Joseph S. O'Leary homepage

Bibliography with Links

NEW BOOK:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KDYM542

Ellen Carol Jones: 'Joysis Crisis compellingly documents how Joyce’s revolution of the word—the “impossible philosophy” of a creativity that is negative and yet also “porous to transcendence”—“wrestles with reality itself,” resulting in truth-telling about the divine and the human. In judicious, enlightening readings spanning Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, Joseph S. O’Leary argues that Joyce’s texts stage a crisis that is both binding and freeing: “an event in writing and language, but also a religious event, a sexual event, and a collective crisis of his city and nation, or of European civilization.” Joyce seeks through his art to grasp the ungraspable world, “a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void,” to reveal the real, even if that real is “unmasterable by historical vision or philosophical reason, or even language itself.” His art is a labor of transformation and a labor of redemption, sounding the depths of existence, revealing the spectrum of suffering humanity, transmuting that suffering through agonistic yet redemptive writing, and translating historical material into something rich and strange: a visionary aesthetic labor that is “a parable of the eschatological transformation that religions yearn for.”'

BOOKS
1. Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in Christian Tradition. Minneapolis: Winston-Seabury. Repr. Wipf & Stock, 2016. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/questioning_bac_1.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/questioning_bac.html
Extract: ‘Overcoming the Nicene Creed.’ Cross Currents 34 (1984):405-13.

2. La Vérité chrétienne à l’âge du pluralisme religieux. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, ‘Cogitatio Fidei,’ 1994.

3. Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth. Edinburgh University Press, 1996. Repr. Wipf & Stock, 2016. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/religious_plura.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/4_derrida_on_tr.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/7-the-empty-chr.html

4. L’Art du jugement en théologie. Paris: Éditions du Cerf (‘Cogitatio Fidei’), 2011.

5. Christianisme et philosophie chez Origène. Paris: Éditions du Cerf (‘Philosophie & Théologie’), 2011. Reviews: https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2016/10/review-of-christianisme-et-philosophie-chez-orig%C3%A8ne-by-f-x-risch.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2016/09/bernard-pouderon-review-of-christianisme-et-philosophie-chez-orig%C3%A8ne.html

6. Philosophie occidentale et concepts bouddhistes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (‘Chaire Gilson’), 2011.

7. Conventional and Ultimate Truth: A Key for Fundamental Theology. University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2015/07/ian-leask-launch-of-conventional-and-ultimate-truth-at-mater-dei-institute-june-26-2015.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2019/12/reply-to-cyril-oregan.html

8. Buddhist Nonduality, Paschal Paradox: A Christian Commentary on the Teaching of Vimalakirti (Vimalakirti-nirdesa). Leuven: Peeters, 2018.

9. Reality Itself: Philosophical Challenges of Indian Mahayana. Brussels and Nagoya: Chisokudo, 2019. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/publications/cp/evi/reality-itself

EDITED BOOKS AND TRANSLATIONS
1. Heidegger et la question de Dieu. Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset (‘Figures’), 1980. Ed. Richard Kearney and J. S. O’Leary. 2nd ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (Quadrige Grands Textes), 2009.
2. Nishida Kitarō, Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness. Trans. Y. Takeuchi, V. H. Viglielmo, and J. S. O’Leary. State University of New York Press, 1987.
3. Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism in the 20th Century. Translated and adapted by J. S. O’Leary. New York, Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1992.
4. Heinrich Dumoulin, Understanding Buddhism: Key Themes. Translated and adapred by J. S. O’Leary. New York, Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1994.
5. Buddhist Spirituality I (World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest 8). Ed. Y. Takeuchi, J. Van Bragt, J. W. Heisig, J. S. O’Leary, and P. L. Swanson. New York: Crossroad, 1993 (London: SCM; New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass).
6. Buddhist Spirituality II (World Spirituality 9). Ed. Y. Takeuchi, J. W. Heisig, J. S. O’Leary, and P. L. Swanson. New York: Crossroad, 1999 (London: SCM).

CHAPTERS IN BOOKS
1. ‘The Irish and Jansenism in the Seventeenth Century.’ The Irish-French Connection 1577-1977, ed. Liam Swords. Paris: The Irish College, 1978, 21-43. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/the_irish_and_j.html
2. ‘Topologie de l’être et topographie de la révélation.’ Heidegger et la question de Dieu, 194-237.
3. ‘Limits to the Understanding of John in Christian Theology.’ Studia Biblica 1978, II: Studies in the Gospels, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone, Sheffield (JSNT suppl. 2), 227-241. 4. ‘En lisant le De utilitate credendi de saint Augustin.’ La Croyance, ed Jean Greisch. Paris: Beauchesne (‘Philosophie’), 1982, 29-49.
5. ‘Father Bovary.’ The Way Back: George Moore’s ‘The Untilled Field’ and ‘The Lake,’ ed. Robert Welch. Dublin: Wolfhound; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 105-18. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/father_bovary.html
6. ‘Religion, Ireland: in Mutation.’ Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s, ed. Richard Kearney. Dublin: Wolfhound, 1988, 231-41. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/religion_irelan.html
7. ‘Exiles.’ Samayoeru hitotachi (Program note), Tokyo, 1989, i-iv. Trans. K. Kondo, 14-16, reprinted in his trans. of play (Tokyo: Sairyusha, 1991),’ 191-7. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/07/fragmented-sexuality-in-joyces-exiles-1989.html
8. ‘The Spiritual Upshot of Ulysses.’ An Introduction to Celtic Christianity, ed. James Mackey. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991. Second edition, 1995, 305-34. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/07/the-spiritual-upshot-of-ulysses-1989.html
9. ‘Impeded Witness: Newman Against Luther on Justification.’ John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism, ed. David Nicholls and Fergus Kerr. Bristol Press; University of Southern Illinois Press, 1991, 153-93. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/impeded_witness.html
10. 'L’herméneutique théologique et ses effets philosophiques.’ Paul Ricoeur: Les métamorphoses de la raison herméneutique, ed. J. Greisch and R. Kearney. Paris: Cerf, 1992, 97-103.
11. ‘Towards the Post-Postmodern Retrieval of Irish Religious Tradition.’ Essays on Class and Culture in Ireland, ed. S. Mac Grianna and P.E.S. Ua Conchurhair. University of Ulster, 1992, 89-102. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/03/toward_the_post.html
12. ‘Theological Resonances of Der Satz vom Grund.’ Critical Assessments: Martin Heidegger, ed. Christopher Macann. New York: Routledge, 1992, I, 213-56. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/07/theological-res.html
13. ‘Origène face à l’altérité juive.’ Comprendre et interpréter: Le paradigme herméneutique, ed. J. Greisch. Paris: Beauchesne (‘Philosophie’), 1993, 51-82. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/origne_face_lal_1.html
14. ‘Plotinus in “Mont Blanc” and Adonais.’ Centre and Circumference, ed. K. Kamijima et al. Tokyo: Kirihara, 1993, 466-81.
15. ‘Origen’s Metaphysical Interpretation of the Johannine Logos.’ The Philosophy of Logos, ed. K. Boudouris. Athens: International Society for Greek Philosophy and Culture, 1993, II, 140-55. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/01/origens_metaphy.html
16 ‘Heidegger and Indian Philosophy.’ Beyond Orientalism: The Work of Wilhelm Halbfass and its Impact on Indian and Cross-Cultural Studies, ed. Eli Franco and Karin Preisendanz. Amsterdam and Atlanta GA: Rodopi (Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 59), 1997, 171-203. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/10/heidegger_and_i.html
17 ‘Religions as Conventions.’ The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, 413-24. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/03/religions_as_co.html
18. ‘Toward a Buddhist Interpretation of Christian Truth.’ Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity, ed. Catherine Cornille. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002, 29-43. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/10/towards_a_buddh.html
19. ‘Atonement.’ ‘Grace.’ ‘Judaism.’ ‘Logos.’ The Westminster Handbook to Origen, ed. John McGuckin. Louisville, London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003, 66-8, 113-17, 135-8, 142-5. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/origen_on_grace.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/origen_on_judai.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/origen_on_logos.html
20. ‘Ultimacy and Conventionality in Religious Experience.’ Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics, ed. Jeffrey Bloechl. Indiana University Press, 2003, 174-99. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/09/ultimacy_and_co.html
21. ‘La Mutation des croyances.’ Le souci du passage: Mélanges offerts à Jean Greisch, ed. Philippe Capelle, et al. Paris: Cerf, 2004, 170-9.
22. ‘Time and Emptiness.’ Zeit: Anfang und Ende; Time: Beginning and End, ed. Walter Schweidler. Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2004, 217-35. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/04/time-and-emptiness.html
23. ‘La percée mystique en philosophie: Plotin, Augustin.’ Expérience philosophique et expérience mystique, ed. P. Capelle. Paris: Cerf, 2005, 133-45. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/03/les-extases-plotiniennes-de-saint-augustin.html
24. ‘The Gift: A Trojan Horse in the Citadel of Phenomenology?’ Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Ian Leask and Eoin Cassidy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, 135-66. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/10/the_gift_a_troj.html
25. ‘God in the Dark.’ In: Ei, doitsu, furansu, kokubungaku ni okeru shinwa, seisho no juyo to henka (Reception and Transformation of Myth and Bible in English, German, French and Japanese Literature). Faculty of Letters, Sophia University, 2005, 1-12. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/god_in_the_dark_1.html
26. ‘Questions to and from a Tradition in Disarray.’ After God:Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy, ed. John Manoussakis. New York: Fordham UP, 2006, 185-207.
27. ‘Moral Qualms and Mystic Claims.’ Song Divine: Christian Commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, ed. Catherine Cornille. Leuven University Press, 2006, 49-67.
28. ‘Augustinienne (Doctrine).’ Notionnaires 2: Idées. Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis, 2006, 80-1. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/doctrine_august.html
29. ‘From Impermanence to Emptiness: Madhyamaka and Momentariness.’ Expanding and Merging Horizons: Contributions to South Asian and Cross-Cultural Studies in Commemoration of Wilhelm Halbfass, ed. Karin Preisendanz. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2007, 525-49. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/04/from-impermanence-to-emptiness.html
30. ‘Divine Simplicity and the Plurality of Attributes (CE II 359-386; 445-560).’ Gregory of Nyssa: Contra Eunomium II: An English Version with Supporting Studies, ed. Lenka Karfíková et al. Leiden: Brill, 2007, 307-37.
31. ‘Forgiveness.’ Ecumenics from the Rim: Explorations in Honour of John D’Arcy May, ed. John O’Grady and Peter Scherle. Berlin: LIT, 2007, 119-25.
32. ‘The Theological Status of Philosophy in Origen.’ Philosophie et théologie: Festschrift Emilio Brito, ed. Éric Gaziaux.Leuven UP, 2007, 3-18.
33. ‘Paste.’ The Literary Encyclopedia. 9 June 2008.
34. Respect for Life and the Problem of Scriptural Violence.’ Beauty, Truth & Love: Essays in Honour of Enda McDonagh, ed. Eugene Duffy and Patrick Hannon. Dublin: Columba, 2009, 93-120. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/01/3_respect_for_l.html
35, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics: A Response to Richard Kearney.’ Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception, ed. Kascha Semonovich and Neal DeRoo. New York: Continuum, 2010, 167-84.
36. ‘Skillful Means as a Hermeneutic Concept.’ Interreligious Hermeneutics, ed. Catherine Cornille and Christopher Conway. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010, 163-83.
37. ‘Rahner and Metaphysics.’ Karl Rahner: Theologian for the Twenty-first Century, ed. Padraic Conway and Fainche Ryan. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010, 23-38.
38. ‘Knowing the Heart Sutra by Heart.’ Traversing the Heart, ed. Richard Kearney and Eileen Rizo-Patron. Leiden: Brill, 2010), 367-80.
39. ‘Gregory’s Metaphysical Investments.’ Gregory of Nyssa: The Minor Treatises on Trinitarian Theology and Apollinarism, ed. Völker Henning Drecoll and Margitta Berghaus. Leiden: Brill, 2011, 351-67.
40. ‘Western Hospitality to Eastern Thought.’ Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions, ed. Richard Kearney and James Taylor. New York: Continuum, 2011, 23-33.
41. ‘Aspiring Minds: Renaissance Humanism in Marlowe, Milton and Goethe.’ In: Y. Nagamachi et al, ed. Ningen no sonkei wo toinaosu.(Re-examining Respect for Humanity).Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 2011, 1-19.
42. ‘The Simplicity of the Ultimate, East and West.’ Aquinas, Education and the East, ed. Thomas Brian Mooney and Mark Nowacki. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. 133-45.
43. ‘Incarnational Ontology and Paschal Transsformation: Acts 2,36 in Contra Eunomium III.’ Gregory of Nyssa Contra Eunomum III: An English Version with Commentary and Supporting Studies, ed., Johan Leemans and Matthieu Cassin. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 613-24.
44. ‘Bedingungen der Möglichkeit einer Begegnung zwischen abendländischer und buddhistischer Philosophie.’ Christentum und Philosophie: Einheit im Übergang, ed. Jean-Luc Marion and Walter Schweidler. Munich: Alber, 2014, 454-68.
45. ’Se libérer des vues en bouddhisme.’ Religion et liberté, ed. Philippe Capelle-Dumont and Yannick Courtel. Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2014, 59-70.
46. ‘The Future of Collegiality.’ Vatican II in Ireland, Fifty Years On: Essays in Honour of Padraic Conway, ed. Dermot A. Lane. Oxford, Bern: Peter Lang, 2015, 305-27.
47. ‘Stanislas Breton, lecteur de Nagarjuna.’ Philosophie et mystique chez Stanilas Breton, ed. Jean Greisch, Jérôme de Gramont, and Marie-Odile Métral. Paris: Cerf, 2015, 145-57.
48. ‘Nicht-Dualität im Vimalakīrtinirdeśa.’ Buddhismus und Komparative Theologie, ed. Klaus von Stosch, Hermann- Josef Röllicke, and Daniel Rumel. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2015, 105-34.
49. ‘Truth and Violence.’ In: Walter Schweidler, ed. Transcending Boundaries: Practical Philosophy from Intercultural Perspectives. Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2016, 237-49.
50. ‘Les incidences radicales du tournant herméneutique sur la théologie,’ Jean Greisch: Les trois âges de la raison, ed. Stefano Bancalari, Jérôme de Gramont, and Jean Leclercq. Paris: Hermann, 2016, 301-17.
51. ‘The Self and the One in Plotinus.’ Self or No-Self?, ed. Ingolf U. Dalferth. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017, 9-36.
52. ‘Buddhist Anatheism.’ Richard Kearney’s Anatheistic Wager: Philosophy, Theology, Poetics, ed. Chris Doude van Troostwijk and Matthew Clemente. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 168-77.
53. ‘Pioneers of Buddhist-Christian Dialogue Before Vatican II.’ Building a Culture of Compassion: Essays Celebrating 25 years of the Vesakh Message to Buddhists, ed. Indunil J. Kodithuwakku. Vatican: Urbaniana University Press, 2020, 27-41.
54. ‘Socrates and Plato in the fathers.’ The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Philosophy, ed. Mark Edwards. Abington and New York: Routledge, 2021, 191-205.
55. ‘The Church and Hunger Strikes: For Critical Commemoration of a Dangerous Past.’ In: Dermot Keogh, ed. forthcoming. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2021/02/the-church-and-hunger-strikes-for-critical-commemoration-of-a-dangerous-past.html

JOURNAL ARTICLES

RECHERCHES DE SCIENCE RELIGIEUSE
‘Dieu-Esprit et Dieu-Substance chez saint Augustin.’ 69 (1981):357-90.
‘Le destin du Logos johannique dans la pensée d’Origène.’ 83 (1995):283-92.

IRISH THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY
‘The Hermeneutics of Dogmatism.’ Review article on Lonergan, The Way to Nicea. 47 (1980):98-118.
‘Has the Nicene Creed Become Inaccessible?’ 48 (1981):240-55.
Reviews: I. Trethowen, The Absolute and the Atonement. 39 (1972):205-6; N. Lash, Theology on Dover Beach. 47 (1980):155-7; A. Stuttgen, Ende des Humanismus, Anfang der Religion? 47:244; E. Brito, Hegel et la tâche actuelle de la Christologie. 48 (1981):144-6; A.T. and R.P.C. Hanson, Reasonable Belief. 48:280-2; V. Twomey, Apostolikos Thronos. 51 (1985):245-6; J. Mackey, The Christian Experience of God as Trinity. 51:321-2; F. Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein. 53 (1987):241; J. Segundo, The Humanist Christology of Paul. 53:242.

ORIGENIANA
1. ‘How to Read Origen.’ 4 (1987):358-60. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/how_to_read_ori.html
2. ‘The Recuperation of Judaism.’ 6 (1995):373-9. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/the_recuperatio.html
3. ‘The Invisible Mission of the Son in Origen and Augustine.’ 7 (1999):605-22. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/the_invisible_m.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/the_invisible_m_1.html
4. ‘Logos and Koinonia in Philo's De Confusione Linguarum.’ 8 (2003): 245-73. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/logos_and_koinn.html
5. ‘Knowledge of God: How Prayer Overcomes Platonism (Contra Celsum VI-VII).’ 9 (2009):447-68.
6. ‘Biblical and Metaphysical in the Texture of Origen’s Writing (CIo II.175-192).’ 10 (2011):671-86.

STUDIA PATRISTICA
‘Insights and Oversights in Origen’s Reading of Romans 4:1-8.’ 41 (2006):225-9.
‘Platonic Dissolution of History in Origen’s Commentary on John X 5-34.’ 46 (2010):241-6.

THE AUSTRALIAN EJOURNAL OF THEOLOGY.
1. ‘Dogma and Religious Pluralism.’ 4 (February 2005).
2. ‘Language in Luther’s Reformation Breakthrough 8 (October 2006). Also in K. Riesenhuber, ed. The Understanding of Language from the Later Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Sophia University research bulletin, 2005, 117-50. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/language_in_lut.html
3. ‘Paul, Origen and Melanchthon on Justification.’ 11 (July 2008). Expanded from: ‘Melanchthon’s Critique of Origen.’ Reception of the Fathers 1350-1550), ed. M. Kobayashi, 82-107. Sophia University, research bulletin, 2003. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/melanchthon-aga.html

SCRIPTURE IN CHURCH
‘Luke’s Selfish Soliloquists.’ 47 (2017):110-21.
'Reading 1 John Contemplatively.' 51 (2021:

ARCHIVIO DI FILOSOFIA
1. ‘Grace Before Being.’ 64 (1996):121-34. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/grace_before_be.html
2. ‘Demystifying the Incarnation.’ 67 (1999):417-31. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/demystifying_th_1.html
3. ‘Enjoying One Another in God: In Defence of Augustine's Eudaemonism.’ 69 (2001):561-76. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/enjoying_one_an.html
4. ‘“Where all the ladders start”: Apophasis as Awareness.’ 70 (2002):375-405. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/where_all_the_l.html
5. ‘Gift and Debt in the Economy of Salvation.’ 72 (2004):579-89. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/gift_qnd_debt_i.html
6. ‘The Eucharist as a Work of Art.’ 76 (2008):169-76. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24488404?seq=1
7. ‘Logical Impossibility in Mādhyamika Argumentation.’ 78 (2010):93-103. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24488352?seq=1
8. ‘Self-determination in James Joyce.’ 80 (2012):249-60. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24488535?seq=1
9. ‘Demystifying the Trinity.’ 82 (2014):129-42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24488858?seq=1
10. ’Luke’s Selfish Soliloquists.’ 84 (2016):225-32. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2021/02/lukes-selfish-soliloquists.html
11. ‘L’Auto-présence de la conscience en bouddhisme et en phénoménologie.’ 86 (2018):157-67. http://www.libraweb.net/articoli.php?chiave=201808502&rivista=85

JOURNAL FOR CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
‘A Seminal Event.’ 2 (2020):176-90.
'Philosophical Depth in Visconti’s Death in Venice.' forthcoming

PHILOSOPHY TODAY
‘Phenomenology and Theology: Respecting the Boundaries.’ 62 (2018):99-118.

HERMATHENA
‘Rethinking the Incarnation.’ Review article on Kuschel, Geboren vor aller Zeit?. 152 (1992):59-69. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23040985?refreqid=excelsior%3A51d5d0ba0abdf1f2c8143840f998add1&seq=1
Reviews: R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 149 (1990):143-7 https://www.jstor.org/stable/i23040913
G. Bruns, Heidegger’s Estrangements. 150 (1991):56-60. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/heideggers_estr.html

SEMINAR (University College, Cork)
‘The Riddle of the Self.’ 4 (1980):51-8.
‘Can We Return to Reason?’ 5 (1981):32-9.

STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY
‘Conventions and Ultimacy in Japanese Religion: A Challenge to Christian Theology.’ 6 (2000):38-58. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/conventions_and.html
Reviews: J. Bracken, The Divine Matrix. 2 (1996):113-17 https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/swc.1996.2.1.113; J. Maher and G. Macdonald, Diversity in Japanese Culture and Language. 2 (1996):117-18 https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/swc.1996.2.1.117; M. Abe, Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue. 2 (1996):229-31 https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/swc.1996.2.2.229 https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/swc.1996.2.2.231 ; P.F. Kornicki and I.J. McMullen, Religion in Japan. 2 (1996):231-3; R.A. Hinde, Why Gods Persist.5 (1999):267-9 https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/swc.1999.5.2.267; B. Hebblethwaite, Ethics and Religion. 6 (2000):108-11.

THE EASTERN BUDDHIST
‘The Significance of John Keenan’s Mahāyāna Theology.’ 30.1 (1997):114-32. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/03/the_significanc.html
‘The Hermeneutics of Critical Buddhism.’ 31.2 (1998):278-94.
‘Nonduality in the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa: A Theological Reflection.’ 46.1 (2015):63-78.

BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES
‘Emptiness and Dogma.’ 22 (2002):163-79. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/3551/summary.
Interview: ‘Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth.’ 19 (1999):239-41.
Reviews: Aitken/Steindl-Rast, The Ground We Share; K. Amill, Contemplation et dialogue. 20 (2000):315-8 https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/two_books_on_bu.html https://muse.jhu.edu/article/3486/summary https://www.jstor.org/stable/i260251.
D. Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism. 21 (2001):147-51. http://www.thezensite.com/ZenBookReviews/OLeary_review_Philosophical_Meditations.htm https://muse.jhu.edu/article/3517/summary.

INTER-RELIGIO
‘Partners for Dialogue.’ 8 (1985):62-99. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3348
Reviews: P. Knitter, No Other Name? 7 (1985):44-7 https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3346 .
E. Sharpe, Karl Ludvig Reichelt. 9 (1986):35-8 https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3352.
J. B. Cobb and C. Ives, The Emptying God. 20 (1991):71-7 https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3383.

THE JAPAN MISSION JOURNAL
1. ‘Literature and Inculturation.’ The Japan Missionary Bulletin 45 (1991):323-35.
2. ‘The Murmur of the Gods.’ The Japan Mission Journal 51 (1997):219-29.
3. ‘The Theological Significance of Jean-Luc Marion’s Thought.’ 53 (1999):300-9. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/01/the_theological.html
4. ‘Finding Kingdom Values in the City.’ 54 (2000):19-27.
5. ‘Emptiness and Dogma.’ 55 (2001):227-45.
6. ‘Buddhism and Forgiveness.’ 56 (2002):37-49; 97-109. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/02/buddhist_and_fo.html
7. ‘Japanese Buddhism: The Dialogue with Our Sister Religion.’ 56 (2002):165-72. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/japanese_buddhi.html
8. ‘Editorial.’ 56 (2002), 218.
9. ‘Stanislas Breton on the Essence of Christianity.’ 57 (2003):184-92.
10. ‘An American Tragedy.’ 57 (2003):232-41. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/03/three_years_lat.html
11. ‘Buddhist Serenity in a Time of Rage. 58 (2004):54-66. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/buddhist_sereni.html
12. Review L. Viévard, Vacuité et compassion dans le bouddhisme madhyamaka. 58 (2004): 136-44. Also published as ‘Emptiness and Compassion.’ Studia Asiatica (Bucharest) 10 (2009):287-96. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/09/emptiness_and_c.html
13. ‘The Stress of Time.’ 58 (2004):147-56. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/the_stress_of_t.html
14. ‘Editorial.’ 58 (2004):218.
15. ‘Towards an Incarnational Ethics.’ 59 (2005):77-86.
16. ‘Vatican Instruction, Church Reception.’ 59 (2005):263-9. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/12/vatican_instruc.html
17. ‘Love Conquers All: An Encyclical and its Intertexts.’ 60 (2006):49-65. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/02/love_conquers_a.html
18. ‘A Note on Nitobe.’ 61 (2007):16-29. In Japanese: ‘Nitobe bunken no shingakuteki kento.’ Kirisutokyo o meguru kindainihon no shoso. Tokyo: Oriens Institute, 2008, 80-100. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/01/a_note_on_nitob.html
19. Review: W. Johnston, Mystical Journey. 61 (2007):69-70.
20. Review: Benedikt XVI, Jesus von Nazareth. 61 (2007):140-4.
21. ‘Governance and Freedom in Church and State.’ 62 (2008):58-72.
22. ‘The Eucharist: A Work of Art.’ 62 (2008):93-7.
23. ‘Paul’s Missionary Motivation.’ 63 (2009):54-62.
24. Review: J. P. Keenan, Grounding our Faith in a Pluralistic World. 63:67-70.
25. ’Dostoevsky’s Quest for Resurrection.’ 63:132-44.
26. ‘Skillful Means and Conventional Truth in Interreligious Dialogue.’ 63:191-207.
27. ‘Rahner and Religions.’64 (2010):60-5.
28. ‘The Attraction of Ancient Indian Thought for Philosophers and Theologians Today.’ 64:119-28.
29. ‘In Newman’s Wake: Ernesto Buonaiuti and the Development of Doctrine.’ 64:254-77.
30. Review: J. P. Keenan, I Am/No Self. 66 (2012):72.
31. ‘Luther and Erasmus Revisited.’ 66:134-44.
32. ‘Vatican II: The Unfinished Council.’ 66:263-82.
33. ‘Overcoming Views in the Vimalakīrti Sūtra.’ 67 (2013):34-40.
34. ‘Facing the Modern World with Pope Francis.’ 67:135-41.
35. ‘Editorial.’ 67:218.
36. ‘A Vexed Question: Catholic Theology Facing Same-Sex Marriage.’ 68 (2014):58-72. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2018/08/a-vexed-question-catholic-theology-facing-same-sex-marriag.html
37. ‘Editorial.’ 69 (2015):2.
38. ‘The Theological Impact of Literary Modernism.’ 69:66-72.
39. ‘Editorial.’ 69:74.
40. ‘Editorial.’ 69:146.
41. ‘Robert Magliola on Buddhist-Christian Dialogue.’ 69:186-9.
42. ‘Editorial.’ 70 (2016):2.
43. ‘Book Review: Jesuits Engage with Buddhism.’ 70 (2016):71-2.
44. ‘Conventional Truth as a Platform for Buddhist-Christian Understanding.’ 70:270-81.
45. ‘Editorial.’ 71 (2017):2.
46.. ‘Excursus: Luther in Bach.’ 71:78-80.
47. ‘Kenosis.’ 71:133-9.
48. ‘Reply,’ 71:144.
49. ‘Editorial.’ 71:146.
50. ‘Luke’s Selfish Soliloquists.’ 71:157-66.
51. ‘Editorial.’ 72 (2018):2.
53. ‘Impeded Dialogue: The Case of Jacques Dupuis.’ 72::49-61.
54. ‘Editorial.’ 72 :146.
55. Book Review: Schmidt-Leukel, Religious Pluralism & Interreligious Theology. 72:276-82.
56. ‘Editorial.’ 73 (2019):2.
57. ‘The Universal Core of Shinto.’ 73:102-4.
58. ’Editorial.’ 73:146.
59. Book Review: R. Schulzer, Inoue Enryō. 73:275-9.
60: Book Review: M. Pesce, Il cristianesimo, Gesù e la modernità. 73:280-2.
61. ‘Editorial.’ 74 (2020):2.
62. Book Review: G. Rappo, Rhétoriques de l’hérésie. 74:71-2.
63. ‘Editorial.’ 74:146.
64. ‘Reading 1 John Contemplatively.’ 75 (2021):47-54.
65. Book Review: O’Loughlin Kennedy, The Curia is the Pope. 75:61-7.

