Catholic Imagination, Part 1: Newman and Interrogating Catholic Imagination - Audio

Episode Topic: Newman and Interrogating Catholic Imagination

Take a deep dive with theologian and Catherine F. Huisking Professor of Theology Cyril O'Regan into the worldview of St. John Henry Newman, one of the greatest Catholic thinkers and educators in history. Consider Newman's ideas about the Catholic university, the Catholic imagination, and whether Catholic literature is an oxymoron.

`Featured Speakers:

• Cyril O'Regan, University of Notre Dame
• Artur Rosman, University of Notre Dame

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/b3399f.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled On Catholic Imagination. 

Thanks for listening! The ThinkND Podcast is brought to you by ThinkND, the University of Notre Dame's online learning community. We connect you with videos, podcasts, articles, courses, and other resources to inspire minds and spark conversations on topics that matter to you — everything from faith and politics, to science, technology, and your career.

• Learn more about ThinkND and register for upcoming live events at think.nd.edu.
• Join our LinkedIn community for updates, episode clips, and more.

Transcript

Introduction and Speaker Background

1 0:10

Welcome friends. Uh, my name is Arthur Rossman. I am the editor in chief of Church Life Journal here at the University of Notre Dame in the McGrath Institute. I'm also an associate, uh, research professor here. I'm honored to introduce Cyril Regan. Uh, Cyril is the Catherine f Husking professor of Theology at Notre Dame, born in Ireland. Dr. Reagan received his PhD from Yale, where he also taught in the Department of Religious Studies before joining Notre Dame's Department of Theology in 1999. Uh, his work spans systematic theology, historical theology, and continental philosophy, and he is especially active in the intersection of theology and continental philosophy. He has done considerable work in 19th century theology and philosophy, postmodern thought mysticism, gnosticism, religion and literature, major Catholic figures such as Newman, Dak Han Ur, van Bazar, and Benedict of the 16th. On the doctrines of the Trinity and the last things, he'll shortly complete two volumes dealing with, uh, the relationship between the Swiss theologian, Hans Alazar and Martin Heider. He will then turn, uh, to complete his gnosticism in modernity project with a volume on narcissism and German, idealism, and a subsequent volume agnosticism and German and English romanticism. Uh, most recently, Cyril was announced as the recipient of this year's Ratzinger Prize. Congratulations, nicknamed the Nobel of Theology. The Ratzinger Prize is awarded annually by the Vaticans, Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict 16th Foundation to scholars who have distinguished themselves with particular merit in the activity of publication and or scientific research. professor Regan has argued that de Caritas es is perhaps the greatest and cyclical ever written, because it makes clear that each individual, saint or sinner is to be valued infinitely, uh, as a work of God to whom God remains faithful, or to use your shorthand, each individual, whatever their circumstances is, to be infinitely valued as a gift. on a personal note, I might add that he has published more than 40 articles with Church Life Journal, and I'd like to thank you. We're championing its cause, which has been a particular gift to me and to countless others. And, and actually I think he's been a gift to many of the people that I see here in the crowd. It's, it's, it's really wonderful. So, you know, uh, what I'm talking about. So I won't drone on. please join me in welcoming Professor Regan and thanking him for as many gifts to the Notre Dame community and the wider church.

