Theology and Culture

Extract

There is a moment in Twelfth Night when Feste, the Fool, calls upon Malvolio, who has been shut up in a dark cell as a dangerous madman. Feste, to render himself the more credible as a prison visitor, puts on a parson’s gown and a parson’s voice and, announcing that he is Sif Topas the curate who comes to visit Malvolio the lunatic, counsels him with words of learned but wholly irrelevant comfort. Malvolio, in frustration at this pastoral nonsense, most violently asserts that he is in no way mad, so the pretence clergyman agrees to test the prisoner’s wits by posing some deep question. ‘What’, he asks, ‘is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?’ From that encyclopaedic knowledge of the classical world we expect in a renascence man, Malvolio answers that the philosopher held ‘that the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird’. Ruthless as if he were conducting a seminar, the Fool then asks him: ‘What think’st thou of his opinion?’ Malvolio rather carefully replies: T think nobly of the soul and no way approve his opinion’. But at this the clergyman seems quite convinced that Malvolio is indeed mad, declaring as he hurries away, ‘thou shalt hold th’opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits’.

This absurd interlude seems to many, I suspect, a paradigm of theological talk. A madman and a fool disputing about the soul, and as if this were not itself at sufficient remove from reality, disputing about whether the human soul might animate a bird. I should like to suggest to you, however, that while this dialogue may very well present an unkind parody of the manners both of the student of religion and of the believer, its satire does not, even glancingly, touch the theologian’s enterprise.