Attunements to grace in the writings of Virginia Woolf and Marilynne Robinson
Keywords: Catholic imagination
reductio
Bonaventure
Edmund Husserl
Marilynne Robinson
theology and literature
intentionality
Karl Rahner
Graham Ward
Gadamer
Nicholas of Cusa
William Lynch
Virginia Woolf
Gestimmtheit
Augustine
phenomenology of literature
Roland Barthes

Short Abstract: This thesis addresses how God’s grace – i.e., abiding presence to and action in creation – can be found operating in the writer, the writing, and the reader of fiction. In my introductory chapter, I propose that great literature, even self-consciously non-religious literature, can serve as a propaedeutic to religious attention, attuning the reader of words to God’s gracious presence in and through creation (the Incarnate Word). I assess this proposal by looking at the fiction of writers Virginia Woolf (an agnostic) and Marilynne Robinson (a confessional Christian). Good literature, like other art forms, can serve as a field of ‘play’ (Spiel for Gadamer) where an author helps her reader become conscious of the ‘natural attitude’ (Husserl) of his relationship to the world of objects and states of affairs in the text, and thereafter in the world around himself. To do so, I adapt Husserl’s phenomenology of intentionality to propose a ‘phenomenology of literature’ which includes resurrecting the purportedly ‘dead’ author. I draw out the theological implications of this phenomenology with the help of Nicholas of Cusa and Jean-Louis Chrétien: creation is the locus where the divine Author ‘unfolds’ (explicatio) God’s gracious presence, appealing to creatures who are always-already enfolded (complicatio) in the foregrounding activity of God. The creature then becomes ‘attuned’ to God’s gracious call, so as to make a theological return (reductio) to God beyond the ‘text’ of the world. In like measure, a text world unfolds from the creative vision of the author, appealing to and directing her reader’s intentional gaze. The text becomes an heuristic tool for the reader’s intentional attention: when a reader ‘brackets’ his natural attitude to the world and ‘descends’ into the text, the unseen author is able to train her reader’s intentional gaze empathically, to see the pluralities in the text as the author has framed them. In response the reader can accept or reject the author’s intentional framing, but he cannot ignore it. I argue that the literary descent-ascent is always-already enfolded in creation, which itself unfolds from the life of God. Hence when the reader ‘ascends’ from the text back to the world around him, his intentional attitude to the world has been inflected – however imperceptibly – by the intentionality of the unseen author. This descent-ascent movement, theologically speaking, prepares the reader of creation to thematize his ‘unformed attunement’ (Rahner) both to the divine Author, and to the intersubjective communities (literary as well as historically religious) in which such thematizing takes place.
The strength of this methodology – a theological engagement with literature grounded in intentionality – depends on what William Lynch calls the descent into the concrete particulars of literary texts. To that end, I analyze the works of non-believer Virginia Woolf and those of believer Marilynne Robinson, to test the merits of my proposed theological framework. Both writers deftly probe language and genre boundaries, disrupt uncritical acceptance (or rejection) of institutional faith, and engage in creative wondering and wandering ‘away from home.’ Such fiction is thus a locus theologicus, where belief and unbelief interact, interrogate one another, and challenge the reader to deeper theological reflection. New aspects of characters, and competing voices within texts, move the reader’s attention from parts to a sense of the whole, and back again. Hence Woolf and Robinson cultivate in readers what I term a katholic imagination (kath’holou, “regarding the whole” of reality). Such an imagination fosters a psychological openness to growth; a willingness to take seriously unattended, unbidden, or unwelcome elements of reality, including the experience (or absence) of divine grace. God plays ‘away from home’ by unfolding (explicatio) God’s very self into finite creation (the Incarnation), so as to make creation’s very enfoldedness (complicatio) conscious to creatures. Hence it is Christ – playing in ten thousand places – whose descent into created particularity attunes us to God’s grace. This grace is operative beyond the usual registers and instrumentation of theological discourse, and so the attentive theologian must engage with literature, among other disciplines.