FUKUIN SENKYO
‘Amerika no higeki.’ 58.3 (March 2004):2-16.
‘Eiga “Chinmoku — Silence” ni okeru fukuinteki kakushin.’ 71.7 (July 2017):11-17.

DHARMA WORLD
‘Buddhism and Forgiveness.’ 31 (Nov./Dec. 2004):14-19.
‘Scripture and Prayer.’ 36 (Oct.-Dec., 2009):4-7.
‘Many Religions, One Reality.’ 43 (Jan.-Mar. 2018), 7-10.

THE FURROW
1. ‘Prayer and Life.’ 21 (1970):608-17.
2. ‘Homilies for July.’ 22 (1971):363-7.
3. ‘The Marian Consciousness.’ 23 (1972):660-5.
4.‘John Paul II on Love and Responsibility.’ 29 (1978): 740-7.
5. ‘The French Bishops on Abortion.’ 30 (1979):353-60. Repr. An Irish Reader in Moral Theology, III, ed. Enda McDonagh and Vincent MacNamara. Dublin: Columba, 2013), 141-7.
6. ‘Christianity in Contemporary Ireland.’ 35 (1984):633-8.
7. ‘Some Buddhist Challenges.’ 36 (1985):35-40.
8. ‘Integrity.’ 36:467-74.
9. ‘Cults and the Occult.’ 36:717-8.
10. ‘Thoughts after Ballinspittle.’ 37 (1986):285-9.
11. ‘Sexual Orientation.’ 38 (1987):680-5.
12. ‘Homosexuality: Pursuing the Dialogue.’ 39 (1988):601-2.
13. ’The Future of Christianity.’ 40 (1989):361-6.
14. ‘Modernist Fiction and Christian Faith.’ 41 (1990):401-9.
15. ‘Featured Review: Art and Our Future.’ 53 (2002):310-13.
16. ‘Featured Review: Liberal Christian Voices.’ 57 (2006):496-505.
17. ‘Featured Review: In Dogged Loyalty.’ 57:577-8.
18. ‘Preaching Paul.’ 59 (2008):606-14.
19. ‘A Dialogue with Dostoevsky.’ 60 (2009):140-5.
20. ‘A Son’s Death.’ 64 (2013):220-7.
21. ‘New Pope, New Hope.’ 64:259-64. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2014/01/new-pope-new-hope.html

THE FOLD (Cork)
‘The Church and the Young Generation.’ 18 (1970):14-16.
‘Celebrating Penance.’ 24 (1977):11-15.
‘Theology and the Laity.’ 28.7 (1980): 36-9.
‘Parents, Youth and Religion.’ 29.2, (1981) 13-17.

CÉIDE
‘Mother Church and her Gay/Lesbian Children.’ 2.1 (Sept.-Oct. 1998). https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/mother_church_a.html
‘A mother’s perspective.’ 2.3 (Jan.-Feb. 1999):27.
‘Are Religions All the Same?’ 2.6 (July-Aug. 1999):4-5.THEOLOG (Student publication, Maynooth College)

THEOLOG (student publication, Maynooth College)
‘The Death of God and Time.’ Spring 1971, 4-5.
‘Searching the Scriptures.’ Spring 1972, 8-11.
‘Servants of Freedom.’ Spring 1973, 21-4.
‘Philosophy and Faith : The Augustinian Perspective.’ 1976, 13-18

THE IRISH TIMES
‘Maynooth Notes.’ 1969-70.
Interview with Andy Pollak. 9.4.1991.
Letters to the Editor. 9.1.80; 11.2.81; 19.2.81; 4.5.81; 13.5.81; 10.6.81;26.11.81; 22.4.82; 10.4.84; 5.9.84; 8.3.85; 3.7.85; 23.9.86; 2.5.87; 22.9.87; 30.8.88; 17.3.90; 29.8.90; 6.11.90; c. 18.3.91; c. 13.11.91; 12.91; 7.3.92; 17.4.92; c. 13.7.92; 23.10.92; 12.92-1.93; 18.1.93; c. 7.4.93; 16.4.93; 24.8.93: 10.1.98; 10.7.98; 21.7.98; 26.10.98: 18.1.99; 11.3.99; 2.6.99; 27.2.2001; 14.4.01; 30.4.01; 4.5.01; 5.5.01; 22.5.01; 15.1.02; 23.12.02; 14.3.03; 8.1.05; 1.3.05; 6.5.05; 28.10.05; 1.12.05; 23.9.06; 29.9.06l 14.1.08; 1.2.08; 13.5.08; 18.6.08; 7.8.08; 13.8.08; 21.8.08; 3.9.08; 20.11.08; 24.2.09; 1.4.09; 17.5.10; 24.7.10; 26.11.10; 4.6.11; 15.7.11; 23.7.11; 14.4.12; 5.7.12; 29.10.12; 27.2.13; 3.4.13; 9.8.13; 11.1.14; 15.5.14; 2.10.14; 20.10.14; 29.7.15

IDENTITY (Dublin)
‘Reflections on the Gay Movement in Ireland.’ 2 (1982):26.
‘Learning from the Nightmare.’ 3 (1982):30.
‘American Notes.’ 5 (1983):8.

OUT (Dublin)
‘The Flesh and the Spirit.’ 1 (Dec. 1984-Jan. 1985):26. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/the_flesh_and_t.html
‘Spotlight on Dr. McNamara.' 1985, 14-16.
‘Aids and Gay Liberation.’ 7 (Dec. 1985-Jan. 1986):28-9.
[Response to Homosexualitatis problema]. 12 (May 1987):24-6.

THE CRANE BAG

‘Joyce and the Myth of the Fall.’ 2 (1978):18-21. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/joyce_and_the_m.html
‘The Riddle of Sacrifice.’ 3.1 (1979):85-7. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/the_riddle_of_s.html
‘Latin America’s Theological Challenge.’ 6.1 (1982):31-4. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/latin_americas_.html

BOUNDARY 2
‘Theology on the Brink of Modernism.’ 13:2-3, Winter-Spring 1986, 145-156
‘Steve Bannon’s Ghostly Triumph.’ (5 September 2017). https://www.boundary2.org/2017/09/joseph-s-oleary-steve-bannons-ghostly-triumph

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Letters.’Henry James’s Models’ 9.7.1999. ‘Mahler and Aschenbach’ 19.11.2002. ‘Bullshit’ 19.01.2007. ‘Death in Venice’ 12.12.2008. ‘Heidegger’ 27.10.2010.

JOURNAL OF ROMANTICISM
‘Shelley and Plotinus.’ 1 (2016):29-50.
‘Coleridge and Plotinus.’ 3 (2018):19-36.

JOURNAL OF IRISH STUDIES (IASIL JAPAN; FORMERLY THE HARP).
1. ‘Notes on the Soul-Motif in Joyce’s Portrait.’ The Harp 8 (1993):61-9.
2. ‘The Musical Structure of “The Dead.”’ The Harp 11 (1996):29-40. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/the_musical_str.html
3. ‘George Moore between Zola and Gide: The Case of “John Norton.”’ The Harp 12 (1997):90-102. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/03/george_moore_be.html
4. ’The Redemptive Emergence of Form in Joyce.’ The Harp 15 (2000):112-18. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/the_redemptive_.html
5. ‘Nietzsche and Shelley in “Blood and the Moon.”’ Journal of Irish Studies 16 (2001):138-47. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/03/nietzsche_and_s.html
6. ‘Beckett’s Intertextual Power.’ 18 (2003):87-101. Partial Japanese translation in Samuel Beckett’s Vision and Movement, ed. K. Kondo. Tokyo: Michitani 2005, 108-31 https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/becketts_intert.html
7. Review: G. Moore, Parnell and His Island et al. 20 (2005):103-5. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/moore_parnell_a.html
8. ‘The palm of beauty: Yeats, Rilke, Joyce.’ 21 (2006):36-48.
9. ‘God in the Dark: Theological Ghosts in Beckett’s Company 20 (2005):34-44. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/god_in_the_dark_1.html
10. ‘Beckett and Radio.’ 23 (2008):3-11.
11. ‘Dionysos in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’ 24 (2009):66-74.
12. ‘Sex and Gender in “Albert Nobbs.”’ 26 (2011):88-96.
13. ‘Robert Welch’s Farewell.’ 28 (2013):7-16. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2014/01/robert-welchs-farewell.html
14, ‘Sexual Dawn at Clongowes: The Latency Period in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter 1.’ 30 (2015): 77-85.
15, ‘The Troubled Heart: Yeats’s persona in “Meditations in Time of Civil War.”’ 31 (2016):54-65.
16, Review: R. Foster, Vivid Faces. 31 (2016):80-2.
17. ‘The Eighteenth Century in Ulysses.’ 32 (2017):53-63.
18. Review: S. Brivic, Revolutionary Damnation. 32 (2017):73-4.
19. ‘From elegiac transience to tragic impermanence: Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.’’ 33 (2018):112-22.
2o. Review: G. Dawe, Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets. 33 (2018):420-2.
21. ‘Comic Entrances, Tragic Exits: Wilde and Socrates..’ 34 (2019):76-89. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog /2020/03/comic-entrances-tragic-exits-wilde-and-socrates.html
22. 'Religious Joyce.' 35 (2021:

THE TRANSACTIONS OF THE ASIATIC SOCIETY OF JAPAN
‘Jun’ichiro Tanizaki meets Thomas Hardy.’ 14 (1999):101-22. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/junichiro_taniz.html
‘Crisis of Assimilation.’ 14:171-4.
‘Lurid Misbehaviour,’ review of Paul McCarthy trans. of Atsushi. Ser. 5, 5: (2014):309-11.

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE (Sophia University)
1. ‘Theology and the Modern Novel.’ 26 (1989):69-104.
2. ‘Beckett’s Company: The Self in Throes.’ 28 (1991):83-124.
3. ‘The Birth of the Soul in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’ 29 (1992):11-50.
4. ‘The Magnanimity of Yeats: Reading “A Dialogue of Self and Soul.”’30 (1993):57-89.
5. ‘Newman on Education and Original Sin.’ 31 (1994):11-45. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/03/newman_on_educa.html
6. ‘Joyce between Jacques Lacan and Hélène Cixous: Interpreting “The Sisters.”’33 (1996):35-51.
7. ‘Enclosed Spaces in “The Dead.”’ 34 (1997):33-52. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/enclosed_spaces.html
8. ‘“Grace” and the Origins of Ulysses.’ 35 (1998):23-45. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/09/grace_and_the_o.html
9-11. ‘Anathemata for Henry James.’ 37 (1999):63-99; 38 2000:59-118; 39 (2001): 37-84. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/love_in_the_tim.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/the_turn_of_the.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/jamesian_subtex.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/roderick_hudson.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/fetichism_in_th.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/authorial_consc.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/goethe_in_the_g_1.html
12. ‘The Heightened Vision of Exile: Dublin in Ulysses.’ 39 (2002):3-24.
13. ‘Introduction to George Moore (1852-1933).’ 40 (2003):33-43. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/09/introduction_to.html
14. ‘Mary Lavin’s Images of the Clergy.’ 41 (2004):17-48. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/the_irish_clerg.html
15. ‘Father and Son in Ulysses.’ 42 (2005):49-77. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/02/father_and_son_.html
16. ‘Intertextuality in Beckett’s "The Lost Ones."’ 43 (2006):59-76.
17. ‘“The Beast in the Jungle” and its Progeny.’ 44 (2007):53-97.
18. ‘The Afterlife of Renaissance Humanism: Marlowe, Milton, Goethe.’ 45 (2008):15-55.
19. ‘Walter Pater’s Construction of the Renaissance.’ 46 (2009):15-42.
20. ‘Newman’s Literary Empiricism.’ 47 (2010):65-98.
21. ‘Symbolic Power in Shelley’s “To a Sky-Lark.” 49 (2912):1-18. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2021/02/symbolic-power-in-shelleys-to-a-sky-lark.html
22. ‘Seduction in Henry James’s “Paste.” 50 (2013):1-46. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2017/11/seduction-in-henry-jamess-paste-part-i-1.html
23. Joyce’s Radical Wagnerism.’ 51 (2014):1-21. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2016/03/joyces-radical-wagnerism-3.html

SOPHIA ENGLISH STUDIES
‘Tampering with Milton.’ 33 (2008):45-61
‘A Mystical Utterance in Context: “Tintern Abbey.”’ 38 (2013):19-58. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2013/12/a-mystical-utterance-in-context-%CA%BBtintern-abbey%CA%BC-.html

ZENITH (Student publication, Maynooth College)
‘A Sermon on Hope.’ 1 (1971):11-14.
‘Intellectual Capitulation.' 3 (1974):16-19.
'Proust's Quest.' 4 (1975):1-8.
'Henry James.' 6 (1976):6-14.

OTHERS

1. ‘Looping the Loop with Tom Murphy: Anticlericalism as Double Bind.’ Studies 81 (1992):41-8.
2. ‘Modern Historical Consciousness in Roman Catholic Thought.’ Zen Buddhism Today 13 (1996):83-108. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/modern_historic.html
3. ‘The Whole Play of the World’ (interview). Graph (NS) 2 (1996):64-83.
4. ‘Dogmat a spotkanu religii.’ Miesiecznik Znak 495 (1996):33-44.
5. ‘Tanizaki’s “Shunkin” and Hardy’s “Barbara.”’ Surugadai University Studies 17 (1998):26-40.
6. ‘Pushkin in “The Aspern Papers.”’ Henry James E-Journal, 1.March.2000. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2018/11/pushkin-in-the-aspern-papers.html
7. ‘Forgiveness in Mahāyāna Buddhism and a Christian Reflection.’ Dialogue (NS) 29 (2002):94-110 (The Ecumenical Institute, Kandy).
8. ‘Questioning the Essence of Christianity.’ Philosophy & Theology 16 (2004):203-16.
9. ‘T. S. Eliot and the Gītā’s Spirituality of Action.’ Journal of Vaishnava Studies 16/1 (2007):143-60.
10. ‘Entrevista: O cristianismo foi moldado pelo contexto ocidental.’ Revista IHU (2007): 248.
11. ‘Knowing the Heart Sutra by Heart.’ Religion and the Arts 12 (2008):356-70.
12. ‘Japanese Studies of Philo, Clement and Origen.’ Adamantius 14 (2008):395-402.
13. ‘La théologie catholique face au mariage homosexuel.’ Cités 44 (2011):27-43.
14. ‘The Ghosts of T. S. Eliot.’ Renaissance Bulletin (The Renaissance Institute, Tokyo.) 38 (2012):27-45. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2014/11/the-ghosts-of-t-s-eliot.html
15. ‘Everyday Life and Ultimate Reality: Dialectical Reversals in Hegel, Heidegger and Buddhism.’ Contemporary Buddhism. 15 (2014):465-78.
16. ‘Bisexual Dynamics in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter One.’ James Joyce Journal (Seoul) 21.2 (2015): 137-54.
17. ‘Nonduality in the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa.’ Hōrin 18 (2015):297-319.
18. ‘Eruaikunisu ni oite Sonzai dou natte shimau no ka?’ (‘Qu’advient-il à l’être dans l’Ereignis?’), trans. Odagiri Kentaro. Ritsumeikan Daikaku Jinbunkagaku Kenkyujo Kiyo 107 (2016):157-76.
19. ‘Research Report.’ Bulletin of the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture 40 (2016):104-6.
20. ‘Numinous Presences in Two Buddhist Sūtras: Toward a Comparative Phenomenology.’ Exchange 46 (2017):245-59.
21. ‘Self-emptying in Martin Scorsese’s Silence.’ Doctrine & Life 67.6 (2017):15-23.
22. ‘Author’s Response.’ [Symposium on Buddhist Nonduality, Paschal Paradox] Horizons 44 (2017):442-7.

BOOK REVIEWS

JOURNAL OF THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
1. L. Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity. 62 (2011):755-9.
2. É. Vetö, Du Christ à la Trinité. 63 (2012):793-6.
3. C. Geffré, Le Christianisme comme religion de l’Évangile. 64 (2013):330-3.
4. E. Durand, L’offre universelle du salut en Christ. 64 (2013):333-5.
5. C. Markschies, Hellenisierung des Christentums. 64 (2013):696-9.
6. E. Falque, Passer le Rubicon. 64 (2013):841-5.
7. E. Bermon/G. O’Daly, ed. Le De Trinitate de saint Augustin. 66 (2015):449-52.
8. J. Rivera, The Contemplative Self after Michel Henry. 67 (2016):883-5.
9. A.-C. Jacobsen, ed., Origeniana Undecima. 68 (2017):775-8.
10. M. B. Simmons, Universal Salvation in Late Antiquity: Porphyry of Tyre and the Pagan–Christian Debate. 69 (2018):333-6.
11. A. Fürst, Origenes. 69 (2018):818-21. https://academic.oup.com/jts/article/69/2/818/5078590?guestAccessKey=aad5ff4f-8308-4c96-9e4d-1b5c315c480b
12. J. Zachhuber, Luther’s Christological Legacy. 70 (2019):456-60. https://academic.oup.com/jts/article-abstract/70/1/456/5289526
13. V. Limone, Origene e la filosofia greca. 70 (2019):851-4. https://academic.oup.com/jts/article/70/2/851/5510124?guestAccessKey=8e9ffbc0-4fe4-44b1-94e5-25fefbf9e989
14. R. Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation. 70 (2019):928-32. https://academic.oup.com/jts/article/70/2/928/5513310?guestAccessKey=5a7e99bc-2b23-46f2-ad3d-e7eb823769f1
15. L. Ayres, The Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology. 71 (2020):426-32. https://academic.oup.com/jts/article/71/1/426/5740019?guestAccessKey=5c98652e-28c9-4f5e-a3e8-ef9e71ac94d9
16. D. Pazzini, Gesù il Cristo in Origene. 71 (2020):356-8.
17. B. Bitton-Ashkelony, et al, ed., Origeniana Duodecima. 72 (2021):
18. J. Zachhuber, The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics. 72 (2021):

THEOLOGISCHE LITERATURZEITUNG
A. Altieri, Voir infiniment. 143 (2018):805-8.
R. Elberfeld. Philosophieren in einer globalisierten Welt. 143 (2018):940-2.

REVIEWS IN RELIGION & THEOLOGY
1. T. Cattoi, Divine Contingency. 17 (2010):577-9.
2. K. Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine, 20 (2013):568-71.
3. ‘Five Books on Sacrifice.’ 21 (2014):289-96.
4. B. Asbill, The Freedom of God for Us, 23 (2016):252-4.
5. G. Bayliss, The Vision of Didymus the Blind, 24 (2017):31-3
6. P. Schmidt-Leukel and A. Hehring, ed. Interreligious Comparisons in Religious Studies and Theology. 24:365-7.
7. E. Shulman, Rethinking the Buddha. 24:370-2.
8. ‘Peter Sloterdijk as an Ally of Theology.’ 25 (2018):5-11.
9. D. Karłowicz, Socrates and Other Saints. 25:90-2.
10. A. Mong, Dialogue Derailed. 25:533-6.
11. P. Allen and B. Neil, ed. Oxford Handbook to Maximus the Confessor. 25:614-17.
12. K. Maitra, Philosophy of the Bhagavad-gita. 26 (2019):286-8.
13. G. Muscolino, Teurgia. 26:303-5.
14. ‘Justification Vindicated’ (M. Horton, Justification) 26:556-61.
15. J. Westerhoff, Golden Age of Buddhist Philosophy. 26:727-9.
16. ‘Toward a Theological Reading of Saint John Henry Newman.’ 27 (2020):163-7.
17. V. A. Lektorsky/M.Bykova. Philosophical Thought in Russia. 27:374-6.
18. J. L. Morrow, Alfred Loisy and Modern Biblical Studies. 27:386-8.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES (FORMERLY PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES )
1. H. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. Philosophical Studies 23 (1974):323-4.
2. R. Kearney, The Wake of Imagination. 32 (1988-90):330-3.
3. N. Denyer, Language, Thought and Falsehood in Ancient Greek Philosophy: W. Jordan, Ancient Concepts of Philosophy. 33 (1992):238-46. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/two_books_on_gr.html
4. G. Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Anatomy of Science. 33 (1992):362-4.
5. F. Dallmayr, Life-World, Modernity, and Critique. IJPS 2 (1994):350-2.
6. D. Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History. 3 (1995):388.
7. T. Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy. 3 (1995):390.
8. J. Derrida, Aporias. 4 (1996):177-83. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/derridas_aporia.html
9. F. Gonzales, Plato and Heidegger. 20 (2012):308-13. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2021/02/review-of-francisco-j-gonzalez-plato-and-heidegger-a-question-of-dialogue-pennsylvania-state-univers.html

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
‘God’s New Faces’: On Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmermann’s ‘Reimagining the Sacred.’ 15 May 2017. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gods-new-faces/
‘Restoring the Divine to the Care of the Earth’: On James W. Heisig’s ‘Of Gods and Minds.’ 12 October 2019. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/restoring-the-divine-to-the-care-of-the-earth-on-james-w-heisigs-of-gods-and-minds/

MONUMENTA NIPPONICA
1. K. Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism; T. Unno, ed. The Religious Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, 46 (1991):569-72.
2. B. Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. 48 (1993):521-6. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/chan_insights_a.html
3. D. Bauer, Die Transmoderne; I. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Überwindung der Moderne? 52 (1997):276-9.
4. T. Ogawa, M. Lazarin, G. Rappe. Interkulturelle Philosophie und Phänomenologie in Japan. 55 (2000):147-9
5. S. Odin, Artistic Detachment. 57 (2002):117-19.
6. H. P. Liederbach, Martin Heidegger im Denken Watsuji Tetsuros. 58 (2003):146-8.
7. D. N. Slaymaker, The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction. 60 (2005):281-3. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/11/the_body_in_pos.html
8. R. Hutchinson/M. Williams, ed. Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature. 62 (2007):131-4. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/07/the-other-in-mo.html
9. S. Heine, Did Dogen Go to China?; R. Payne et al. Discourse and Ideology in Medieval Japanese Buddhism. 62 (2007):389-92.
10. S. Heidegger, Buddhismus, Geschlechterverhältnis und Diskriminierung. 63 (2008):178-81. http://jodoshinshubuddhism.wordpress.com/2008/07/07/shinshu-life-links-070708 https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/07/women-in-shin-b.html
11. S. Yamada, Shots in the Dark. 66 (2011):159-61.
13. Y. Miyamoto, Beyond the Mushroom Cloud. 68 (2013):147-50.
14. Nanyan Guo, Refining Nature in Modern Japanese Literature. 70 (2015):173-5.

