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The Idea of Christian Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
In the autumn of 1958 the columns of Blackfriars, normally reserved, as we know for polite murmurings of theological disagreement, resounded with literary controversy. In the September issue, in an article on ‘Morals and the Novel’, Bernard Bergonzi published some interesting, if inconclusive, reflections on the relation between a Catholic view of certain (principally sexual) moral matters and the presentation of those matters in works of literature, particularly novels. Unwisely, perhaps, he supplied the want of a conclusion with a quotation from Newman’s Idea of a University: ‘from the nature of the case if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man.’ Unwisely, certainly, Bergonzi decided to begin his reflections with the case of Paolo and Francesca (Inferno, Canto 5), whom he was persuaded ‘Dante would surely have liked to forgive... were they not already damned’. These opening and closing tropes attracted the characteristically circumspect but uncomfortably firm analytical attention of Kenelm Foster in a letter to the Editor. Bergonzi was convicted of failing to distinguish between Dante-as-poet and Dante-as-protagonist-of-the-poem, and Newman was shown either not to have said what he meant, or to have begged the question. The question, Kenelm then believed, was this: ‘can the subject-matter of literature—which, concedo, is sinful man—ever be treated, in-formed, in a way that may appropriately be called Christian?’
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- Copyright © 1986 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 In the essay ‘Religion and Literature’ contributed to the symposium Faith that Illuminates (1935) and included in T.S. Eliot: Selected Prose, edited by Hayward, John (Penguin, 1953)Google Scholar. 1 quote from Kenelm's own copy.
2 An unpublished essay, ‘Notes on Art and Morals’, dating from the time of the controversy about Lady Chatterley's Lover—Kenelm was prepared to testify in favour of the novel‘s publication—comes closest to the problem in the remark: ’The original good done to me by the Paradiso… is not the same as a good moral intention, in the full human and Christian sense of “moral”. Yet this intention may be a further effect of the poem indirectly. In order to see the divine purpose of art I suppose we should have to trace the connection between these two effects.'
3 It is much to be regretted that Kenelm never addressed himself at length to the problem which he acknowledged to be basic: 'how far and in what sense does Catholicism admit the possibility of an implicit faith in Christ?' (The Two Dantes. p. 154) His treatment of the derived problems in the three‐part essay ‘The Two Dantes’, seems to rest on the premiss that Dante‐the‐poet regarded the salvation of Ripheus and Trajan in Paradiso XX ‘as extremely exceptional, indeed as abnormal’ (p. 249). Yet Kenelm's own discussion of the questions in Paradiso XIX, to which Paradiso XX provides the answer, surely shows that it is Dante‐the‐character's ‘surprising’ assumption that there is no alternative to explicit faith‘ (p. 154) which the eagle is rebuking for the shallowness of its conception of divine wisdom. Kenelm draws special attention to II. 85–90 of canto XIX (p. 146), but their implication would seem to me not that ‘if we judge God to be just or unjust, the criterion itself that we use must derive from him’, but rather that if we judge Dante‐the‐character's virtuous Indian to be just we are already assuming in him a—to us perhaps unfathomable—relationship to the divine source of all justice.
4 Arthur Sale recalls a lecture given by Kenelm to Italian teachers of English on ‘Three Religious Poets’. It dealt with Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas but unfortunately no record of it seems to remain.
5 To profess a belief in the Incarnation of our Lord was to profess at least this much belief in the theological importance of His mother, nor did Kenelm scruple to continue the quotation: Incipe, parve puer: qui non risere parenti Nec deus hunc mensa, dea nec dignata cubili est. ‘Begin, little boy, to know your mother with a smile … Begin, little boy: him who never smiled at his parent no god invites to table, nor goddess to her bed' (Kenelm’s trans.)
6 E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature tr. Willard Trask (Princeton, 1953) ch. 9: ‘Farinata and Cavalcante’. The link between Dante's mixed style and his unique fusion of history and allegory seems first to have been noted by Schelling, from whom Hegel's comments on the poem, of which Auerbach speaks so highly (p. 167), also partially derive.
7 Certainly he saw the longing for maternal warmth of the urchins in ‘Les Effarés’‘les pauvres Iésus pleins de givre’, as an analogue of the general human longing that was fulfilled in the motherhood of Mary, but an explicitly secular analogue, as the poem's comical conclusion emphasizes. I base this remark on Kenelm's own comments scribbled into the margin of his Penguin Rimbaud, and elaborated in his Christmas talk.
8 Contrast the view expressed by Anne Barton in “'Enter Mariners, wet”: realism in Shakespeare‘s last plays’, in Realism in European Literature, ed. N. Boyle and M.W. Swales (Cambridge, 1986) pp. 47–8)
9 See ‘Dante: poet of the intellect’ (New Blackfriars, 1965). Helen Gardner lays great stress on the Yeats identification (The Composition of ‘Four Quartets’, London, 1978, pp. 65–9, 186–9) but acknowledges the presence of other models (p. 185).
10 I should like, and Kenelm would have wished me, to thank my wife, Rosemary, for her part in the writing and the typing of this essay.