The Value of Literature: II—Shakespeare and the Tudor Homilies

Extract

‘Similitude of manners’, wrote Sir Thomas More in his Life of John Picus, ‘is a cause of love and friendship: a likeness of conditions is (as Appollonius saith) an affinity’. In the first of these articles looking at the uncertain place of literature within our modem culture, and within a Christian cultivation of the virtues, I tried to show how Chaucer’s art restores friendships which have been rent by our denial of common human weakness, a likeness of conditions in frailty and sin. I suggested that Chaucer invites his readers to overcome a desire to pass sentence on their neighbours in two ways: firstly he allows us to hear our sentences on the lips of his characters, and to see the violence such dismissive voices call into being; secondly he asks us to give voice to others’ sins and, in giving voice to them, hear ourselves and our own weakness. Chaucer thus creates a language of communal forgiveness as he trains our ear, and in the laughter he raises that language effects what it signifies. In that sense we can agree with David Jones that art is sacramental, and add that literature imparts an ethics of speech.

Here I shall be pursuing this view of art as contributing to an ethics of speech, something sadly neglected by most of today’s Catholic moral theologians. Apparently mesmerized by the bits and pieces of human anatomy below the belt, they remain uninspired by our vocal chords. The past tells a different story.