JAPANESE JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES
1. R. Magliola, Derrida on the Mend. 12 (1985):362-6. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2322
2. D. Lopez and S. Rockefeller, ed. The Christ and the Bodhisattva. 14 (1987):335-7. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2366
3. P. Griffiths, On Being Mindless.15 (1988):81-3. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2374
4. G. Parkes, ed. Heidegger and Asian Thought. 15(1988):311-13. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2391
5. G. Parkes, ed. Nietzsche and Asian Thought. 19 (1992):90-4. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2478
6. J. P. Keenan, The Meaning of Christ. 19 (1992):94-100. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2479
7. J. Sanford et al. Flowing Traces. 20 (1993):73-7. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30234132?refreqid=excelsior%3Adffbdf12b58266217757436cfa674781&seq=1
8. D. Kalupahana, A History of Buddhist Philosophy.20 (1993):78-83. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30234133?refreqid=excelsior%3A0f106bb7bd112e9722cd426cbb51debf&seq=1
9. J. Cabezon, Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender. 20 (1993):86-9. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30234135?refreqid=excelsior%3A41dba989ff2b88bec62fe62788e48cb5&seq=1
10. S. Heine, Dōgen and the Kōan Tradition. 21 (1994):113-15. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2535
11. Ng Yu-Kwan, T’ien-t’ai Buddhism and Early Mādhyamika.22 (1995):224-7. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2570
12. S. Laycock, Mind as Mirror and the Mirroring of Mind. 22 (1995):227-9. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2571
13. Fu and Heine, Japan in Traditional and Postmodern Perspectives. 23 (1996):189-92. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2593
14. P. Griffiths, On Being Buddha. 23 (1996):196-200. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2595
15. P. Mommaers and J. Van Bragt, Mysticism Buddhist and Christian. 23 (1996):200-4. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2596
16. E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self. 23 (1996):213-14. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2601
17. B. Faure, Visions of Power. 24 (1997):194-7. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2623 https://search.proquest.com/openview/7f84bdfc2f81852c9f11dde0a70e1945/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1818335
18. B. Bocking, A Popular Dictionary of Shinto and Nagarjuna in China. 24 (1997):210-1. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2627
19. M. Teeuwen, Motoori Norinaga’s The Two Shrines of Ise. 24 (1997):214-5. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2629
20. H. Keel, Understanding Shinran. 24 (1997):219-22. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2634
21. P. Harvey, The Selfless Mind; M. Deegalle and F. J. Hoffman, Pali Buddhism; J. Pickering, The Authority of Experience; P. 22. Williams, Altruism and Reality. 26 (1999):208-15. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2680
23. A. van des Kooij and K. van den Toorn, Canonization & Decanonization. 26 (1999):216-20. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2681
24. B. Bodart-Bailey, Kaempfer’s Japan. 27 (2000):137-9. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2709
25. D. Bargen, A Woman’s Weapon. 27 (2000):139-43. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2710
26. B. Frank, Dieux et Bouddhas au Japon and Amour, colère, couleur. 28 (2001):157-60. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2735
27. R. Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God. 29 (2002):165-8. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2772
28. J. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness. 29 (2002):168-75. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2773
29. J. Greisch, Le Buisson ardent et les lumières de la raison. 29 (2002):175-80. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2774
30. G. Reeves, A Buddhist Kaleidoscope. 30 (2003):175-7. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2804
31. Y. Wang, Buddhism and Deconstruction. 31 (2004):201-6. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2834 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30233746?refreqid=excelsior%3Ac5f87d3eca79001010cacb383d287cb5
32. F. Girard et al. Repenser l’ordre, repenser l’héritage. 31 (2004):213-16. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2837 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30233749?refreqid=excelsior%3A9b7ba28d868b5441fb8bf49df3833c2f
33. D. Lopez, ed. Critical Concepts for the Study of Buddhism. 33 (2006):182-6. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2893
34. H. Kim, Dōgen on Meditation and Thinking. 35 (2008):376-80. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2967
35. J. D. May, Converging Ways? 35 (2008):400-2. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2974
36. J.-N. Robert, La Centurie du Lotus. 36 (2009):381-4. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2994
37. D. Hirota, Asura’s Harp. 37 (2010):167-70. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3011
38. K. Lee, The Prince and the Monk. 37 (2010):170-2. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3012
39. U. App, The Birth of Orientalism. 38 (2011):213-6. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3041
40. F. Lachaud, Le vieil homme qui vendait du thé. 38 (2011):226-8. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3046
41. J. Shields, Critical Buddhism. 38 (2011):399-401. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/4112
42. R. Magliola, Facing Up to Real Doctrinal Difference 42 (2015):395-8. http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/4463

JAPAN CHRISTIAN REVIEW
1. J. M. Kitagawa, The Christian Tradition: Beyond its European Captivity. 59 (1993):135-8. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3518
2. T. Dean, Religious Pluralism and Truth. 61 (1995):109-112. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/4145
3. J. Heisig and J. Maraldo, Rude Awakenings. 62 (1996):128-32. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/4145
4. R. Drummond, A Broader Vision. 62 (1996):132-4.
5. D. Tracy, Naming the Present. 63 (1997):115-16. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/4156

H-BUDDHISM. H-NET REVIEWS
1. H. Kazimow, J. and L. Keenan, Beside Still Waters. August, 2003. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/reviews/15972/oleary-kasimow-and-keenan-and-keenan-beside-still-waters-jews
2. Y. Wang, ed. Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought. 2008. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/reviews/16034/oleary-wang-deconstruction-and-ethical-asian-religion-and-philosophy
3. Paul B. Watt, Demythologizing Pure Land Buddhism. 2016. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=46909
4. Richard Bowring, In Search of the Way. H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews, Dec. 2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/reviews/1058614/oleary-bowring-search-way-thought-and-religion-early-modern-japan

THE JAPAN TIMES
Book Reviews: 1. B. A. Wallace, Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic. 8 April 2012.
2. J. Watts, ed. This Precious Life. 29 July 2012.
3. H. Wakabayashi, The Seven Scrolls Tengu. 26 August 2012.
4. T. D. Leighton, Zen Questions. 13 January 2013.
5. P. Haskel, Sword of Zen. 24 March 2013. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/03/24/books/zen-master-indulges-japanese-sword-myth/
6. R. Welch, Kicking the Black Mamba. 7 April 2013. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/04/07/books/processing-the-bitter-to-a-durable-beautiful-form
7. D. Massarella, Japanese Travellers in Sixteenth-Century Europe. 12 May 2013.
8. Endo Shusaku, Kiku’s Prayer. 23 June 2013. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/06/30/books/book-reviews/preaching-endos-theme-of-a-maternal-divinity/#.Wg568BOCx0s https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/464699
Letters to the Editor. May 1985; 4.4.93; 22.5.05; 18.2.07; 2.6.13: 9.6.13

OTHERS
D. Holmes, More Roman than Rome. New Blackfriars 59 (1978):531-32. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43246953?refreqid=excelsior%3Aad56d41e709d182e3cbc4f2502d6291c
L. Arnhart, Aristotle on Political Reasoning. Review of Politics 45 (1983):468-70. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1407191?seq=1
J. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas. The Thomist 49 (1985):477-81.
R. Williams, Sergii Bulgakov. Religiologiques 25 (2001):360-4. https://www.religiologiques.uqam.ca/no25/recensions/Leary.html
J. P. Williams, Denying Divinity. Philosophy East and West 55 (2005):370-3. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_east_and_west/v055/55.2oleary.pdf
Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth. National Catholic Reporter (21 September 2007):29.
E. Däumer and S. Bagchee, The International Reception of T. S. Eliot. Sophia 57 (2009):126-31.
G. Peters, Reforming the Monastery. Sixteenth Century Journal 45 (2014):843-4. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24246053?refreqid=excelsior%3A472ab3f3b009ac0ed93520bf71ecf55f
W. L. Todd, The Ethics of Śaṅkara and Śāntideva. Journal of Buddhist Ethics 23 (2016):161-4 http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/files/2016/11/Todd_OLeary_16_2.pdf
C. Simpson, Merleau-Ponty and Theology. Journal of Religion 97 (2017):145-6.

LECTURES
‘Alltäglichkeit und Letztgültigkeit. Dialektische Umkehrungen bei Hegel und Heidegger und im Buddhismus. ‘ Humboldt University, Berlin, 30 January 2012. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/02/allt%C3%A4glichkeit-und-letztg%C3%BCltigkeit-dialektische-umkehrungen-bei-hegel-und-heidegger-und-im-buddhismu.html
‘Überwindung der Metaphysik bei Erasmus und Luther.’ Charité Hospital, Berlin, 7 May 2012. https://www.academia.edu/23028028/Disputation_Luther_und_Erasmus
‘Negative Dialektik bei Nāgārjuna und Hegel.’ University of Leipzig, Dept. of Indology, 28 June 2012. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/06/negative-dialektik-bei-n%C4%81g%C4%81rjuna-und-hegel.html

DOCTORAL DISSERTATION
Methods and Structures in the De Trinitate of St. Augustine. Pontifical University of Maynooth, 1976.

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October 30, 2021

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KDYM542

Ellen Carol Jones: 'Joysis Crisis compellingly documents how Joyce’s revolution of the word—the “impossible philosophy” of a creativity that is negative and yet also “porous to transcendence”—“wrestles with reality itself,” resulting in truth-telling about the divine and the human. In judicious, enlightening readings spanning Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, Joseph S. O’Leary argues that Joyce’s texts stage a crisis that is both binding and freeing: “an event in writing and language, but also a religious event, a sexual event, and a collective crisis of his city and nation, or of European civilization.” Joyce seeks through his art to grasp the ungraspable world, “a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void,” to reveal the real, even if that real is “unmasterable by historical vision or philosophical reason, or even language itself.” His art is a labor of transformation and a labor of redemption, sounding the depths of existence, revealing the spectrum of suffering humanity, transmuting that suffering through agonistic yet redemptive writing, and translating historical material into something rich and strange: a visionary aesthetic labor that is “a parable of the eschatological transformation that religions yearn for.”'

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February 15, 2021

The Church and Hunger Strikes: For Critical Commemoration of a Dangerous Past

Terence MacSwiney (1879-1920) is no doubt the most iconic and “exemplary” of all hunger strikers, and back in the 1950s and 60s he was certainly an icon for us in the North Monastery, where both he and his murdered predecessor as Mayor of Cork, Tomás Mac Curtain (1884-1920), had been pupils. What has most dimmed his glorious legend for me is the subseequent history of Republican hunger strikes, culminating in the “sacrifice” of ten men in their twenties in 1981.

But more generally, that recent history has raised deep questions about the ethos of what is now somewhat misleadingly called “the Irish Revolution,” and especially about its religious components. The glowing commemorations of 1966 still held to the unbroken founding myth fashioned by Pearse, and its “terrible beauty,” at a time when painful memories of the 1922-23 Civil War were fading. In 2016 peaceful commemoration was again possible, since the “Troubles” had been so satisfactorily wrapped up, to international acclaim, in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The GFA seems to have replaced the founding myth as the new consensus horizon of commemoration, which has changed its key from triumphalism to somcething like therapy. President Michael D. Higgins organized a seminar, “Macnamh,” in Áras an Uachtaráin on 4 December 2020, which presented commemoration as a talk of “comprehensive ethical public memory” in which “inclusivity takes centre stage” and which reaches reaching out in critical sympathy to all participants and victims of past conflicts as a dialogal and reflective practice to enhance Irish community today. The thirty years of civil strife and terrorism in the Six Counties, an unsightly gash in the texture of modern European history, are now almost as if they had never been (despite the fact that about sixty “peace walls” still stand in Belfast as a warning that much dangerous hostility remains). In addition to bending over individual cases of injury and grief, the new perspective subsumes the Troubles and preceding Irish conflicts into a broader history of empires and rebellions, a calming Aufhebung that is some way to T. S. Eliot’s Heraclitean view of the English Civil War: “United in the strife that divided them” (“Little Gidding”). When scholars and others from both sides of the historical divides discuss the shared past together, each side’s cherished story in enhanced by reception into an ecumenical vision, and universalized by connection with similar stories from other times and places.

How Ideologies Die

Looking back at 1920 from 2020 offers an education on how ideologies die, or at least change beyond recognition. Our history textbooks as children in the 1950s gave their penultimate pages to 1916 and the last page to modern Ireland: each picture celebrated wondrous success—the Shannon Electrification Scheme for instance—but the last picture of all was a blank map of Ireland, with the Union Jack planted in its north-east corner. The sacred cause of a United Ireland, thoroughly internalized, shone in our juvenile minds as we marched around piping ballads about Roddy McCorley (d. 1800) and Kevin Barry (1902-20). Well, now the Holy Grail may descend, thanks to Brexit and for dismal financial reasons, and perhaps in the form of a mere federation, if a Dublin parliament still feels unable to handle the tensions of the North. So do ideologies end, “not with a bang but with a whimper.” Or perhaps the cross-border exchanges that have been intensified since 1998 (and that resume the approach of Seán Lemass after the hiatus of the Troubles) will create sufficient mutual amity to make transition to a united Ireland a more serene and joyful event than could have been foreseen. In any case, the idea of fighting and dying for Ireland, which brought a tear to so many Irish eyes, and to even more American ones, is now so linked to the PIRA campaign of terror that this ricochets on the historical record all the way back. Bloody sacrifice that makes “a stone of the heart” (Yeats, “Easter, 1916”) has been desanctified and now we revisit scenes of past violence only to pity and deplore.

Before proceeding, let me dwell on the 1981 hunger strikes, which loom as a black cloud between us and Terence MacSwiney. They explicitly took as their motto MacSwiney’s words in his inaugural speech as Lord Mayor: “It is not those who can inflict the most. But those who can endure most who will conquer.” For MacSwiney this was a clear-eyed strategy, matured in previous imprisonments and through observation of other hunger strikers, and confirmed by the mass hunger strike of IRA prisoners that had ended with an amnesty on 14 April 1920. Moreover, he knew fully the mythic power of the role he was assuming, one well expressed by the budding Banbridge-born classicist E. R. Dodds (1893-1979) in a letter to the Manchester Guardian on 26 August: “Let him die and before the month is up he will be a legend, a symbol, a ghost haunting the secret thoughts of every Irishman. In Ireland a legend has the power of many bayonets; and ghosts live longer than men.”

As soon as MacSwiney was arrested he declared with preternatural decision that he would use the weapon of “hunger strike.” It is a strange weapon, belonging to the repertory of psychological warfare or a “war of nerves.” It provokes the authorities to violent reaction, as in the use of force feeding, which had already secured moral victories for the Suffragettes, the first hunger strikers in the British Empire. The hunger strike uses moral and emotional blackmail, showing up the authorities as lacking in empathy or even forcing them to fake displays of empathy, and pressuring the populace to total support of the self-martyred. Of course it must be accompanied by a skilful PR operation. Taoiseach Éamon de Valera (1882-1975) did not display much empathy to republican hunger strikers in the 1940s, but cut off the oxygen of publicity by censoring reports. The hunger strike of up to 8,000 republicans in ten prisons from 14 October to 23 November 1923 had likewise met little empathy from the new Government whose leaders knew all about the technique. The hunger strike is a rather friable tactic, since it can easily lose its force, as authorities become more adept at defusing it (as in the “cat and mouse” Temporary Discharges Act used against the Suffragettes, releasing hunger strikers when they grew weak and rearresting them when they recovered strength) or more brazen in facing it down, as Mrs Thatcher did, or even mocking it. It is easily demystified, becoming just another problem of prison discipline.

But MacSwiney’s famous utterance was not just the declaration of a strategy. It is suffused with religious associations. MacSwiney had a thirst for martyrdom reminiscent of some early Christians. He felt deep regret that he had not joined the Easter Rising, and remarked “Ah Cathal, the pain of Easter Week is properly dead at last.” Pearse’s “blood sacrifice” (as a somewhat muddled retrospective propaganda styled it) was the founding event of the Irish struggle for independence, but it was enacted quickly; he was executed on 3 May 1916, a few days after the insurrection of 24-29 April. MacSwiney’s was a prolonged agony of 74 days, and drew the whole world into meditation on this Passion of an Irish martyr. Pearse proceeded with no clerical support, but MacSwiney could claim he had the Church on his side. The Church at that time was strong, and universally respected, and its support was marked by reflective sobriety. Hagiography predominates massively in the literature on MacSwiney, his numinoous image eclipsing the history of his thought and his development, as well as questions about his militarism and the baleful later influence of his legendary self-martyrdom: one wonders if anyone thought of promoting his cause for Canonization; after all the last Austrian emperor, Charles I (1887-1922), was beatified by John Paul II in 2004 despite his approval of using poison gas in World War I.

The effort of the 1981 Maze Prison hunger strikers to win church support was less successful. There had been some clerical sympathy with the earlier Long Kesh “dirty protest,” from Frs Raymond Murray and Denis Faul, Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, and even the pacifist Daniel Berrigan, SJ, who led a delegation of 55 Americans to Long Kesh in June 1980, hoisting the protest to international recognition. Berrigan read Long Kesh in light of his own American prison experience, and his group may have been gulled by plausible IRA propaganda. The systematically organized spectacle of ten young men dying—the largest number ever reached in an Irish hunger strike—was too extreme to win the same degree of sympathy. Lots of priests attended the hunger strikers’ funerals, with IRA military salutes; but that did not necessarily indicate approval of the ends or means of the hunger strike. Their theology of blood sacrifice was no longer fresh and vigorous but had become a weird and archaic cult, which did not strike deep chords in the breasts of Irish citizens south of the Border, where the age of naive devotion was ending. For every group who clamoured for support of the hunger strikers an equal and opposite group arose to protest indignantly against any display of support. Meanwhile the bulk of the population reacted with irritation or indifference. Hunger strikers might be elected to Westminster or the Dáil, and streets might be named after the first of the ten victims in Paris and Teheran (and his name is the only one most people recall today), but these were very spotty gains. Thatcher’s victory was no doubt Pyrrhic, in that the hunger strike sparked a resurgence of violence. Yet had she granted the prisoners political status they and their tactics might now be canonized in Irish and English school textbooks as legitimate and exemplary, which despite the efforts of Sinn Féin they thankfully have not been.

Richard Kearney acutely noted the desperation behind the IRA’s attempt to supplement the ballot and the bullet with religious fanaticism. “The republican hunger-strikers sought to escape their actual paralysis by realigning their plight with a mythico-religious tradition of renewal-through-sacrifice…. It was something which operated largely as a pre-reflective password of the tribe, frequently escaping critical analysis… a mythic logic which claimed that defeat is victory, failure is triumph, past is present… a highly structured and strategic method of combining contraries which secular reason keeps rigidly apart.” This line of inquiry has not been sufficiently followed up, but instead a thin representation of the mythico-religious aspect (as in the case of Pearse) has been ritually invoked either to celebrate or to demonize.

Seamus Heaney remarked about Conor Cruise O’Brien: “I think the obstinate voice of rationalist humanism is important. If we lose that we lose everything, don’t we? I believe that Conor Cruise O’Brien did an utterly necessary job in rebuking all easy thought about the Protestant Community in the North.” The deep nationalism and Irish archetypes that Seamus Deane accused O’Brien of failing to take into account have much less purchase on the Irish people forty years on, and their power was waning even then, pari passu with that of Irish Catholicism. The 1979 visit of John Paul II was called at the time, and often since, “the last hurrah” of Irish Catholicism. The Pope addressed the gunmen: “On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence…. Further violence in Ireland will only drag down to ruin the land you claim to love and the values you claim to cherish.” This went unheeded or was bandied about as a pollitical football. But the IRA itself was a waning force, personified by “that devious, cowardly, death-dealing little generalissimo Seamus Twomey.” Its mishmash of brutal terrorism, a decaying sacrificial cultism, and a veneer of progressive policy was an ’ ory brew that citizens of what IRA propaganda branded “the Quisling state” (viz. the Republic of Ireland) found increasingly nauseous. Martin McGuinness’s deluded bid for the Irish Presidency in 2011 can have left few illusions as to where the Irish people eventually stood. Thirty years of bloodshed and terror had achieved precisely nothing, or less than nothing, except perhaps to confirm Yeats’s diagnoses: “We had fed the heart on fantasies,/ The heart’s grown brutal from the fare“ (“Meditations in Time of Civil War”); “Great hatred, little room,/ Maimed us at the start” (“Remorse for Intemperate Speech”).

Mayor and Bishop

The churchman most associated with MacSwiney’s hunger strike was his bishop, Daniel Cohalan (1858-1952), who visited him in August 1920, as well as the hunger strikers in Cork, where Mick Fitzgerald died on October 17 and Joe Murphy on October 25, the same day as MacSwiney. MacSwiney’s funeral ceremonies were attended by several archbishops and bishops in Southwark and Cork (a Dublin ceremony was thwarted by the government shipping his body directly to Cork, but Archbishop Willliam Walsh presided over a Requiem Mass instead). Three years earlier, Thomas Ashe (1885-1917), killed by force feeding in Mountjoy Prison, had been given a funeral in the Pro-Cathedral, in the presence of Archbishop Walsh, an event that no doubt gave aid and comfort to future hunger strikers. (Ashe’s well-known poem shows how the Catholic devotional revoluion and the Celtic literary revival both fuelled sacrificial piety: “Let me carry your Cross for Ireland, Lord! For the cause of Roisin Dubh.”) MacSwiney’s funeral was an internationally resonant demonstration of the Church’s support for a self-sacrificing son. “Mourners in Boston, Chicago, Melbourne, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Manchester held symbolic, mock funerals with empty caskets.” Requiem masses were held for MacSwiney before large congretations in Buenos Aires (“attended by many of the most distinguished personalities in the country, politicians, military officers, diplomats, high civil servants, clergy and many deputies and senators”) and in a dozen other towns in Argentina. One might say that MacSwiney’s hunger strike to the death, unlike any before or since, became an ecclesial event. That must have blown the scruples of churlish moral theologians out of the water. But after the lessons of the century since then some critical distance may be permitted. The Church of that time was not in all respects a model of enlightenment: consider the ferocious anti-Modernist crackdown that had been raging since 1907, and the uncritical embrace of the extravagances of Fatima (1917). As to the world at large, the Great War, despite its stunning literary yield, is now regarded as a mistake and utterly futile. It formed the backdrop to the 1916 Insurrection, which some would now see as a mistake within a mistake. The prelates who held back from celebrating MacSwiney’s heroism may emerge as the wiser ones from today’s vantage. They include Cardinal Francis Bourne of Westminster and Benedict XV (Pope from 3 September 1914 to 22 January 1922), who according to the British representative Count de Salis, “was convinced that MacSwiney must have taken food to survive for so long” and “expressed surprise at the excessive ostentation of the funeral. ‘There was a certain element of farce with it all” (Stuart Mews). Msgr Hagan deplored that Benedict, “immersed in ‘his one hobby, that of extending and consolidating diplomatic relations,’” saw the Irish struggle as “nothing more than a needless disturbance of the harmonious relations which otherwise could exist undisturbed between the Holy See and the Empire” (Patrick Murray).

The Irish Bishops referred in October 1920 to “hunger strikers, who think nothing of their lives if they can do anything for Ireland in the sad plight to which the rule of the stranger has reduced her” (Padraig Corkery). Cohalan wrote to The Times on 28 August: “To add a personal touch, let me add I have visited the Lord Mayor of Cork in prison.To put it mildly, I was scrupulously careful against saying anything that would confirm him in his resolution to continue the hunger strike.” To the Cork Examiner on 11 November he wrote: “If the Hunger Strike in Cork Gaol is not called off these self-sacrificing men will pass away one after another without impressing the world any more than it has been impressed already. The continuance of the Hunger Strike will only lead to a waste of human life.” The aura of self-sacrifice covered a multitude of sins, and led bishops to a moral liberalism and a spirit of dialogue that they were never to show on such matters as divorce, abortion, and sexual behaviour. Bishop Colahan “reasoned that the three deaths [Fitzgerald, Murphy, and MacSwiney] had secured for the Irish cause both a moral victory and international attention, and that any further deaths would be a futile waste of life.” “It is clear that, during the War of Independence, Bishop Cohalan viewed the hunger strike not as an act of suicide but as a legitimate act of defence against an aggressor. Such an action could be justified once it was not futile. In the case of MacSwiney the benefits were, in his understanding, immediate and weighty. The later hunger strikes of this period [during the War of Independence] met with his disapproval, not because he judged them to be wrong per se but because, in his understanding, they lacked proportionate reason.”

When the IRA ambushed a mobile Auxiliary patrol at Dillon’s Cross in Cork on 11 December 1920, killing a British officer, the Auxiliaries’ retaliation for this, and for the killing of seventeen Auxiliaries in the Kilmichael ambush of 28 November (a gaisce mór for Tom Barry), included murdering two IRA men in their beds and burning down the centre of the city, perhaps the most ruinous event in its history. The next morning Bishop Cohalan issued a decree stating that anyone taking part in an ambush was guilty of murder and would be excommunicated. Then on the Fourth Sunday of Advent he issued a “Pastoral Letter in the Aftermath of the Burning of Cork.” While arguing that the existing mode of Government had “no sanction in the moral law,” and was the “rule of might over right,” he added: “Though resistance to unlawful oppression may be lawful theoretically and in the abstract, it may be wrong in practice.” He counseled his flock to “bear this period of persecution patiently” and “above all avoid the terrible crime of taking human life.” This was in line with what the entire hierarchy had said in October, and was an effort to halt a cycle of tit for tat murders. A Sinn Féin member of Cork City Corporation Councillor Ó Cuill attacked the bishop: “He stands now only where his people [the clergy] always stood—in the wrong.” Kevin O’Higgins (1892-1927) wrote in March 1921: “Justice is vindicated on earth by the patient and dignified sufferings of people like them [his father, then imprisoned] rather than the mean-spirited effusions of the Bishop of Cork and many of his colleagues.” He also claimed: “Probably not since the persecutions of the early Christians has human nature risen to finer heights in endurance for an ideal than in Ireland today.” But “it was that very mindset which O’Higgins was to denounce a year later.”

There was “a fundamental shift between 1921 and 1923 in [Cohalan’s] moral analysis of violent resistance and the hunger strikes that formed part of it.” When Cohalan refused Christian burial to hunger striker Denis Barry who died on 20 November 1923, Terence MacSwiney’s sister Mary commented in the Cork Examiner that the bishop’s new view of hunger strikes as suicide, never permissible, “if true today, must have been equally true three years ago, when he officiated with all the honour that the Church can pay to a faithful son, at the obsequies of another hunger striker.” She herself had been on hunger strike since her arrest on November 4 and her “heroic struggle” was acclaimed by Archbishop Mannix in Melbourne, resulting in her release on 20 November, a damaging loss of face for the Free State government. The “Republican Women of Cork” denounced to the Pope Cohalan’s politicization of Confirmation addresses. The turbulent Fr Michael O’Flanagan said he’d prefer to “go to Heaven with Denis Barry than to hell at the head of a procession of high ecclesiastics.” But hunger-strike heroics had lost their lustre and the Civil War gave them a context less prepossessing than the “glorious years” of fighting British rule. Yet Cohalan “could have employed the theological framework he had previously used, which accepted hunger strikes as moral in certain circumstances…. The hunger strike could now be described as an act of tyranny against the legitimate government of Ireland rather than as an act of defence against an unjust aggressor” (Padraig Corkery).

An alternative view is offered by James Healy, SJ: “When faced with a bad hunger-strike the easiest condemnatory language to use for an ensuing death is that appropriate for suicide since ‘everyone’ knows that suicide is wrong.” Or it may be that the Bishop Cohalan did not regard the 1923 hunger strike, which collapsed embarrassingly, as worthy of serious political analysis and thought it more logical to treat its handful of fatalities as rather foolish cases of suicide. (The Civil War had ended in May, so this rumpus had less weighty political significance.) “Privately, Cohalan was much less assured of the moral rectitude of his treatment of Barry”; he wrote to Bishop Foley of Kildare and Leighlin that he had dealt with the matter “in foro externo in relation to the public life of the Church,” but “if Barry got the last Sacraments, and as the strike is ended, I might reconsider the question” (Patrick Murray). The apparent inconsistencies in epicopal response indicate that despite their high conception of their authority and its scope the bishops were swayed by changing circumstance, as witness also the difference between Cardinal Michael Logue’s (1840-1924) judgement on Michael Collins (1890-1922) and his Squad in 1920: “No object would excuse them, no hearts, unless hardened and steeled against pity, would tolerate their cruelty,” and his acclaim of the dead Collins in 1922 as “a young patriot brave and wise.” Logue’s “settled contempt for Republicans and their activities,” contributed to the failure of the Vatican legate Salvatore Luzio’s visit to Ireland from 19 March to 5 May 1923. The Vatican was jostled by both sides, seeking its legitimation of the new government or its recognition of the right to rise in arms against it.

George Sweeney, indulging the regrettable tendency of many writers to regard all moral discussions as politically motivated, claims that before 1922 that bishops did not condemn militant republicanism for fear of alienating their flock, but now they had become “more confident and condemnatory.” “In return for the Church’s support, [William T.] Cosgrave’s [1880-1965] government agreed to abide by the decisions of the Catholic Church in matters of morality and not to interfere with the hierarchy’s control of education,” and this in Sweeney’s view influenced Cohalan’s changed stance. But surely this underestimates the great difference between a fight for Ireland’s independence and a fight against Ireland’s new government? Since Cohalan’s interventions are all in the pastoral mode, with little systematic exposition of his principles, he may not have seen the need to explain his change of framework, or may not even have been fully conscious of it; the bishops as a body had swung firmly against the Republicans and behind the Government, as shown by their pastoral letter of 10 October 1922: “All who in contravention of this teaching, participate in such crimes are guilty of grievous sins and may not be absolved in Confession nor admitted to the Holy Communion if they persist in such evil courses.” Their strong support for the government made them reluctant to speak out against the 81 official executions, amounting to state terror, that included 11 teenagers and 45 men in their twenties, from 17 November 1922 to 3 May 1923. “Although the executions were opposed in private by various bishops,” it remains the case that “to the end of the conflict there is no record of a specific Episcopal condemnation of any of the Free State misdemeanours during the civil war” (Bill Kissane). An appeal to the Vatican against the Bishops’ Pastoral “failed to reverse the Catholic Church’s attitude to the republicans who remained blamed for all the destructiveness of the civil war” (Kissane).

