with David Mahan

Ben Quash is Professor of Christianity and the Arts at King’s College, London. A specialist in the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, he has written extensively on the relationship between theology and the arts, theological aesthetics, and Christian ethics and liturgy. He is also the creator of the Visual Commentary on Scripture, an online commentary on the Bible in dialogue with works of art.

DM: First, thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to do this, Ben. Let me begin with a broad question about the interpretive lens you deploy in Found Theology. As the main title indicates, a notion of ‘finding’ represents one of the key concepts you elaborate in the book. The other, which serves as its terminus, is ‘the given.’ Can you say a bit about this paradigm for thinking about theology more broadly, and how it serves theology’s engagement with the arts in particular? What work does it do that other interpretive lenses may not?

BQ: Thank you, David, and it’s lovely to be in conversation with you. One of the things that inspires me in Found Theology is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Frost at Midnight in which he uses the verb ‘to ask’ intransitively, praying that his infant son may grow up learning how to live, as it were, ‘askingly’. That for me encapsulates something of what both theology and the arts should prepare us to do: to live with a receptive and responsive readiness to receive things that we cannot predict, and imaginatively to incorporate them in our understanding of the world, of ourselves, and of God – in our visions of what God has prepared for those who love him.

I think that this requires a more developed pneumatology than is frequently found in recent and maybe even historic Christian theologies. There is of course an eschatological impetus here as well, but the risk of playing the eschatology card too soon is that one leaps over the interval of time in which we are called to find our way, to build our visions, to seek to have ourselves transformed so that we are fit for that eschaton. In the book I call this process of finding, building, and transformational openness ‘abduction’, following the American Pragmatist philosopher C.S. Peirce. Abduction in this philosophical sense describes a process of creative hypothesising—a more adventurous sort of inference towards what is (or might be) true than is typical of the other and perhaps more scientistic inferential modes of ‘deduction’ and ‘induction’.

I’d dispute the suggestion that the idea of the given is the terminus of the book. Rather, givenness, in my terms, generally designates that by which we are resourced as we move forward: the scriptural canon, the sacraments of the Church, the theological insights and the personal witness of those who have equipped us for our own Christian journeys. The process of finding can be understood as a process of allowing the full implications of what has already been vouchsafed to us to be unfolded through new encounters with what is always still being offered.

DM: Yes, I appreciate that distinction, and how the use of ‘terminus’ is misleading with respect to this more robust understanding of the relationship you imagine between the given and the found. Can you also say a bit more about the notion of ‘intransitivity’?

BQ: ‘Intransitivity’ is one of the terms developed by the poet and painter David Jones in his famous essay entitled ‘Art and Sacrament’. He speaks of the intransitivity of art as a way of signaling its gratuity, and its freedom from merely utilitarian ends. But it also allows him a way of suggesting that art, precisely in its gratuity, points towards God; towards the one in whom all things have their origins and their end. This God cannot be described in any art form but can be gestured towards—obliquely, intransitively, but genuinely.

DM: One of the most intriguing elements of your study involves your broader theological framework and method, including a combination of historical theology and biblical theology, with pneumatology as the main theological consideration. In what ways did your organization of the book seem especially appropriate?

BQ: I wanted to alternate chapters that worked in a more traditional theological vein with chapters that dwelt long and attentively with specific works of art or cultural production. The reason for this was that I wanted to embody or exemplify in the book’s practice—in the book’s ‘performance’—what I was advocating in the book’s argument. Close attention to what you find needs to be able to change you as well as what you think and feel. High theory (including its theological varieties) has a tendency to sit at one level above the evidence, speaking de haut en bas in a way that immunizes it against self-corrections, answerability, and sometimes necessary change.

DM: I love this way of putting it, that a book’s performance would embody the book’s argument. Will you say more about both in regard to your focus on the works of the Holy Spirit, in contrast to the ways we often ground or elaborate a theological understanding of and engagement with the arts (for example, in doctrines of Creation or Incarnation)?

BQ: Pneumatology gave me a language for this which I felt had continuities with some influential philosophical hermeneutical theories like those of Hans-Georg Gadamer, and some influential literary-critical theories like those of the Konstanz School of ‘reception aesthetics’. But the pneumatology took these further, and actually allowed those other doctrinal loci that you mention to come more fully into view and to be addressable. To read the world in its intense and communicative interconnections through the mediating work of the Spirit is also to realise the world as one creation, with one maker, and to hear in all the creatures of the world the speech of the incarnate Wisdom (who also speaks in all of Scripture).

DM: You spend a good bit of time examining the ‘given’ of Scripture and seize upon the concept of ‘maculation’ as one way to comprehend the Bible itself as a site that instantiates the relationship between the ‘given’ and the ‘found’ that you deploy for theological reflection today. Where did this concept of maculation come from, and what is its importance to the argument you advance?

