Myers’ picks up on this concept of concrete literature in opposition to the abstractions of modernity (more on this below). Rather than the abstractions of modernity, located in endless statistical study and the claims of scientism, the contemplative realist writes his insights into particular characters, stories, devices, and words. Hren terms such a person a “contemplative realist.” This kind of author “invites us to be bothered by our hapless treatment of nature as mere spectacle,” and seeks to “correct the pantheistic compassion and the algebraic abstraction of Modernity.” The contemplative realist causes the reader to encounter the real, and in so doing live in alignment with it. In a world where secularism reigns, the task of the aspiring literati involves re-enchanting the mind to apprehend the real. He describes late modernity as suffering from a lack of attention to the fullness of reality: we “were born under the halogen star of secularism,” and as such are much more attuned to consumerist trends than non-material reality. In 62 pages, Hren develops a vision for the kind of author late modernity needs: the contemplative realist. These authors share a common project, and merit consideration together to help the reader perceive how literature can ground our apprehension of the real. Where one might expect to find substantive differences between a Catholic and Protestant approach to literary aesthetics, these authors complement each other and show the recognition across Christian scholarship that engagement with the arts aligns with a biblical “metaphysical dream.” While Myers does not reference Hren’s scholarship, Hren includes Myers’ poem “The Reverend on Natural Theology” as an example of the kind of challenge the contemplative realist must meet. In contrast to a meaningless world governed by power dynamics and identity politics, these authors propose that a Christian vision of reality understands the world as meaningful and the task of literature as expressing that meaning in a beautiful way. Joshua Hren’s Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto and Benjamin Myers’s A Poetics of Orthodoxy: Christian Truth as Aesthetic Foundation express dismay at the nihilistic turn in literary studies but offer something substantive and inspiring, indeed, insightful, in its place. Two slim, beautiful, volumes have come out in recent years approaching a shared goal from different angles.
Eugene: OR, Cascade Books, 2020.Ĭhristians should be energized by a new spirit of literary criticism amid the barren desert they otherwise find themselves in. A Poetics of Orthodoxy: Christian Truth as Aesthetic Foundation. San Francisco: Benedict XVI Institute, 2022.
Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto.
0 kommentar(er)
