Virginia Woolf and the Corinthians

Extract

Leonard Woolf, in Downhill all the Way, remarked of his wife that ‘the idea of a party always excited her’, and though it is true that on 11th November, 1918, ‘Virginia and I celebrated the end of a civilization’ by ‘eating, almost sacramentally, some small bars of chocolate cream’, for Virginia Woolf, as for the rest of us, eating was generally a celebration of the continuing value of life, where, as at the restaurant meal of The Waves, ‘here and now we are together’ drawn into ‘this communion’, and making ‘something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time’.

Talk of that kind about eating is an open invitation for those Christians who would engage in ‘Theology and Literature’, but a man should guard against any quick transition from Virginia Woolf’s talk of sacramental chocolate creams and congregations of past time to his peculiar Christian understanding of meal and communion. It should give us pause, for example, that the chocolate creams were eaten at the ‘end of a civilization’, and that in The Waves the meal is created around a hero who, described in Christ-like terms certainly, is finally ineffective.