The Romantic Influence on Newman's Views

Hopkins and the Catholic Imagination

James Joyce: A Complex Relationship with Catholicism

Romanticism and Catholicism: A Complex Relationship

2 3:04

Well, for once, I think I want to sound more nearly like John Milbank than John Ong. That is, there's a gift exchange. I want to suggest that, uh, our tour is also a gift and is also a demi urge in so far as it's very few people, have had, I think a career in which they've created something out of nothing. so I think Church Life Journal, has been a one man band. It most certainly has been a one man creation. So, I think that sort of is a gift. I've just simply slipped under the door of the gift. I am probably going to bear heavily on your patience in this talk, not because I think the talk is incredibly complex, but it might sort of go a little bit on the long side. So before we start, just let me tell you as briefly as possible what it is, uh, so that you have some kind of traction and at least whatever else you're going to say about Reagan after this talk. How disappointing it was and how it was entirely marvelous, if not miraculous, that he was awarded at the Ratzinger Prize. its fault will not be a, a fault of composition or logic. There is an argument. The argument is fairly simple. Newman does something in the idea of the university that is almost impossible for him to say something profoundly stupid. He says that he cannot imagine a Catholic literature, though he does point to Shakespeare and suggests Alexander Pope, well, he's kind of Catholic, et cetera, but he wants to rule it out. We can understand he's under all kinds of pressure, but it is an immense and bewildering fapa. The counterfactuals are endless, but what I want to do is I want to reconstruct him and outside the pressure that looks like it's been exercised by creating this curriculum that is not supposed to lead Catholics astray. Newman says other things which Problematizes interrogates, but does not dismiss Catholic imagination or Catholic literature. That's second Newman. That is, if you like, Newman under Rebound. Newman returned to himself. He's the one I want to talk about. And the third thing I wanna talk about is I want to try and make what he suggests in this, shall we say Newman, having repented, providing criteria wherein you can actually suggest this is Catholic and this is not Catholic. And for that purpose, I'm gonna do choose two authors who have to be influenced, by Newman. Both are Irish. Both have an association with Newman House in Dublin, Jarman Hopkins, Hopkins, and James Joyce. And I'm going to come to the controversial conclusion that James Joyce is not a Catholic author. Just about everything Newman wrote on any topic over the long span of a career is controversial in some way or other, and engenders strong responses, whether of outrage or acclaim, frustration or elation, the emotion of being hard done by or quiet vindication the experience of reading Newman. Either the idea at university or other text is rarely, if ever, however, that a disappointment, an experience in which enemies and friends of Newman alike feel deflated, where one side is deprived of their seeding anger at a forensic and Sophistical Newman and the other loses the privilege of celebrating their hero. Who brings the opposition to grief at first blush. One of the few exceptions to the above rule seems to be Newman's Reflections Appendix three of the idea of university in which in the context of creating an English literary curriculum for the Catholic University, that is the common hope of Newman and the Irish Catholic bishops, the former Oxford Don, who's entered into something like a contract, a mutual misunderstanding. But the Catholic authorities comes to pose the question of whether now one going forward to is such a thing as a Catholic literature. This is a brave and bold question, one that we should be grateful to Newman for asking yet to an unusual extent. The analysis that pares the question seems to lack the usual Newman sharpness and to use a 19th century word use with respect to explorers and geographers seems to me to be oddly circum literal. That is it house the shore of the peripheral and never cuts a swath inland towards the center. That Newman found the answers in the negative, even going so far as to suggests that Catholic literature is an oxymoron, seems that wants to be over peace with the general impression of squinting and crown. What friends and enemies alike would think to be a pedestrian piece in which Newman's intellect for once confounding difficult difficulties with impossibility, which is something Newman almost never does, yields prematurely to making a judgment he did not need to make and his war for having made. Now just how spectacularly bad the judgment is, comes into view from one accounts for the following, two considerations. First that a critic with a brain of a tempit or fruit fly. We'll be capable of coming up with a long list of counterfactuals from Newman's time and going forward. Jared, Manny Hopkins, James Joyce, grain Green, Evan W. And a host of other Irish writers writing in the shadow of Joyce, such as John Mcg, Garron CU Toin, and others writing in the Shadows of Hopkins such as Shamini and John f Epstein, who's among us. And this is not to speak to the American representatives. The standards such as Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, and somewhat lesser authors as j Pars and non-standard, such as John Berryman, Robert Lau, and perhaps even the divisive come Comet McCarthy, gifted with a Catholic vision of hell on Earth and whose language seems to move towards the condition of liturgy. Even if an inverted an internal one to suffice it to say that a list is only getting started, more names can be added. Moreover, the looser the criteria, the more the population grows and in due course might possibly move towards getting state recognition after the manner of Vanuatu. The second and supporting consideration is that an irrepressible champion of Newman, such as Ian Carr, who will not hear a bad word about his hero or even admit a reservation after speaking about Newman's denial of a Catholic English literature In the Catholic revival in English literature, jauntily proceeds to speak deliberately and incisively, but Hopkins Beak, Chesterton Green and War as Catholic authors, and to make matters even more bizarre, puts Newman to the front of the list of the more than plausible counterfactuals is almost as if care gives us a license not to take Newman seriously, maybe even to presume that Newman made a joke that we all now in. I want to move from this very hapless conclusion to an interrogation. The prospects then seem dim with regard to us taking anything positive from what Newman says about Catholic literature in the idea of university. Indeed, a closer reading of the offending appendix hardly improves the prospects of getting anything positive and in all likelihood really makes matters worse. Yet this is where we should start and in the process make things worse before we make them better and make them better. We will for numerous mistakes are not just anyone's mistakes. They are brilliant and telling mistakes, mistakes, which if we pay attention to other things he says in the appendix and the other two appendix says on literature that precede them. May in fact help us to restate the problem of Catholic imagination and perhaps even suggest criteria as to where we might find it in any event, and more particularly, while we cannot redeem Newman's conclusions, we can be instructed by the reasons he does not provide as well as those he does provide by problematizing the notion of Catholic literature. You get this analysis off the ground. First, let us begin with the two hinged propositions in the appendix proposition. One, English literature is precedent, and two, whether or not there were Catholic authors in the past, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and others. going forward, there will not be great Catholic authors that is authors of such literary excellence that they will admit of being made part of the canon. Since literature has standards internal to itself that will reject the dict dictates of Catholicism. Now how are these propositions supposed to be related to each other? And there are at least two difficulties. The first foremost, albeit with a few qualifications, advances a historical thesis to the effect that as the English cannon of literature evolved, it is precedent or at least has become such. The second in contrast is a statement of principle concerning the fundamental lack of fit between English. Literature faded to insist upon his integrity, and Catholicism equally faded to insist upon his own dogmatic truths. The second difficulty is material or substantive. If Newman is doubtful about the prospects of a non antagonistic relation between literature worthy of the name and Catholicism, why is it not equally worried about the prospects for a non antagonist an on organic, relationship between Protestant Protestantism and literature? The question becomes urgent when one acknowledges that historically speaking, it is Protestantism that has far more routinely held itself apart from culture, either presumptively because it lacks culture, lacks moral seriousness, or that it functions as a temptation. Here Newman seems to have skirted the difficulty by being able to identify the majority of readers in in the English canon as president. He does not ask the question at whether. Writers made it into the canon because, or despite of the fact that their fake commitments were precedent. But to remind if Catholic beliefs get in the way of the integrity of literature, why don't precedent beliefs get in the way of the integrity of literature such that the canon principle be no precedent literature either. The puzzle is twofold. How and why presentism does not interfere in the autonomy of literature in the way that Newman thinks Catholicism does and doubtless will continue to do going forward. And does this putative lack of pressure or belief exercised by present authors in, in the English canon mean press? Maybe