Archdeacon Thomas Duggan (1890-1961), my Parish Priest in Ballyphehane from 1957 to 1961, who died in Lima as a member of the Cork Mission to Peru at the end of 1961, turns out to have been a significant agent in the events of the so-called Irish Revolution, as Fr Carthach McCarthy relates. “My generation at Maynooth embraced the ideals of Easter Week 1916, with a hundred percent fervour,” Duggan recalled, but he was not a passive observer of this: “An ardent Republican, Thomas had many close associates within the hierarchy of Sinn Fein and was well known to promote their ideals at Maynooth.” In 1919, after serving as a chaplain in World War I, “on his return to the Cork Diocese, he was appointed as Secretary to Bishop Cohalan. The relationship began well, but soon deterioriated due to what the Bishop perceived as Thomas’ ardent republicanism. As a senior cleric in a position where he had to navigate a delicate path due to the impact of the War of Independence, the Bishop felt that he could not rely on Thomas’ unwavering support and dispensed with his services.” The 1920 hunger strike at Cork Jail was an opportunity for action: Duggan became Assistant Chaplain at the Jail and “when Mick Fitzgerald died on 19 October 1920 after 67 days on hunger strike, Thomas was at his bedside. As further men died, Thomas became unconvinced over the efficacy of this tactic and was instrumental in efforts to have the hunger strike stopped.” Nor was his sympathy confined to the spiritual: “A plan was hatched to blow the walls of the prison to free many of the prisoners. By his own admission, Thomas became involved in smuggling weapons and guncotton into the prison to facilitate the escape attempt.” But in the Civil War Duggan was a peacemaker: “As a confidant of both Tom Barry and Michael Collins, Thomas played an important role in trying to mediate between the warring factions in the Irish Civil War, taking a neutral position between the Pro and Anti-Treaty forces.”

[ ‘The enigma that was Archdeacon Tom Duggan OBE MC, Chaplain to the Forces,’ WW1ResearchIreland.com, 12 March 2020; see Carthach MacCarthy, Archdeacon Tom Duggan: In Peace and in War (Dublin: Blackwater, 1994). Tom Barry (1897-1980) is another local hero who might abide our question. In the War of Independence, as he recounts in his long-selling Guerilla Days in Ireland (Dublin: Irish Press, 1949; republished by Anvil Books 1993 and Mercier Press 2013) his unit shot dead sixteen civilians accused of informing in the first six months of 1921, nine of whom were Protestants. However, he assures us, “the majority of the West Cork Protestants lived at peace throughout the entire struggle and were not interfered with by the IRA.” His unit also carried out reprisal killings of captured British soldiers in response to the execution of IRA Volunteers, a situation immortalized in Frank O’Connor’s chilling story of 1931, “Guests of the Nation.” “Barry would assert in later life that he opposed both the 1930s bombing campaign in England and IRA contacts with Nazi Germany. In fact, in January 1937 he had taken a trip to Germany seeking German support, which was assured to him subject to the condition that the IRA limit its actions to British military installations once war was declared. Financing was to be arranged through the Clann na Gael in the USA. The Army Convention in April 1938 adopted Seán Russell's S-Plan instead. Barry resigned as chief of staff as a result, but remained in contact with German agents at least to February 1939” (Wikipedia).

Moral Theology Between Justice and Suicide

Moral theology, though pursued with integrity by the participants in its debates, was inevitably exploited by political agents both in 1917-23 and in 1981. Catholic priests urged prisoners in Mountjoy to end their hunger strike, using the arguments against suicide. Todd Andrews (1901-1985) recalled: “I had a visit from the prison chaplain… he warned me that I was wilfully endangering my life which was an immoral act totally forbidden by the Commandments.… The chaplain was doing the dirty work required by his British employers” (C. S. Andrews). Some moral theologians stretched the principle of double effect to cover hunger strikes, Like the maiden who leaps from a tower to avoid a fate worse than death, a hunger striker is not directly willing his own death but some other end. This proportionalist reasoning seems to have seduced Bishop Cohalan in his earlier phase. But the moral prohibition of suicide proves a rather durable objection, for we meet it again in a letter from Cardinal Basil Hume to Bishop Edward Daly of Derry in 1981: “a hunger strike to death is a form of violence to one’s self and violence leads to violence.” After Bobby Sands’ death the Irish Bishops stated that “there is some dispute about whether or not political hunger striking is suicide, or more precisely, about the circumstances in which it is suicide.” In both periods the suicide theme became a rabbit-hole or a quagmire. Theologian Maria Power remarks that in 1981 the Church “needed to create a balance between its teaching and prophetic functions. When it came to the hunger strikes, the church didn’t achieve the balance necessary. It became side-tracked by points of moral theology regarding the issue of suicide, and in doing so allowed these to obscure the real issue of justice.” But did justice obviously require that perpetrators of terrorist acts be given political status? And again, the “real issue” may lie in the fanatical theology of the hunger strikers, which the focus on suicide has the slight merit of partially deflating. But it is true that Irish bishops generally have made too much of moral theology and canon law, at the expense of theological imagination.

The debate on the moral issue a century back includes some sparring between Canon John Waters, chaplain at Mountjoy Prison (he accompanied Kevin Barry to the scaffold), and Maynooth professor Patrick Cleary (1886-1970), who as an early member of the Columban Missionaries was to become Bishop of Nancheng in China. Cleary warns the Canon “that no man should be allowed to fling about the epithets ‘suicide’ and ‘criminal’ without proving to the hilt that he is justified in doing so.” A hunger strike may be not only licit but obligatory: “if a big national issue is at stake, which would be very materially benefited by a strong protest against injustice, and which, on the other hand, would be seriously compromised by even an apparent admission of guilt, it would seem that in these circumstances disobedience might be not only a right but even an obligation.” So sacred is the obligation that the principle of double effect easily takes care of the incidental damage inflicted on himself by the prisoner: “It may be that incidentally the same act may result in the death of the striker: the principle is conserved not by the death but by the refusal to acknowledge the prison chains.” Brendan O Cathaoir says that Cleary “defended Terence MacSwiney theologically during his 74 day hunger strike. Dr Cleary supported the hunger strike as a protest against British policy, but not to death.” But in the essay quoted he does defend the strike unto death, and rejects Canon Waters’ moral distinction between the “limited, non-fatal strike” and the fatal one and his claim that “whilst the danger which results from temporary abstinence is indirect that which results from continued abstinence becomes direct.” A Jesuit theologian, Patrick J. Gannon, wrote: “No hungerstriker aims at death.... His object is to bring the pressure of public opinion to bear upon an unjust aggressor.... There is nothing here of the mentality of suicide.”

Canon Waters saw the Mountjoy hunger strikers as emboldened by theologians’ assurances of the legitimacy of their action. Harried bishops, such as John Vaughan, auxiliary bishop of Salford, yearned for a clear determination from the Vatican, a Roma locuta est moment, but it was not forthcoming, and the morality of the hunger strike remains murky to this day. Perhaps there are transgressive and subversive actions that cannot be mapped unambiguously by the moralist, and that it is of their essence to remain disturbingly unmapped. One thinks of Kierkegaard’s “teleological suspension of the ethical” or even of Luther’s words to Melanchthon: pecca fortiter, sed crede fortius (sin strongly, but believe more strongly). Such is the fringe region into which hunger strikes take us, and it is one that can never be clarified or normalized in the light of common day. Gannon took a bold step in this direction: “Sincere good faith redeems from guilt an act that may perhaps harmonise but ill with the divine law. That the Irish hunger-strikers are in this disposition is too evident to need elaboration.”

In other religious traditions too, self-immolation may inspire awe, but it is not canonized as a normal ethical action. The spate of self-immolations by Tibetan monks since 1998 was denounced by lamas and also by western Buddhists, but not by the Dalai Lama, whose followers at Dharmasala, [who] insist that ‘what qualifies the violence of the suicidal act is its motivation. If you commit suicide because of your personal lot, that can be considered violence; but if you commit suicide in the name of the freedom of six million people, then it is not violence.’At the Rinzai Zen monastery, Zenryûji, I saw a monument to the wartime self-sacrifice of the Kamikaze pilots, also admired by Donald Trump; but who would dare raise the principles of their action into a universal moral imperative? How free and voluntary was this sacrifice? The young men, even if sustained by fanaticism and esprit de corps, were pawns in a military strategy (the same may be true of the 1981 Long Kesh strikers). The monks who burnt themselves in Vietnam had American imitators: Alice Herz, aged 82, in Detroit on 16 March 1965; Norman Morrison, a Quaker, outside the Pentagon on 2 November; Roger Allen La Port outside the UN building in New York on 10 November; Florence Beaumont in Los Angeles on 15 October 1967. On 19 January 1969, the Czech student Jan Palach immolated himself in protest at Soviet repression, and on 13 January 1998 Alfredo Ormando inflicted fatal burns on himself in St Peter’s Square in protest against church homophobia. The Vatican comment can be summed up in the words, “Quid ad nos?” (Mt 27:4). Did these expensive gestures, now forgotten, make a deep impression on anyone? Self-immolation easily misfires and is dismissed as futile. If its aim is not well thought out or if its audience is misjudged it can become a grisly farce, as with the seppuku of novelist Mishima Yukio (1925-1970). Today hunger striking seems to have become a routine form of protest, carried out with the deftness of Mahatma Gandhi, whose numerous hunger strikes were mostly relatively short fasts. Consider Olan Horne, Massachusetts, who vowed to “stop eating until the Vatican acknowledges it received pleas for help from local families riven by clergy sexual abuse.” He fast lasted less than nearly a week, and received no Vatican notice. “This wasn't about me killing myself,” he said. “I had the ability to not eat for a week.” Or consider Fr Gary Graf, Chicago, who, with the blessing of Archbishop Blaise Cupich, embarked on a hunger strike on behalf of Dreamers (undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children). “Yes, it’s dramatic,” he explained; “It’s a way in which we pray for our political leaders and invite them to do their jobs.” A strong man, Graf could sustain his six week fast, but without the threat of dying the hunger strike becomes almost an athletic feat. Refashioned as an approved symbolic gesture, a spiritual exercise, it scarcely troubles impervious state authorities. One recalls that the Church reduced the ancient Irish custom of fasting against a debtor to “a ritual hunger strike that began at sundown and ended at sunrise.” The hunger-strike unto death is also a cultic sacrificial ritual, which 1. “makes a virtue of necessity,” as a weapon of the powerless; 2. “it can demonstrate legitimacy,” establishing “the importance and truth of a cause”; 3. “it flatters the followers of a cause by linking them with the heroic”; 4. “the cult caters for the needs of machismo and masochism,” giving Catholic asceticism and glorification of suffering an unorthodox twist. On this last point psychoanalysis finds an ample field of application, from Alfred Adler on “the masculine protest” to Freud and Theodor Reik on the dynamics of masochism. That no deep study on these lines exists suggests that the whole area is surrounded by a taboo, as if it were an untouchable sacral action.

[For a critique of the Provisional IRA as the chief agent of the Troubles, whose campaign of terror aborted the progressive movements of hte 1960s, see Liam Kennedy, Who Was Responsible for the Troubles}? The Northern Ireland Conflict (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). Such books are no doubt still seen as traiterous by bien-pensant IRA sympathizers even though Islamist atrocities have robbed terrorism of much of its charm.]

Conclusion

In the vitriolic arguments kindled by Irish Republican violence, the Irish Catholic Church is often denounced from both sides, either as playing footsie with the gunmen, or as siding with the authorities in an opportunistic way. From this little survey, it seems to me that the Church has been divided and undecided at many junctures in the history, and that there has been no settled policy either for or against the Republican “cause.” Church leaders can always be relied on to denounce unjust violence and to uphold the sacredness of human life. In the Troubles they failed to produce a coherent and nuanced vision of the situation, but oscillated between abstract denunciations of violence and empathy not only with its victims but with its perpetrators. It did not emerge from the period with its moral authority enhanced, and its role in the Good Friday Agreement does not seem to have been a key one. In the 1920s similar division and oscillation may be observed. In both periods this allowed perpetrators of violence to dismiss church authorities or to hear them selectively. This is a sad and disappointing conclusion, but after all the entire chronicle of Irish political violence, much as we have tried to glorify it in song and story (and film), is a sad and disappointing one. That is why the Irish Republic has been gradually reinforcing alternative foundations for its identity, with a focus on literary and musical culture, European connections, soft power, and a broader and more disinterested view of the entire Irish past. Whatever renewal the Church can expect will be contingent on its creative engagement with this emergent post-ideological Ireland.

[Forthcoming with documentation in a volume edited by Dermot Keogh on international reactions to the events in Ireland a century ago.]

Posted at 03:58 AM in Justice and Peace | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 09, 2021

Symbolic Power in Shelley's 'To a Sky-Lark'

Shelley’s ‘To a Sky-Lark’ is one of the best known English poems, about which, one imagines, there is nothing new to be said. Long a staple of anthologies and school textbooks, the poem remains in many memories as a pretty bagatelle without deep meaning. To comment on it would seem as futile as to analyze over-familiar musical pieces such as Eine kleine Nachtmusik or Für Elise. Yet literary criticism cannot abandon classical texts as if they were exhausted sites. One function of this discipline is to shed new light on familiar texts, and thus breathe new life into them. It can do so in this case by revisiting the poem with fuller knowledge of its complex context, as one moment in Shelley’s intense and abundantly documented reflection on the two great questions of his time: the nature and role of poetry and imagination, and the political fortunes of the revolutionary ideal of liberty. ‘To a Sky-Lark’ might seem far from such philosophical concerns, but even Shelley’s simplest, lightest verses can never be divorced from his complex thought, for which he was always seeking the most powerful poetic expression. The full meaning of the poem becomes accessible only when we stop treating it as a flight of fancy and see it instead as a poem of imagination, in the full Romantic sense of that term. The lark is not a pretext for a string of pleasant and poignant conceits, but a symbol.

Imagination, as opposed to Fancy, is the faculty that Coleridge called the ‘esemplastic power.’ The word could be taken as a literal translation of Einbildungskraft (German ein = Greek eis, en, ‘into, in,’ with overtones of ‘one’; Ger. bilden = Gr. plattein, ‘to shape’; Kraft, ‘force’), which in German Idealism, particularly Schelling, is not merely a subjective faculty (whether ‘mirror’ or ‘lamp,’ in M. H. Abrams’s scheme), but a power of cosmic unity. (Or the word may come from Schelling's Ineinsbildung – the interweaving of opposites.) Imagination generates symbols, which also have an esemplastic character, in that they shape and unify, or bring out the fundamental pattern in, a whole tract of experience, and correspondingly shape and unify the poems in which they occur.

‘To a Sky-lark’ is not a casual piece of ‘nature writing,’ nor does its personification of the lark, heavily investing in the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ lead to the sentimentalism which D. H. Lawrence scorned in Wordsworth’s practice of ‘making flowers talk.’ It lies between ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and Adonais on the trajectory of Shelley’s interrogation of freedom, creativity, the essence of poetry, and his own role and identity. Like the cloud in a neighbouring poem, the lark ‘may be interpreted as a natural Platonic symbol of the upward, ethereal, and incorporeal transcendence of the soul away from mortality to the heavens of Platonic purity’ (Notopoulos, 271-2), but there is much more to be said than that. The poem was published in Prometheus Unbound and Other Poems in 1820, among other shorter pieces such as the odes to the West Wind, to Heaven, and to Liberty: ‘it certainly makes a difference to one’s grasp of poems like “The Cloud” to see the company they kept.’ This cluster of works is sustained by the desire to ‘write poems that would both solve and escape the contradictions of the human condition: the expression is “complex” because the desire for simplification implicitly admits its impossibility’ (O’Neill, 121).

Symbols are central to poetry because of that ‘impossibility.’ They are used to point beyond what can be said straightforwardly or in transparent images as in allegory. They harbour a reserve of meaning that can never be fully spelt out, and they often have a charge of ambivalence as well. Yeats, who wrote an essay on ‘The Symbolism of Shelley’s Poetry,’ created several such symbols, such as the stone in ‘Easter 1916’ or the cluster of emblems marshalled in his imagination of Byzantium and the Tower. However the obscurity and ambivalence that attach to powerful symbols should not be taken to mean that they are radically indeterminate. They stand for an excess of meaning rather than a lack of it. Postmodern criticism in the wake of Paul de Man emphasized a self-erasing quality in Shelley’s writing, and underestimated his desire to say, and his success in saying, exactly what he intended to say, especially in such lucid and classically structured utterances as ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ ‘To the Sky-Lark,’ and Adonais. The metaphorical cascades in these poems never undermine the coherence and authority of their central symbols, but neither can the symbols be reduced to the message they convey; they have a vibrant autonomous presence, which can ‘tease us out of thought’ like Keats’s Grecian Urn.

Shelley mustered every resource to build up his symbolic structures and enhance their communicative power. He is one of the most intertextual poets in English, allowing resonances from the great English poets and from the Greek and Roman classics to enrich the semantic charge of his verse. His diction has the choice quality that comes from awareness of the history of the language and of Latin roots. His early writing in blank verse (‘Alastor’) tended to be infiltrated by the rhythm and diction of Wordsworth. To find his own voice he experimented with a variety of verse forms, flourishing on the challenge of difficult tasks, the constraints of an elaborate formal mould, such as terza rima in ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘The Triumph of Life.’ The original stanza form of ‘To a Sky-Lark’—four short lines with three accents, normally alternating between six and five syllables, followed by a hexameter, with the rhyme scheme ababb—conveys an impression of immediacy, as if the poem sprang into existence in a few moments, an inspiration caught on the wing. The short lines can mirror the speed of the skylark’s daring ascent and flight, while the hexameter fits the infinite leisurely expansion of its movement and song through the sky. The rhythm is so infectious that ‘one gets the stanzas by heart unawares and repeats them like “snatches of old verse”’ (Leigh Hunt, in Barcus, 327).

Shelley also took care to give his works an effective overall structure. Thus ‘To a Sky-Lark’ falls into four sections, three groups of six stanzas and a coda of three stanzas. Stanzas 1-6 describe the lark’s presence; stanzas 7-12 seek similes for it; stanzas 13-18 turn to contrasts, increasingly highlighting the pain of human existence; stanzas 19-21 form an affirmative conclusion, as the poet draws the lesson of the lark. The beginning of the second and third sections are marked by a direct address to the bird (‘What thou art we know not’; ‘Teach us, Sprite or Bird,’ which recapitulates the opening lines of the poem). It seems that one resource he did not consistently exploit is that of punctuation. The punctuation of ‘To a Sky-Lark,’ as well as details of spelling, varies considerably, indeed alarmingly, from edition to edition. Textual study of Shelley is almost as complex as if he were an ancient classic (see Crook 2011). I have taken the text of Donovan et al. as my base text, but altered the spelling of ‘bright’ning’ and ‘chrystal’ and the punctuation at some points (replacing the irritating dashes with commas and eliminating one colon). This is for copyright reasons, and draws on older editions.

The Invisible Voice (st. 1-6)

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! 

Bird thou never wert, 

That from Heaven, or near it, 

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

The identification of the bird as a spirit is not a casual fancy but is central to the metaphorical structure of the poem. In the previous year Shelley had called the West wind a spirit, and the word carries something of the same power here. The idealizing or derealizing character of Shelley’s imagination, on display here, led generations of critics to imagine that he was a vague poet, unable to focus his images precisely. Dogged and indeed dogmatic empiricism lay like a blight over mid-twentieth century poetry and criticism, obliging poets to clog their verse with pylons, gas pumps, and other emblems of realistic observation. Shelley’s powers of observation were extremely keen, but were brought to bear on the subtle and evanescent world of light and clouds. But observation remains subject to a higher poetic faculty, imagination.

Wordsworth rather sourly commented that Shelley’s poem ‘was full of imagination, but that it did not show the same observation of nature as his poem on the same bird did’ (Barcus, 2). In fact, from the journal entries of Mary Shelley and John Gisborne we know that Shelley would have observed the aspects of the bird noted by Wordsworth. Gisborne writes: ‘We here beheld the speckled songsters, burst forth from their bed of rich herbiage and soar fluttering… to a height at which the straining eye could scarcely ken the stationary and diminutive specks into which their soft, still receding forms had at length vanished’ (quoted, White, II, 594).

Ironically, Shelley’s poem echoes Wordsworth’s ‘To the Cuckoo’ (1804):

O blithe new-comer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice:
O Cuckoo! Shall I call thee bird
Or but a wandering Voice?...

No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery…

and ‘To the Skylark’ (1805):

Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;
A privacy of glorious light is thine,
Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine…

Like Keats’s nightingale, the skylark is a symbol that lights up both the nature of ultimate reality, imagined as freedom and joy, and, by contrast, the painful aspects of finite, mortal, human existence. Keats wrote in May 1819, Shelley in June 1820, but in his letter to Keats of July 27, 1820, Shelley refers only to Endymion (1818) and he probably did not read the nightingale ode until receiving the volume in which it was published, sent by Keats in August 1820, and of which Shelley wrote, in a letter to the editor of the Quarterly Review, ‘I have just seen a second volume, published by him evidently in careless despair’; praising ‘Hyperion,’ he adds: ‘the canons of taste to which Keats has conformed in his other compositions are the very reverse of my own’ (Ellershaw, 2). His reaction to the nightingale ode is reflected in Adonais in 1821:

Thy spirit’s sister, the lorn nightingale,
Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain… (st. 17)

The chief difficulty of the stanza form is that the short lines threaten to cramp the diction and make it unnatural. One can sense that danger in the second and fourth lines here. But Shelley keeps it at bay, and in most lines achieves a felicity of diction that can be seen as a bestowal of the stanza form, the danger of artificiality not arising at all. The cramped space here gives plosive violence to the crush of consonants in ‘blithe Spirit! Bird.’ The concentration of force and speed in the first four lines is followed by the joyful release of the fifth. Part of the freedom conveyed by the hexameter is the way it allows the long word ‘unpremeditated’ to breathe, unfolding its syllables at a leisurely pace. This line has a pedigree in English poetry going back to Paradise Lost IX—‘and inspire/ Easy my unpremeditated verse’—and always associated with the theme of spontaneous inspiration. Inserting it in a hexameter Shelley allows it to breathe with a new loveliness. Shorten the hexameter to a pentameter—e. g. ‘In strains of unpremeditated mirth’—and the long word is a dull nod to convention. Hexameters tend to become shapeless, and Shelley uses alliteration (the ‘pr’s) as a shaping principle.

Higher still and higher 

From the earth thou springest 

Like a cloud of fire; 

The blue deep thou wingest, 

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

‘Like a cloud of fire’ is the first simile in the poem, which will attain its freest flight in a long train of similes that allow Shelley to course through the images that most delighted his imagination. The similes unfold the imaginative power of the skylark-symbol, and point to one central paradox: the skylark is unseen yet fills the world with its voice, emblematizing the power of the poet-prophet’s word. The similes are marked by an unlikeness that gives them spice, like dissonances enriching harmony. The metaphor does not refer to any visible form of the skylark but to the speed of its movement, its revolutionary break with earthly heaviness. The lark is like a cloud of fire only in its motion of springing up from the earth, the associations of ‘cloud’ and ‘fire’ move away from the bird but point to the figure for whom the bird is a metaphor, namely the poet, touched by the fire of inspiration. Compare Adonais: ‘Back to the burning fountain whence it came.’ Again the hexameter is shaped by alliteration. G. M. Matthews ‘the nuée ardente of an active volcano, a mass of superheated steam and incandescent dust which, as an observer had seen it over Vesuvius, “appeared in the night tinged like clouds with the setting sun”’ (164); there is a note of ‘mutiny and protest’ in this ‘propaganda broadcast with tempestuous energy’ (166), which echoes Milton’s line on Satan: ‘Springs upward like a Pyramid of fire.’ In the contemporaneous ‘Ode to Liberty’ Shelley had used the image of fire with revolutionary purpose: Liberty… /Scattering contagious fire into the sky,’ echoing a line of Southey, ‘The patriot-flame with quick contagion ran’ (quoted, Donovan et al., 387).

Reciting the poem, one tends to read, somewhat nonsensically: ‘Like a cloud of fire, the blue deep thou wingest,’ but ‘Like a cloud of fire’ goes with the first two lines and is divided from ‘the blue deep’ by a semi-colon. Rossetti’s edition of 1874 tried to bend the punctuation to the verse as he heard it, replacing the semi-colon with a comma (Donovan et al., 471). This is the only place in the poem where the first three lines of a stanza are grouped together. It is also rather awkward that the second sentence that begins with the heavy inversion, ‘The blue deep thou wingest’ (in contrast to the natural ‘From the earth thou springest’). Such awkwardness is hardly noticed when the poem is read aloud. Does all poetry skate on thin ice in this way?

In the golden lightning 

Of the sunken Sun, 

O’er which clouds are bright’ning, 

Thou dost float and run; 

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

‘Lightning’ seems an incorrect choice of word here, but poetic licence can dictate that the word stands for something that has no other word to express it, namely the light shed from the sun after it has gone down. The second simile is maximally abstract, but Shelley has the gift of making abstractions leap into life. The ‘unbodied joy’ is of a piece with the elaborate fresco of shimmering forms in Adonais. (Computer spell-checkers will alter the word to ‘embodied,’ and indeed one eager scholar suggested this emendation of Shelley’s text!) Like all the metaphors in the poem it is paradoxical. Poetic joy is the greater for being unbodied; the poet disappears in his words. Note that the poem is set at a particular time, after sundown, though we tend to associate it with the brightness of the midday sky, a confusion encouraged by the similes in the following stanzas, which refer to broad daylight, dawn, and night.

The pale purple even 

Melts around thy flight; 

Like a star of Heaven, 

In the broad daylight 

Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

Keen as are the arrows 

Of that silver sphere, 

Whose intense lamp narrows 

In the white dawn clear, 

Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.

These stanzas develop a single simile, the lark being compared with Venus, the morning star disappearing into the light of day. Again it is not the visible star but its invisibility that is stressed. Though unseen, the lark is heard and its presence is felt. This is not a poem of flat observation but sketches what Heidegger would call a ‘phenomenology of the unapparent.’ The supreme reality for Shelley always lies out of sight, ‘Pinnacled dim in the intense inane,’ like the One of Plotinus.

All the earth and air 

With thy voice is loud, 

As, when Night is bare,  

From one lonely cloud 

The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed.

In this simile, the moon, like the sun earlier, sheds light while remaining itself unseen. Again the potency of the hidden, the invisible, is stressed.

Similes for the Undescribable (st. 6-12)

What thou art we know not; 

What is most like thee? 

From rainbow clouds there flow not 

Drops so bright to see

 As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

The quest for similes is made explicit or reflective. Stanzas 6 and 12 introduce the similes negatively, stressing how they cannot match the bird’s wonder, but the four stanzas they enclose develop positively the most beautiful images in the poem. Stanza 6 introduces the poem’s third cloud, referring to ‘the illuminated drops of rain which continue to fall after the sun has appeared and created a rainbow among the clouds’ (Donovan et al., 473). The cloud is linked with ‘thy presence,’ the hidden, numinous source of the sparkling notes. If the intertangled metaphors of ‘Ode to the West Wind’ were marshalled with sovereign hand, consistent as the sinews in a Renaissance marble statue, the inventive course of the riot of similes here might seem looser, each image existing on its own, like a separate bead on a string. The colons at the end of each stanza suggest such a linking string, and add to the propulsive movement of the verse.

Like a Poet hidden

In the light of thought, 

Singing hymns unbidden 

Till the world is wrought 

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

This simile expounds the underlying metaphor of the whole poem, emphasized by the capitalization. The mode of existence of the lark expresses that of the poet, ‘hidden in the light of thought.’ The paradoxical structure of private hiddenness and universal manifestation holds the similes together, fuses them in a symbolic grasp of the poet’s entire existence and role.

Like a high-born maiden 

In a palace-tower, 

Soothing her love-laden 

Soul in secret hour, 

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Here we are in the realm of fancy (Sir Walter Scott) rather than imagination, fancy that flies away from the grave symbolic import of the poem to play with pleasing images. The hyphenated words ‘high-born’ and ‘love-laden’ enhancing the rhyming tightness of the short lines, which then overflow unbroken in the leisurely expanse of the hexameter.

