Abstract
This chapter explores the ascended and hidden Christ in the theology of John Keble, John Henry Newman, and other Tractarians and their sympathizers. Norman argues that reflection on the veiled figure of Christ provided the theological starting point for the Tractarian notions of religious and literary reserve. Starting with Keble’s Christian Year (1827) and Ascensiontide sermons, Norman relates Keble’s Christology to relevant poetic and literary theories found in the Praelectiones: the ascended Christ, concealed behind the “bright veil” of “soft cloud,” enacted an objective veiling in heaven, subsequently reflected in subjective notions of Tractarian poetic reserve, symbolic veiling, and the suppression of religious imagination. Destabilizing and undermining too-easy accounts of positively revealed religious knowledge of the figure of Jesus, Norman shows how Tractarian Christology took an apophatic turn that challenged, subverted, and provided a corrective to the Romantic theological imagination. Tractarians and their religious supporters engaged with the apparent absence of the ascended Christ, his concealment in heaven, and the difficulties and perplexities caused by not seeing Jesus, the “Awful Unknown Truth” (Newman). Ultimately, the Tractarian sense of the sacramental mystery of Christ meant that their “Figure of Jesus” escaped human language and image-making, finding expression in Eucharistic devotion and shared conceptions of the norms and limits of religious poetry.
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Notes
- 1.
Having prohibited attempts to imagine the glorified Christ in heaven, Keble elsewhere authorized the re-imagining of that which Christ himself sanctioned and instructed to be memorialized and re-enacted (1 Cor. 11:23–26). In his sermon on “Eucharistical Offices,” Keble allowed the Christian imagination a strictly limited scope of vision, restricted to the “the Consecration of the Holy Communion, and the offering of [Christ] Himself on the Cross.” It was Christ’s will that “we should fix our whole attention” on “those two moments of our Lord’s earthly and visible life.” By “Keeping these two scenes before you in thought and imagination, fixing on them the eye of a strong faith, you will by God’s blessing be enabled to cast all your burthen upon Him … and to come into His Holy Place” (Keble 1848, 269–71). This is one example where Keble allows for a legitimate (if strictly limited) role for the Christian imagination. It may perhaps be better understood as a “Eucharistic imagination,” focussed on what Christ sanctioned and sanctified as a figure of himself.
- 2.
Newman’s “trained imagination” may be compared here with Archbishop William King’s teaching that theological analogy functioned to “correct our imaginations.” The relevant text (originally from 1709) was reproduced in the Bampton Lectures of Newman’s one-time mentor, Richard Whately (1833, 503). King’s teaching received clarification and development in the work of his associate, Bishop Peter Browne. According to Browne, “we always find Analogy us’d to Inform the Understanding, as Metaphor and other Figures are, to Affect the Imagination … In Divine Metaphor the Resemblance … is Imaginary; ’tis pure Invention and mere Allusion alone, and no way founded in the Real Nature of the things compared. But in Divine Analogy … the Correspondency and Proportion is Real” (Browne 1737, 136–37). Because metaphor was “the result merely of the Imagination,” it was held to be “altogether Arbitrary” (Browne 1733, 3).
- 3.
What Coulson calls Newman’s “principle of limitation” in religious language (“that the senses convey truth and reality but only up to a certain point—they betoken the unknown, they do not reveal it; and acting as they do like figures of speech, they can be pushed too far”) is informative here (Coulson 1970, 59). For further examples of comparisons of “imagination” in Coleridge and Newman, see Coulson (1981, 9–11) and Drive (2018, 26–27).
- 4.
The likening of the Ascension of Christ to the absence of a dear friend taken away was hinted at in Keble’s “The Nearness of the Unseen World” (Keble 1876, 105). It was also deployed by Pusey in “The Ascension our Glory and Joy” (Pusey 1883, 386), and several times by R. W. Church (Church 1902, 1:106; 2:194; 3:162–63).
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Norman, R. (2020). Tractarian Reserve and the Veiled Figure of Christ: Ascension, Mystery, and the Limits of Imagination. In: Ludlow, E. (eds) The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century . Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_8
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