we've found a secret link between the two propositions for it certainly looks as if Protestantism. Is functioning not as something positive that has gotten aligned with literature. Again, as something positive as exercising, strengthening and stretching the imagination, but as something negative or pri that is a set of ideas or stances that happen not to get in the way of literature being literature and maintaining its desired independence and integrity that is hallowed in modernity. I want to suggest that there are two lines of supposition that Newman does not aju, that may in fact be the key to understanding why he makes the judgements he made, and also might prove helpful for a deeper and sharper understanding of what we, what we are referring to in this conference as Catholic imagination. The first of these is exogenous. That is. Comes outside Newman. I'm thinking here more particularly that in his Le Leisure domain towards English literature as President and having Milton Southie and Byron as exemplars Newman shows himself open to the influence of the romantic narrative of the coming to independence and integration of literature as grounded in the unfettered imagination. The second is internal to Newman's understanding of Proselytism that proved instrumental in his conversion almost a decade prior to his writing of the appendix. Just a little bit more about those two points regarding the first, this concerns the story that English romanticism told itself about its origins as defender executor. She and chief exhibitor of the prerogatives of imagination and his freedom from tradition and religious confession and more particularly the romantic story that Newman Plausibly buys into, has to do with Milton the RS President, setting the terms for later English literature, especially poetry in articulating a poetic code, confident with regard to creativity and insistent upon freedom, even if or as a committed cavernous, it could be cast as retarding. What he opened by his commitment to pro and beliefs about the absolute sovereignty of God. Election justification by faith and the wrath of God by claiming he is prone to paradise loss. Not only to have outbid all prior epics with regard to scale and importance of poetic theme, but also. Far more bravely to have supplemented scripture in his rendering of the fall of the angels. As a supposition of both the creation and fall of human beings, Milton opens up the prospect of human creativity being taken as the substitute for divine creativity indeed supplanting it altogether. Even if all romantics are not equally assertive, concerning Newman's role in their release into a creativity that is not answerable to a pre-given religious and ethical norm, still it is quite evident that some of the more important romantics suppose Milton made possible what their age made necessary. That is the jetting of the cargo or Protestant beliefs deemed accidental to poetic construction and judged to have delayed. The proper self understanding of the poet as instantiating, a creativity co-extensive human desire for expressing all that is true and beautiful. Also thereby contributing to the formation of elevated souls and authentic human communities. Shelly provides one of the best examples in prose as well as poetry in pamphlets on art and creativity, as well as lyric poems like O to the West Wind. Skylar Mont Blanc, he relentlessly argues and illustrates a form of divine human creativity that is not tram by superstition, civility, and rule. In his verse, drama, Prometheus Unbound, filling in the gaps by the loss of the loss of the is isus cycle, dramatizing the reconciliation of Zeus and Prometheus. He images a human creativity. Taking the place of a di divine creativity marked by arbitrary rule and psychologically riven by hate and vengeance, of course, as a play can be understood as a kind of divine catis in which a divine comes to recognize just how vacuous the divine really is. It can also be understood as Milton as a comment on Milton wising up to what his true commitments are, and they are certainly not a commitment to the rightful and self-justifying God of Calvinist belief. Now, Shelly is tantalizing the indirect in evoking Milton in the process whereby the creativity of God the sovereign, yields to the more expansive and humane creativity of human beings. Milton's unshackling himself from his Calvinist beliefs. The very subject of what arguably is the greatest of all William Blake's poem, coincident with the purification of creativity that the divine euron undergoes. Milton Undergoes also undergoes the same process of dispatching the qualities of Capris legislation and vindictiveness that distort his own creativity of Blake in general and the point Milton in particular, we can, with a significant measure of confidence, say Newman do nothing. Yet Newman did know something of Cobridge had read a number, obvious texts, certainly aids to reflection that treated us on method and had found congenial coverages, confession of having a disposition towards the other world and his view of conscience as opening up the divine. Still, as far as I'm aware, there was no mention of Coleridge in the appendix. It was difficult to think, given the subject matter regarding the history of English literature that the table was not, had not been said by Coleridge in the biographical literary in which Coleridge had plotted the lines of modern English literature from Shakespeare towards Word or from Milton towards Word who succeeded in the lyrical ballads according to Ridge, as liberating the productive imagination that represents an echo in time and under the condition finitude of the Infinite. I am Newman, famously affirms the imagination in the alogia and in a certain sense, his notion, though the illit of sense and the grammar of ascent pays homage to it faced. However, with KO's actual claim, doubtless Newman would've found it exorbitant, even if Cole Rich. Keeps the on analogical structure between creature and creator officially intact. It seems evident that you defined as productive rather than reproductive Imagination will not broke any pre given content, religious or otherwise. To sum up, when Newman spoke of English literature being precedent, he has to be supposing, at the very least, the romantic account of the English cannon that is motored by precedent principles of autonomy that over time successfully dislodge as inessential. Those inherited precedent beliefs that derogate from the status of human beings and downplay their potential as CapEx infinity. This is the exogenous or external, this reason for thinking that Protestantism in a way. Capacitated, the dislodging of its particular beliefs embodied in literature, and wouldn't you course yield to a literature in which the values are entirely aesthetic and internal to the work of art as entirely a work of imagination. As suggested already, Newman's own view regarding the trajectory of Prostatism in the modern world also comes into play. In his sketch of the history of English literature, Newman saw that Prostatism had Aleg gone profound changes from the time of Elizabeth and Kraner, and given the emphasis on private judgment was capacitated to do so, it did so on two overlapping tracks on one track, the rationalist track proselytism underwent a filtering in which private judgment was ensconced as pivotal. Doctrines such as predestination, justification by faith, rather God and a host of others could be sanitized or set aside. This seemed to receive both wide and vivid expression in the Augustine age reports with their moralism and their interest in the role of directing manners and ennobling society on another track. The more evangelical track that received this apogee in the writings and preaching of the Wesley Brothers doctrines were also to extent set aside, even though not with the same level of prejudice as illustrated in and by the rational camp. So what is crucial now was no longer the doctrines themselves and the possible shaping function, then the experience itself, personal experience, whether expressed in judgment or feeling became self-authenticating. In the latter case, that is in the effective case. The effects were felt in the 18th century in 18th century literature with perhaps the funkin and romantic favorite Thomas Chatterton. The main example, the doctrinal cargo or tism had become sufficiently light to be born without compromise to the autonomy and integrity of literature that increasingly was deemed essential for the description of literary greatness and acceptance into the canon. And throughout Newman's career, but especially in the Polodia, he made plain his opposition to both stains, both of which shifted the center of gravity from the divine as transcendent object of worship to the self certifying of human reason or experience. Obviously, the internalists and Externalism constructions of the en unfolding or cosmism are mutually supporting. They illustrate how and why it is that Prostatism could sponsor. Of literature rather than Catholicism. this can be assumed to be the background of Newman's underscoring of how, in contrast, Catholicism has no such history and thus Catholic literature. In Catholic literature, confessional beliefs would, could and necessarily would have to cut thus insistence that the Catholic literature, or one might say Catholic imagination would have to be dogmatically inflected, which of course Newman realizes entails the destruction of the integrity of literature. It's hard to cavel with Newman, but he has in fact misstated the issue even on his own terms to use a more technical language, sorry, he tells us in Appendix Zoo rather. Which concerns literature more broadly, that great literature is an irreducible personal exercise or infection in language. Here's the more technical language he forges later in the grammar. He is pointing to the writer as exercising his or her own irreducible and irreplaceable illit of sense, which is the ability to make informed judgements on the fly as it were, without appealing to rule. This obviously bears on the issue of whether a Catholic writer as a writer would be dogmatic in the strict