Theology
Posted Thursday, January 31, 2008
A Review of In the Light of Christ
by Douglas Marshall
As I write this, we are about to put away the flotsam and jetsam of Christmas, 2007. The tree sits by the curb awaiting collection and the last of its needles have been vacuumed from the living room carpet. The process of forgetting about Christmas has begun and the Valentine’s Day cards are already in the stores. They will give way to cards for St. Patrick’s Day, Easter and Mother’s Day. Great festivals of the Christian year take their places beside secular holidays on the card store shelves.
Mary Beckett’s In the Light of Christ (Ignatius Press, 2006) invites us to imagine a Christmas that cannot be neatly packed away for another year, a moment when God entered human history in the person of Jesus Christ in order to reveal to us his purposes for his creation. It is an assertion we make whenever we recite the Nicene Creed, and yet the words that describe our shared belief fly in the face of the central elements of modern intellectual discourse: reason, the observable and measurable and the Nietzschean contempt for the transcendent. In this environment Christianity is reduced to just another “narrative” competing with other equally valid “narratives.” But Mary Beckett challenges us to suspend our disbelief and to entertain the possibility that the Christian story is wonderfully, cosmically true.
Beckett’s program is ambitious. In 627 pages she attempts to portray the ways in which the central tenets of what she describes as “Augustinian” Christianity are reflected in the literature of the western tradition. “It is the thesis of this book,” Beckett tells us, “that [the value of the works treated] – that is to say, their truthfulness, beauty and goodness – rests in relation to the absolute truth, beauty and goodness that are one in God and that are definitively revealed to the world in Christ.”
Readers may be surprised to discover that Beckett begins her journey through western literature 450 years before Christ’s birth. She argues that to read Aeschylus, Sophocles and Plato as well as Vergil and Cicero from the perspective of Christian faith is to invest them with “deeper and richer” meaning. Not surprisingly, Augustine is awarded two of Beckett’s twenty-two chapters. Augustine’s neo-Platonic embrace of absolute transcendent truths and his understanding of the Church as a corpus permixtum whose gold will only be separated from its dross at the final judgment are essential to the standards which Beckett posits. Two chapters are also devoted to Shakespeare. In a fascinating survey of all the plays, Beckett highlights the bard’s crypto-Catholic perspective, especially in his treatments of Machiavellian manipulations of earthly power.
And Beckett has her villains. Although Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought does not receive systematic consideration, his shadow permeates In the Light of Christ. Beckett regards Nietzsche as the anti-Augustine par excellence, the denier of any absolute of truth, beauty and goodness and, famously, as the writer of God’s obituary. She is lukewarm toward some avowedly Christian authors. Beckett criticizes Milton for linking his faith to the Cromwellian experiment and then apparently losing it after the restoration of the monarchy. T. S. Eliot is scolded for converting to high Anglicanism in order to be “more English.” The standards of the terrestrial city are not those of the city of God.
Several points of light manage to penetrate the Nietszchean gloom of the modern period. Among Beckett’s twentieth century heroes are Wallace Stevens and the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Her treatment of Stevens is especially insightful since she has already publishes a monograph about him.
A few quibbles. At times the author’s Augustinian yardstick locks her into uncomfortable positions. This is especially true of her treatment of Thomas Aquinas. Beckett laments Thomas’ instrumental role in the separation of theology from philosophy rather than examining his remarkable achievement in reconciling the claims of Christianity to the philosophical discourse of the thirteenth century. Beckett is so indebted to the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar that she seems at times to be writing extended footnotes to his thought. Nevertheless, In the Light of Christ is a book remarkable for the boldness of its project and the learning of its author. To read it is to see old friends from the freshman literature survey course in startlingly new ways.
Douglas Marshall has recently retired to his native Philadelphia after a career of teaching Greek and Latin at St. Paul’s School in Concord, N. H., Oberlin College and Dartmouth College.