A Poetic Christ: Thomist Reflections on Scripture, Language and Reality (original) (raw)

A Poetic Christ makes available for an English-speaking audience, in condensed form, the wide-ranging explorations of Olivier-Thomas Venard into language and aesthetics, Scripture and Christology, semiotics and sacramental theology, all done in dialogue with the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Translating sections chosen, in consultation with the author, from Venard's three-volume work, Thomas d'Aquin poète théologien, Kenneth Oakes and Francesca Murphy have provided a work that can well stand on its own as an overview of Venard's thought, as well as serve as an entrée into the larger body of Venard's work. Venard, a Dominican Friar, currently serves as Deputy Director at École Biblique et Archéologique in Jerusalem, the institution founded by Marie-Joseph Lagrange in 1890 that is probably best known for producing the French translation of what is known in English as The Jerusalem Bible. Lagrange distinguished himself during the Catholic Modernist crisis of the early twentieth century by embracing modern historical and philological approaches to the Bible without ever stepping beyond the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy, and offering astute and acute criticisms of Alfred Loisy's theology and biblical criticism that probed far more deeply than the somewhat panicked condemnations issuing from Catholic officialdom. The historian Marvin O'Connell has suggested that at least part of the reason for Lagrange's intellectual equanimity during those fraught times was his thorough grounding in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, learned not as a sclerotic system of propositions, but as a living tradition of inquiry. Perhaps this is to make too much of an accidental institutional connection, but it is tempting to see the spirit of Lagrange living on in the work of his confrere Venard, who rigorously engages with non-theological and even anti-theological discourses without either embracing them uncritically or treating them simply as foes to be defeated, all the while keeping one eye on the thought of St. Thomas, whose work "links art, wisdom and friendship" (167). Oakes and Murphy organize their volume into four main parts and a conclusion. The first section, titled "Scripture," consists of two selections from Venard's third volume, Pagina Sacra (2009), and shows his engagement with biblical hermeneutics, recast as an "aesthetics of encountering Christ" in the biblical text (64). In a striking image, he compares the relationship between Christ and the Gospel texts to a mobius strip (84), in which the interior is simultaneously the exterior, such that the evangelical proclamation of Christians is simultaneously "exterior" to the words of Jesus-he remains the master and they the disciples-and "interior" to those words: "the gift of the Holy Spirit. .. comes not only to illuminate remembrance of Jesus' ministry but to deepen and develop his message" (86). Christological faith is therefore distinct and yet inseparable from ecclesial faith: "the New Testament, as a rule of faith, is structured in such a way that at the same time when I offer acts of faith in Christ, I offer acts of trust in the cultural and linguistic mediations which make him known to me and vice versa" (99). The second section, titled "Theology and Literature," contains material drawn from Venard's first volume, Litérature et théologie (2002), the subtitle of which, Une saison en enfer, signals the unlikely presence of symbolist poet Artur Rimbaud as a major theological interlocutor for Venard. There is in modern literature, Venard claims, a hidden and even repressed theological investment, and this is what draws our attention. Rimbaud embarked upon a devout, if profane, quest for what lies at the heart of language and therefore at the heart of the self. The young Rimbaud wrote in a letter, "Je est un autre"-"I is an other" and Venard does not flinch from identifying this "other" with Christ, and "the voice that the poet hears resonating in the depths of language with the voice of God" (132). But at the same time, he realizes that this is a hard sell in the contemporary literary world, which sees "the 'voice' of God [as] nothing but an illusory effect of the