Like a glow-worm golden 

In a dell of dew, 

Scattering unbeholden 

Its aerial hue 

Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view:

The ‘g’ and ‘d’ alliterations tighten the short lines this time. The glow-worm may be connected with the fireflies mentioned in Mary Shelley’s note: ‘It was on a beautiful summer evening, while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the sky-lark, which inspired one of his most beautiful poems’ (Donovan et al., 468). The simile brings a shift from music to light, and the next one modulates to scent:

Like a rose embowered  

In its own green leaves, 

By warm winds deflowered 

Till the scent it gives 

Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:

Despite this synaesthetic plenitude, the sequence of four similes might seem loosely associative, like the set of dreamy scenes Keats’s nightingale evoked:

The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.

But a closer look shows a tight logic in Shelley’s sequence. In each case there is an expansive effect, affecting many, whose cause remains hidden and self-absorbed. The short lines reflect the intense self-concentration of the hidden cause, the hexameter the miraculous overflow of the effect. Where the nightingale casts Keats afloat on a dream voyage into legendary pasts ending up in a never-never land, Shelley’s similes are intent on their purpose of analyzing the essence of the lark, or of the poet, in four exercises of imagination, four inspired soundings. Imagination is at its esemplastic work even if the immediate impression is one of freely dispersed fancy. Keats is rudely awoken from his dream: ‘Forlorn! the very word is as a bell/ Tolling me back to my sole self.’ But Shelley’s thought grows to an ever more intense wakefulness. In the final words of the poem, ‘I am listening now,’ all the thoughts and images the lark has evoked are fully present, whereas at the end of Keats’s poem the nightingale has fled and the deceptive illusions of fancy are banished.

Sound of vernal showers 

On the twinkling grass, 

Rain-awakened flowers, 

All that ever was

 Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Two more similes here, expressed as negative contrast. The poem continues to accumulate images of joyous, clear freshness, as yet unshadowed by any hint of pain (whereas in Keats the pain is present from the start, coterminous with the delight of the bird’s song: ‘My heart aches…’).

Saddest Thought (st. 13-18)

Teach us, Sprite or Bird, 

What sweet thoughts are thine; 

I have never heard 

Praise of love or wine 

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine:

The bird becomes a teacher to the poet, first in a light, playful way, but then inspiring more sombre thoughts, until in the last stanzas it becomes a positive model of poetic existence.

Chorus Hymeneal  

Or triumphal chaunt 

Matched with thine, would be all 

But an empty vaunt,

 A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

In the mournful sound of ‘chaunt, vaunt, want’ do we not hear a subliminal echo of a word that rhymes more naturally with ‘Hymeneal’ than ‘be all,’ namely the word ‘funereal’? The ‘hidden want’ in the chorus and chant is not just a poetic deficiency, but suggests a deficiency in existence itself, as becomes increasingly explicit in the following stanzas.

What objects are the fountains 

Of thy happy strain? 

What fields or waves or mountains? 

What shapes of sky or plain? 

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

Here again the pure ecstasy of the lark’s song is subtly shadowed by the pain of mortality. The last four words retrospectively undermine the cloudless joy of the preceding lines, reminding us that such joy is not accessible in human life.

With thy clear keen joyance 

Languor cannot be: 

Shadow of annoyance 

Never came near thee: 

Thou lovest; but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety.

The opposition of ‘joyance’ and ‘languor’ is another triumph of diction, and the word ‘annoyance’ is elevated by the rhyme and poignant contrast with ‘joyance.’ ‘Joyance’ might seem an artificial word, stretching a line that goes from ‘joy’ to ‘joyful’ to ‘joyous’ to the point of preciosity. Or rather the line stretches from ‘joy’ through ‘enjoyment,’ with help from the French jouissance. ‘Joyance’ is not simply joyfulness, but ecstatic enjoyment, close to ‘rejoicing’ or ‘delight,’ a favourite word of Shelley’s: ‘Rarely, rarely comest thou/ Spirit of Delight!’ It is active not passive joy, in accord with the active verb ‘lovest.’ ‘Languor’ and ‘annoyance’ are everyday, mundane words, but Shelley elevates them, giving them a keener sense. ‘Annoyance’ is made to sound like French ennui or Italian noia, a word of nihilistic intensity on the lips of Leopardi, the nearest Italian equivalent to Shelley. Shelley may have exclaimed ‘che noia!’ when dealing with ‘importunate creditors’ (White, II, 211). ‘Languor,’ too, takes on the strong sense of ‘languishing’ and taedium vitae. ‘Far more clearly than is apparent from the poem it is an instinctive reaction from an immediate definite environment,’ with its ‘shadows and miseries’ (ib.). But what biographical circumstance contributed to intensity of mood is sublated into clarity of symbol, feeding into the great over-arching project of the poet-legislator. Elevation of speech goes hand in hand with density of symbolic connotation, with a felicity that puts Shelley in the company of Milton and Wordsworth, and with a light aristocratic grace that comes from the confidence of lucidity.

Waking or asleep, 

Thou of death must deem 

Things more true and deep 

Than we mortals dream,

 Or how could thy notes flow in such a chrystal stream?

After ‘hidden want,’ ‘pain,’ ‘languor,’ ‘annoyance,’ ‘sad satiety,’ it is inevitably that ‘death’ makes its appearance. The lark’s song has banished languor and annoyance and now overcomes death, but all of this breeds an intenser awareness of how these shadows cling to human existence. Instead of dwelling on death directly, the poem instead broods on the metaphysical condition of transience:

We look before and after, 

And pine for what is not: 

Our sincerest laughter 

With some pain is fraught; 

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

No self-pity here, but a grave insight into the human condition. His classical formation, as well as the example of Wordsworth, stands Shelley in good stead in these famous lines, which bring to a climax the set of stanzas that have brought consciousness of pain and mortality to the surface. The lines are bereft of simile or image, in contrast to the rest of the poem. Their diction is simple, though the words ‘pine’ (half-rhyming with ‘pain’) ‘sincerest’ (continued by ‘sweetest’ and ‘saddest’), and ‘fraught’ are beautifully used: ‘sincere’ carries a Latin overtone of innocent and untroubled, like a clear sky; ‘fraught’ has the physical sense of ‘freighted’ but also the psychological sense, currently prevalent, of ‘tense.’ Above all the lines are distinguished by a directness of statement, repeating three times the thesis that human beings are never completely happy, in parallel with the threefold statement two stanzas back that the lark is perfectly happy. The ‘languor,’ ‘annoyance,’ and ‘satiety’ of the previous verse become pining, pain, and sadness here, and are sounded in their inner, inescapable essence. ‘Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux,’ wrote Alfred de Musset (‘La Nuit de mai’), echoing Shelley, but without the extra charm of Shelley’s alliterations.

Poetic Faith (st. 19-21)

Yet if we could scorn  Hate and pride and fear;  If we were things born  Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Even if human life were without pain, it would still not come near the sheer joy of the skylark. The lines carry an Empsonian ambiguity, for they could be read to mean: ‘if we knew not sorrow, we could never come near thy joy.’ Without the agony of existence, the ecstasy induced by lark (or nightingale) would lack its full metaphysical impact. The stanza, thus read, would not be a mere continuation of the preceding contrasts but begins the last movement of the poem, its affirmation of poetic faith.

Better than all measures 

Of delightful sound, 

Better than all treasures 

That in books are found, 

Thy skill to poet were, thou Scorner of the ground!

Here the ‘poet’ is introduced in a general and impersonal way, in a stanza that is perhaps the most conventional in the poem. The ‘skill’ here is, paradoxically, an inspired spontaneity that has no need of the book-learning that played so great a role in Shelley’s own laborious and often laboured art. The poetic skills he deployed were at the service of a spontaneity, an abandonment, with the true lyrical afflatus took over. This has been touched on at various points: ‘unpremeditated mirth’ (st. 1), ‘singing hymns unbidden’ (st. 7), ‘a flood of rapture’ (st. 13), and now the final stanza brings it to its climax in defining the lark’s skill in terms of the classical notion of inspiration as madness, the furor poeticus:

Teach me half the gladness 

That thy brain must know, 

Such harmonious madness 

From my lips would flow,

 The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

Shelley’s translation of Plato’s Ion: ‘they utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a state of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed by a spirit not their own’ (Donovan et al., 477). Shelley, when inspiration strikes, is a man possessed. The poem is no longer at the services of his views, but commandeers them and goes beyond them.

The general reference to the poet is here concretized as Shelley thrusts his own persona as poet to the fore, as also happens in the last stanza of Adonais and the fourth and fifth stanzas of ‘Ode to the West Wind.’ Keats’s nightingale ode ends on a defeatist or irresolute note, but Shelley, in these three poems ends with a declaration of poetic faith. Shelley’s line, ‘Thy spirit’s sister, the lorn nightingale,’ touches on this melancholy, or paralysis and despair, in Keats; the images that embody Shelley’s spirit (wind, lark, fire, stars) are invincibly upbeat, bearing the force of his Promethean belief in progress, reform, and rejuvenation of the world. Keats cherished the dream of being numbered among the English poets, and developed a deep sympathy with human suffering, but rarely showed concern or confidence that the world would listen and be ‘wrought to sympathy.’ He did not assume his role as poet as self-consciously, as ‘officially’ as Shelley did, though in his elegy Shelley thrusts that role upon him in the most grandiose fashion, raising his stature with all the techniques of apotheosis learned from the Greeks and Milton. Keats had a less secure understanding of his vocation as poet, and used quite vague language: ‘What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth’ (Ellershaw, 164), ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ Shelley gives concrete value to these abstractions, bringing out a cosmic and metaphysical significance in his verse. Rarely has one poet done so good a turn for another. This defining moment in the reception of Keats is ignored by critics who prefer to whittle Keats back down to size, focussing on the empirical conditions of his poetry, and praising him as a model ‘for every man who wishes to discipline his sensibility and refine his sensual vision’ (Walsh, 98). It is understandable that they resist Shelley’s sublation of his dead friend into a Neoplatonic vision. Yet rather than re-imagine Keats arbitrarily, Shelley is recognizing and warmly affirming the conjunction of their destinies as the two supreme Romantics. This is a marriage made in poetic heaven.

Shelley wished to become an oracle, a medium for Orphic utterance. It is ironic that his most ambitious effort in that direction, Prometheus Unbound, carries less conviction than these three intensely personal poems in which the grand messianic gesture remains only a posture of longing. Shelley’s historical and political vision of liberation can be pieced together from his works, but it is not given substantial embodiment in a great masterpiece. Prometheus Unbound has not taken its place alongside The Prelude as a rich and rewarding poetic utterance. Instead, Shelley’s most successful poems are his least political. In them poetic speaking or saying imposes itself as an end in itself, and the liberating desire the three poems evoke in the reader is a general resolution to speak freely, transformingly. But to speak poetically is to be transformed in a radical way which political ideology cannot encompass. The spirit of poetry blows where it wills, as the hearer like the poet is ‘borne darkly, fearfully afar.’

To say that Shelley’s ‘self-knowledge’ was ‘distorted by an excessive preoccupation with the public or messianic role of the poet’ (Walsh, 89), as opposed to the down-to-earth realism of Keats, is to consign Shelley’s three most perfect poems to the realm of illusion. Keats himself wrote in August 1820, on receiving Shelley’s The Cenci: ‘A modern work, it is said, must have a purpose, which may be the God. An artist must serve Mammon; he must have “self-concentration”—selfishness perhaps. You, I am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore’ (Ellershaw, 183). Shelley, in his best poems, achieved this artistic ideal without abandoning his magnanimous role as a prophet with a message, going beyond Keats with a courage that the critics have failed to appreciate. As they plumb the fragility of human existence and celebrate the imagination, the three poems carry a persuasive enlightenment that has philosophical depth. That Shelley in addition stood forth as a prophet, like Blake, and hoped that his ‘dead thoughts’ would ‘quicken a new birth,’ adds to the grandeur of these prophetic performances. He did not seek self-knowledge but self-transformation into the vehicle of a Spirit, and the three poems show the transition from the empirical ‘I’ who speaks of his weakness to a transcendental ‘I,’ the Poet, whose voice triumphs over death. This is close to Mallarmé’s ‘disparition élocutoire du poète,’ and to Rilke’s self-transformation. Rilke was disturbed by Paula Becker-Modersohn’s uncanny portrait of him, painted long before the sovereign breakthrough of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus in 1922, for she caught his essential identity, the poet latent in the man, a somewhat frightening figure, dehumanized, an oracular mask (see Petzet; O’Leary 2010). T. S. Eliot sees the poet as haunted by ‘a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing.’ The poem is a kind of exorcism, followed by ‘a moment of exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation, which is in itself indescribable’ (98). Shelley lacked ‘self-knowledge’ no more than Rilke; both knew themselves as Poets, creatures of a rare stamp, sacrificing the everyday self to this preternatural identity. Shelley, with his hallucinations of auto-scopie, ‘was, when alive, a revenant and in that sense partook of the strange temporal logic of spirits and spectres discussed by Derrida’ (Allen, 228), ‘an elemental spirit… an angel who imprisoned in flesh could not adapt himself to his clay shrine’ (Mary Shelley, quoted, ib., 229).

Romanticism was dismissed as ‘spilt religion’ by T. E. Hulme. The nature mysticism of Wordsworth and Hölderlin could be seen as a regression from Christian mysticism. Their relationship to Nature, by whom they were ‘Fostered alike by beauty and by fear,’ can sound like an echo of the biblical relationship to God. Shelley’s prophetism and messianism is a dechristianized version of Blake’s. Or should we see Wordsworth and Shelley as autonomous natural mystics, tuning in to a depth of soul, or an enlightenment, that the language of Christianity had cluttered up? Both, in their most inspired moments, become seers:

…we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things. (‘Tintern Abbey’)

Fancy becomes imagination, and imagination is a vision of the depth of things. Poetry as a contemplative naming of Being. Heidegger has pursued this dimension of the poetic in his ample commentaries on Hölderlin. Many see Shelley as turning in a circle of idle, narcissistic subjectivity, and so unworthy of comparison with Wordsworth and Hölderlin as poets of Being. Indeed, with Plotinus, he goes ‘beyond being’ at the end of Adonais, back to the pure simplicity of the One, the hidden source of all the splendours of the world of creative mind and the world of Nature. But this cannot be dismissed as nihilism, a death wish, cheap escapism; it is better to see it as a supreme act of imagination, with its own inner necessity and logic, its own truth.

References
Allen, Graham (2007). ‘Mary Shelley as Elegiac Poet: The Return and “The Choice.”’ Romanticism 13:219-32.
Barcus, James E., ed. (1975). Shelley: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Crook, Nora (1996). ‘“Casualty”: Mrs Shelley and Seditious Libel: Cleansing Britain’s Most Corrupt Poet of Error.’ In: Graham Allen et al., ed. Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality. London: Pickering & Chatto, 61-74.
Donovan, Jack, et al., ed. (2011). The Poems of Shelley. Volume 3: 1819-1820. London: Longman.
Eliot, T. S. (1957). On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber.
Ellershaw, Henry, ed. (1944). Keats: Poetry and Prose. Oxford: Clarendon.
Matthews, G. M. (1968). ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley.’ In: R. B. Woodings, ed. Shelley: Modern Judgements. London: Macmillan, 162-95.
Notopoulos, James A. (1949). The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
O’Leary, J. S. (1995). ‘Plotinus in “Mont Blanc” and Adonais.’ In: K. Kamijima et al., ed. Centre and Circumference. Tokyo: Kirihara, 466-81.
——. (2010). ‘Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics: A Response to Richard Kearney.’ In: Kascha Semonovitch and Neal DeRoo ed. Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception. New York: Continuum, 167-84.
O’Neill, Michael (1989). Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Petzet, H.-W. (1977). Bildnis des Dichters. Frankfurt: Insel.
Walsh, William (1966). The Use of Imagination: Educational Thought and the Literary Mind. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
White, Newman Ivey (1947). Shelley. London: Secker and Warburg.

From English Literature and Language 49 (2012):1-18.

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February 04, 2021

Luke’s Selfish Soliloquists

Among the four canonical Evangelists, Luke is the one most concerned with economic issues. Whether his reflections amount to a coherent, consistent money ethics, or whether they are a loose set of prophetic admonitions from which no systematic view can be distilled, is disputed. Perhaps the currently most satisfactory position is that of Hays (267): “Nobody can be Jesus’ disciple unless he or she renounces all possessions (14:33). This single coherent principle might be manifested in a variety of ways, contingent upon the disciples’ distinctive vocations and relative affluence.… Understanding renunciation to entail an internal separation with a necessary corresponding external expression, Luke describes a spectrum of behaviors which the modern interpreter can recognize as actualizing that renunciation.” The Christian should be detached from his or her possessions, and should think only of how best to dispose of them for the good of all. The detachment has three dimensions: care for one’s soul, for the divine will, and for the common good. People are in flight from themselves (from their vocations), from God (conscience), and from the care and respect for others that is implied in the idea of the common good. Unlike a later piety that would stress “God and the soul” at the expense of “society,” viewed so negatively as to inspire a fuga mundi rather than creative engagement, Luke makes being a good neighbour the hinge of salvation: “This do, and you shall live” (Lk 10:28), and he thinks out the social consequences of this far beyond the level of individual good will.

What ensures to Luke’s writing a gripping existential cogency is its Sitz im Leben, its concern with “propertied Christians who have been converted and cannot easily extricate themselves from their cultural mindsets” and who even “found theological justification for their self-centeredness” in opting out from care for the common good (Karris, 117, 122). The picture of the early community in Acts 2 is not a dreamy utopia of total sharing; in fact there was “no obligation for everyone to rid themselves of their goods,” and those who really did so, such as Barnabas (4:36-7) were admirable exceptions (like Peter and Levi in Lk 5:11, 28) (Dupont, 511). Luke does not draft a doctrinaire polity that would put the church community irremediably at odds with civil society. Yet the koinônia (2:42) of the Christians, based “on the fact that one enjoys the same heavenly goods,” which “assure the objective foundation of fraternal communion” (Dupont, 516), could not remain just a sentiment but demanded material expression, as the phrase hapanta koina (2:44; 4:32), “all things in common,” indicates. As early Christian sources insist, if one shares heavenly goods, a fortiori one must share material goods (Didache 4.8; Letter of Barnabas 19.8). This close conjunction of spiritual and material, individual and collective, gives a wholesome and creative character to Luke’s vision, again something rarely recovered in later piety.

The common good is not an “extra” in this vision, some sort of bothersome tax on believers striving toward heavenly salvation. Rather it defines the very milieu within which Christian commitment is exercised, much as in republican Rome, as remembered by Cicero, virtue was primarily defined as service of the res publica. Cicero deplored the choice of those who preferred a retired and tranquil life to the bother and danger of public affairs (De Republica I). Roman virtue was inherently social and political. The same may be said of Hebrew virtue: the Torah sets forth a social order, and the righteousness demanded by the Prophets never dwindles to a merely individual perspective.

Reference to Cicero is not a divagation here, since Luke creates a synthesis of Graeco-Roman values with those of the Torah. Paul had urged the Greek ideal of equality (isotês) for his communities (2 Cor 8:13-14) and Greek ideals pervade the Lukan picture: among those noted by Jacques Dupont are Pythagorean images of a golden age, taken up by Plato; the widely attested ideal of friendship as having all in common, koina ta philôn; the ideal of a community without want (Seneca, Ep. 90.38), where there is no needy person (endeês) (Acts 4:34, echoing Deut 15:4 LXX to which it gives an eschatological consummation). This openness to Graeco-Roman thought is another wholesome feature of the Lucan outlook, which suggests that his picture of ecclesial community has a bearing on the wider society, holding up to it the challenge of realizing its own best ideals. The Lukan Jesus is critical of disparities of wealth and power and his message of “a new social order based on service and humility” could have been subversive of the Roman State, in the long run, but in fact it did not come to this; the precise charges of revolutionary hostility to the State listed in Lk 23:2 were false ones (Cassidy, 65-6).

The glowing portrait in Acts of a community of both spiritual communion and material sharing, born with the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit, is Luke’s vision of the common good, and it can also be seen as solving the aporias about money that recur throughout his Gospel (though this depends on how one sees the relation of the two books and on whether Luke already intended to write Acts when he wrote the Gospel: the inclusion of the Ascension in the Gospel suggests that he did not). The problem of money comes most vividly to the fore in a series of calculating soliloquies in the Gospel. These take us into the world of individuals who withdraw from community, a world marked by shiftiness like that of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11), heartlessness like that of the rich man who ignores the beggar at his gate (Lk 16:19-31), self-protection like that of the priest and Levite who “passed by” (10:31-2). Luke’s gallery of human weaknesses espouses all the messiness of our anxiety-ridden dealings with possessions and money, and with status and identity. He actually intensifies the aporetic character of the money problem.

Startingly, money is made the main theme of John the Baptist’s preaching. The question, “What shall we do?” put to him by the multitude (Lk 3:10), the tax collectors (3:12) and the soldiers (3:14), will recur later: “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” (10:25; 18:18); this comes from Mk 10:17 and Luke has projected it back into John’s dialogue with the multitude. Questions of praxis had become pressing for Luke’s community, and he shows that he means business in addressing them. The Baptist’s reply is a concrete instruction on how to handle money: to the multitude he says, “He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise” (3:10); to the tax collectors: “Collect no more than is appointed you” (3:13); to the soldiers: “Rob no one by violence or false accusation, and be content with your wages” (3:14). These prosaic injunctions, influenced by early Christian baptismal instruction (Schürmann, 179-81), sit ill with the apocalyptic tenor of the rhetoric that defines the Baptist’s character (as in 3:7-9, 16-17), and are a pointed addition on Luke’s part, perhaps deliberately dinting the standard image of the Baptist that had become rather remote. This revisionism confirms that in Luke’s understanding the key issue for Christian praxis is how to handle possessions and money.

Luke’s soliloquies are one of the distinctive marks of his literary art. They involve the reader by their Everyman quality, for we are all in the position of the rich and selfish Christians that Luke intends to reach. These inner monologues are introduced by phrases indicating a turning to oneself: “he said to himself” (7:39; 16:3; 18:4); “he thought to himself” (12:17), “he came to himself” (15:17); he “prayed thus with himself” (18:11).

The first of the soliloquies in the Gospel does not concern money directly. Simon the Pharisee reflects, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner” (7:39). Some find here a benevolent excusal of Jesus’s unawareness mixed with disappointment at his lack of prophetic perception. But most of the soliloquies are in the key of calculation, whether about money, or about nice social and moral distinctions as here, and they are motivated by self-interest and self-protection. They usually contain an error of judgement that rebounds on the soliloquist in a suprising reversal. The poor woman transgresses boundaries which the rich Pharisee carefully patrols. Simon’s hospitality has been stingy, reflecting his calculating mind, and the woman’s behaviour has been warm and generous (7:44-6). “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little” (7:47). Here an “economics” of love and forgiveness is adumbrated, which shapes the way people share or fail to share their goods in practical life. Generous love is the cement of a new social order, and Luke shows a sufficiently realistic grasp of social and economic realities to lend this prescription persuasive force, making it difficult to dismiss it as a flight into mere well-meaning sentiment.

The framework of judgement presupposed in Simon’s soliloquy sets him up for a characteristic Lukan reversal, according to a basic programme of the Gospel, expressed in the Magnificat (Lk 1:52-3) and the Beatitudes and Woes (6:20-6). Simon judges the woman by the Law, implicitly confident that he himself is justified by his observance of it. “The insufficiency of observing the Law consists in the tendency to self-justification. For redemption and the attainment of eternal life what is needed is the opening and surpassal of the Law. This happens in the turn to the neighbour through almsgiving or concrete deeds of love” (Klein, 145). The place held in Paul by justification through faith is held in Luke by this turn away from self-concern to concern for the common good. There is ample basis for such a view in sapiential literature: “Water puts out a blazing fire; and almsgiving atones for sin” (Sirach 3:30); “Almsgiving saves from death and cleanses away every sin” (Tobit 12:8). More should have been made of this in Christian tradition, for it would have spared us much fruitless brooding on grace, justification, sanctification, and predestination abstractly conceived. Note that Simon receives a friendly instruction from Jesus, for “the rich for Luke are not enemies but people in danger; and in this they stand very close to the pious” (Klein, 157). The reader of the Gospel is both both rich and righteous, simul iustus et peccator, and hears the words of Jesus as simultaneously Good News and call to repentance.

The next soliloquy is that of the rich fool, which is particularly pungent: “What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?… I will do this: I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones; and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry” (12:17-19). This is a calculation about the most incalculable thing of all—the amount of days remaining in one’s mortal span. The uncertainty permits us to postulate a reassuring “many years” and to relax into enjoyment of present pleasures as if this were the height of wisdom; whereas it should generate urgency and throw us back on the present as the sole locus of service.

Here again the soliloquy is followed by a dramatic reversal: the calculated imaginary world of the soliloquist is interrupted by the emergence of the incalculable real. Note that the speaker uses the same question that elsewhere expresses ethical awakening in face of eschatological urgency: “What shall I do?” But the summit of his folly is to answer that question without referring to God. Using possessions as “a source of security apart from God” (Green, 491), and scorning the responsibility they entail to meet the needs of others, “he did not consider that his life was on loan from God,” a loan that suddenly falls due. Not only is gospel salvation enacted in material activities such as sharing, hospitality and almsgiving, but the basic realities of life and death are profiled in economic terms, as if God’s dealing with humans were an immense economic transaction. Ultimately a principle of mercy and generosity overrides strict application of an economic tit for tat, both on God’s side (15:20-24) and on ours (the good Samaritan, 10:25-37), but at a first level the latter is grimly insisted on, as in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (16:19-31).

The reversal of the rich fool’s expectations is not simply a matter of unexpected demise. It is a divine judgement, for he has consistently rejected wisdom and indulged in godlessness (Seccombe, 142). Luke is not telling us to worry about death and its timing—we already do—but about righteousness and judgement. The correct disposition of one’s possessions is a theme of sapiential literature, as in Job 31:17-32. The one who disposes of them badly, through narrowness of perspective, indifference to the neighbour, or sheer greed, is a fool not in some banal everyday sense but as one who lacks the wisdom enjoined by the Lord and linked with the divine life itself (Prov 8:22-31). His complacent soliloquies are already mocked in the wisdom literature: “When he says: ‘I have found rest, now I will feast on my possessions,’ he does not know how long it will be till he dies and leaves them to others” (Sirach 11:19). And this unwisdom translates into social injustice: “Given the high level of interconnectedness characteristic of the village economy, it is worth asking why this farmer lays out a course of action in isolation from others whose well-being is affected by his decision” (Green, 490).

A short soliloquy occurs at 12:45: “But if that servant says to himself [en tê kardia autou, in his heart]: ‘My master is delayed in coming,’ and begins to beat the menservants and the maidservants, and to eat and drink and get drunk…” Like so many of these soliloquies, this one insinuates itself into the secret thought of its hearers, echoing, as at 12:19, the Epicurean catchwords that are always so tempting. The “delay of the parousia” had dulled the zeal of many in Luke’s generation. The inner thought of unconcern for the Lord’s will is instantly translated into indulgence of self and abuse of others, three dimensions of a single disorder that we may imagine to have become manifest in Luke’s Church, in contrast to the ideal situation of the pentecostal beginnings.

