Towards a Christian Literary Theory

In the following, I conclude tbe course of two semesters by suggesting some outlines of a Christian literary theory.
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[@veronikab7595]

Thank you for streaming/uploading your lectures Dr. Mason, they are amazing!

[@bradley8224]

Fantastic lecture! Incredibly relevant.

[@LitProf]

Glad you think so!

[@clodaghread5655]

Wonderful thank you

[@rafaelsakarya]

Thanks for keeping me in! I stand by what I said.😄 1:06:44

[@LitProf]

Well, thanks for that!

[@yac2617]

Not too sure if you have read the book “A thousand heartbeats” by kiera cass

[@LitProf]

I have not

[@DaemonZodiac]

The wonderful irony of Gods creation is that everything that is 'of the physical' is always a pale imitation of everything that is 'of the spiritual'.
To attempt to get rid of the author is thus a pale imitation of getting rid of the sinful self as writer... what do I mean here? For instance, when Jesus bteaks the 6 loaves and divides thetwo fish among the pwople, and 12 baskets of broken s caps are left over, if we read hjis thru sinful eyes we rwad it woth the physical body, i.e. literally... but if we rid ourselves of thw sinful self we read it symbolically, which is an act that the apiritual self performs... thus the 5 loaves become the 5000, the two fish are understoid ad the soul and the body (that need to be confirmed as seperatw in order to be reunited) and the 13 baskets are the disciples who break themselves into two pieces in order to allow the teaching of Christ to dlow thru them.
The literary attempt to get rid of the aurhor is thus a pale imitation of what was achieved a ling time ago in fullnrss in the gospel literature.
In my humble opunion, that is.

[@peterg418]

@@DaemonZodiacWhy do we think people’s intentions are transparent to themselves? Perhaps we cannot know what the artists intended. We can only listen to the song, look at the painting, etc. I like better the idea that if Nature really were all that it could be, we would have no need to supplement our lives with art. Plus, and seemingly at odds with the last claim, isn’t rather the case that the spirit is the generic, stripped-down form of the particular? There are varied and dynamic instances of trees, for example, but the spirit of the tree is easily captured in the simplified child’s drawing.

[@peterg418]

@@DaemonZodiacI know Plato pretty well. I didn’t cite The Forms because I don’t think it’s true. To use another example: Only after we perceive multiple shades of red, not before, can we humans come up with the idea of redness. So, while interesting, we’re not really recovering lost information. But dividing the fish, to your point, participates in this, and I think you might be right. If I hug my kids once, that’s an isolated incident. But if I hug them over and over again throughout the years, that material act can rise to the spiritual dimension of constituting a good childhood. Something like that, almost even to the level of an archetype. Or maybe I stretched your idea too far.
When you say the leftover scraps are the 12 disciples, that interpretation holds (or not) regardless of the author’s intentions. When we analyze art, wouldn’t you agree that interpretations are not bound by the author’s intentions? And the way you interpret this story (attempt understanding) supports this. Only after the atom is split can you say “a bit like splitting the atom,” an analysis that had to wait 2000 years (with all respect to Democritus). In other words, the path to understanding can be repaved.

[@peterg418]

@@DaemonZodiac thank you for your generous response. if you are a Kierkegaardian, much of what you are saying begins to make sense, though up to a point. Are you infinitely resigned to your position, which means, and this is what I see, that you are making claims about how things are rather than giving me evidence and argument that might bring me over to your side? And if it’s a matter of faith, ok, because getting to “an idea beyond all ideas” in “two independent dimensions” has no purchase otherwise. If you were to invoke something like the Kantian sublime as a realm outside of the natural world but wholly within experience, and wholly within us, that might be fruitful terrain. I appreciate your reading of the loaves and fishes, as I’ve said, but you do call it “My reading,” and even call it a reading a few places. One, that suggests it’s an emergent interpretation, as if there are multiple readings that might inform one another and reverberate between the text and the reader. Two, this is a version of the dialectic, where you are participating in the ongoing contouring of textual meaning. You say Jesus is mediator between us and God, but so are The Bible, priests, our interpretive communities, etc. mediating the relationship. I suppose that was the very idea of Vatican ll. When you say, “it is there for all,” isn’t it rather the case that only the properly initiated can access “it.” In some sense, one must be introduced to Jesus/God by what is sometimes called elsewhere a “warm handoff.” Just like one cannot hold treeness in their mind without having seen a tree, the Platonic path seems to require one behold a beautiful object before one sees beauty elsewhere and then finally beauty as a quality beyond the particulars. And then, to my point, there is reverberation between beauty and the shifting domain of what we call beautiful, and then the very ideal of beauty changes, just as treeness might change when we encounter different species of trees, which is why there aren’t, to my way of thinking, “two independent dimensions” “wholly separate,” as they inform each other. And you can think of it this way: where was treeness before trees existed? Or where was beauty before humans were around to point to it?
The “reading” you are “suggesting” doesn’t really require a leap of faith. No textual interpretations do in the sense that, whatever else you are bringing to the engagement, interpretations are either supported by the text or they aren’t. What I think you are claiming is that the text points to what the case actually is, the Truth with a capital T. Don’t you agree? You are aligning the text with the leap of faith you have already made. Perfectly fine, of course.

[@peterg418]

@@DaemonZodiac I appreciate your considered responses. I agree with beholding one’s ability to think. Maybe it was Leibniz (pretty sure) who said that even when you evacuate the content, the intellect remains. But, I would say, what is the intellect but a capacity? There is something (sort of) of the Nietzschean warning against thingifying adjectives/processes here. The ability to grasp redness or treeness is a capacity, where redness and treeness are not substantive content for a wholly separate domain outside of our minds that really do seem to be pre-slotted for concepts. I can give other examples (like being unable to separate the dancer from the dance), but I think my other posts carry my claim for holding onto the dialectic. You want separate domains, while I insist on reverberation and an ongoing influence that goes both ways. Fair.
A Christian soul? No, atheist. Despite years and years of Catholic school. I listen to Dr Masson, because he reads texts I care about, offers a viewpoint I can’t get elsewhere, and is a good lecturer. I appreciate that he doesn’t read his lectures and that he gives a big-picture understanding of the ideas. I also like that he doesn’t equivocate. He is very clear where he stands. For me, “menace” is not quite the right word. When I teach The Abolition of Man, I teach it with William James’s “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and Walter Pater’s “Conclusion.” And I do my best to give charitable readings of each, without taking sides. In fact, at the end I ask students who they think I align with, and they always say with Lewis. But I think Lewis’s claims are weak. In fact, in that lecture Dr Masson said he wasn’t that impressed with Coleridge’s waterfall, which runs counter to Lewis’s insistence (and Coleridge’s) that a fixed response is necessitated. At that moment Dr Masson was with Gaius and Titius, which, I believe, tallies a point for me. Well, maybe the waterfall was more impressive 200 years ago.

[@DaemonZodiac]

if u do just beleive then you are in a state of uncertainty... acknowledging thaqt will do wonders for you.. and when u calm down you might like try this shirt on i am offering you.. you might like it. altho if you accept you know nothing 9like socrates, of course0 you will probably suddenly have a decent brand new shirt of your own anyway. but you may have to repent of being disingenuous before any of these things can begin to unfold for you. have you heard of Jesus Christ..? he preached thr gosple of reeptnace, you know...died a criminals death.. i m a criminal,. i shoplift on a daiiy basis... but i digress again...just like an eternal sinner...