sense that is defend in and through writing determinate Catholic beliefs. This surely would be the work of the magisterium, perhaps the Catholic theologian or the controversialist. To be a writer is not necessarily to deny that one has beliefs, but one's beliefs are assumptions. Now operate in a horizon in which they're not argued, but rendered, dramatized, and put on the pressure to be experientially and linguistically persuasive. One can be assisted by distinction Newman makes between religion and theology earlier in the development of doctrine. In contrast with theology, religion is the response of the person to the truths of faith that form an ethos and that shape and inform decisions in life. Religion has determinacy and shape, yet it is neither explicitly theological nor dogmatic. Religion operates largely through images, metaphors, characters a narrative. The question to be asked is not whether literature and dogma go together, but whether literature can be religiously wake bearing in a significant way. If we're allowed this inundation that has proceeded on new manian grounds, then going forward at least there's no reason to deny the prospect to Catholicism as long as the integrity of literature is preserved by avoiding the evolution into deducts and haran. It is by means of this correction that's internal to Newman's talk that we can move towards something like a criterion for Catholic literature and Catholic poetry in particular, to state it more bluntly perhaps than I ought for a literature of poetry to be Catholic. It requires that the symbols, metaphors, and narratives have a relatively saturating effect on the port of prose. That is its basic linguistic form. Catholicism is a mode of seeing the world and parsing and squaring up to its contradictions. Belief can be suspended. Problematized one can spend an enormous amount of time attending to gaps in understanding and feeling, but beliefs cannot be absolutely denied. It's displacement and replacement by the secular can be contemplated, even made thematic, but never sanctioned an agonized displacement. That is the feeling that the time for Catholic is up. That still probably means you're still in the game and agonized displacement or feeling of displacement and replacement, that you're no longer with the zeitgeist. This is a liminal element with respect to Catholicism. I want to test this newly minted Ian perspective with a view to seeing how it works regarding two authors who typically we have no problem calling Catholic, Jared Man Hopkins and James Joyce, both of whom are indebted to Newman in the former case, Newman being essentially the reason for his conversion and in the latter case, an elective affinity when it comes to pro style, but also were occupants of Newman House where Newman stayed when he was giving the lectures. That made up the idea of the university than not. Obviously, at that time, I want to argue the following first, that it would be difficult to come upon a more ly saturated writer than Hopkins. Obviously, he's gonna pass the test, but we're fine colors indeed that the Catholic saturation is such. Despite the late sonnets that represent Hopkins dealing with his own despair, the Hopkins' poetry plausibly. Represents a kind of limit as to what literature can religiously bear. Second, contrary wise, I will argue that according to these newly minted criterion or criteria, James Joyce's portrait of the artist as a young man is not a Catholic text, but the belated romantic text in which Catholicism serves as a symbolic narrative husk of a perfection only realized in the derangement and epiphanies provided by the secular world. Uh, Hopkins. I take it that only the truly unserious would deny that Hopkins is a Catholic poet, a more particularly that his poetry is thoroughly and Assistly incarnation. We respect. At this point, we could offer a bundle made up of the following poems as evidence. God's Grandeur Spring the Wind, hover Pied Beauty, RA the Harvest. And kingfishers. As Kingfishers catch fire. It should be noted first that in Hopkins incarnation differs from pron such as bridges and more in being more nearly performative than thematic. You perform the incarnation, you don't talk about it. It should also be noted. Secondly, the Hopkins' notion of the incarnation differs from that of Highman Highman, such as Wordsworth and Shelly, in that the divine power that suffuses this physical world is not vague and impersonal and indicative of our own greatness, as well as implicit greatness of nature, but signifies rather the person and energy of Christ who ties together the world of unique particulars in all of their irreplaceable uniqueness and integrity. Indeed, one can see a profound pushback against a romantic ideology. Which even if the incarnation of Christ is not dismissed, it is transposed into a more general idiom in which Christ is a possible element, a vocabulary element of incarnation. But Christ does not supply the grammar of incarnation. Perhaps this aspect of Hopkins' poetry, what we might call following Deida, the restricted economy of incarnation as opposed to the general economy. Incarnation represented by the romantics is most successfully captured in God's grandeur. And the wind hover Hopkins' determinate frame for epiphany and theophany is presented in the opening lines of God's grandeur. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shiny from shook foil. It gathers to a greatness like the S of oil crushed with respect to incarnation. In these opening lines Hopkins manages that wants to be thematic and performative. That is the very imagery in which his general view of the world is couch. That is the imagery of flame out shining with shook foil, ooze of oil, performs that of which it speaks or signifies. And as he does, so he suggests moves beyond per partisanism, but also beyond high romanticism where the merging of the thematic and the performative did happen though tended to be more or less exceptional. Still superficially, it is not evident from the outset that Hopkins has distanced themselves from the best examples in how romanticism of unity of theme and performance of worldview. For instance, the opening lines of Mount Blanc in which Shelly Expounds, his view of spirit as a river ave tumbling down the mountain. There isn't that poem, the concreteness of image that renders the worldview. Moreover, in ecstatic mode to what we find in Hop Hopkins. There is a surcharge or sublime energy that excites and insights participation, yet even with Map Blanc, as the measure of what can be achieved in how romanticism, the differences impress themselves In the term grander, the poem obviously recalls the Psalm A, singing The Glory of God that shines through nature, as well as on Mount Sinai and in the Holy of Holies, and which in Christian reading might be associated with Christ, but even more directly grandeur or the greatest is an expression of Christos Christ our king. Again, the addition of crushed to ooze, ze of oil seems to evoke Christ to his crush for our sake. And oil is obviously sacramental. Most likely evokes the oil of baptism and the entrance into the living Christ. The commitment to determine the particulars and orientation towards persons rather than principles is carried out. And Este of the sonnet in which the dearest freshness deep down things is presided over by the brooding Holy Spirit, reminding obviously of a relation to Christ, suggesting a connection of the Spirit of God hovering over the chaos to boho in the act of creation, while also recalling those passages in Hebrew Scripture of Yahweh as the brooding hen, his connection seems to be cemented. But in the final line of the poem, Hopman speaks of the covering wings. God's grandeur renders a poetry that is incarnation, saturated, and possibly sacramentally saturated as well by making sure that neither Christ nor the Holy Spirit. As creative and sustaining are evacuated of the concrete persona and authorized into principles, I think I'll leave the wind harbor. So if alone, it's a wonderful point, but I think I'll leave it alone. Now. What Hopkins's focus on Christ's incarnation is central to his ward. Nonetheless, it is only one aspect of a complex ve that overall is eucharistic and involves the drama of loss and alienation from God as presupposition for resurrection. The record that Deutsche Land is a poem of apocalyptic terror. A ship carrying nuns already in exile goes down on the Devon coast. The assertion of the Eucharist into the poem occurs as early as line two, where goddess is first recognized that the God who gives bread as well as breath. The question of the poem is what responses. This manifestation of the terrible, whether acceptance or rejection, blessing or curse aversion or admiration rings out of the whirlwind. The nun is the cipher of the suffering Christ. And because such she is inlaid into Christ and thus into his resurrection, she and the four other nuns, all sort of are lost or just before they're all lost, break out into the acclimation. Let him Easter in us. This has stated just as the leading nun, in one of her last breasts, uh, breath, rather, has placed herself in the book of Revelation, the Book of the Lamb, by citing its ending Marata Come, come Christ, come quickly. Of course, it is open to the reader of Hopkins to take. His or her point of view of hopkins's poetry from the dark saunas that brings down the curtain on the small uve in which glory is to be found everywhere in the meanest of things and moments, even in the darkness on the surface. These points seem to speak of the disappearance of God, of which Heli Miller speaks, and which Matthew Arnold dramatizes in the penultimate Stan of Dover beach. The CFA was ones two as the fo and round earth, shore lay light, the foals of a bright girdle furled, but now I only hear its mely long withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of night, wind down the vast edges, D rear and naked shingles of the world, the nightmare escape of the sauna, carrying comfort, and five other saunas that follow. It seemed more like a winnowing and a test of belief. Arnold nostalgia for the absence of