Readers can identify totally with the soliloquy of the prodigal son, especially if one is cynical enough to read it not as an undiluted expression of heartfelt conversion, but rather as a calculation about survival. If read as a straight narrative of religious conversion it can appear clumsy or wooden, and the indignation of the elder brother merely churlish. But thanks to the penetration of biblical studies by the subtleties of modern literary criticism we are learning to read Luke as a great master of narrative art, insinuation a wider spectrum of intricate motives than conventional piety normally takes account of. The phrase “coming to himself” (15:17) “does not on its own signify repentance. ‘Coming to one’s senses’ is more the idea,” although “shades of repentance are clearly evident” (Green, 581). At best they are shades, and even then they are far from evident. The “conversion” is prompted by destitution and impossible to dissociate from economic considerations. The speech the prodigal rehearses for his father is skillfully calculated to win back his favour, and in what he says to himself there is no reference to any injury done to his father: “How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants’” (15:17-19). A more honest speech would begin, “Father, I’ve come back because I am dying of hunger,” so “the lie by omission is flagrant” (Aletti, 235). (Aletti adds that the soliloquies “allow the reader to get beyond appearances, to enter into the real motivation of the actors, and to assess the sometimes enormous distance that separates the words and the feelings locked in the depth of the heart.”) This soliloquy also meets reversal, for the father forgives the son when he sees him at a distance and interrupts his rehearsed speech before he can say “treat me as one of your hired servants,” a phrase that is not the deepest level of self-abasement, since the servants were paid; “the finesse of a narrator without any illusion about certain discourses of repentance” is to be admired (Aletti, 236). The paternal response is not in the same key of calculation as the soliloquy, and its generosity undercuts the son’s cautious and mistrustful performance. The son’s judgement thus fell short of the mark, just as his brother’s calculations of merit and reward (15:29-30) are tangential to the father’s uncalculating love for the sons.

The dishonest steward, a squanderer like the prodigal son (16:1), also finds himself in pressing straits; his soliloquy is again “a significant turning point in the parable” (Culpepper, 307): “What shall I do, since my master is taking the stewardship away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do, so that people may receive me into their houses when I am put out of the stewardship” (16:3-4). Again we have the question, “What shall I do?,” and again, as at 12:17, the framework within which it is posed falls far short of the perspective of the kingdom of God. This soliloquy, unlike the prodigal son’s, offers no pretext for reading sublime meanings into it. But whereas the rich fool was planning material aggrandizement, the steward is battling for survival, so his question and its answer are not fatuous. His calculation turns upon some tricky business, but in a surprise twist he is praised by his master for his prudence (16:8) and Jesus comments: “Make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon” (16:9). The reversal effect here lies in the unexpected confirmation of the steward’s calculation by the master and by Jesus. The soliloquist’s judgement might seem base and cynical, but unlike the delusions of the rich fool it shows sterling common sense.

While the Gospel sometimes urges selfless and self-forgetful giving—“Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Mt 6:3; no equivalent in Luke)—it also uses do ut des reasoning quite unembarrassedly in the same Matthean passage (6:4, 5-6, 16-18) and in the saying, “the measure you give will be the measure you get, anda still more will be given you” (Mk 4:24; Lk 6:38), as well as in similar calculations about forgiveness and not judging (Mt 7:1-2; Lk 6:37), which in Luke immediately precede an eloquent expansion of the “give, and it will be given to you” topos (Lk 6:38). Love itself is calculated, in that selfless love will win a great reward (Mt 5:46-7; Lk 32-5). As in the case of the prodigal son, the unjust steward’s calculations about his own welfare become a model for wise disciples. But the closed world of the soliloquy opens up to unexpected horizons of divine generosity: “Your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind (chrêstos) to the ungrateful (acharistous) and the selfish (ponêrous)” (Lk 6:35). Reconciliation with the community is close at hand, a mere matter of “making friends” through almsgiving, and it is at one and the same stroke an easy path to rediscovering God as kind and merciful. The badness and shabbiness of money does not prevent it from being an instrument of grace, a key to “eternal habitations” (16:9). In fact its badness is not ontological but a matter of general misuse, “in theft and exploitation, hoarding, conspicuous consumption, and the more general disregard for outsiders and persons of low status and need” (Green, 596-7). Luke never preaches distance and disdain toward the actual economic and social order, but seeks to transform and redeem it. “Wealth is either used faithfully—that is, in the service of God and thus in solidarity with and on behalf of those in need—or, as in v. 13, it takes on a personified, cosmological status in which case its claims for service are as unyielding as they are perverse” (Green 596). The shared wealth of the ideal Christian community of Acts is a blessing for the recipients but even more for the donors: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

The parable of the unjust judge, which is close to the earlier images of the importunate friend (11:5-8) and the father who will not give his child a snake when he asks for a fish or a scorpion for an egg (11:11-12), has a soliloquy: “Though I neither fear God nor regard man, yet because this widow bothers [or more strongly, ‘badgers’] me, I will vindicate her, or she will wear me out by her continual coming” (18:4-5). “The language Luke uses is startling, perhaps even humorous, borrowed as it is from the boxing ring,, for it invokes images of the almighty, fearless, macho judge cornered and slugged by the least powerful in society” (Green, 641). Here the calculation goes against the soliloquist’s habitual behaviour, a reversal effected by the widow’s pleading. The point made earlier—“If you, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (11:13)—is now dramatized by entry into the mind of a bad man swayed by impetration. As in the case of the dishonest steward, all-too-human calculations become a vehicle for reflecting on divine attitudes. Luke’s Gospel is not a pabulum for beautiful souls; it constantly engages us amid the pressures of our money calculations, skilfully pulling on that thread to lead us to the social realities that are the hallmark of the Kingdom.

There is a kind of prayer that is not addressed to God at all but is a self-centred soliloquy. a prayer to oneself. “The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself [statheis pros heauton tauta prosêucheto], ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get’” (18:11-12). The phrase “pros heauton” may refer to his position: “The Pharisees separated themselves from others to maintain their purity before God, so this Pharisee takes a position that reflects his identity—standing by himself” (Culpepper, 341). Or it may refer to his prayer: “Concerning himself he prayed these things” (ib.). But the irony is even more piquant if we read, “to himself he prayed these things.” (This suggestion is “too sophisticated,” says Marshall [679], who sees pros heauton as “representing an Aramaic ethic dative which emphasizes the verb.” But the topic of “self” looms large in the other soliloquies and Luke is certainly “sophisticated” enough to be able to develop it as a thematic element.) The Pharisee's prayer of thanksgiving goes astray: “For God’s acts, the Pharisee has substituted his own” (Green, 648). A society in which people are more preoccupied with their own achievements and success than with the common good these are supposed to subserve will also be blind to the divine graciousness that is enacted and tasted in work for the common good. Virtuous scorn for degenerate society, in the spirit of Molière’s Alceste, which places itself “in one camp and all others in the category of thieves, rogues, and adulterers” (ib.), misses out on the basic solidarity of all citizens in reponsibility for the social fabric. Social corruption is not a licence for resignation and disengagement but a challenge to assume anew the social task. This is a moral socialism that will be given material expression in the lifestyle of the pentecostal church. The turn away from this into the petty world of self is a plunge into fatuous delusion. Luke underlines that the Pharisee may be any one of us, or rather is every one of us: “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled” (18:14). The text tracks a common human delusion and how it is set up for reversal.

There is one more soliloquy at 20:13, though it is introduced by the simple “the owner of the vineyard said”: “What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; it may be they will respect him.” This is developed from Mk 12:6, which is not so clearly a soliloquy: “They will respect my son.” The reversal of the soliloquist’s expectations by the wicked behaviour of the tenants portrays goodness (and by extension divine goodness) as naive and trusting over against the brutal and summary calculations of the wicked: “This is the heir; let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours” (Lk 20:14). The last phrase here is slightedly more consciously calculating than Mark’s “and the inheritance will be ours” (Mk 12:7), as is the phrase dielogizonto pros allêlous, in place of Mark’s pros heautous eipan, since it suggests a deliberative casting about in mutual give and take. “The act of ‘discussing among themselves’ is typical of those who oppose the redemptive purpose of God at work in Jesus,” as at 5:21 (“Who can forgive sins but God alone?”) and 9:46 (“A discussion arose among them as to which of them was the greatest”) (Green, 708)—both cases in which Jesus “knew their thoughts” just as he divines those of Simon at 7:40. Secret discussions based on suspicion, opportunism, resistance, plotting, have the same calculative character as soliloquies. In Acts the disciples invest the same mental energy more wholesomely in open debate, thus preserving the principles of “the Way” (Acts 9:2), foremost among them care for the common good, over against those whose calculations insidiously undermine them.

Our survey of the soliloquies lights up only a small corner of the immense world of Lukan thought. Luke does not lock us into the private world of the soliloquists, wrestling with dilemmas of conscience in a hole-in-corner way. Their calculations serve to highlight what overthrows them, Luke’s vision of a decent human society. While in Luke-Acts it is the church that exists as a community of sharing or of the common good, the whole tenor of Luke’s writings supports civic virtues and values as well. That is, the Kingdom of God is not only an ecclesial enclave, an eschatological community that is not of this world, but involves care for the earthly city as well. That at least is how it is seen in the church’s social teaching, greatly influenced by Luke since the time of St Ambroses’s commentary on his Gospel.

Luke cherishes the civic virtues of this time. The “solutions” to the problems of the earthly city that church teachers propose and a committed laity enacts are not solutions coming from the outside; they are inherent in the social order itself. That is why one might say that the church’s teaching falls flat if there is no context in the social order ready to receive it. Leo XIII did not preach in a vacuum—his teachings resonate with the entire issue of labour and capital as developed in the 19th century. Pius XII’s positive words on democracy would make no sense without the entire debate about democracy since the 18th century. Neo-Augustinians who take an anarchist approach to the State and regard all the rhetoric of democracy as empty and illusory place an undue burden on the Church (idealized and glorified in a medieval way) and lame the Church’s capacity to be in dialogue with the earthly city and to offer a beacon in support of its deepest values. It would be an immense task to track Luke’s attitudes to the secular authorities in Acts, but in general he seems devoid of the negative apocalyptic mentality that sees the Church as exiled in an evil age. He could be seen as undertaking in this regard a daring course correction for the growing Church, as when he boldly thrusts the apocalyptic John the Baptist into the thick of social concerns. His rich reflections will continue to intersect with the ethical questions of current economic debate and with Christian efforts to think of the common good in the broadest perspective of an integral human ecology (see Zamagni), which both gives “glory to God in the highest” and brings “peace on earth to people of good will” (Lk 2:14).

References

Jean-Noël Aletti, Quand Luc raconte (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1998).

Richard J. Cassidy, Jesus, Politics, and Society: A Study of Luke’s Gospel (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1978).

R. Alan Culpepper, in The New Interpreter’s Bible, IX (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995).

Jacques Dupont, Études sur les Actes des Apôtres (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1967).

Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997).

Christopher M. Hays, Luke’s Wealth Ethics: A Study in Their Coherence and Character (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2010).

R. J. Karris, “Poor and Rich: The Lukan Sitz im Leben,” in C. K. Talbert, ed. Perspectives on Luke-Acts (Edinburgh: Clark, 1978), 112-25.

Hans Klein, Lukasstudien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005).

I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978).

Heinz Schürmann, Das Lukasevangelium, I, 4th ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1990).

David Peter Seccombe, Possessions and the Poor in Luke-Acts (Linz: Studien zum Neuen Testament und seiner Umwelt, 1982).

Stefano Zamagni, “For an Integral Ecology,” The Japan Mission Journal 70 (2016):7-15.

Posted at 04:52 PM in Bible | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 02, 2021

Review of Francisco J. Gonzalez, Plato and Heidegger: A Question of Dialogue (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).

In this masterful and fascinating study, Francisco Gonzalez tracks the ups and downs of Heidegger’s lifelong engagement with Plato and gives an illuminating explanation of the ambivalences and contradictions that dogged it. Gonzalez argues that Heidegger could have had a more fruitful dialogue with Plato, whose phenomenological insight often anticipates his own. But in Plato the phenomenological strand cannot be clearly differentiated from the prevailing context of logical, metaphysical, and ethical reasoning, with which Heidegger was out of sympathy; hence his oscillations in reading Plato, whom he sometimes denounces as an abstract metaphysician, sometimes embraces as a fellow in the phenomenological quest. Since Plato saw dialectic as the primary means by which the mind is led to truth, whereas Heidegger sees it as a distraction from phenomenological apprehension of truth as unhiddenness, there is bound to be much unease and instability in his phenomenological appropriation of any Platonic text. Heidegger sees Plato as caught in an intellectualist posture that keeps him from pursuing his phenomenological intuitions to the end. Gonzalez believes that Heidegger’s fixation on the impossible ideal of a pure phenomenology bypassing logical dialectic is the ultimate source of his misreadings of Plato.

In the 1924-25 course on the Sophist, logos in general is viewed as Gerede, superficial talk. Heidegger thinks that ‘because the Greeks lived in speech they were also imprisoned by it’ (8). Dialectic is seen as playing an important role in the effort of the Greeks to free themselves from this imprisonment: ‘philosophy, in its attempt to disclose the things themselves, must both begin with logos and break through it by means of a “speaking for and against”… that destroys the autonomy and self-sufficiency that logos has in Gerede’ (9). But this dialegesthai is phenomenologically feeble; it cannot reach the pure noein (GA 19:197), the intuitive givenness of the phenomena.

Gonzalez objects to Heidegger’s phenomenological reductions of such key concepts as eidos and the Good. Eidos as an instrument of rational penetration, defined in the inventive give and take of dialectical argument, does not interest Heidegger. Rather he sees eidos as the authentic ‘look’ of a thing, in the sense of its appearance as that which it is, or as the power (dunamis) whereby a thing is enabled to step forth as it is and to be known as it is. Gonzalez finds contradictions between the discussion of the forms in terms of light and in terms of dunamis. But perhaps these can be softened if one keeps in view the phenomenon of the being of what-is to which both metaphors point.

In his 1931-32 lectures on ‘the essence of truth,’ Heidegger gives a rich, sensitive reading of the cave allegory (Rep., 514A-517A), which is presented as telling of successive acts of noein, with very little role for legein or logos. The series of events in the allegory reveal the nature of truth as ‘unconcealment’ (Unverborgenheit), as something that is always enacted as a wresting from concealment. The captives are likened to the average philosopher, who deals with metaphysical truths but cannot discern the process of emerging into unhiddenness. The ‘hermeneutical violence’ of this reading stems from its exclusively phenomenological thrust. Heidegger in the 1930s was working his way to a more integral phenomenology of the togetherness of being and thinking, which he summed up in the idea of the Ereignis. The interrogation of beings in view of their being is continued in the interrogation of being itself in view of what one can call the phenomenological conditions of its possibility. Heidegger is drawing on Plato as a resource for this latter interrogation when he reads the Good phenomenologically as that which ‘renders fitting’ (tauglich) the relationship of beings and the mind that perceives them, a relationship of un-concealment, which is the ‘yoke’ (zugon) between the openness of beings and the understanding of being. Thus if the eidê represent the breakthrough in Plato of a vision of being in its difference from beings, the Good, the idea of ideas, points to a more radical difference, that between being and the Ereignis, as that which ‘grants’ being: ‘Es gibt sein.’ For a while Heidegger seems to have caught a glimmer of the Ereignis in the Good, conceived as naming the innermost essentiality of being.

It was inevitable that at some point Heidegger would realize that he was thinking as much against Plato as with him. Gradually he comes to see the Good as ‘the step to “value,” to “meaning,” to “the ideal”’ (GA 65:210), to a metaphysics divorced from the authentic thinking of being. It misnames the truth of being, and lays the foundation of metaphysics as an ontotheology that grounds beings in a supreme being. The 1940 essay, Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, no longer embraces the promising resonances of Plato’s language, but ‘grossly simplifies and sometimes even contradicts the much richer and conflicted reading in the courses: a reading that suggests certain affinities between Heidegger and Plato that are suppressed in the essay’ (Gonzalez, 3). The pages on the Good as what appropriates thought to the truth of beings in 1940 are no more than a relic of what is said on this in 1931-32, and they are quickly followed by reproaches in which Plato is put in his fateful place in the history of metaphysics. Many Heideggerians have subscribed to this impoverished doxographical stance: ‘Once we have identified Plato’s central doctrine, a doctrine that is moreover “unsaid” in Plato, what further need is there to study his texts?’ (162). Gonzalez liquidates this attitude, allowing Heideggerians to study Plato again with a good conscience. I hope that his book will also encourage Plato scholars to change their dreary diet of analytical philosophy and draw on the hermeneutical resources offered by Heidegger.

Heidegger’s loss of the real Plato, increasingly replaced by a caricatural Platonism, is offset by two discussions that point to ‘the dialogue that could have been,’ but that were not followed up. The dogmatic presupposition that in Plato the essence of truth changed from ‘unconcealment’ to ‘correctness’ leads Heidegger to lose the benefit of his subtle reading of the Theaetetus in the 1931-32 lectures, which implicitly overturns the presupposition, something he prevents from becoming clear only at the cost of arbitrary assertions (224). The discussion of the myth of Er in the 1942 course on Parmenides surprisingly finds in Plato a mythic vision of the concealment at the heart of a-lêtheia. Heidegger treats it ‘as some ghostly remnant of an earlier understanding of saying, one that Plato himself is leaving behind in the turn toward metaphysics’ (234). Again there is a clash between his reading of the text and his governing dogma: ‘while Plato’s text on Heidegger’s own reading shows the belonging-together of alêtheia and lêthê in being itself and characterizes our relation to being as anamnêsis in response to this understanding of being, we must believe that the transformation of alêtheia and lêthê into mere “subjective states” begins with Plato’ (240). Gonzalez concludes that Heidegger’s basic view of Plato is disproven by his own most perceptive readings of Plato’s texts (254). How could such a paradoxical situation arise? Homing in on the phenomenologically most promising aspects of Plato, Heidegger was impatient with the dialectic in which they are embedded, and saw it as spelling the triumph of metaphysical correctness over phenomenological unconcealment. (Gonzalez does not problematize the notions of unconcealment and correctness themselves.) For Gonzalez, dialectic is essential to philosophical thought and Heidegger’s rejection of it is intellectual suicide. Nor did his belief in dialectic prevent Plato from thinking in the direction of the ‘matter itself’ just as steadily as Heidegger.

I wonder if Gonzalez has done justice to the early Heidegger’s conception of phenomenology. The phenomenological data contain a priori intelligible patterns, such as the structures of temporality in Husserl or the web of the existentials in Sein und Zeit. The orderly clarification of these is not just a matter of ‘some sort of unmediated seeing’ (69), but implies a travail of thought moving to more integral levels of analysis. Heidegger considers this superior to dialectic, because it is not tied to and guided by quarrels about the definition of words. The later Heidegger also constructs a path of thought that moves through successively deeper layers, despite some declarations that might make it seem a pure intuitive contemplation. In denying any dialectical or dialogal character to Heidegger’s thought, Gonzalez also underestimates the significance of his dialogue with his favoured philosophers and poets (in the dialogal setting of his seminars). Conversely, is it true that for Plato ‘philosophy was nothing more nor less than dialectic’ (309)? The dialectic in the Symposium, the Phaedrus and the Phaedo turns around central phenomena that it seeks to clarify, and the phenomena prompt Plato at climactic moments to leave dialectic behind for mythic utterance, which is not particularly dialogal either.

In ‘Grundsätze des Denkens’ (1957), Heidegger speaks rather enthusiastically about dialectic, noting how the laws of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle becomes dynamic and mobile in German idealism. Then ‘thought becomes knowingly dialectical’ (GA 11:128), and we enter ‘the highest dimension of thought in the historical course of metaphysics’ (11:131); the dialectic of Plato pointed forward to the destiny that is now accomplished. The prevalence of dialectic as a global reality today is linked with the triumph of science over nature in the atomic age (11:134). Again it becomes clear that authentic thinking has to step back behind this dialectic and overcome it. In reply to a question of Jean Beaufret in 1973, Heidegger declared: ‘Heraclitus represents the first step in the direction of dialectic. From this perspective Parmenides is more profound and more essential… Tautology is the only possible way of thinking what dialectic can only cover up’ (quoted, 291). Gonzalez finds here an extreme of monologism that cuts off dialogue, but one might recall that many Buddhist and Christian thinkers have used such language too, and that their sense of an ultimate simplicity did not abolish dialogue. [Heidegger's remark is possibly aimed at Hegel, who speaks condescendingly of Parmenides but acclaims Heraclitus and states that all of Heraclitus's saying found a place in his own Science of Logic.]

Faced with Heidegger’s hostility to dialectic over half a century, Gonzalez undertakes to show that Heidegger himself cannot avoid dialectic and falls into an ‘unelective affinity’ with Plato (292). Indeed, one could go further and claim that the entire movement of Heidegger’s thought is dialectical in a broad sense, and exhibits affinities especially with Hegel. When Heidegger reverses metaphysical priorities he summarizes his path of thought in chiastic utterances such as ‘the essence of language is the language of essence,’ which pass the initiative from the thinker who eagerly questions after explanations and grounds to the ‘matter itself,’ the Sache that calls forth thinking and guides it on its way. Is this not reminiscent of the dialectical reversals that recur throughout the Phenomenology of Spirit?

Gonzalez’s final chapter discovers dialectical patterns in the 1962 text Zeit und Sein. These cannot be the sort of reversal found in Heidegger’s overcomings of metaphysical ways of thinking, for now he wants to leave off from overcoming metaphysics and simply to bring the phenomenon of being itself as the Ereignis into view – truly a tall order! Heidegger comes close to silencing himself: ‘What remains to be said? Only this: das Ereignis ereignet. Thereby we say the same of the same with respect to the same’ (quoted, 297). The original German is more dynamic here: ‘vom Selben her auf das Selbe zu das Selbe’ – these prepositions, like those of Hegel, might harbour a considerable amount of implicit dialectical reflection. Gonzalez argues that a simple saying of being cannot escape becoming at least a negative dialectic, since it must use ordinary language while at the same time crossing it out, as in negative theology. ‘A form of thinking that can get at what it wishes to express only negatively by working against the forms of expression it is forced to employ’ (302) can be called dialectical. Gonzalez judges this ‘self-dismantling dialectic’ a failure (304); it makes sense only a clearing the ground for a direct seeing of Ereignis; and since Ereignis is also Enteignis, known only in its withdrawal, this entails a ‘phenomenology of the inapparent.’ ‘But how can a phenomenonology of what is never a phenomenon avoid self-deconstructing?’ (308). One might defend Heidegger here by seeing the ‘inapparent’ as a structural dimension of the phenomenon, another form of the concealment that is the condition of unconcealment, and that has been central to Heidegger’s phenomenology all along.

Curiously, this late Heidegger comes close to Plato: for Plato, ‘the good makes beings manifest as beings, thereby at the same time letting them be’; this resonates with Heidegger’s ‘characterization of being as letting beings come to presence, or bringing them into the open’ (312). If so, we are brought back to the warmth of Heidegger’s attitude to the Good in 1931-32, and an unnecessary alienation of thirty years is ended. A fundamental difference remains: ‘while neither Plato nor Heidegger looks for the truth of beings in beings themselves, Plato turns to logoi and how the truth of being manifests itself therein, whereas Heidegger insists on attempting to see and say being directly in a way that bypasses both beings and logoi’ (335). But it seems to me that this radical bypassing is confined to a small number of Heidegger’s texts, and that these presuppose the long interrogation, throughout his work, of beings and logoi in view of the truth of being. Thus the commonalities between Heidegger and Plato may go far beyond the one noted by Gonzalez the apophasis of Zeit und Sein and that of Plato’s Seventh Letter (342). The final message of this book is that, contrary to a long-standing deleterious cliché, propagated by Heidegger himself, the coast is clear for a mutually challenging and nourishing dialogue between the two thinkers. The task is immense, and the place to begin, henceforth, is with careful study of Gonzalez’s rich and stimulating book.

International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (2012):308-13.

Posted at 03:49 PM in Heidegger | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hidden in Plain View: The Model of the Princess Casamassima

Christina Light is Henry James’s first major heroine. In both Roderick Hudson (1875) and The Princess Casamassima (1887) her appearance is delayed for dramatic effect. She appears first, very briefly, in the fifth chapter of the earlier novel (RH [Library of America] 228-30; NY [New York Edition] 94-7), in the grounds of the Villa Ludovisi, and reappears in chapter VIII when she visits Roderick’s studio. She dominates the novel thereafter, while none of the other characters develop much beyond their early presentation. The question that springs to Roderick’s lips on her first appearance is: “Who is she?” (229; NY 95), and many have taken this as a riddle set by the author, prompting numerous attempts to identify the “real” Princess Casamassima. Proposed sources fall into three categories: women personally known to James, characters in fiction, and major or minor public figures or celebrities.

The Hunt for Models

Leon Edel, in the fourth volume of his biography of James, links Christina’s “magnificent tresses” with those of Fanny Kemble’s daughter Sarah Butler Wister. Another Roman model is “the haunting Elena Lowe” who “attracted him by her beauty, her remoteness, her air of quiet intelligence —her mystery.” “In Christina, James seems to have set down the deep fascination he had felt in the mysterious and unreachable young Boston woman he glimpsed so briefly in Rome. ‘Beautiful, mysterious, melancholy, inscrutable,’ were the words he had used to describe Elena Lowe; for no other woman of his acquaintance had he used such language. Colm Tóibín, in The Master, suggests that the model for Christina in the second novel is none other than the author’s sister, Alice James. As Alice is often mentioned as a model for another character in the novel, the invalid Rose Muniment, Tóibín suggests that James offers a “double portrait” of Alice in Rose and “the Princess herself, subtle, brilliant and darkly powerful, recently arrived in London.” This implies treating the Christina of the later novel as a quite new character, only nominally connected with the Miss Light of Roderick Hudson. But James’s remarks in the Prefaces to both novels show that he ascribes to her a rich and stable identity. In contrast to the pallid Mary Garland, her antithesis Christina’s “presence and action are… all firm ground” (NY xix).

The way James speaks of her as developing after the close of Roderick Hudson could suggest that he has a real person in mind: “I remember at all events feeling, toward the end of ‘Roderick,’ that the Princess Casamassima had been launched, that, wound-up with the right silver key, she would go on a certain time by the motion communicated; thanks to which I knew the pity, the real pang of losing sight of her…. One would watch for her and waylay her at some turn of the road to come—all that was to be needed was to give her time. This I did in fact, meeting her again and taking her up later on” (NY xx). In the Preface to the second novel he writes of “that extremely disponible figure of Christina Light” who “had for so long, in the vague limbo of those ghosts we have conjured but not exorcised, been looking for a situation, awaiting a niche and a function”; she is one of those “honourably buried” characters who “revive for him by a force or a whim of their own and “walk” round his house of art like haunting ghosts, feeling for the old doors they knew” (1[vol. 1 of the New York edition of The Princess Casamassima].xviii). Christina, he adds, was not “completely recorded” in the earlier novel. But if she is based on his study of a real person, the ongoing development of that person would tell him how inadequate his first sketch of her had been. Her “natural passion” was “to continue in evidence” (1.xix)—again a strange way to speak of a mere fiction. But if the model was a famous woman, constantly appearing in headlines, and very much refusing to be “a recumbent worthy on the slab of a sepulchral monument” (1.xix), then her real-life irrepressibility could ricochet on her fictive portrait. “Her pressure then was not to be resisted—sharply as the question might come up of why she should pretend to strike, just there. I shall not attempt to answer it with reasons (one can never tell everything); it was enough that I could recognise her claim to have travelled far—far from where I had last left her: that, one felt, was in character—that was what she naturally would have done” (1.xix). Perhaps “one can never tell everything” indicates what James is keeping silent about: the identity of his principal model. Since none of the models suggested from among James’s acquaintance carry the double glamor surrounding Christina from the start, the glamor of extraordinary beauty and of high aristocratic status, they remain quite unconvincing.

