The theological dimension to Bram Stoker’s work is totally neglected and yet, like Maturin, Stoke... more The theological dimension to Bram Stoker’s work is totally neglected and yet, like Maturin, Stoker can be shown to be seeking a mediation between Catholic and Protestant, and Irish and English, with The Snake’s Pass an allegory of this proto-ecumenism. The influence of the Anglican idea of the via media, central to Victorian theology, is traced in his work, and compared with the influence of Walt Whitman’s model of comradeship and nation. In particular, F. D. Maurice’s inclusive ecclesiology is at work in Dracula, where the vampire acts as an Antichrist whose economy of substitutionary sacrifice is opposed by a union of Protestant word (diaries, typing) and Catholic sacramentals (Eucharistic host, etc.) and acts of mutual self-sacrifice and reciprocity such as the blood-transfusions. Maurice’s questioning of eternal damnation and Gladstone’s idea of immortal life as a gift are also important in a novel that aims to redeem even Dracula himself.
The nostalgia for the Catholic past comes full circle in Chapter 14 in an assessment of clerical ... more The nostalgia for the Catholic past comes full circle in Chapter 14 in an assessment of clerical ghost stories with their interest in ecclesiastical architecture, fittings, and texts. In M. R. James, antiquarian protagonists show little respect for holy objects and thus invoke demonic invasion. James is concerned with the effect of a world which refuses to admit the spiritual power of objects, and thus has no ways of mediating their causal power. His tales question this boundary between subject and object. J. Meade Falkner shares this desire to restore the sacramental and psychic efficacy of objects by showing their negative power in The Lost Stradivarius and positively in the novel of Gothic usurpation, The Nebuly Coat, in which Cullerne Minster is a living thing and agent of Providential judgement through the ‘speaking’ arches of its moving tower, and by the bells, which mediate past and present and enact providential judgement.
Chapter 6 centres on discussions of Dante and Mary Shelley. Brought up as Godwin’s daughter in th... more Chapter 6 centres on discussions of Dante and Mary Shelley. Brought up as Godwin’s daughter in the tradition of rational dissent, Mary Shelley has recourse to Dante’s Commedia to think theologically. She uses it allusively in Frankenstein to import a perspective of divine judgement on her scientist through dramatic irony and parallels with Dante’s Ulysses. Dante’s Gothic aesthetics of the damned as grotesque signs makes sense of Frankenstein’s failure to acknowledge his Creature, or admit any relation between them, thus making the Creature his monstrous double. In Mathilda and Valperga, by contrast, heroines compared to Dante’s female guides interrogate political tyranny and offer a more positive feminine mode of mediation between earthly and heavenly realms. Dante informs also Shelley’s conception of the prophetic authority of her role as author, where the grotesque allows a mode of human creativity which avoids claiming godlike powers, and allows a model of empowerment paradoxically enabled through an acceptance of creaturehood.
Divine Beauty and the Grotesque in Dante's Paradiso
Yearbook of English studies, 2009
Abstract:This is a piece of theological aesthetics that seeks to argue for a grotesque element in... more Abstract:This is a piece of theological aesthetics that seeks to argue for a grotesque element in our understanding of the beautiful. It uses examples of monstrous transformations of Ovid's Metamorphoses in Dante's Paradiso to demonstrate that the grotesque is not just confined to the contorted bodies of the damned in Inferno but is part of Dante's apprehension of God himself, whom he sees as Trinitarian rings smiling at each other. Following Pseudo-Dionysius's theory of biblical metaphor, this becomes a way of witnessing to the impossibility of comprehending the Divine essence, yet also to the opening of a way for humanity to participate in the Divine life. Furthermore, humanity's hybrid nature can imitate the double nature of Christ, which Dante presents in grotesque form as a griffin. The argument makes use of John Ruskin's theory of the grotesque in Modern Painters as the result of limited perception of truths too great to grasp.
