David Jones and the Craft of Theology

Becoming Beauty

Elizabeth R Powell

• Editore: T&T Clark
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780567691644
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Theology & Religion
• Categoria: Theology

This is an imaginative exploration of the art of David Jones which addresses Christian teaching through engagement with selected artistic works: a poem, a painted inscription and a wood engraving. Elizabeth R. Powell's study does not just enable readers to understand Jones but also to use his kind of loving attention in their own lives – which, Jones would argue, is theology's most important task. Through close readings of material objects, Powell draws the reader into the participatory, performative and dialogical possibilities of the craft of theology. She frames an older style of theology in a distinctive and modern way, as a graced human practice and a place of transforming relation with the divine. Powell argues that Jones's art works offer places of beauty in which to 'become beauty' along the way. Located at the cross-section of theology, literature and the arts, this volume shows that being interdisciplinary is nothing less than finding ways for theology and humanity to be more richly itself.

1

The quest for sacrament: ‘A, a, a, DOMINE DEUS’ poem

In the introduction, we raised questions about theology’s vocation and practice, in particular the practice of theology as craft, including the craft of writing theology. Of course, there is something self-implicating about all of this: the very tools of our inquiry are themselves part of the inquiry. How, then, to proceed? I have proposed to address such questions indirectly by way of a close, attentive engagement with the art of David Jones. Fittingly, this first artefact not only is itself a writing – this poem, ‘A a, a, DOMINE DEUS’ – but also foregrounds questions about writing in the modern epoch. Though we have already been introduced to Jones’s understanding of sign and sacrament, in this chapter I first explore further the tension Jones locates at the heart of all human beings and culture between sacrament and what he calls ‘the utile’ – the merely useful or functional. I then introduce Jones’s short poem, ‘A, a, a, DOMINE DEUS’, in this context as dramatizing the search for the sacramental through the modern wasteland. Before engaging the poem directly, I pause to ask what kind of writer Jones himself is, how he started writing poetry and the kind of readers his work enjoins us to be. The main body of this chapter then is my own participation in the ‘quest for sacrament’ in the body of the poem itself. We will find that the very minimalism of this poem creates space for readers to ruminate, to imagine or ‘fill up “what is lacking”’¹ and so to perform the quest for sacrament oneself. I conclude this reading with some early, gestational reflections on the kind of writers – and the kind of persons – this quest calls us to be.

Introduction: ‘Asking the question’ and the myth of Peredur

The language of quest is deeply rooted in the medieval romance tales of King Arthur and his court, which were dearly loved throughout his life by David Jones. In the Victorian period, the Welsh Arthurian cycle of stories (found in the treasure of tales known as The Mabinogion) were translated into English and thus re-integrated into this larger corporate imagination of the West.² One of these mythic figures to whom Jones repeatedly returned is the story of Peredur son of Efrawg, a kind of ‘coming of age’ story, recounting his journey from an innocent and sheltered youth, raised in the woods by his mother, to his becoming one of the revered knights of Arthur’s Court. Along the way he encounters a multitude of unexpected challenges, battles and loves. His formation is by no means a straightforward path but full of pitfalls and human fallibility.

In his essay, ‘Use and Sign’, Jones recalls one of these failures in particular: ‘You will recall how the hero in the ancient tale (Peredur, better known as Percival) was blamed, not only for not “asking the question” concerning the Waste Land, but for actually causing the land to be waste by failing to ask the question.’³ The Mabinogion recounts this failure as bearing the gravest of consequences, not just for Peredur but a whole kingdom:

Peredur, I greet thee not, seeing that thou dost not merit it. Blind was fate in giving thee fame and favour. When thou wast in the Court of the Lame King, and didst see there the youth bearing the streaming spear, from the points of which were drops of blood flowing in streams, even to the hand of the youth, and many other wonders likewise, thou didst not inquire their meaning nor their cause. Hadst thou done so, the King would have been restored to health, and his dominions to peace. Whereas from henceforth, he will have to endure battles and conflicts, and his knights will perish, and wives will be widowed, and maidens will be left portionless, and all this is because of thee.⁴

The streaming spear and drops of blood about which Peredur fails to inquire are signs of something other, and not only signs but themselves full of efficacious, healing power. What Peredur does not know, but other stories in the Arthurian cycle suggest, is that this spear pierced the side of Christ and thus bears his salvific blood.⁵ It is a fundamentally ambiguous artefact: like the Greek concept of pharmakon or indeterminacy, it may be both poison and cure.⁶ Because Peredur does not ask the question, however, this symbol remains solely an instrument perpetuating a cycle of violence and death. Its healing power is only realized, or so the lesson of Peredur implies, if there is one who inquires into ‘meaning’ and ‘cause’.