Turning to literary models, the reception of the novel has been characterized, as A. Robert Lee remarks, by “a solid round of influence hunting.” “The similarity of plot between The Princess Casamassima and Turgenev's Virgin Soil has been much commented upon; yet it seems that in many respects James’s novel is closer to his own criticism of Virgin Soil than to the actual novel” (Anne-Claire Le Reste). In 1877, James described Turgenev’s “Neshdanoff, who is the natural son of a nobleman, not recognized by his father’s family, and who, drifting through irritation and smothered rage and vague aspiration into the stream of occult radicalism, finds himself fatally fastidious and sceptical and ‘aesthetic’—more essentially an aristocrat, in a word, than any of the aristocrats he had agreed to conspire against. He has not the gift of faith, and he is most uncomfortably at odds with his companions, who have it in a high degree.” This is a precise advance sketch of Hyacinth Robinson, who in addition knows himself to be “the bastard of a murderess, spawned in a gutter out of which he had been picked by a poor sewing-girl” (2.216). “He probably based Christina partly on the series of heroines—Elena, Lisa, Tatyana, Gemma, Marianna—whom of all Turgenev’s characters he most admired” (W. H. Tilley, The Background of The Princess Casamassima, 1961). “With the three important women in Nezhdanov’s life, however, with Mme Sipyagina, Mashurina, and Mariana, James does some fancy juggling of roles and traits to produce the Princess, Lady Aurora, and Millicent Henning. The beauty of Mariana, a lady by birth, is vulgarized and given to the sexually attractive cockney, Miss Henning…. Sipyagina, according to Lerner, is scaled upward to become the Princess” (Oscar Cargill). This again is an unconvincing suggestion.

Turning to public society for a possible model, we note W. H. Tilley’s failure to find any, though he does find real-life models for many of the characters in this thickly populated novel. “The parallel between Franz Reinhold Rupsch, the saddler [Friedrich August] Reinsdorf chose to assassinate the Emperor [Wilhelm I of Germany in 1883], and Hyacinth Robinson, the bookbinder Hoffendahl chose to assassinate a duke, is too striking to pass unobserved.” But “among the many stories of conspiracy and subversion in the Times, not one describes a princess who has left her husband to fraternize with revolutionists. If James based Christina on a figure in real life, it was someone not well known. And probably not contemporary, for while it was one thing to build characters on the model of well-documented types—young artisans who caught the revolutionary fervor, older ones who ran things from behind the scenes—it was quite another to devise a revolutionary princess.” M. S. Wilkins notes that there was “the Princess Obolensky, who joined Bakunin’s organization in Naples and later retired to Casamicciola, on the island of Ischia.” Princess Belgiojoso, née Cristina de Trivulsio, a dynamic grande dame in Rome around 1870, is proposed as a model on the basis of James’s account of her in William Wetmore Story and His Friends. Tintner calls her “the great cosmopolitan star of Paris of the 1880s”: “As a real historical character, the princess added to the material by Feuillet upon which he drew for his world-weary citizen of the world, the Princess Casamassima.” Again we sense the lack of a proper objective correlative for James’s Princess.

The hunt for models reaches its paroxysm in the far-fetched proposal that Christina is modeled on James himself. Warren Johnson asserts that “her appearances in Roderick Hudson and The Princess Casamassima [reveal] the most complete, considered, and confident portrait of the development of the mind and experience of the novelist in a character in James’s fictions.” As the hunt grows vertiginous fashionable postmodern theories are projected onto the text, as in the suggestion that The Princess Casamassima is “constructed so that anybody could read their own intertextuality into it,” and “the references sprinkled over the text were not so much intertextual as about intertextuality” (Le Reste). Much more satisfactory would be the identification of one major intertext that becomes a hidden structural and thematic pillar of the novel. Le Reste adds:

"The major target of this strategy of elucidation has been the Princess, the most unaccountable character in the book, and probably one of James’s characters that has been interpreted in the most polarized and passionate ways…. [Pierre] Walker’s book is a revealing instance of this tendency. Although he is one of these comparatively rare critics who acknowledge the status of the Princess as the novel’s “paramount enigma” (28), he still writes that the reference to Feuillet “is a very significant clue to understanding the major cruxes of The Princess Casamassima: Hyacinth’s and the princess’s friendship, the Princess’s supposedly capricious personality, and the end of the novel” (21). Tintner uses a similar strategy in her Cosmopolitan World of Henry James, yet with a radically different end, convoking another Feuillet novel to give a much less favorable interpretation of the Princess as “frivolous”… (Cosmopolitan 77)…. The same strategy is at work in [John L.] Kimmey’s comparison of The Princess with the other two novels of the so-called “naturalist series.” Arguing in a 1968 article about The Princess being a rewriting of The Bostonians, he found that the Princess was similar to Olive “in type and function” (542-3)—although Olive is a much more coherent character than the Princess. In a 1970 article focusing on The Tragic Muse, he then found the Princess to be similar to Julia Dallow, both described as “aggressive females impressing their wills on others” and “capricious personalities” (526). The ambiguous characterization of the Princess is again a casualty of [Roland] Dove’s comparison of James’s novel with Le Rouge et le noir, in which he states from the outset that “there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that the later novel was in any way indebted to the earlier one” (131), but still concludes that the Princess is “a bored and capricious woman, like Mathilde” (150)."

"Although she is the pivot around which everything revolves, she remains a missing pivot, through her elusiveness, and because both characters and readers’ attempts to make sense of her are ultimately frustrated…. Her theatricality, her sense of the mise en scène are repeatedly asserted but, as Hyacinth notes, “her performance of the part she had undertaken to play was certainly complete, and everything lay before him but the reason she had for playing it” (267; 2.19). Her incommensurable beauty thus appears not as a mere descriptive characteristic, but rather as a sign for her unintelligibility: “she was too beautiful to question, to judge by common logic,” Hyacinth reflects (195; 1.212). She can only be defined in terms of her opacity and the frustration she creates: indeed “a model of the unsatisfactory” (250; 1.294). At the end of the novel, her course is undetermined, contrary to the other characters whom the readers can well imagine leading their narrative lives unchanged. Her extra-narrative future is the only one which is mentioned…. Her trajectory calls for an unimaginable “outside of the text.”"

To be sure, as Tilley says, “it cannot be proved that James needed any model for the Princess; he may have fashioned her from whole cloth.” The creator of Isabel Archer, Marie de Vionnet, Milly Theale, Kate Croy, Maggie Verver, and Charlotte Stant would be capable of such a feat. Nonetheless, given James’s proclivity to reinforce his creations by drawing on hidden models, which add an extra dimension to his fictions when they emerge to light in a kind of palimpsest effect, it is worth pursuing the hunch that there is something more to James’s heroine than meets the eye. He drops hints, in his usual fashion, that come into focus in an “anamorphic” effect (like the skull that appears in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, when viewed from a certain angle). James is fascinated with Christina, in love with her in a sense, yet no woman in James’s life provides any basis for such a steady fascination. But what if the model was a public figure, with whom everyone was in love? Both novels refer to Christina ritually as the most beautiful and “remarkable” woman in Europe. What if his model simply were a real woman who was routinely granted that status—a woman among the most famous of her time, and still famous today? What if James had done what a modern novelist might do in taking the figure of Lady Diana Spencer, aka Diana, Princess of Wales, for the unacknowledged model of a fictional creation? Then one could say that the model was hidden in plain view, like Poe’s “purloined letter,” and that the literary detectives chasing after obscure leads were missing the obvious, the fascinating woman whose face stared at them from newspapers, magazines, posters, and television screens on every side. Just as the letter in Poe’s story is concealed under a shabby exterior, James conceals his model under the unprepossessing guise of a low-born adventuress, promoted by her vulgar mother as a business proposition. And yet he gives many clues that enable the reader to detect the original. Who is she? Like Isabel Archer, she may be seen as “a rich, synthesized figure about which the novelist had reflected a long time, gathering material from a variety of sources” (Cargill) Yet there is a principal model for Christina, who plays a role comparable to that of Oscar Wilde for Gabriel Nash in The Tragic Muse or that of Morton Fullerton for Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove.

The story of her early years may owe something to Alexandre Dumas, fils’s L’Affaire Clemenceau, in which “Madame Dobronowska, a Polish adventuress, and her daughter Iza, a girl of extraordinary beauty… search for a suitor with sufficient money and position to satisfy their ambition” (Cargill). But I propose that the primary model for Christina’s character and destiny is none other than Elisabeth, Empress of Austria (from 1854 until her assassination in 1898), and that James throws out many ironic hints of this buried identity. Known in popular lore as “Sissi,” the more correct form of her nickname is “Sisi,” and I shall use it for convenience in what follows. For her biography of the Empress, the fundamental work is the thoroughly documented Elisabeth: “Die seltsame Frau” by Egon Caesar Conte Corti (1934). Its dark portrait is confirmed in Brigitte Hamann’s Elisabeth: Kaiserin wider Willen (1981), translated as The Reluctant Empress (1986). The difference between the two Christinas are those produced by age and experience, and it is one of the strengths of the portrait that it captures these changes so convincingly. The situation is somewhat like that of Rosine in The Barber of Seville who is so transformed as the Countess of The Marriage of Figaro as to make it rather a shock when the name “Rosine” is voiced in the latter play. What Edel says of Elena Lowe applies better to Sisi: “Again and again in the novel she is portrayed as an enigma and a ‘riddle.’ There are references to her ‘unfathomable’ coquetry and to her nature as ‘large and mysterious.’” The epithets “beautiful, mysterious, melancholy, inscrutable” used of her in a deflationry tone in a letter of 1874 would apply perfectly to the Empress. The way James speaks of his heroine in the notebook entry on The Princess Casamassima may point to this: “The Princess will give me hard, continuous work for many months to come; but she will also give me joys too sacred to prate about.—In the 3d installment of the serial Hyacinth makes the acquaintance of x x x x x.” James’s sacred hush and portentous “x x x x x” mark the secret of her identity, not to be blabbed about. As with all James’s hidden allusive and intertextual schemes, he keeps up an ironic game with the reader, dropping a series of hints but keeping mum about their unnamed referent.

Hapsburg Hints

When James wrote Roderick Hudson in Florence in 1874, Sisi was already, at thirty-six, famous as the most beautiful woman in the world and as the willful and unhappy wife of Emperor Franz Joseph. James would have had ample opportunity to know all about her, since in addition to the newspapers, everyday conversation would have echoed the rumors that ceaselessly swirled about her. Sisi’s full name was Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie. The name Christina may recall Elisabeth Christine (1715-1797), wife of Frederick the Great, whose marriage was intended to boost Prussian-Austrian relations, but who was separated from Frederick after seven years in 1740. A more famous Christina, independent and intelligent like Sisi, is the Queen of Sweden (1626-1689), who lived in Rome after her abdication and is buried in St Peter’s Basilica; Christina Light was born “in the shadow of Saint Peter’s” (272; NY 162: “the dear shadow”). The name “Casamassima” is that of an ancient Italian town, in the metropolitan area of Bari, but it also means “greatest house,” and the House of Hapsburg was the greatest royal house of Europe, ruling the Holy Roman Empire continuously from 1440 until Napoleon abolished the Empire end in 1806, and then ruling the Austrian (from 1867 Austro-Hungarian) Empire from its foundation by Francis I in 1804 until its collapse in 1918.

Christina is a Neapolitan princess (1.294), her husband being “a Neapolitan; one of the oldest houses in Italy” (RH 323; NY 243), which in practice would suggest a Hapsburg. The Prince has a “resemblance to some old portrait of a personage of distinction under the Spanish dominion at Naples” (PC 1.269). A detail added in the New York text of Roderick Hudson confirms his Hapsburg identity: “the prince is, among many wonderful things hereditary Grand d’Espagne” (NY 407), the highest rank in the Spanish nobility. His “princely fortune,” the New York text specifies, comes mostly from “his great Sicilian property” (NY 243). The Spanish Hapsburg rulers of Naples and Sicily were Charles IV = Emperor Charles V (1516-54), Philip I = Philip II of Spain (1554-98), Philip II (1598-1621), Philip III (1621-47; 1648-65), Charles V (1665-1700), Charles VI (1713-35). An allusion to the Inquisition (RH 330-31; NY 254-5), which these monarchs would have supervised in the Two Sicilies as well as in Spain, is another recall of Hapsburg history. Christina’s maid Assunta tells her, “You dine at the Austrian Embassy,” and later when she is asked “Going where?” she replies, “To the Spanish Embassy, or whatever it is” (354; NY 289). The international sphere of her social life is a Hapsburg one. Madame Grandoni says: “There is something in the girl, as one looks at her, that seems to make it very possible she is marked out for one of those wonderful romantic fortunes that history now and then relates. ‘Who, after all, was the Empress of the French?’ Mrs. Light is forever saying. ‘And beside Christina the Empress is a dowdy!” (273-4; NY 165). Indeed, Mrs. Light does say so later in the novel: “You may laugh at me if you like, but haven’t such things happened again and again without half as good a cause, and doesn't history notoriously repeat itself? There was a little Spanish girl at a second-rate English boarding-school thirty years ago!... The Empress certainly is a pretty woman; but what is my Christina, pray?” (330; NY 253, “was a pretty woman”). Miss Pynsent has “a portrait of the Empress of the French taken from an illustrated newspaper and framed and glazed in the manner of 1853” (1.58). The Empress Eugénie (1826-1920) was a Spanish countess by birth, just as Sisi was a German duchess. The two rival imperial beauties first met in 1867 in Salzburg, where the much taller Sisi was judged the winner. The two women could pool their miseries when they last met in Cap Martin in 1894.

But Mrs Light prefers her daughter to marry a minor prince rather than a real ruler: “There might be another coup d’état somewhere, and another brilliant young sovereign looking out for a wife! At last however… since the overturning of the poor king of Naples and that charming queen,… and the dreadful radical talk that is going on all over the world, it has come to seem to me that with Christina in such a position I should be really very nervous. Even in such a position she would hold her head very high, and if anything should happen to her, she would make no concessions to the popular fury” (330; NY 253). The reference is to the Bourbon Francesco II, who had reigned for scarcely a year when he was overturned by Garibaldi in 1860. The exiled queen was none other than Sisi’s own favorite sister Maria Sophia (1841-1925), who closely resembled her and was also a famed beauty. Maria indeed held her head high, telling her husband that if he did not lead his troops against Garibaldi, she would do so herself. This is the only explicit reference to Sisi’s immediate family in either novel. Like Sisi, Maria had a troubled marriage, contracted for political reasons at the age of sixteen, and her flight from her husband in 1862 led people to draw parallels with Sisi’s own behavior. She was reconciled with him, and was able to consummate the marriage when he was cured of phimosis, bearing him a short-lived child, Maria Cristina Pia, on Christmas Eve 1869, Sisi’s 32nd birthday. She was Sisi’s hostess and initiator into the hunting world during her English sojourns in 1876 and in 1878, when she upset Crown Prince Rudolf by passing on a rumor about his mother’s relations with Bay Middleton (on whom see John Welcome, The Sporting Empress, 1975). She appears as a character in Proust, where she is praised as a “heroic woman,” “the soldier queen who herself fired shots on the ramparts of Gaeta” (À la recherche du temps perdu, Pléiade edition 3.752), “the glorious sister of the Empress Elisabeth” (3.825). Madame de Verdurin, in wartime, smears her as “a frightful spy” (4.344). Oriane de Guermantes comments on the late Empress: “a little dotty, a little crazy, but a very good woman, kind, dotty, and very lovable” (2.799). She adds a mischievous comment on the Empress’s loose-fitting dentures. Sisi had in fact bad teeth, which even the most expensive dentists could not remedy.

Unlike Sisi, Christina comes from nowhere, and it is her beauty alone that warrants her mother’s squalid ambition. Still the New York text manages to give that beauty historical depth: “Her beauty had a robustness and tone uncommon in the somewhat facile loveliness of our western maidenhood” (266); “her beauty had, in spite of her youth, an air of longer history than consorts, in general, with the rather extemporised look of American loveliness” (NY 154). Christina’s consent to marry Prince Casamassima after the revelation of her illegimacy is intensively rewritten in the New York text. Madame Grandoni says, “The old obloquy attaching to irregular birth is now mere stage convention and melodrama” (much more so when James is rewriting than in 1875). Rowland replies: “Well, Christina has a taste for that—she was glad immediately to be able to see herself in a new high light” (NY 418-19). Both novels see Christina as acting a part. One might say that the part she acts is a parody of that of Sisi, who herself was quite histrionic, whether attempting to be a model empress or fleeing that role to adopt truant or Bohemian ones, or finally the poetic and tragic attitudes of a heroic recluse. Madame Grandoni, who is German despite her Italian name, makes the puzzling statement of the Princess that “she isn’t German, poor lady, any more” (1.210). The meaning is “any more than she is Italian,” but the phrase seems another glancing hint at the Bavarian Sisi. Begun in Florence, Roderick Hudson “was earnestly pursued during a summer partly spent in the Black Forest” (RH viii), and its heroine is linked with Germany at several points. German allusions continue to throng around the Princess in the second novel. Hyacinth refers to Schopenhauer, which the Princess finds “delightful” (2.48); she recurs to that later: “It is most extraordinary, your knowing about Schopenhauer” (295); “your knowing poor dear old ‘Schop.’” (2.59); he refers back to this in his letter to her from Venice, calling Schopenhauer “that musty misogynist” (2.142), a view shared by Sisi, though both she and Ludwig II “revered the philosophy of Schopenhauer” (Hamann). In the last scene she says to the sinister Schinkel: “You’re English is remarkably good—I wish I spoke German as well” (2.424). Again, James seems to play ironically with the originally German identity of his model.

Parallel Beauties

Christina first appears as “a young girl, apparently of about twenty. She was tall and slender, and dressed with extreme elegance; she led by a cord a large poodle of the most fantastic aspect” (229). Sisi’s tallness (172 cm) and slimness were much commented on as was her elegance of dress. Her hour-glass waist was along with her hair her most celebrated physical feature. She was also a dog-lover. Sisi’s dazzling beauty was her most celebrated attribute. Beauty ran in the family, among her sisters, and also in Ludwig II and Crown Prince Rudolf. In her late twenties she grew in self-confidence as “she felt more every day the power of her beauty over her husband, but also over the entire outer world” (Corti). Lady Aurora comments on Christina: “She might do so many other things. She might charm the world” (2.192). Rosy Muniment thinks that “the Princess might be anything, she might be royal or imperial” (2.205). Hyacinth notes a “divine power of conciliation” as “the most wonderful of her secrets” (2.209). These references point beyond the actual Christina to her ideal potential, which coincides with the ideal image of Sisi, whose charm at least in the early years played a great role in Austrian politics. “It was not deference, however, her face provoked, but startled, submissive admiration; Roderick’s smile fell dead, and he sat eagerly staring. A pair of extraordinary dark blue eyes, a mass of dusky hair over a low forehead, a blooming oval of perfect purity, a flexible lip, just touched with disdain, the step and carriage of a tired princess—these were the general features of his vision” (229). Sisi’s most distinctive physical feature was her dusky hair, reaching to her feet, and tended with elaborate daily care. Her portraits do not show a low forehead except when the hair covers it, but her face could be described as oval. Christina’s hair is highlighted at several points: “Before him sat Christina Light, in a white dress, with her shoulders bare, her magnificent hair twisted into a classic coil, and her head admirably poised. Meeting Rowland’s gaze, she smiled a little, only with her deep gray eyes, without moving. She looked divinely beautiful” (279; NY 170, “divinely fair”).

"Christina, still in her white dress, with her shoulders bare, was standing before a mirror, readjusting her hair, the arrangement of which, on this occasion, had apparently not met the young sculptor's approval…. As Rowland entered, Christina was losing patience. “Do it yourself, then!” she cried, and with a rapid movement unloosed the great coil of her tresses and let them fall over her shoulders. They were magnificent, and with her perfect face dividing their rippling flow she looked like some immaculate saint of legend being led to martyrdom." (282; NY 178)

"“Mamma’s not really shocked,” added Christina in a moment, as if she had guessed her mother’s by-play. “She is only afraid that Mr. Hudson might have injured my hair, and that, per consequenza, I should sell for less.” “You unnatural child!” cried mamma. “You deserve that I should make a fright of you!” And with half a dozen skillful passes she twisted the tresses into a single picturesque braid, placed high on the head, as a kind of coronal (283; NY 179, producing the effect of a coronet)."

In the New York text of Roderick Hudson, James upgrades his accounts of Christina and Prince Casamassima in a more splendidly imperial direction. Here are some examples: "There she stands in her incomparable beauty, and Roman princes come and bow to her (297); there she stands in all her grace, and les grands de la terre come and do her homage "(NY 151). "She has been told… that her face is a fortune, and that, if she plays her cards, she may marry a duke" (273); "that her face is her fortune, that she was made for great things, and that if she plays her cards she may marry God knows whom" (NY 164). "He had the great quality of regarding himself in a thoroughly serious light (322); with his dim aspirations and alarms, he felt himself in charge of the very highest interests" (NY 241). "A race of princes who for six hundred years have married none but the daughters if princes (322); who for endless generations have sought brides only with some correspondence of name and condition" (NY 241-2). "She would be forced. There would be circumstances (323); There would be circumstances, conditions, necessities, des raisons majeures" (NY 243). "An old uncle, Monsignor B——" (324); "an old uncle, a high ecclesiastic, a Cardinal probably of the next batch" (NY 243). "She would make too perfect a princess to miss her destiny" (325); "She would fill a great position too perfectly to miss her destiny" (NY 245). "Her hair reached down to her feet, her hands were the hands of a princess" (329); "of an empress" (NY 251). "I have raised money on that girl’s face! I’ve taken her to the Jews and bade her put up her veil (329); put off her veil and let down her hair, show her teeth, her shoulders, her arms, all sorts of things" (NY 252).

The veil is to hide Christina’s angelic and dazzling beauty when she is ten; James subscribes thoroughly to the myth of unparalleled beauty, which in real life grew up about Sisi; the aging Sisi used veils and fans to hide the decay of that beauty. In the second novel, the drama of her dazzling beauty is replayed: “The simplest way to express the instant effect upon Hyacinth of her fair face of welcome is to say that she dazzled him” (1.205-6). “She was fair, shining, slender, with an effortless majesty…. Her dark eyes, blue or grey, something that was not brown…. The head, where two or three diamond stars glittered in the thick, delicate hair which defined its shape, suggested to Hyacinth something antique and celebrated” (1.207). A famous portrait of Sisi by Franz Xaver Winterhalter shows just such diamond stars in her hair. This is a very clear allusion to Sisi. James would have known this painting of 1864 because “countless reproductions, above all of the image in ballroom dress with the diamond stars (Diamentensternen) in the hair, made Sisi’s beauty known worldwide” (Hamann). “Her dress was dark and rich; she had pearls round her neck and an old rococo fan in her hand” (1.208), “her painted fan” (1.223). Her stature is again noted. “She smiled down at Hyacinth—who even as he stood up was of slightly smaller stature—with all her strange high radiance” (1.298). “She had still the air of youth” (at the time of composition of the novel the real-life Sisi would be in her late forties). Sisi’s youthfulness at this age was considered phenomenal. As to the color of Christina’s eyes, which here as in the earlier novel varies between blue and gray, one may recall the famous changing hues of Emma Bovary’s eyes.

The beauty trope is often simply repeated in the rewriting of Roderick Hudson: “she’s one of the great beauties of all time” (360: NY 296); “the most beautiful girl in Europe” (388; NY 339). But it is sometimes played down: “if my daughter is the greatest beauty in the world, some of the credit is mine” (326); “if my daughter is the gifted creature you see, I deserve some of the credit of the creation (NY 248). Sometimes it is enhanced: “the same indifferent tread” (330); “the same Olympian command of the air, as it were, not less than of the earth” (NY 254). “Her complexion, her glance, her step, her dusky tresses, may have been seen before in a goddess, but never in a woman” (360); “the planting and the mass of her dusky tresses, may have been seen before in a goddess on a cloud or a nymph on a Greek gem, but never in a mere modern girl” (NY 296-7). The multiplication of Greek allusions might reflect James’s awareness of Sisi’s Hellenism later in life; she built a palace in Corfu and learned modern Greek so well that she translated two plays by Shakespeare into it.

The New York version of The Princess Casamassima has some touches of a similar upgrading: “luminous sweetness” and “delicate consideration” (148) become “luminous charity” and “direct tenderness” (1.212), matching more precisely the impact of Sisi; “the Princess’s sharpest anxieties” (381) become “the eminent lady’s high anxieties” (2.183). “In her behaviour, the unexpected was the only thing to be looked for” (364) is rephrased to yield a deeper characterization: “the note of her conduct would always be a sort of splendour of freedom” (2.159-60). Her “brilliant mildness” (335) becomes a “glory of gentleness” (2.160). The vocabulary of “splendour” and “glory” exalts the personage. But “a sort of glorious charity” (365) becomes “a rapture of active ministering charity” (2.160). In both texts, when she visits the invalid Rose Muniment, “she had put off her splendour… made herself humble for her pious excursion” (365; 2.160).

The rewriting of Roderick Hudson enhances the portrayal of Christina in the light of her later development: “Christina, I suspect is very clever” (273): “Christina, I imagine, has plenty of wit—also plenty of will” (NY 164). (Mrs Light, in reply to Rowland’s question whether Christina really cares for Casamassima.) “She is a living riddle. She must needs follow out every idea that comes into her head. Fortunately, most of them don’t last long” (326); “Even to me who have so known and so watched her she’s a living riddle. She has ideas of her own, and theories and views and inspirations, each of which is the best in the world until another is better. She’s perfectly sure about each, but they are fortunately so many that she can’t be sure of any one very long” (NY 247-8). “She is generous” (360); “she’s intelligent and bold and free and so awfully on the lookout for sensations” (NY 297).

As in the case of Sisi, Christina’s beauty is subordinate to a charm of personality: “he declared if Miss Light were inordinately plain, she would still be the most fascinating of women. ‘I’ve quite forgotten her beauty,’ he said, ‘or rather I have ceased to perceive it as something distinct and defined, something independent of the rest of her. She is all one, and all consummately interesting!’” (RH 288). For “the most fascinating of women” the New York text has, rather flatly, “the most wonderful of women and the best conceivable company” (NY 187). “She is never the same” (288); “She’s never the same, and you never know how she’ll be. And it’s not for a pose—it’s because there are fifty of her” (NY 187). James compliments himself on the portrait of Christina: “The multiplication of touches had produced even more life than the subject required” (NY xx). But very many of these touches are drawn from the real-life Sisi, who was a living encyclopedia of female charm and fascination.