How can the teacher open what Charles Taylor describes as the 'immanent frame' of a secular self-... more How can the teacher open what Charles Taylor describes as the 'immanent frame' of a secular self-sufficient view of reality? This article describes two modules studying non-realist literary modes-Gothic and fantasy writingwhich seek to do this. God and the Gothic reverses the psychological turn in 19th-century Gothic to examine the way Tzvetan Todorov's idea of the fantastic hesitation can be used to enable an opening to the transcendent and offers a new way of narrating Victorian Gothic through Gaskell, Oliphant, and Machen. Religion and Fantasy invokes the defamiliarising technique of Victor Shklovsky and the magic idealism of Novalis to connect German and British imaginative writing from Coleridge, through
Radcliffe’s Anglican orthodoxy is established in Chapter 4, along with her attempt through her fi... more Radcliffe’s Anglican orthodoxy is established in Chapter 4, along with her attempt through her fiction to offer a theology of mediation and participation. She works with Shaftesbury’s Platonic moral realism in contrast to Mrs Barbauld’s associationist view of taste and develops a mode of mystical ascent through the interplay of vertical and horizontal experiences. The sublime allows ascent through an awareness of one’s created nature, which is linked to Shaftesbury’s taxonomy of forms. It is an inherently social and virtuous experience, as in James Thomson’s Seasons, and centred on melancholy—an awareness of fallenness, which again allows for a mediation through this distantiation. Twilight’s veiling inbetweenness restores a sense of the lost Eden, while music and liturgy offer humanity’s articulate praise as an example of a Shaftesburian ‘form that forms’. Radcliffe’s explained supernatural is revisioned as a false idolatrous sublime that mistakes an effect for a cause and refuses the mystical ascent.
even unearths accounts of Chesterton’s lectures at Notre Dame. Every aspect of Chesterton’s life ... more even unearths accounts of Chesterton’s lectures at Notre Dame. Every aspect of Chesterton’s life is covered from his idyllic Kensington childhood and schooldays at St Paul’s, through the creative years as a London journalist, his conversion to Catholicism and his involvement in Distributism – a localist political philosophy, now gaining a fresh importance in these globalised times. The book contains a tremendously detailed index, which enables the reader to discover what Chesterton had to say about everything from Mussolini to virginity, taxi-cabs to wonder. This biography is stronger on what Chesterton did and said than on analysis, context and assessment. The importance of The Everlasting Man, Chesterton’s most ambitious work and a sort of universal history needs to be contextualised and linked to the comparable projects of Christopher Dawson and Jacques Maritain. Its role in the conversions of C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers is ignored. Similarly, Orthodoxy uses a kind of Humean scepticism to deconstruct contemporary scientism with wit and brilliance, something that would not become apparent from Ker’s exposition Chesterton has become the catholic C. S. Lewis and therefore an institutional figure – almost a quasi-saint. He is therefore treated with restraint and respect, and what is actually most saintly about him is lost. Among the illustrations in Ker’s volume there are none of Chesterton’s comic drawings, or pictures of him in fancy-dress as Dr Johnson. The wonderful story about him having to exchange trousers with the vicar at his own wedding is left out, and Chesterton’s taking a pistol on honeymoon to defend his bride is downgraded to ‘family legend’! These stories matter because they are in accord with Chesterton’s love for the extraordinary in the mundane, his omnivorous delight in the comic and the vulgar. These loves undergird the incarnational theology, which he learnt from his Anglo-Catholic socialist friends like Conrad Noel, and which enabled his development of a specifically English Catholic vision after his conversion. Despite these cavils, the reader is in safe hands in this fair-minded biography, which tries to see all sides in the many controversies in which its subject became embroiled, notably the Marconi scandal. Chesterton’s energy is reflected in that of his biographer, and the reader is encouraged to explore further the excitement that Chesterton Western Diaspora the three most popular valid male names for Jews were Joseph, Judah, and Jacob (p. 63). For females, the popular names were Mariam, Sarah, Shabit. By contrast in the Eastern Diaspora, as presented in volume IV, the three most popular male names were Abba, Samuel, Joseph, and for females Martha, Salome, with Imma and Miriam equal in third place. However, archaeological and textual remains from the Eastern Diaspora are more sparse, with a total corpus of 2601 names being documented. It is hard to over-estimate the wealth of information, the scholarly value, and the quality of the research that stands behind these volumes. In the introduction to the first volume Ilan stated that she would need to live another forty years to complete the project. With the assistance Thomas Ziem for Part III, and Kerstin Hünefeld for Part IV the project appears to be progressing more rapidly than anticipated. The remaining volume to be published as Part II will cover Jewish names from Palestine in the period 200-650 CE. Hopefully one will not have to wait too long to see the completion of this highly significant project.