God. Carrying comfort seems to have both The test. The test is that fighting, wrestling with God and winnowing is that, that the purpose of the experience of God is that my chaff may fly. There is the neither beyond grief, without the experience of the comforter who might give consolation the loneliness. That beyond imagining leads to a kind of de creation. A lonely began and there is a pointing to a heaven of which has a baffling ban, and somehow or other, a hidden God who has a deep decree and not available for inspection, a Christ go, goes up for a God that might reveal himself in delicious kindness. Yet hope irrationally continues to hold. Continues to subsist that joy might come in God's season in the right measure of size or size, the absence of God. The main point is the absence of God can no more be taken for granted than God's presence in the manifold of the priests Christian who has appropriated his Christianity or being appropriated by it. Everything is dramatic, everything is act. This applies to the nature and origin of Epiphany as it does to the experience of the absence of God, which is still religious because it speaks to our relation in this instance, God's sovereign act of withdrawing that remains mysterious and that is granted a limited space. It ignatius its, uh, exercises, but our front and center in St. John of the cross. And this brings me to the other Denon of Newman House in the wake of Newman, James Joyce. Perhaps the most famous man of letters that our small island produced and who largely succeeded in exp appropriating the English language from the conqueror by first writing it perfectly in the importance of the artists, deranging it in Ulysses, and rearranging it entirely in Finnegan's wake. Here we focus only on the portrait where his Joyce is, buildings from man into which he became an artist in three struggle with Catholicism, whose control of our behavior, Irish behavior and minds were ubiquitous, and whose legacy was self-hatred and guilt, that depressed intellect, repressed imagination, and made human flourishing impossible throughout the novel. In his protagonist, Stephen DADUs Joyce shows his distaste for the clerical Vanguard Horror. Horror at some of his figures. Father, father Dolan, obviously, and contempt. For the low ceiling of bourgeois expectation under which Catholicism and politics do their dance. Excoriation and exposure are inevitable in such an anti-Catholic text, which turns out to be so damning, precisely because Joyce has as his anti-hero, hero, a character who speaks the language of Catholicism. So well, of course, if the effective takedown of the Catholic church was all that was achieved, we might well wonder why the texts enjoys such a high reputation. Yes, there is the perfection of the language and the great set pieces that feature at the beginning, the beginning of language, the Mau goes down the road, the hellfire sermon, the epiphany of the young woman on the beach, and also the use of a motto, uh, to mirror the motto of the Jesuits of silence, exile, and cunning. That conclude that concludes the growing of the damage and unhappy youth into an author, the damage of his own life. The proprietor of words yet more, I would say much more is going on than this. Stephen Semi Divine Status. His role as mediator between the eternal and temporal is given in his very name and is enacted in and through his expropriation of this mediatorial function from the Catholic priesthood that seemed to have a monopoly on it. While the exercise of Catholic power can be raw and brutal, much of the power is soft, and therefore, Anjo's account more insidious, is embodied in litanies sermons, the words of forgiveness, and above all the entire ritual of the Eucharist. Its pacing, its gestures, its cadences, and above all the words of institution. This is my body and this is my blood. Wherein language generates its objective, correlative. If we could say that Stephen adopts the role of prophet in protesting against the church's raw power. He liquidates the church by liquefying his soft power by taking on the role of priest whose words have sacramental power. That the power of language is derivative with respect to another, helps with his elevation to the role of mediator since priests. After all, our best mouthpiece is for Christ, who is the real agent of metamorphosis and of the transmutation of the invisible into rather the visible into the invisible. The art is emerging from Christless has come to recognize that at its best Catholicism has been a code for a more general economy of soccer, of sacrament relevant to all of our physical and sensory sensory reality. Each and every one of our experiences, whether sacred or profane. There's something of Prometheus about Joyces Steven. He's a thief who steals fire and gives it away to those other heroes of language, who have been brave enough to empty heaven sideline Christ while taking on his obscure as supporters and experientially bankrupt institutions. Joyce's preferred romantic in the text, maybe because of the license provided by transgression is Byron, if the novel gives the unmistakable feel or whiff of Shelly in the muted recall of Prometheus Unbound, but more nearly of the manifesto for the artist laid out in defense of poetry in which the poet is at once, mediator, prophet and priest, and the master presider over a language. That is original rather than secondary or tertiary, alive rather than dead. A language that might create a community corelative to its creativity. Indeed, as the portrait leans towards this building's romantic conclusion, the portrait not only rebuts Catholicism, but leaves a drain of all authority and bereft of its linguistic power that now belongs to Joyce. Thus, the question and maybe a payoff from this journey through Newman towards criteria for Catholic description to an author's work. Does Joyce provide us with an example of Catholic imagination in the portrait, thereby setting up the prospect of Catholic description of his work as a whole? Of course, it would not grade out in the way that Hopkins's poetry grades out ly. Then very few pieces of literature are going to hit its level of Catholic Supers saturation in image metaphor, and even the experience of the dark night of God's absence. Now, if the novel were to be defined by the presence of Catholicism as a theme, then it's obvious the portrait is a Catholic text and an example of Catholic imagination. Yet this is precisely what Newman's amended definition does not allow. Catholic ascription is not based on theme, but on the perspective of the author who is formed by Catholic symbols, metaphor and shapes the world through them. Sometimes comfortably, sometimes uncomfortably, sometimes in crisis, sometimes joyously, but always experimentally and searchingly Joyce's. Has the very determinate result that the prominent Catholic signifiers were always bereft of the corresponding signifies. Happily. However, the arrival of the art is meant that the signifiers now signify properly in the secular world marked by power, struggle, sensation, desire, sex, and above all flux Catholicism is the world from which the secret has been wrong, that it is an illusion and was always talking about the world, or at the very least, a former transcendence that does not involve either a personal God or transcendent real or beauty. Beauty and reality are defined by here, and there is no essential difference between sacred and profane language. Between different imaginative capacities, but only the difference between imaginative capacities and different levels of linguistic power. In this sense, the portrait represents a be later form of romanticism that insisted on the divine power of human imagination. Indeed, if we think of Newman's sense of proselytism as summed up in private judgment, then we might even say however, counterintuitively it may be that the portrait is an exercise in precedent imagination. I realized that this is a provocative conclusion, but does follow from the criterion of Catholic literature that followed on a rereading of what Newman could have said. According to his own principles in the text to the quoted and which cover which responding to the pressure of bishops, he was forced into the hyperbole of insisting that English literature was president and that the mingle of Catholic doctrine literature proposed by the bishops was not literature. In my reconstruction, Newman's fundamental criterion of Catholic point of view in experimental form convey dominantly in and through image, metaphor and narrative. Having Catholicism as an explicit theme does not count. In addition, there may very well be cases that while the language evokes a Catholic perspective on the world, it does not perform it to a significant degree. Justice Hopkins's poetry would represent a supersaturated Catholic imagination. Other texts and other authors represent an unsaturated, but nonetheless, real Catholic imagination. But these will be the liminal cases. One can imagine that there can be a correspondence between romantic and Catholic inclinations, but only insofar as the romantic element has not affiliated divine figures and elevated human beings to divine heights. And with this, so if I'm going to conclude. There are conditions under which Catholic literature can negotiate fruitfully with romanticism provided. The following is the case as long as God has not been killed, as long as Christ has not been deleted or depleted into a figure of the imagination, as long as Christianity is no lo is not simply a mythic code that has been cracked and that we can thank the romantics and those writers in the wake for finding a human correlus for the signs that failed to signify. There is a Catholic literature. Newman was wrong. There is a catty literature. Newman was right, but there's only a catty literature with something like a criterion. Whereby we might be able to make up our mind as to what level of saturation are we talking about and whether it works or whether in fact, actually in the giving of Catholic signs, the signs and the meaning of those signs are in the process of being erased. Thank you very much.