Other Parallels

Once we have this thread, parallels between the real Empress and the fictional Princess spring into view. Sisi’s vivid intellectual and contemplative life is mirrored in Christina’s: “she was full of resources…, she found time to read, to write, to commune with her piano and above all to think” (2.195). Like Sisi, Christina “asked personal questions with a directness that was sometimes embarrassing to the subject” (2.196-7). Like Sisi, she is “an immense walker” ch 22 268; “‘I’ve come on foot from the far south of London—how many miles? four or five?—and I’m not a particle tired.’ ‘Che forza, che forza!’ the old woman sighed. ‘She’ll knock you up completely’” (2.180). Her vitality is emphasized: “Hyacinth was struck more than ever by the fund of life that was in her, the energy of feeling, the high free reckless spirit” (2.177). The frequent occurrence of the word “high” echoes language of royalty in Vienna, where the Emperor and Empress were normally referred to as “high” personages.

The conclusion of chapter 33 may hint at a lesbian characterization of Christina: “She and Lady Aurora were evidently on the point of striking up a tremendous intimacy, and as he turned this idea over walking away it made him sad for strange vague reasons that he couldn’t have expressed” (2.202). Sisi has often been the subject of such speculation, given her great affection for beautiful women and the lack of proof of sexual relations with men other than her husband; that James was clued in to such matters is clear from the immediately preceding novel, The Bostonians. Madame Grandoni assures the Prince that his wife’s crimes are merely political: “If she were a real wretch, capable of all (1886, 468-9: ‘a licentious woman’), she wouldn’t behave as she does now, she wouldn’t expose herself to the supposition (1886, ‘irresistible interpretations’)” (2.310). But she does have an affair with Paul Muniment.

The Princess is accompanied by a Captain Sholto just as Elizabeth was accompanied by Captain George “Bay” Middleton? Middleton was rather an ugly man, though striking in the saddle. Paul Muniment calls Sholto a “tout” for the Princess, and herself a “monster” (1.258-9). Like Middleton, Sholto has been “in camps and courts” (1.255). As Miss Pynsent perceives, he is “some kind of uncanny masquerader” (1.260)—again underlining the unreality of the Captain’s behavior,—and perhaps an element of unreality pervading the novel. Middleton was Scotch, and Sholto is a boy’s name in Scotland, that of the legendary progenitor of the Douglas clan. Sholto holds that she is “the cleverest woman in Europe,” but is lacking in heart: “The Princess isn’t troubled with that sort of thing” (2.71; 303: “The Princess hasn’t”). Ironically, Sholto like Bay Middleton is a hunter, but the Princess unlike Sisi despises the sport: “He had travelled all over the globe several times, ‘for the shooting,’ in that brutal way of the English” (311); expanded with feeling in the New York edition: “in that murdering ravaging way of the English, the destruction, the extirpation of creatures more beautiful, more soaring and more nimble than themselves” (2.82). It is hard to see how Sholto can set himself up as her adorer and why he is tolerated by the Princess as a hanger-on without the shared passion for hunting that brought Middleton and Sisi together. In real life Middleton preempted the end of the relationship by riding off; Sisi, no doubt offended, was silent; losing a ring of hers that he carried round his neck, Middleton took it as an omen, and in fact died in a race three weeks later.

The first interview of Prince Casamassima with Madame Grandoni captures many traits of Sisi — “expensive and luxurious” (1.274)—her shopping expeditions were a bursar’s nightmare—whereas the Prince lives frugally, as Franz Joseph did. “Christina will never consider you—your name, your illustrious traditions—in any case in which she doesn’t consider herself much more” (1.277). A minor Italian prince would not be concerned about his wife’s behavior in London, but in the case of an Empress it could be an international incident.

Christina, like Sisi, is, as Hyacinth perceives, “proudly, ironically reserved, even to the point of passing with many people as a model of the unsatisfactory” (1.294). How would Hyacinth know this? But it is a trait of Sisi that would be known to the thousands gossipping about her all over Europe. Hyacinth has the right blend of awe, discretion, and adoration for encountering such a high personage: “He hadn’t made such an ass of himself as might very well have happened; he had been saved by the thrill of his interest and admiration, which has not gone to his head and prompted him to show that he too in his improbable little way was remarkable, but had kept him in a state of anxious, conscious tension, as if the occasion had been a great appointed solemnity, some initiation more formal than any he believed practised even in the grimmest subterranean circles” (1.295). All of this is more suited to imperial royalty than to a minor Italian princess.

His response to Christina’s bibelots again carries overtones of Sisi’s collecting habits: they reveal “the character of a woman of high fashion…. their beauty and oddness revealed not only whole provinces of art, but refinements of choice on the part of their owner, complications of mind and—almost—terrible depths of temperament” (1.285). Christina’s combination of charm and majesty is again Sisi’s: “And in this peculiar high grace of her presence he couldn’t have told you if she struck him as more proud or more kind” (1.285). “He found himself discussing the Bacchus and Ariadne and the Elgin Marbles with one of the most remarkable women in Europe” (1.286). Hyacinth reminds us a little of Keats here, and Tintner has suggested that Christina is his Lamia. Christina describes art as “a synthesis made in the interest of pleasure” (1.287). She talks irreverently of her husband, telling Hyacinth that she hadn’t seen “for nearly three years” (1.287), which matches Sisi’s much-discussed absences of years from the Viennese court. Christina asks about Pinnie and in response to Hyacinth’s description of her as “old and tired and sad and not very successful” she replies in a rather narcissistic way, “Ah, well, she’s not the only one!” At the date of writing Sisi would have been approaching fifty and would have been well known to feel exactly what those four epithets indicate. “All I ask of my husband is to let me alone. But he won’t. He won’t return my indifference” (1.288-9) again corresponds to Sisi’s situation, as does the following exchange: “‘It can’t be easy to be indifferent to you.’ ‘Why not if I’m odious? I can be—oh there’s no doubt of that!” (1.289). She claims to have been “extremely reasonable” with her husband (as Sisi was with hers in arranging his friendship with the actress Katharina Schratt [1853-1940] as a compensation for her own desertion), and that “most of the wrongs—the big ones, those that settled the question—have been on his side. You may tell me of course that that’s the pretension of every woman who’s made a mess of her marriage” (1.289). Sisi reproached Franz Joseph with his philanderings early in their marriage; she saw herself as the victim of his family. But the basic wrong was to have married her at all (at age sixteen). As for Christina, “bored to death by her royal spouse, and taking revenge upon him for his ‘mysterious crime’—and what a convenient one!—she throws herself into all kinds of social causes with more fervor than discrimination… a discontented, bored, neurotic and empty society woman struggling to amuse herself” (Maxwell Geismar). Sadly, this description perfectly fits the beloved Empress as well.

“He has conducted himself after the fashion of a spoiled child, a childe with a bad little nature, in a rage; he had been fatally wanting in dignity and wisdom and had given the Princess an advantage which she took on the spot and would keep for ever. He had acted without manly judgement, had put his uncles upon her (as if she cared for his uncles, powerful prelate as one of them might be!), had been suspicious and jealous on exactly the wrong occasions—occasions as to which her resentment of it had been just and in particular had been showy” (1.302; 213: “occasions on which such ideas were a gratuitous injury”). “This was how you spoiled your affairs most of all—by treating a person (and such a person!) as if, as a matter of course, she lied” (1.306). “At the bottom then of much that she does is the fact that she’s ashamed of having married you” (1.307). As in Sisi’s case, it is impossible to disentangle the marital disappointment, the subersive resentment of the established order, and the deeper metaphysical disillusionment.

Disillusionment

Melancholy and disillusionment are basic to Christina’s character, as to Sisi’s. She looks as if “the soul of a world-wearied mortal had found its way into the blooming body of a goddess”; “‘Where in the world has Miss Light been before she is twenty,’ observers asked, ‘to have left all her illusions behind?’” (RH 294; NY 198). “I am tired to death of myself; I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet” (301; NY 208). “I am weary, I am more lonely than ever, I wish I were dead!” (369; NY 311, “weary and dreary”). In the second novel her disillusion have become a settled state: “There’s nothing in life in which I’ve not been awfully disappointed” (1.291).

Religion too has faded: “I had the real religious passion. It has passed away” (RH 346; NY 278: “I had for three months—positively—the perfect vocation”). Rowland finds this unconvincing: “She liked to idealize herself, to take interesting and picturesque attitudes to her own imagination” (346); “She liked to carry herself further and further, to see herself in situation and action” (NY 278). The religious note is secularized in the New York edition: Rowland no longer says “I believe in God” (347), but “I’m very old-fashioned. I believe in the grand old English Bible” (NY 279). She expresses disillusion: “I was a little wrinkled old woman at ten” (347; NY 279). She asks, “Please tell me about your religion” (348; NY 280, “your faith”). He replies elusively: “It is simply a sentiment that makes part of my life, and I can’t detach myself from it sufficiently to talk about it” (348); “Such things—one’s way of meeting, morally, the mystery of the universe—lie very deep down, at the bottom of one’s trunk. One can’t always put one’s hand on them in a moment” (NY 280). This echoes the famous exchange in Faust (1.3413-68) in which the protagonist explains his nebulous religiosity to the perplexed Gretchen, again surrounding Christina with German atmosphere. Christina descants on religion in a long passage which disappears in the later text: “Beware, then, of finding yourself confronted with doubt and despair! I am sure that doubt, at times, and the bitterness that comes of it, can be terribly eloquent. To tell the truth, my lonely musings, before you came in, were eloquent enough in their way. What do you know of anything but this strange, terrible world that surrounds you? How do you know that your faith is not a mere crazy castle in the air…. Nothing is true, or fixed, or permanent. We all seem to be playing with shadows more or less grotesque. It all comes over me here so dismally! The very atmosphere of this cold, deserted church seems to mock at one’s longing to believe in something. Who cares for it now, who comes to it, who believes in it?… And yet the Catholic church was once the proudest institution in the world…. When such a mighty structure as that turns out to have a flaw, what faith is one to put in one’s poor little views and philosophies?” (348-9). Such discourse actually fits the real life Sisi better than the fictional Christina. Despite this, Christina does take a religious turn: “One day she got up in the depths of despair; at her wit’s end, I suppose, in other words, for a new sensation. Suddenly it occurred to her that the Catholic church might after all hold the key” (407). This, too, is omitted in the New York edition. These omissions show James focussing on the psychology of religion and withdrawing from theological discussion, for which he was poorly qualified and which was a threat to the integrity of his art. In The Princess Casamassima Christina is a Catholic: “I’m a Catholic, you know—but so little by my own doing!” (2.198; 1886 text, 391: “—but so little!”). “I don’t know if I’m religious or whether if I were my religion would be superstitious, but my superstitions are what I’m faithful to” (2.17; 266: “are certainly religious”). Sholto tells Hyacinth that “she wanted to cultivate a belief in ghosts” (2.75); her attitude to her superstitions is that of a collector. Sisi dabbled in spiritualism. Like Sisi, she has bursts of piety, but not of a standard ecclesiastical kind. When Hyacinth tells her “he would have conformed to the great religious rule—to live each hour as if it were to be one’s last,” she replies, “In holiness, you mean—in great recueillement?” (294; 2.57). She herself is an object of worship. Roderick uses the language of the divine: “that goddess of the Villa Ludovisi” (264; NY 151); “She’s a goddess” (270); “The daughter’s simply a breathing goddess” (NY 160). “To dance the cotillon with Miss Light” (299) becomes in the New York text, “to dance a cotillon with a divinity” (NY 206). “And then her mouth! It’s as if a pair of lips had been shaped to utter pure truth without doing it dishonor!” (288): “And then her divine mouth—it might really be that of a goddess! It’s as if a pair of lips had been shaped just not to utter all the platitudes and all the pretences” (NY 187). For his part, Hyacinth “questioned if she were really of the same substance with the humanity he had hitherto known. She might be divine but he could see she understood human needs” (1.207). He speaks of her “hands divine” (2.145). Roderick and Hyacinth have similar perceptions of her formal graces. Roderick admires “the extraordinary perfection of her beauty. ‘I had no idea of it,’ he said, ‘till I began to look at her with an eye to reproducing line for line and curve for curve. Her face is the most exquisite piece of modeling that ever came from creative hands. Not a line without meaning, not a hair’s breadth that is not admirably finished” (288; NY 186-7). Hyacinth is struck by “purity of line and form, of cheek and chin and lip and brow, a colour that seemed to live and glow, a radiance of grace and eminence and success” (1.207). Her first worshipper was her mother, on discovering her beauty as a child: “I worshipped her” (RH 328; NY 251). Madame Grandoni says, “She always looks the same: like an angel who came down from heaven yesterday and has been disappointed in her first day on earth” (1.272). In Rose Muniment’s dwelling, she is “like a radiant angel” visiting a corner of earth (2.160), and “had cast the charm of the worshipful over the little company” (2.162; 1986, 366: “thrown a spell of adoration”). Christina may be adored for her beauty, but she is exposed to criticism from the start. Paul Muniment suspects “she’s an idle, bedizened trifler; perhaps even a real profligate female” (1.230). “Profligate” refers to the suspicion that the young men the Princess picks up were also her sexual partners; similar rumor swirled around Sisi, though probably baseless. But by the end of the second novel, much disillusionment with Christina has set in. The question whether she is “humbug” is bruited (2.194); Hyacinth finds himself sympathizing with her much-abused husband (2.317); Millicent calls her “your trumpery Princess” (2.337). The Romanian philosopher Émile Cioran found deep significance in the figure of Sisi: “She was totally desenganada, disabused, cut off from the world. She was not interested in the ideological debates of her epoch [a difference from James’s Princess], her formation being principally literary…. She would have been disappointed in any circumstances; she was born disappointed.” “‘Madness is truer than life,’ the empress said, and she could have reached this conclusion without the help of a single disappointment. Why did she like Shakespeare’s fools so much? Why did she visit lunatic asylums wherever she went? She had a marked passion for what is extreme, for everything that differs from the common fate, for everything on the margins. She knew that madness was within herself, and this threat flattered her perhaps. The feeling of her singularity sustained her.” “I think that she was incapable of experiencing a real passion. The illusion that this inevitably entails would no doubt have been impossible for her. Perhaps she fell in love as a game.” What Cioran says about Sisi’s love-life applies with perfect accuracy to Christina. “She detested people, with the exception of the little folk, fishermen, peasants, village idiots. She was in her element only during her solitary ruminations…. What is going to happen, the next act in the historical tragedy of Europe, already unfolded in Vienna, the symbol henceforth of collapse. Without this grandiose backdrop, Sissi would only have been an unhoped-for subject for biographers, or a goddess for the ravaged. Tsarist Russia was not so lucky as to have a comparable figure at its close.” “The obsessions, fads, and oddities of a Sissi could take an extra charge of meaning only in an epoch that was going to culminate in a model catastrophe. This is why the figure of the empress is so significant, and why we understand her better than did her contemporaries.”

Subversion

“Nothing in Roderick Hudson suggests the revolutionary princess of the later novel. Somewhere, then, James is likely to have seen or heard or read about a beautiful, romantic lady who, separated from her husband and defying the aristocratic name, took an active part in revolution” (Tilley). But James would have followed Sisi’s career in the newspapers and in conversation, and noted her rather subversive activities in England and Ireland in the late 1870s. In Ireland, in 1879 and 1880, she had been greeted by adoring crowds, at a time when Queen Victoria, well received in her visits of 1849, 1853, and 1861, was unpopular, returning for a last visit only in 1900. Sisi could well have been regarded as fomenting rebellion. Sympathetic to the revolutionary ideas of 1848 she had used her influence to set up the Kingdom of Hungary in 1867, splitting the Austrian Empire in two. The new notes in the character of Christina Light roughly correspond to new aspects of Elisabeth’s character that had come to the fore since the publication of Roderick Hudson. James must have been aware of Queen Victoria’s disapproval of Sisi’s influence in Ireland. He wanted to go to Ireland in order to “see a country in a state of revolution.” (letter to Thomas S. Perry, Jan. 1886). On one of her hunts, in 1879, she penetrated the precincts of Maynooth College, the national seminary (my alma mater), which Victoria suspected of encouraging Fenian sympathies, and she was made much of by the priests and seminarians, on two further visits as well. Her second visit to Ireland in 1880 prompted Victoria to tell Franz Joseph to recall his wife. Unprecedently, he commanded, and she obeyed. Her host in Ireland, ironically, was Earl Spencer, ancestor of Princess Diana. Sisi’s political outlook is now better known thanks to her verse diary, with its withering satire on her husband’s family and on Queen Victoria’s. She planned that it would be published in 1950, “in favor of those unfortunates who are branded criminals for their political struggles and libertarian inclinations” (Corti). In a changed world, it finally became public eighty-six years after her death: Kaiserin Elisabeth, Das poetische Tagebuch, ed. Brigitte Hamann (Vienna, 1984).

Sisi pretended to scorn class distinctions and to cherish the people, which endeared her to the people of Hungary and of Ireland, and she is still recalled in Munich and Vienna today as “the people’s Empress.” But it was a role she played increasingly rarely, generally cherishing her solitude. It endeared her to the people of Hungary and of Ireland, and she is still recalled in Munich and Vienna today as “the people’s Empress.” Christina’s interest in “the people” is a repetitive trope in The Princess Casamassima: “I like to know all sorts of people” (1.209). “We take a great interest in the people” (1.212) Christina finds English society boring — “it’s the common people who please her” (1.278)—this description applies to the rapturous love affair between Sisi and the common people of Hungary and Ireland. James’s detection of the psychological motive of this interest is acute: “She would be world-weary—that was another of her notes; and the extravagance of her attitude in these new relations would have its root and its apparent logic in her need to feel freshly about something or other” (1.xix). “She wishes to throw herself into the revolution, to guide it, to enlighten it” Madame Grandoni explains (1.220). She later warns Hyacinth of those “who even think it useful to throw bombs into innocent crowds and shoot pistols at their rulers” (1.283), ironic in view of Sisi’s fate at an assassin’s dagger in 1898. “The pronunciation of her words and the very punctuation of her sentences were the revelation of what he supposed to be society—the very Society to the destruction of which he was dedicated” (1.216). The anarchist Lucheni, full of resentment at the ruling classes who could afford to stay in the best hotels and who set to limits to their greed. “I’m one of thousands of young men of my class—you know, I suppose, what that is—in whose brains certain ideas are fermenting” (1.216). She replies, “You’re much more interesting to me than if you were an exception” (1.217). Showing off her bookbinder to Lady Marchant and her daughters is “an episode from which the Princess appeared to derive an exquisite gratification” (295) or as the New York edition has it, “that appeared to minister in the Princess to a thorough ironic glee” (2.59). He asks why not tell them who he was: “Otherwise, where was the point” (2.59) and she replies that they’d not have believed her.

The decline of Christina in the second novel—“She has degenerated into a bored and willful woman, who seeks excitement in undermining a society whose greatest flaw, in her eyes, is its dullness” (M. E. Grenander)—bespeaks a deeper distress, again analogous to that of Sisi. As Millicent Bell observes: “There is a tragic side to the Princess, even if James’s tone in treating her represses it.” She is in the line of Daisy Miller, “young women whose resistance to a preconcluded definition is the essence of their ordeal.” But her drama is more complex and elusive than this suggests, and again mirrors the complexity of the real-life model. The young Christina of Roderick Hudson might invite comparison with Daisy Miller, but the mature Princess is beyond that. Christina “haunted James as someone whose destiny could not easily be concluded and even in this novel she remains unconcluded” (Bell), as Sisi’s destiny remained unconcluded when James wrote. “Like Isabel she is in search of some adequate employment of her superior character, and cannot find it” (Bell)—that sentence fits Sisi so well that it could serve as her epitaph!

Though professing “very little respect for distinctions of class” (1.289), Christina may remain intensely class-conscious, taking a perverse delight in acting as if she were déclassée. Hyacinth imagines that “perhaps it was her habit to sent out every evening for some witless stranger to amuse her” (1.212). The social obstacles are a challenge she delights to brave. An obscure Italian princess in exile might be described as “a woman in my position, who’s tiresomely known, and to whom every sort of bad faith is sure to be imputed” (1.216), but the description better fits Sisi, dogged by paparazzi and the object of incessant public commentary. Even in the strange final scene in which the Princess and Schinkel keep watch outside Hyacinth’s room, until finally they break down the door and discover his dead body, touches reminiscent of Sisi are added: “She was used to the last vulgarity of stare and didn’t mind it” (2.424; 548: “She was used to being looked at hard”). She pays the cab over-generously, and in response to Schinkel’s observation, “You gave him too much,” replies, “Oh, he looked like a nice man. I am sure he deserved it” (550; 2.426). A similar scene is depicted in Sisi’s Greek tutor Constantin Christomanos’s adoring memoir: “The Empress bade me give the young man a gold coin: ‘If it was a matter of helping us over a greater obstacle, I’d have given him tenfold,’ see said with the satisfied smile of inner triumph.” Even at the end her anxiety about Hyacinth does not suspend her aesthetizing and self-dramatizing outlook: “The Princess was anxious, was in a fever; but she could still relish the romance of standing in a species of back slum and fraternising with a personage so like a very tame horse whose collar galled him” (2.424).

Christina’s relations with her husband’s family are exactly Sisi’s with her in-laws: “My husband traces his descent from the fifth century, and he’s the greatest bore in Europe. That’s the kind of people I was condemned to by my marriage” (1.291). The Hapsburgs traced their lineage to the founder of the family, Adalrich, Duke of Alsace, who died after c. 683 AD. They may have regarded the young Sisi as privileged to marry into them. As to Christina, the Casamassima family “considered that they had done her a great honour in receiving her into their august circle (putting the best face on a bad business) after they had moved heaven and earth to keep her out of it” (1.294). “What she had had to suffer from their family tone… had evidently planted in her soul a lasting resentment and contempt” (1.295).

“Hyacinth gathered that the force of reaction and revenge might carry her far, make her modern and democratic and heretical à outrance—lead her to swear by Darwin and Spencer and all the scientific iconoclasts as well as by the revolutionary spirit” (1.295). Sisi had shown these attitudes above all in taking in hand the education of her precocious son Rudolf, whom she supplied with teachers representing precisely these attitudes in science, politics, and religion, with a strong dash of anticlericalism. “Heretical” is an odd quality to ascribe the Italian-born American woman, but had precise connotations in Catholic Austria. But here it could refer to social “heresies” like those of Lady Aurora (1.291).

Like Sisi “she had never been in America, and knew very little about it, though she wanted greatly to cross the Atlantic” (1.292); a statement that does not quite fit the daughter of an American woman. She speaks of Fate as Sisi did: “her destiny might require her to take some step” (1.293). Again pure Sisi: “her disgust with a thousand social arrangements, her rebellion against the selfishness, the corruption, the iniquity, the cruelty, the imbecillity of the people who all over Europe had the upper hand” (1.293).

Sisi was notoriously self-obsessed, and it is to escape such self-obsession that Christina wants “to throw herself into some effort that would make her forget her own affairs and comprehend the troubles and efforts of others” (1.293). James indicates that her political slumming is but a further twist in her self-obsession. Sisi’s atttude to her social obligations is replicated in Christina’s: “I’ve got to pay stupid visits myself, visits where the only comfort will be that I shall make the people jump” (1.298). The public was well apprised of Sisi’s marital dissatisfaction. She frequently wished that her husband had never seen her, and after the Mayerling tragedy in 1889 rued that she had brought the madness of her Bavarian family into her husband’s family.

The Prince is suspicious of “this English Captain… Godfrey Gerald Cholto” and Madame Grandoni assures him that “he doesn’t count the least little bit” (1.308). “‘Isn’t he then in love with her?’ ‘Naturally. He has however no hope…. He accepts the situation better than you. He occupies himself—as she has strongly recommended him in my hearing to do—with other women!” (1.309). Sholto may be “creeping after stags in the Highlands” (1.323), matching the Scotch huntsman Middleton. Dragged into spying on Paul and Christina by her jealous husband, Hyacinth—here repeatedly given the manlier title “Mr. Robinson”—“felt his heart beat insanely, ignobly” (2.324), with jealousy. He is as much in love with Paul as with Christina, or perhaps more, to judge from such passages as this: “he merged himself, resting happy for the time, in the consciousness that Paul was a grand fellow, that friendship was a purer feeling than love and that there was an immense deal of affection between them. He didn’t even observe at that moment that it was preponderantly on his own side” (2:219). The Princess does not introduce him into real Society, and “her feeling for him is erotically indifferent and coldly curious—at best, coldly maternal” (Bell). The men Sisi patronized were useful to her education, and replaced when they had served that purpose. “It is because he is a citizen of that netherworld” (Bell) that Hyacinth replaces Sholto, but he disappoints Christina by being too aristocratic to really represent it and is replaced by the more rough-hewn Paul. Hyacinth’s love for Christina is that of a son seeking a mother. His premonition of danger to her takes on extra pathos if we think of Sisi: “dearest Princess, if anything should happen to you—! But his voice fell; the horror of it, a dozen hideous images of her possible perversity and her possible punishment were again before him, as he had already seen them in sinister musings” (2.405-6). James might be credited with some premonitory intuition here and in his account of Christina’s discovery of the dead Hyacinth. Three years after he wrote, Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself and his willing companion Baroness Vetsera, at the Mayerling hunting-lodge, in the most shocking incident of Sisi’s reign, which left her a desolate Mater Dolorosa clad in black for the rest of her life.

Hyacinth, recently orphaned a second time by the loss of his adoptive mother Pinnie, seeks in Christina a mother about all, and is crushed by her final indifference: “She turned from him as with a beat of great white wings that raised her straight out of the bad air of the personal. It took her up too high, it put an end to their talk; expressing an indifference to what it might interest him to think of her today, and even a contempt for it, that brought tears to his eyes” (2.406; the image of the wings, added in the New York text, may owe something to The Wings of the Dove). Hyacinth, like Roderick, is crushed by the onward march of Christina, who seals his destiny. But her own destiny is still wide open at the end of the story, and there are intimations that it will be a dark one.

Appendix: here is another example of how the failure to identity the real model generates unconvincing postulates:

"Another Model for Christina Light" by B. Richards, Brasenose College, Oxford University (The Henry James Review 5 (Fall 1983):60-65.

"One feels a certain need to find an original or originals for Christina since her character is so rich and full—so full, in fact, that James realized that he had not exhausted her possibilities in one book, and re-introduced her in The Princess Casamassima. I am anxious to suggest a supplementary source for Christina not because we need someone in the background of reality to be convinced of her plausibility—she is a powerful creation in her own right, and needs no support—but because opening our minds to the possibility that a fictional character may have several reallife prototypes forces us to relinquish literalist readings of fiction and to have greater respect for the artist's creative and inventive imagination. Christina Light is not a portrait of a single historical individual, but an invention, with traits of a number of women. This essay is a further contribution to a picture of James's creative methods, and, as we shaU see, also a contribution to the study of his methods of textual revision. Elena Lowe is sufficiently convincing as a source, so far as the beauty and the enigmatic quality of Christina Light are concerned, and doubtless she provided a touch of Christina's irresponsibility, but there are other features that we do not find in her, and for these we have to turn to another American expatriate of James's Roman years: Eleanor Strong. More than any other woman James knew at this time, she was capricious, and this was the dominant adjective for Christina Light. On the available evidence, she contributed as much to the creation of James's heroine as Elena Lowe and Mrs. Wister. James came across Eleanor Strong in Rome in 1869. She was in the American circle in which he moved; he first met her through his relation Mrs. Ward. He described her as "a very sweet and agreeable woman" with a "youthful and precocious daughter" (HJL I, 173). She was living away from her husband, Charles Edward Strong, as she had been since 1866."

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Hidden in Plain View: The Model of the Princess Casamassima

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