BQ: It’s a term I adapt from a Jewish scholar, David Weiss Halivni. In my usage of it, I regard the maculations of Scripture as the ‘grit’ and the gaps that require our energetic interpretive and imaginative engagement with the Bible’s texts (thus, not ‘immaculate’). The grit includes material that resists easy assimilation or smooth and comprehensive distillation into a tidy interpretative scheme. The gaps are things left unsaid or unexplained.

DM: How then does maculation, and then later your examination of ‘reception aesthetics,’ help to substantiate the way you understand the work of the Holy Spirit in terms of the given and the found, which then undergirds the value you find in theological engagement with the arts?

BQ: My attraction to the idea of maculation is the way it requires a participative understanding of our relationship to Scripture—and thus a pneumatologically-inspired one. Scripture asks things of us not just ethically—though it does do that—but imaginatively. It requires us to supply so much in places where it remains reticent, or gives us options and pathways whose various merits we must entertain and explore. We must do this with an ‘asking’ disposition that will predispose us to ‘find’ things.

Paradoxically, I would say, this is part of Scripture’s ‘perfection’, so to speak. The fact that it is not immaculate in the sense of containing nothing that might challenge us, trip us up, or jar, is precisely the reason for its hospitable and transformative importance in our collective Christian life.

Reading Literature through a Christian Lens

DM: For your case studies, which demonstrate the practical application of your argument, you feature a variety of artistic media, including literature. Were there distinct challenges you encountered in the application of your method to literature specifically, and any ways that your engagement with literature proved particularly illuminating?

BQ: The biggest reward for me was discovering in more depth how the ways in which literary texts are constructed can differ so very dramatically from one another. There are texts crafted to open up human possibilities, and there are texts designed to propose and enforce single points of view, and eliminate alternatives.

I focussed in Found Theology on the textures and dynamics of the language of English at the time of the translation of the King James Bible, and then on the poetic corpus of the 17th century poet Henry Vaughan—one of my very favourite writers. Both of them lived through complex and often cruel periods of English religious history, in which many people of differing convictions sought coercive solutions to religious conflicts, and were prepared to use language in support of such coercion—indeed sometimes precisely as coercion.

But this was also a period which saw a perhaps unparalleled capacity in the English language for flexibility, nuance, improvisation, and discovery.

DM: What in particular attracted you to Henry Vaughan’s literary work for this project?

BQ: Vaughan‘s poetry models a certain abductive reasoning in its particular words and images. But I think he also stands as a case study of something more generally true of poetry: how poetic language itself, in other eras than Vaughan’s own, is language that opens up rather than closing down. Like Ted Hughes pursuing his ‘thought fox’, poetry is innately disposed to questing. And finding is premised on questing, which is why poetry has such a significant place in my book.

DM: Among Winter Cranes is a publication devoted to the study of Christian poetics and how we may go about shaping it in our present moment. Accepting that the very meaning of a Christian poetics is a work in progress, where do you see this undertaking intersecting with Found Theology, and what do you think your work contributes?

BQ: For some reason, my own instincts are to use some other qualifier than ‘Christian’—like theological, or even pneumatological! Maybe the more specific paradoxically has a potential to go wider than the word ‘Christian’ does when it falls on many contemporary ears.

For good or ill, both Christians and non-Christians often have an over-determined notion of what ‘Christian’ means: something more given than waiting to be found! I don’t think Christian poetics should be exclusively the study of poetry by Christians or poetry about Christian themes or ideas—as I know you agree. What really interests me is how an understanding of the world and its workings that is informed at the deepest level by Christian thought and practice can be brought to the understanding, the analysis, and the appreciation of the processes of poetic making and to the poems themselves.

The worthwhileness of doing this will be proven only if something illuminating, or penetrating, emerges as a result of such readings. The distinctiveness and richness of reading poetry with a Christian sensorium should be something attractive and generously-additive to its other readers and interpreters, even if they don’t read in this way themselves.

DM: I appreciate that qualification and intriguing suggestion. One of the prickly challenges of the Christian Poetics Initiative has been to clarify what we mean by both ‘Christian’ and ‘Poetics.’ And I am grateful for the work that you continue to do, which supplies this kind of undertaking with rich theological reflection. Thank you for taking the time to give our readers a sense of this book and the important project it undertakes.

Ben Quash

Professor of Christianity and the Arts, King’s College, London
ben.quash@kcl.ac.uk

David Mahan

Lecturer in Religion and Literature, Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Yale Divinity School
Co-Director, Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts
david.mahan@yale.edu