1 55:06

So we have about 20 minutes for questions.

4 55:16

Thank you. Uh, Sarah, this is not a well-formed question, but I'm hoping that you can help me. It seems to me, following after Joyce, people like Graham Green or Evelyn V, but particularly I'm thinking of Graham Green, has a Catholic imagination in something like the sense in which. The Greek tragedies feel that plot can only proceed by a particular metaphysical configuration of the world. So for green plot comes from the strictures that Catholic moral imagination places on goodness and value, and the protagonists sort of are, are almost crushed by that. But their actions, often tragic actions come from the strictures of the Catholic truth of the world, which is also in a sense tragic. do you think that that's, that's a species of Catholic imagination? That's presumably a one of your limit cases. But is there anything you want to say about green and wall is really what I'm asking?

2 56:16

Well, let, let's stick to green. So it seems to me, so that on this new menu analysis, green is in that, is that, Green wants to and does not want to believe. Green finds himself in situations where beliefs sort seems to be on offer, which he can, which he refuses, and other occasions in which it's impossible to refuse precisely because it represents a limit to the ego, just as he thinks it's impossible to be forgiven except forgiveness. Forgiveness gets offered, refused, and gets offered again. So it seems to me that while you could thread sort of, you could think about green's novels as, you know, there are these, shall we say, mountains of dogma, sort of which crop up, sort of know in an experience whereby sort of it's offered as a prospect, a prospect sort of know that you can sort of quite comprehend, uh, but a prospect that kind of bruises you in some particular way. Arrests you, interferes with you. Part of the reason why sort of, I spent some time talking about the non incarnational elements, uh, in Hopkins, whereby sort of that he's able to bring those elements which seem, if you like, to be pulling the rug, sort of know of an entire kind of Catholic imagination so far as that's given an image positively given an images and narratives and metaphor and would seem that he's pulling the rug and all he is doing, in fact sort of is making the rug more complex. That is he's finding a place, he's finding a place, for a dark night in which sort of, you can only say so of no, well, whatever. I want to think about being something more than is the case here, that I am not experiencing this. what I'm experiencing sort of is the question of it. I am experiencing not so much my interrogation of it'cause that was what would be skepticism. I'm experiencing that reality interrogating. So I, I take in some sense that it's easy, it's fairly, it seems fairly easy to me unless sort of, you know, I'm missing something. it's fairly easy to graft. I think green sort of onto, you know, a region sort of, you know, of that super saturation. And what he does of course is, uh, there is no singing, there is no incarnation, uh, there is no kind of sacrament, sacramental imagination, but there is an attestation, of sort of, of an irreparable loss, an irreparable counter sort of to you, uh, an irreparable call to you, with sort of somehow or other spears and cuts, otherwise would be sort of a secular imagination. Uh, and one's interest sort of in writing, uh, having a profession, getting along and so forth, or simply, uh, behaving as ethically. As you ought to, or sort of trying not to behave as bad as you generally do, but I think much more is going on, I think, than that. I think that there is this sort of intervention, this sense in which, uh, you're beckoned, you are affronted, but you sort of are on the cusp of affirmation and negation. Another one thing fully not the other,

3 59:27

I would say. Could you closer? Sure. Will do, will do.

