Books

IN THE LIGHT OF CHRIST: Writings in the Western Tradition, by Lucy Beckett

Reviewed by Francis Phillips

Contents - Jun 2007 - Buy a copy now Editorial: Sacred music: an integral part of worship - Michael Gilchrist New Missal translation: light at the end of the tunnel - Michael Gilchrist News: The Church Around the World Obituary: A tribute to natural family planning pioneer, Dr John Billings, RIP - Msgr Peter J. Elliott Tsunami: Salesians help Solomon Islanders New Zealand Catholic college's intellectually challenging RE program - Bernard Moran Verbicide: 'Happy' or 'Blessed'? How faith can be drained of meaning - Arthur Ballingall Youth ministry active in the Melbourne archdiocese - Barry Coldrey Sigrid Undset: Revived interest in a remarkable Norwegian Catholic novelist - Michael Daniel The Caroline Chisholm Library: Melbourne's hidden treasure - John Young Obituary: Bill Daly RIP: fearless defender of Catholic orthodoxy in Australia - Fr James Tierney Letters: Vatican II (letter) - Francis Vrijmoed Letters: Parish amalgamations (letter) - Eilenn A. Gomm SFO Letters: Judas rethink (letters) - John Schmid Poetry: A Glimpse of My Glory - Maureen Bidess Events: Archbishop Chaput in Australia - Melbourne 4 July 2007 Books: IN THE LIGHT OF CHRIST: Writings in the Western Tradition, by Lucy Beckett - Francis Phillips (reviewer) Books: EDITH STEIN, WOMAN OF PRAYER: Her Life and Ideals, by Joanne Mosley - Tim Cannon (reviewer) DOES YOUR PARISH STOCK AD2000? Books: THE SONG OF BERNADETTE, by Franz Werfel - Michael E. Daniel (reviewer) Books: AD2000 Books Reflection: Pentecost, the Holy Spirit and the Eucharist - Fr Dennis Byrnes

'A formidable blow at the dreary, deconstructed landscape we now inhabit'

IN THE LIGHT OF CHRIST:
Writings in the Western Tradition
by Lucy Beckett

(Ignatius Press, 2006, 560pp, $43.90. Available from Freedom Publishing)

Oscar Wilde once described a cynic as 'knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing'.

This careless witticism suggests more than he could have realised; indeed, it is a neat description of the post-Christian culture in which we live.

Lucy Beckett has written a magnificent demonstration of the poverty of the rational, scientific outlook when divorced from 'value', the value of certain classic texts in the light of truth, goodness and beauty - the light of Christ.

Beginning with Plato and Greek tragedy - 'For Aeschylus and Sophocles, as for us, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom' - she traces how writers down the centuries have anticipated or responded to the coming of God into the world; in this enterprise she is constantly alert to the either/or that Christ's incarnation poses: either the Christian story is true and therefore the whole of life is charged with the mystery and grandeur of God; or man is merely a 'biological accident in a random universe'. As the philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, states: 'There is no neutral ground.'

St Augustine

Central to her thesis are the writings of St Augustine. Rescuing him from the bad press he has endured over the years (obsessed with sin and negative about sex) Beckett shows his enduringly creative influence on later torchbearers.

For Augustine, in incomparable prose, vividly describes the tension between the city of God and the civitas terrena, and the drama of man's existence caught between the two: his need for grace, his weakness, his longing for transcendence and his struggles to overcome himself.

Until the 13th century the Augustinian tradition predominated. With the advent of the universities, of Peter Abelard and St Thomas Aquinas, a chasm developed between professional theologians and the amateurs (literally 'lovers'). Abelard 'presaged a future in which thinking about the things of God would be cut free from receiving God as a gift of grace.'

For Beckett the Western tradition meant 'a collaborative achieve- ment of coherent intellectual effort'. Athenian tragedy prefigured the truth of Christianity; Virgil - 'anima naturaliter Christiana' and thus the chosen companion of Dante - influenced Augustine who, in turn, inspired the monastic writers: Benedict, Bede, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aelred of Rievaulx (who had at his deathbed a psalter, The Confessions and St John's Gospel) and others.

But the book is by no means a dry, academic survey of an immense wealth of literature; the author has the gift of bringing her chosen writers to life in such a way that the reader is constantly prompted to turn, or return, to the works she considers with such passionate rigour.

As she observes, simply knowing the complex details of Dante's cosmology will not make us love him; what makes him, Shakespeare, Pascal, John Donne or Dostoievsky (to name a few of the writers she engages with) come alive on the page is their artistry, which reflects their relationship to God, their own experience and the books that have influenced them.

Clearly, a great influence throughout this book are the writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Quoting von Balthasar on Shakespeare - 'All the time he is utterly certain that the highest good is to be found in forgiveness' - Beckett shows how Shakespeare's 'sense of the truth of God and of the freedom and responsibility of the will' are shaped by the Christian and specifically the Augustinian Catholic tradition.

Common sense will intuitively recognise this in his celebration of goodness and truth 'through a beauty from which they are not separable'; thus she challenges the modishly convenient 'values-free' Shakespeare. She wonders whether Shakespeare, whose background was demonstrably Catholic, had read Augustine's Confessions. It remains an intriguing possibility; after all, Augustine invented the soliloquy as a mode of dramatic discourse.

Enlightenment

Finally we come to the long shadow of the Enlightenment. Beckett observes that by the time of Dr Johnson's death in 1784 (he himself had a greater sympathy for the old faith than is commonly realised) it was becoming rarer and therefore more difficult 'for an intellectual to believe that the central doctrines of the Christian faith were true.' This was the fitful but courageous journey of the brilliant, chaotic Coleridge, who, like Pascal before him or Newman after, had come to a certainty of the Trinitarian God.

Newman saw the either/or as a turning towards God's redeeming love for the world or a turning 'to our own intelligence, our own opinions, our own will'. Yet the influence of Matthew Arnold prevailed. High-minded Victorians hoped that culture could replace faith; later critics like F.R. Leavis divinised literature, under the illusion that 'poetry can save us'.

A fascinating late chapter examines 20th century writers from a cultured but entirely secular background and education who struggled to discover what lay behind their quest for an ultimate meaning behind words; these include the writer and mystic Simone Weil, the critic George Steiner and the novelist Saul Bellow. How can a gifted modern writer admit the possibility of faith without seeming irrational? And how can a Christian creative writer, in the sceptical, relativist climate of today (when someone on a recent, serious, BBC radio program can dismiss Catholic beliefs as 'flailing, dying superstitions' without protest) have any platform at all?

This short summary can hardly do justice to such a rich and thought-provoking book. Beckett's work, drawing on a wide range of poems, plays, essays, letters and diaries, offers an erudite, lucid and insightful commentary, presenting the Western canon in a way not hitherto attempted.

While informative - indeed inspiring - for Christian readers, it is also aimed at intelligent agnostics, open-minded and brave enough not to fudge the conclusions to which the book draws them. In these 600 pages the author, herself a published poet who has written studies of Wallace Stevens and Wagner's Parsifal, has struck a formidable blow at the dreary, deconstructed landscape we now inhabit and shown what great writing is like when it is fed, sometimes partially and indirectly, from the bloodstream of faith.

Mrs Francis Phillips is an English journalist who works with the London Catholic Herald.

Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 20 No 5 (June 2007), p. 16