The theological dimension to Bram Stoker’s work is totally neglected and yet, like Maturin, Stoke... more The theological dimension to Bram Stoker’s work is totally neglected and yet, like Maturin, Stoker can be shown to be seeking a mediation between Catholic and Protestant, and Irish and English, with The Snake’s Pass an allegory of this proto-ecumenism. The influence of the Anglican idea of the via media, central to Victorian theology, is traced in his work, and compared with the influence of Walt Whitman’s model of comradeship and nation. In particular, F. D. Maurice’s inclusive ecclesiology is at work in Dracula, where the vampire acts as an Antichrist whose economy of substitutionary sacrifice is opposed by a union of Protestant word (diaries, typing) and Catholic sacramentals (Eucharistic host, etc.) and acts of mutual self-sacrifice and reciprocity such as the blood-transfusions. Maurice’s questioning of eternal damnation and Gladstone’s idea of immortal life as a gift are also important in a novel that aims to redeem even Dracula himself.
The nostalgia for the Catholic past comes full circle in Chapter 14 in an assessment of clerical ... more The nostalgia for the Catholic past comes full circle in Chapter 14 in an assessment of clerical ghost stories with their interest in ecclesiastical architecture, fittings, and texts. In M. R. James, antiquarian protagonists show little respect for holy objects and thus invoke demonic invasion. James is concerned with the effect of a world which refuses to admit the spiritual power of objects, and thus has no ways of mediating their causal power. His tales question this boundary between subject and object. J. Meade Falkner shares this desire to restore the sacramental and psychic efficacy of objects by showing their negative power in The Lost Stradivarius and positively in the novel of Gothic usurpation, The Nebuly Coat, in which Cullerne Minster is a living thing and agent of Providential judgement through the ‘speaking’ arches of its moving tower, and by the bells, which mediate past and present and enact providential judgement.
Chapter 6 centres on discussions of Dante and Mary Shelley. Brought up as Godwin’s daughter in th... more Chapter 6 centres on discussions of Dante and Mary Shelley. Brought up as Godwin’s daughter in the tradition of rational dissent, Mary Shelley has recourse to Dante’s Commedia to think theologically. She uses it allusively in Frankenstein to import a perspective of divine judgement on her scientist through dramatic irony and parallels with Dante’s Ulysses. Dante’s Gothic aesthetics of the damned as grotesque signs makes sense of Frankenstein’s failure to acknowledge his Creature, or admit any relation between them, thus making the Creature his monstrous double. In Mathilda and Valperga, by contrast, heroines compared to Dante’s female guides interrogate political tyranny and offer a more positive feminine mode of mediation between earthly and heavenly realms. Dante informs also Shelley’s conception of the prophetic authority of her role as author, where the grotesque allows a mode of human creativity which avoids claiming godlike powers, and allows a model of empowerment paradoxically enabled through an acceptance of creaturehood.
Divine Beauty and the Grotesque in Dante's Paradiso
Yearbook of English studies, 2009
Abstract:This is a piece of theological aesthetics that seeks to argue for a grotesque element in... more Abstract:This is a piece of theological aesthetics that seeks to argue for a grotesque element in our understanding of the beautiful. It uses examples of monstrous transformations of Ovid's Metamorphoses in Dante's Paradiso to demonstrate that the grotesque is not just confined to the contorted bodies of the damned in Inferno but is part of Dante's apprehension of God himself, whom he sees as Trinitarian rings smiling at each other. Following Pseudo-Dionysius's theory of biblical metaphor, this becomes a way of witnessing to the impossibility of comprehending the Divine essence, yet also to the opening of a way for humanity to participate in the Divine life. Furthermore, humanity's hybrid nature can imitate the double nature of Christ, which Dante presents in grotesque form as a griffin. The argument makes use of John Ruskin's theory of the grotesque in Modern Painters as the result of limited perception of truths too great to grasp.