Why did Jones consider the imperative to ‘ask the question’ so pressing for modern civilization? And just what, for that matter, is the question? Finding answers can be as allusive as the story of Peredur itself. For Jones, I suggest, to ask the question in modern civilization is an essential form of resisting an encroaching spirit of utility – or what Jones dubs ‘the utile’. ‘The utile’ is his shorthand term for, as he writes, ‘what is vulgarly and generally understood by “merely utilitarian” or “simply functional.”’⁷ This view reduces the being of things to mere use; all things are instrumentalized, that is, valued purely for what they effect rather than what they are. To insist on the fundamental gratuity of creation is in clear tension with this kind of reductive or pragmatic utilitarianism: the gratuitous affirms the inherent value of all that is simply insofar as it is and is rooted in a theology of creation as gift.

We have already been introduced to the importance of Jones’s formation by the modern recovery of a Thomistic metaphysics in which creation is a gift.⁸ ‘Being’ only ‘is’ at all because of the free act of the Creator who even now sustains it in its existence. Creation is fundamentally and thoroughly dependent – held in being by the divine Word which first speaks it into being. Creatures receive this gift of being through their own particular, finite forms: whether a blade of grass, a turtle, a human being or even an angel. The shape of each thing is the shape of the gift that it is. The primacy of the gratuitous or of the gift of existence means that the primary end or purpose of all creatures is to praise the Creator simply by being the kind of creature they have been made to be. The multiple uses, functions or finite ends which such creatures carry out are by no means nullified but ordered; they are gathered up towards this primary orientation or telos towards the Good, the Gift-Giver. So, for instance, the blade of grass pushes its way through the earth and provides food and nests for insects and soft ground for human beings; in simply being itself, it brings glory to its Maker.

This metaphysics of gift helps us articulate more clearly Jones’s critique of the utile, which, as Jones claims, ‘is ubiquitous in our civilization, yet the exact lie of it is not easy to trace’.⁹ The utile is a particularly spiritual problem that manifests in the material forms of specific things or specific acts.¹⁰ The utile is a form of making and/or of using that has either forgotten or sets itself in outright opposition to the inherent sacredness of all that is. Examples are not hard to marshal – modern slavery is a stark instance, but subtler examples of the utile constantly besiege us in technology, in the banalities of consumerism and so forth. It would be wrong to imagine that the utile is something uniquely modern; it is rather a perennial, perhaps the original, human temptation. However, the ubiquity of the utile in the post-Industrial era is especially marked and is manifest in the kinds of artefacts we produce. The possibilities of mass production opened through a variety of inventions have seemed to reinforce this temptation towards instrumentalization and commodification and the eclipse of a horizon beyond, of the ‘more than’ or gratuitous heart of things.

If the utile is not a discrete object or an identifiable space, no wonder Jones writes that ‘the exact lie of it is not easy to trace’. As John Hughes perceptively argues, for David Jones the utile is ultimately nothing in this ontological sense – that is, it is a slide away from the fullness of gift, of being, and so towards nothingness.¹¹ Jones gives a summary of this metaphysics in ‘Art and Sacrament’ thus:

I understand [the philosophers] to say that for anything to be real it must have esse. … When philosophers tell us that ‘bad’ is a deprivation of some ‘good’ and is thus a negative quality only, we all can apprehend something of what is meant. We know that the ‘bad’ is real enough in the common speech sense of the word ‘real’, but that in a deeper sense the bad must be a deprivation of some reality. And in everyday speech we in fact employ this philosophical usage; as when a painter says of a painting which he does not like: ‘It is so bad, it simply does not exist’ or ‘My dear, it just isn’t there’, or ‘It’s nothing’. These are but three examples from everyday jargon. We know what is mea...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The art of David Jones and the craft of theology
• 1 The quest for sacrament: ‘A, a, a, DOMINE DEUS’ poem
• 2 The art of the incarnate word: ‘Quia per Incarnati’ painted inscription
• 3 ‘The Vessel of the Ecclesia’: ‘Bride’ wood engraving
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page