5 59:31

Cyril. Thank you, so much to say. But if I hope you'll, excuse a personal anecdote here. was traveling in Scotland on a professorial vacation and stopped at Walter Scott's Abbotsford, which is, Scott's home's medieval manner, uh, that he recreated, from scratch, including a chapel. Uh, and when we were there, there happened to be a newly ordained Scottish seminarian. Who was saying mass at the chapel, because in the, in the generation after Scott, it was swept away with the Oxford movement and, Newman himself came and, and said, mass at Walter Scott's, uh, chapel. which is to say, I think one of the things maybe we can, I want to go back to your diagnosis of Newman Uncharacteristically making a mistake. why did he make a mistake? and hastiness and pressure? Certainly, but it seems to me maybe he didn't have confidence in what he himself said about the romantics he liked. So, Wordsworth Coleridge, Scott. Sally too. and didn't necessarily didn't, maybe, didn't see that they could overcome the anti Catholicism that he had diagnosed in the Protestant tradition that had shaped the literary tradition. So I, I guess I have maybe a, just an idea, um, and I'd like to hear what you, what you think about it, Cy, is, is that in some ways Newman was the missing link himself to maintain, to bring forward this kind of deeper sense of almost like Catholic romanticism that he was able to see in glimpses in Wordsworth, Coleridge, south and Scott. and maybe, maybe he didn't know the answer. He didn't have hope in the answer because in some ways he was almost the answer himself. Okay.

2 1:01:32

Right. That's a very interesting question. the first point is a kind of clearing of the, of my throat in some sense with respect to kind of giving an answer. That is that at some level, uh, certainly in the Alogia Newman, invites us to think about the peaceable kingdom in which romanticism and Catholicism can exist, right? So those references romanticism are fairly positive. we know that he has a somewhat troubled view, sort of, of coverage, but it's not entirely a negative view. So in other words, for those sort of persons who think, look, Newman said some positive things about romanticism and of course he points a romanticism as at least half a cure, right? For skepticism and for materialism and this world, thisness, right? So in that sense, you can negotiate. The question I think that he's asking about romanticism is, with whom and under what conditions. The reason why sort of, I talked in the way I did and the way sort of, I tried to try to talk about that. We move sort of now from Milton to the Romantics. And I think that access from, let's say Milton to Wordsworth is, that's the dance of liberation. all romanticism from any form of religious belief just so happens that was pro belief. That was in, in the ascent. So romanticism is, if you like, involved sort of in self designation, as we sort of have removed sort of, you know, all allegiance and where, so we have that gesture of self-affirmation, of liberty and that religion is only a past and then we have corelative to that, the ways of, in which. The religious imagination is selfing that is not, shall we say, validated in and through its object. It's ver it's verified, sort of know in and through, simply so of know its own attestation. So what I think he calls for is a discrimination who, who are those authors romantic and not necessarily making sort of no explicit inroads, very much sort of no into anything like a kind of fundamental shaping sort of, of the world in and through sort of belief and myth and uh, image and so forth. But nonetheless, say something about the world that is congenial and it doesn't make impossible a conversation. My view, whoever is that, and I spent more time on the negative aspect, is that romanticism as such more nearly functions as a displacement replacement whereby, so you have an assertion of a religiosity. That is non confessional. That's potentially universal, though exceptional. And that, that then functions not merely as a partial answer, to the materialism and the physicalism Epi Davos modernity. But it's the only answer. And that those enlightenment folks that if, who criticize religion, they were right. They in turn, whoever had to be criticized. So romanticism without its absolute, shall we say, apotheosis, and its displacement, you know, of actual religion, that cannot be negotiated with'cause it's telling you it's not going to negotiate. And what I'm trying to say with respect to the portrait, Joyce is telling you, I think we have to listen. He's telling you I will not negotiate. I'm refusing what the novel does is it itself is an exercise in Demonalization. He is depathologizing before you. The business from man is how God helped me. How I overcome Catholicism and how I overcame not so much fidelity, but fieldy, right? Fieldy sort to something that's external to me because sort of it is a community of group activity, which has supposedly a form of authority other than the authority that I compose upon reality. So the text itself is Catholicism in the act of disappearance. It's Catholicism in the act of its own self erasure. And I think we get, I mean, I'm Irish, so I want my, I want my guy, I want my guy to be a Catholic author. but it seems to me sort of that we should push, are, are we just simply sentimental? Are we getting desperate? So, so I, I suppose this is, this is really what I think that the renovated new man is forcing on us. I do think, actually your question I think is not really indicative but central in the form in which you made it, because I do think that the narrow issue as it turns out is that because of, of the Catholic imagination, remember that the Catholic seems to be sort of the adjective qualifying the noun often. Of course it's not quite, not quite sure so what the qualification is worth, but it is imagination itself. that is a precedent product, you know, and we had to be very careful of colonizing it. That is, it's quite clear. So that, that when we're talking about a imagination or inspiration about imagination in particular, and that's obviously, so what COVID is gonna systematize them by Grapha, right? He borrows from shelling, he cribs from shelling, he plagiarizes, so absolutely from shelling. So we just simply, we had to convict him of that. So there's obviously no honors code, so there's no been exercise at that particular moment. but when he's, but when he's sort of now metaly undergirding imagination as productive, he can say all he likes. It's, it's the repetition. So there's no in the fin mode so that we're an echo all. So there's no, the infinite I am, but you're saying it's productive imagination. There is a absolute ambiguity between whether that's divine or not. So therefore, with god's a, this displacement and that ambiguity is structural and quite deliberate in my view. Now it does, that does not mean, so the history of code reach after the biographic, uh, is not a kind of different history. It's a quite somewhat different history where I think, so there's no, something is taken off of that particular claim, but he is making that claim in the con, in the context obviously like doing a literary history and making kind of, uh, you know, literary evaluations. So I think that's my point, but I think romanticism, where it goes, will turn out to be the issue.

6 1:08:13

Thank you Professor Ogan. This has been excellent. two quick questions. Well, maybe we'll see. the first one was posed to me two days ago after I gave a talk on Hopkins about whether you would consider Inscape and Intres as sort of downriver of maybe the ill sense. Is there any connection between those? Uh, I suspect there's some metaphysical underpinning of, that would require an understanding. The second question, would you see Joyce as sort of an object lesson is what happens when you become untethered from a metaphysic or a God, such that if you look at his, the progression of his novels, portrait of the artist Dublin or Ulysses Finnegan Wake, it becomes less and less intelligible so that we're not talking about unique hase. The ness that you see in Hopkins, which can be understood by others, but in fact becomes almost like a private language that is no longer understandable.

3 1:09:02

Right.