How can the teacher open what Charles Taylor describes as the 'immanent frame' of a secular self-... more How can the teacher open what Charles Taylor describes as the 'immanent frame' of a secular self-sufficient view of reality? This article describes two modules studying non-realist literary modes-Gothic and fantasy writingwhich seek to do this. God and the Gothic reverses the psychological turn in 19th-century Gothic to examine the way Tzvetan Todorov's idea of the fantastic hesitation can be used to enable an opening to the transcendent and offers a new way of narrating Victorian Gothic through Gaskell, Oliphant, and Machen. Religion and Fantasy invokes the defamiliarising technique of Victor Shklovsky and the magic idealism of Novalis to connect German and British imaginative writing from Coleridge, through
Radcliffe’s Anglican orthodoxy is established in Chapter 4, along with her attempt through her fi... more Radcliffe’s Anglican orthodoxy is established in Chapter 4, along with her attempt through her fiction to offer a theology of mediation and participation. She works with Shaftesbury’s Platonic moral realism in contrast to Mrs Barbauld’s associationist view of taste and develops a mode of mystical ascent through the interplay of vertical and horizontal experiences. The sublime allows ascent through an awareness of one’s created nature, which is linked to Shaftesbury’s taxonomy of forms. It is an inherently social and virtuous experience, as in James Thomson’s Seasons, and centred on melancholy—an awareness of fallenness, which again allows for a mediation through this distantiation. Twilight’s veiling inbetweenness restores a sense of the lost Eden, while music and liturgy offer humanity’s articulate praise as an example of a Shaftesburian ‘form that forms’. Radcliffe’s explained supernatural is revisioned as a false idolatrous sublime that mistakes an effect for a cause and refuses the mystical ascent.
even unearths accounts of Chesterton’s lectures at Notre Dame. Every aspect of Chesterton’s life ... more even unearths accounts of Chesterton’s lectures at Notre Dame. Every aspect of Chesterton’s life is covered from his idyllic Kensington childhood and schooldays at St Paul’s, through the creative years as a London journalist, his conversion to Catholicism and his involvement in Distributism – a localist political philosophy, now gaining a fresh importance in these globalised times. The book contains a tremendously detailed index, which enables the reader to discover what Chesterton had to say about everything from Mussolini to virginity, taxi-cabs to wonder. This biography is stronger on what Chesterton did and said than on analysis, context and assessment. The importance of The Everlasting Man, Chesterton’s most ambitious work and a sort of universal history needs to be contextualised and linked to the comparable projects of Christopher Dawson and Jacques Maritain. Its role in the conversions of C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers is ignored. Similarly, Orthodoxy uses a kind of Humean scepticism to deconstruct contemporary scientism with wit and brilliance, something that would not become apparent from Ker’s exposition Chesterton has become the catholic C. S. Lewis and therefore an institutional figure – almost a quasi-saint. He is therefore treated with restraint and respect, and what is actually most saintly about him is lost. Among the illustrations in Ker’s volume there are none of Chesterton’s comic drawings, or pictures of him in fancy-dress as Dr Johnson. The wonderful story about him having to exchange trousers with the vicar at his own wedding is left out, and Chesterton’s taking a pistol on honeymoon to defend his bride is downgraded to ‘family legend’! These stories matter because they are in accord with Chesterton’s love for the extraordinary in the mundane, his omnivorous delight in the comic and the vulgar. These loves undergird the incarnational theology, which he learnt from his Anglo-Catholic socialist friends like Conrad Noel, and which enabled his development of a specifically English Catholic vision after his conversion. Despite these cavils, the reader is in safe hands in this fair-minded biography, which tries to see all sides in the many controversies in which its subject became embroiled, notably the Marconi scandal. Chesterton’s energy is reflected in that of his biographer, and the reader is encouraged to explore further the excitement that Chesterton Western Diaspora the three most popular valid male names for Jews were Joseph, Judah, and Jacob (p. 63). For females, the popular names were Mariam, Sarah, Shabit. By contrast in the Eastern Diaspora, as presented in volume IV, the three most popular male names were Abba, Samuel, Joseph, and for females Martha, Salome, with Imma and Miriam equal in third place. However, archaeological and textual remains from the Eastern Diaspora are more sparse, with a total corpus of 2601 names being documented. It is hard to over-estimate the wealth of information, the scholarly value, and the quality of the research that stands behind these volumes. In the introduction to the first volume Ilan stated that she would need to live another forty years to complete the project. With the assistance Thomas Ziem for Part III, and Kerstin Hünefeld for Part IV the project appears to be progressing more rapidly than anticipated. The remaining volume to be published as Part II will cover Jewish names from Palestine in the period 200-650 CE. Hopefully one will not have to wait too long to see the completion of this highly significant project.
Uploads
Papers by alison milbank