complexity is experienced in the passages surrounding the characters’ swooning. Such episodes prove rationality to be as much of a problem as irrationality when it comes to love. Reason is particularly suspect in Criseyde’s response to the couple’s parting.

Factoring in the paradoxical relationship between faith and empiricism in Protestant epistemology, this essay attributes Othello’s disaster to his inability to take the leap of faith a Protestant sensibility demands. Protestantism inherits from Luther a rigid compartmentalization of the knowable and the mysterious. Othello, innately inclined and further conditioned to think in terms of “tangible evidence,” cannot imagine alternative possibilities. His handling of Cassio’s brawl shows how Othello requires that facts speak for themselves, and how he has no access to the “imaginative effort” necessary for charity. Additionally, Iago’s manipulation renders imagination intolerable for Othello, and reinforces his tendency to literalism, doctrinal purity, and a need for certainty.

Considering The Third Man as an “entertainment” with “serious religious and ethical engagement,” this essay suggests the novel’s ultimate discrediting of the despair indicated by the desolate setting, postwar Vienna, and by Jansenist determinism. Two thematically crucial scenes address this despair: the visit to the office of Dr. Winkler, the cynical relic collector; and the interview between the protagonist and the charlatan Harry Lime, who has faked his own death, as they ride on the Great Wheel. “Both Lime’s speech atop the Wheel and Winkler’s dismissal of the relics point the reader to the same interpretive enigma: bodies are nothing more than charnel or they are significant spiritual ‘clues.’” A comparison to the story “A Visit to Morin” shows how The Third Man forces a confrontation with the possibility of grace.

After reviewing important manifestations of Heaney’s engagement with Classical literature, this essay examines the poet’s appropriation of Book Six of the Aeneid in several poems from the 2010 collection The Human Chain. Allusiveness to Virgil lets Heaney explore death, loss, memory, guilt, and, ultimately, the affirmation of life. Helpful in the analysis is Heaney’s concept of “translation.”

With reference to the virtue-ethics tradition, especially the system of St. Thomas Aquinas, this essay interprets the pentangle emblazoned on Gawain’s shield as symbolizing the perfection of interconnected virtues, and the Green Knight as figuring Christ in his martyrdom. Linking these two strands of meaning is the Thomist idea of fortitude, the virtue under particular scrutiny in the poem. Gawain fulfills the secondary part of fortitude, attack, while the Green Knight fulfills the primary part, endurance, and is identified with Christ. His axe, holly bob, and green coloration, and even his menacing aspect, all foster this significance.

Through the lens of her meandering faith journey, this essay reviews the work of the celebrated Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy. A metaphor Roy used in an interview, that of life as a prison and the artist as a bird singing between the bars, provides a common theme in the shifting religious attitudes of her writings. At times her attitude grows bitterly satirical, with a “broad steak of anti-clericalism” (The Cashier). But Roy’s spirituality shows through in how she was affected by her two sisters’ illnesses and deaths. If a prison, life was still able to grant “sacramental moments” pointing to a “radiant world beyond this one.”

With reference to Wilde’s personal religious struggles, especially the suppression of his long-standing attraction to Roman Catholicism, this essay reads De Profundis, Picture of Dorian Gray, and “Ballad of Reading Gaol” as the author ‘s symbolic working out of his conversion, both spiritually and as a novelist. In the latter sense, the essay draws on the theory of Rene Girard regarding novelistic conversion: the artist’s “disavowal of the mimetic desire that has enslaved him to his models.” Since Christ is in Girardian terms the only model to imitate in safety from envy and violence, Girard’s theory offers insight into Wilde’s views on Christ as individualist and on life as imitation of art.

A massively prolific man of letters in fin de siècle America, William Dean Howells experienced spiritual conflict and doubt throughout his long life. Opening with the bleakness of A Modern Instance, this essay examines some of the important points in Howells’s religious evolution. Influenced by Tolstoy and certain Protestant progressives, Howells felt that religion “should be motivated by the spirit of love, not adherence to some creed.” This emphasis on “the interrelatedness of our lives” appears in The Minister’s Charge and A Hazard of New Fortunes, but Howells’s spiritual crisis grew acute with the death of his daughter Winifred. The poetry collection Stops of Various Quills reflects this grief, but his spirituality remained complex, as evidenced in “a Circle of Water” and The Leatherwood God.