2 1:09:04

So I'd say with respect to the first question, it's clear that Hopkins has a sense that the poet sees it's not divine inspiration. It's seeing, so as a practice, it's seeing as a pedagogy referring back to Laos night. There, there is this kind of sense in which, we start out not seeing that much. We start out seeing not that sharply, uh, and eventually we do Inscape and in stress into me, sort of know on the other side of things. So clearly this learning, learning to see is, I suppose the way Newman might think about is a form of impersonation that is, it's a ways of becoming a person. But what you see, the quit task or the thisness of things

6 1:09:58

is

2 1:09:58

presumably sort of just, that is a metaphysical comment about the nature of the world. A statistic comment about the nature of the world that is, that particulars are there. So to afront you and aright you and invite you in stress, I think sort of is the ways, sort of in which, we have to talk about all things less as, even though, there's a sense in which Hopkins talks about it as things, there's ways in which also that really, there there are bundles of energy. So intres itself, I think as that then sort of tends to be reflected in the language, is the assertion that, so there's no, within any sort of no one field of vision, there is, there is an energy that is both sort of, uh, simultaneously, uh, an act of fusion and act of fusion. but an act sort of no, of. An act of act. I mean, so one of the things I think we'd have to do, I think with Hopkins is to try and translate him so they know from the language of being into the language of act, but in stress then so also is the one and only means by which everything holds together. Everything holds together. Like in stress is everything holds together by stress. I mean it's a stress of things, but it's also a stress across all those things. and all those things stressing and if you're like stressing us out. So that would answer, I think we respect to the first question. the second question. well, yes. I mean, I wanted to take what would look like the easy case for Joyce, being a Kathy thinker, right? We got Eucharist all over the place, Sacramento. We've got language, we've got litanies, we've got music. Everything looks like if that's not, if that's not a Catholic text, we're all in trouble. Well, we're all in trouble. But that because of that, it seems to me that the text itself, right, is the deconstruction of the fact, also the deconstruction of the possibility of the sacramental imagination. So, you know, I think we just have to do a double take. It is not an example of the sacramental imagination. It's an example of the deconstruction of the sacramental imagination, which then gets sort of know to those texts, which you mentioned later on. I did sort of know somewhat, uh, you know, facilely kind of, uh, introduce Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. But I think basically, sort of know your question sort of now is really kind of more or less sort of know where I was. When you think about the experimental modernist, uh, nature of Ulysses. One sort of has to assume sort of adaptable point. Is that right? Signs? So we have signs, but do we have symbols? We have an organization sort of know of the text, let's say by myth, but is this a sense in which myth? somehow or rather functions as other than a kind of placeholder, uh, a kind of catalog, you know, for certain kinds of behavior or certain kind of happenstances. And in that sense, w there's not, there isn't a, there isn't a signified, operative. There is now sort of no, a set of signs, all of which sort of no will points sort of no to the imminent are all generated within the imminent frame and all will point to objects which themselves are imminent. Now that those particular imminent objects are not static is not a thing entirely right now. He also has his view with respect to, you know. Whether things are going to hold up and whether they stay long enough. So they know for us whether experiences are coherent enough for us to render them and register them. But that's side, that's a side I think to the actual question. And I think if you're thinking about Finnegan's Wake, Finnegan's Wake sort of is no longer sort of, shall we say, simply that the signs do not refer to, let's say signs are not symbolic. They're not sacramental, they're not incarnational, they do not render and give us the gift of reality. But Finnegan's Wake sort of is that, well we now have, we're gonna have a problem sort of with respect to signs and not simply the signifies in the sense that we don't really have a stable kind of set of signs.'cause we can, we can have agglutinate language. Right? there are, I believe 70 or more than 70 languages. So on the one hand, Vinegar's wake is set up as a kind of universal language or Esperanto, right? That's a, that's one gesture, which is, uh, Joyce is not going to redeem. So we've got the universal language, which now Southern is melted into the tower Babel. That is, there is no one language, there is no universal language. It's only Babel, Babel of language where, so there are no signs wherein every, in words or what words he's using, they don't, they cannot signify univ because they're not even, they're not even a word in any language. So all of that sort of goes by the board. Bebo and universal language are the same thing. There's simply two different sides of the same coin. And the, that is of course, then the far reaches of the consequences of when in fact words do not signify when in fact they don't re render reality. this sort of is where it's gonna go. In that, in that respect. I mean, uh, MBTA Echo, of course is a interpreter of Joyce and yeah, he says some very, very interesting things. And most of the things he says about Joyce seem to me to be true. I mean, he has his own particular interests. He is, has his own kind of semiotics and Joyce of course, so there's no parallels. The kind of medieval semiotics and that he's going to enjoin and not the one that he's not going to enjoin. But when Sope, when he kind of is really, really does stipulate that the aesthetics, and I didn't talk about this here, the aesthetics, theistic aesthetics of the text, which becomes sort of the object of exploration, but really parody, right? And displacement. In other words, if you're thinking about sort of a way in which that we've got sort of a telian, platonic way of talking about the world in which sort of the transcendence sort of leaks in and, and our language is relatively inadequate, but still sort of, it gets there. And when Thomas is talking sort of new about the appearance of beauty. When that beauty sort of no is a beauty. So that somehow or other is more than the actual thing. So that we just, the bearer sort of that particular beauty, notice that, uh, in the portrait that also, so there, there is undone, it's, it's undone. So there's no, by the stipulation, first of all, there is a kind of mistranslation that occurs, which points to the thing only as a thing. And the thing can signify other than itself that in a sense that everything that would've been regarded as a given with respect to medieval aesthetic, which would account, so there's no, for the appearance of that sort of we're, is not material, right? The rendering sort of no invisible of the invisible, uh, that's countersigned. That is, uh, it's already sort of now, now will be stipulated on the basis of interpretation that it cannot do that. So it cannot do sort of know why this built up. So what's happening is that Thomas, whatever Thomas said. Thomas is not denied, but Thomas sort of is In fact, there is in fact a parody of Thomas, whereby Thomas could never really have said, uh, what he said, and if he said what he said, it was entirely improper and misplaced. So all medieval aesthetic theory is gone, which leads then Umberto echo to suggest that really the world, the world of the world that we have come into the world that to some extent joys both prophesizes and is a, the exemplar of, it's a world of ki osmos, not a world of cosmos. It's not a world. So there's no in which, so there's no, you could even think so that there's any reference to anything beyond itself, itself on close. Uh, it's tur uh, it's turbulent. It signifies. It signifies, but can never, never grasp or signified. and that is the world and therefore the courage that we ought to have, the courage of the writer, the courage of umber to echo, uh, right in the name of the rose. Is the courage of No to Endure. So in and through the way in which we have this systemic, systematic, absolutely irrevocable split between the sign and the signified.

1 1:18:16

With apologies to everyone in the queue, we have to wrap up and thanks, Cy.