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Literature and Theology: A Note on some Suggestions of F. D. Maurice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
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Like the Cambridge ladies of e.e. cummings’ poem, who ‘believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead’, we most of us indulge in the interdisciplinary performance of literary and theological study. Walking home from the Sunday morning service we appraise both the englishing of the liturgy and the structure of the homily without much thought of whether we are right to mix literary and theological judgments. In this we ought to be encouraged. And we ought to encourage others.
It is, perhaps, for such encouragement that an undergraduate asks when he puts his name down for a course advertised in ‘Literature and Theology’ like that proffered at the University of Kent. My acquaintance with such young men and women suggests to me that for them literature and theology are not at first differentiated as autonomous disciplines, for they are experienced as modes and moments of one conversation. Their centre is in the undergraduate talking.
Yet the self spinning at the centre is not enough. Those works of literature and theology about which the young people talk witness to the experiences of others and thus become encouragements for them to think of those others. The ‘blessed rage for order’ proclaimed by the poet and the theologian communicates to the undergraduate a sense of their strivings and of his own unordered existence. And, though I intend to indicate here only that ordering of experience which may be suggested to those who attend to literature and theology, I am aware that something of the same discontent affects men in many disciplines and that these have all an interest in the new order.
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- Copyright © 1978 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Has the Church or the State the Power to educate the Nation? 1839, p. 36
2 Life and Letters, ed. Abbott and Campbell, Vol. II p. 89.
3 Life and Letters, ed. M. C. Church, 1894, p. 157.
4 Quarterly Review, July 1860.
5 Eight Volumes, 1835‐47.
6 For example his literary‐critical suggestion that the history of Xerxes scourging the Hellespont is to be explained on the supposition that the informant of Herodotus had remembered an image from the Persae; Thirlwall, op. cit. Vol. 2 p. 281, cf. Persae lines 745‐8.
7 Loc cit. p. 291.
8 The tone of these highly significant lectures can be assessed from this remark in the preface: There is such a thing as the cant of orthodoxy, as well as a cant of fanaticism and hypocrisy. Persons may repeat certain phrases with a confidence that they understand and value them, in proportion to their real ignorance of their meaning, and without attaching indeed any distinct meaning to the Terms which they repeat', Introduction, p. xxv.
9 National Education, p. 55.
10 For example the patristic authors were being closely looked at in the debates in the 1855 issues of the Journal of Prideaux Tregelles' suggestion that Hippolytus, Refutatio Haeresium, in referring to St Mark as 
had taken for a physical deformity what was really a figure of one who was pollice truncus through his likeness (cf. Acts 13:13) to a soldier who by self‐mutilation has rendered himself unfit for service. See especially J.C.S.P. May 1855, p. 224.
11 Quarterly Review, Vol. 109 No 217 p. 258.Google Scholar
12 Replies to Essays and Reviews; 1862 p. 454.
13 Inspiration and Interpretation, 1861 p. xxii
14 of Life of F. D. Maurice, Vol. I p. 164.Google Scholar
15 To the Revd. F. D. Maurice' 1854.
16 of Life, Vol. II p. 608.Google Scholar
17 Gospel of St John p. 471.
18 of Life of F. D. Maurice, Vol. I p. 164.Google Scholar
19 Doctrine of Sacrifice, p. 2.
20 The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2 volumes, 1879, edited by Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, p. 1–2.
21 ‘So long!’Leaves of Grass, 1860 p. 455.
22 Gospel of St John, p. 411.
23 Epistles of St John, p. 28.
24 Gospel of St John, p. 337.
25 Friendship of Books, p. 58.
26 Apocalypse, p. 313.
27 Prelude, 1850, Bk. I lines 77–79 and 464–467.
28 Prayer Book, p. 55.
29 Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament, 2nd edition 1855, p. 326.
30 Quarterly Review, January 1861, p. 305.
31 The Epistles of St John, 1881, ed. p. 17.
32 Kingdom of Christ, 1959 reprint, Vol. I pp. 166‐7.
33 cf. Doctrine of Sacrifice, p. 300: ‘St John's is not, as some people may carelessly imagine, difficult or unintelligible language. It is particularly cleat and transparent’.
34 cf. the discussion in Doctrine of Sacrifice, p. 113 ff of the terminology of redemption, remission, propitiation and intercession, which berates those critics who have muddled these precise scriptural terms: ‘Great inconvenience, I think, has resulted from a loose habit of confounding the ideas which these words express, as if they were not capable of separate illustration’.
35 Maurice was convinced, for example, that we possess the ipsissima verba Christi and that reports of. speeches by biblical persons are totally verbatim (cf. Life Vol. IIp.471Google Scholar). He was revolted by the critical suggestion that the hymns in the first chapters of Luke's gospel were invented by the evangelist for Zechariah and Mary, ‘mimicy of this kind of feeling must have been odious and contemptible’Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven, p. 21.
36 cf. among many such examples, Maurice's remarks about I Cor. 4:3 as a ‘key to the language of the Bible’, Theological Essays, 1957 reprint, p. 254.
37 ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’, Essays and Reviews, pp. 391‐9.
38 Review of Jowett's Epistles of St Paul, J.C.S.P. III 1855, p. 86.
39 Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament, p. 327.
40 The Kingdom of Christ, Vol. I p. 164.
41 The Gospel of John, pp. 392‐3.
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