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From Angst to Encounter: Nathan Scott's Journey in Theology and Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Diane Apostolos-Cappadona
Diane Apostolos-Cappadona*
Affiliation:
The George Washington University
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Abstract

Nathan A. Scott, Jr. is identified as a leading figure in the development of the interdisciplinary field of theology and literature. This essay presents an interpretation of his methodology and scholarly development over a thirty-year period (1952-1981). Paul Tillich's theology of culture is understood as the major methodological and theological influence on Scott's early work. Martin Heidegger's philosophy (preeminently the essays on aesthetics) is the major influence in the development of Scott's mature scholarship. Scott's methodology has a seven-step structure and the textual analysis of his works is presented in a chronological manner. The central foci in the shift in Scott's inquiry are the type of literature he analyzes and his understanding of the role of the poet. The essay concludes with an evaluation of Scott's contribution to this field of study and suggestions for its future development.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Fall 1983 , pp. 304 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1983

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References

1 Scott, Nathan A. Jr., The Broken Center (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. ix.Google Scholar See also his Rehearsals of Discomposure: Alienation and Reconciliation in Modern Literature (New York: King Crown's Press, 1952), p. vii.Google Scholar

2 Scott defines the role of the Christian critic in “The Modern Experiment in Criticism: A Theological Appraisal” in Modern Literature and the Religious Frontier (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), pp. 22–45;Google Scholar and also in The New Orpheus (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), pp. 141–70.Google Scholar The role of the theological interpreter is defined in “Faith and Art in a World Awry” in The Broken Center, pp. 187–211.Google Scholar

3 Scott, , Modern Literature and the Religious Frontier, p. 37.Google Scholar

4 Scott, , The Broken Center, pp. 120–21.Google Scholar

5 Tillich, Paul, “Introduction” in Systematic Theology 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975 [1951]), p. 63.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., p. 63.

7 Tillich, Paul, “On the Idea of a Theology of Culture” in What is Religion? Tr. Adams, James Luther (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973 [1969]), p. 165.Google Scholar

8 Tillich, Paul, “The Courage of Despair in Contemporary Art and Literature” in The Courage To Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975 [1952]), p. 143.Google Scholar See also his “Protestantism and the Artistic Style” in Theology of Culture, ed. Kimball, Robert C. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972 [1959]), pp. 68–75.Google Scholar

9 See the following essays by Scott, : “The Literary Image in a Time of Literary Dearth” in Negative Capability (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 59–89, esp. pp. 61–86;Google Scholar“The Sacramental Vision” in The Wild Prayer of Longing: Poetry and the Sacred (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 43–75, esp. pp. 60–75;Google Scholar“On the Fallacies of a ‘Close Reader,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 (March 1971), 76–82;Google Scholar‘Eliot and the Orphic Way,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43 (June 1974), 201–31, esp. 205–09 and 229–30;Google Scholar“Heidegger's Path—Towards the Recovery of Being” in Mirrors of Man in Existentialism (Cleveland, OH: Collins, 1978), pp. 88–117;Google Scholar and “Arnold's Version of Transcendence—The Via Poetica,” Journal of Religion 59 (July 1979), 261–84, esp. 273–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 For an alternative appropriation of both Heidegger's understanding of the poet and his philosophic language, see Rahner, Karl, “Poetry and the Christian” in Theological Investigations, 4 (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966), pp. 357–67.Google Scholar

11 Heidegger, Martin, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” in Existence and Being, tr. Scott, Douglas (Chicago: Regnery, 1949), p. 280;Google Scholar see also his Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Hofstader, Albert (New York: Harper Colophon, 1975 [1971]).Google Scholar

12 Heidegger, , Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 74;Google Scholar see also p. 225.

13 Ibid., p. 218.

14 Neoorthodoxy is defined by Gilkey, Langdon, Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 85.Google Scholar Both Tillich's and Scott's emphasis on the “crisis” moments would also classify them within the traditional boundaries of neoorthodoxy. Tillich's neoorthodoxy included a specific theological anthropology in which the human person is not only fallible and distanced but anxious and questioning.

15 Scott, Nathan A. Jr., , The Poetry of Civic Virtue (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), p. 74.Google Scholar

16 Significantly, Scott refers twice to Heidegger's description of one of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings of worn leather shoes in “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 15–88, esp. pp. 33–37;Google ScholarScott's, references are in Negative Capability, pp. 69–70Google Scholar, and Mirrors of Man, pp. 109-10. Here Scott confronts through Heidegger the questions of self-relationality, poet, poem, Being and transformation of earth to “world.”

17 In his analysis of Heidegger's Discourse on Thinking, Scott looks at Heidegger's “meditative thinking” through a neoorthodox lens; see Scott, , The Wild Prayer of Longing, p. 68.Google Scholar

18 Scott's use of the terms “sacrament” and “sacramental grace” are specific; see his The Wiid Prayer of Longing, p. 49.

19 Ibid., p. xv.

20 Scott, , Modern Literature, p. 56.Google Scholar

21 Scott, , “Eliot,” p. 214.Google Scholar

22 Scott, , The Wild Prayer of Longing, p. xiii.Google Scholar

23 Scott, , “Matthew Arnold,” pp. 273–74.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., p. 274.

25 Scott, Nathan A. Jr., Craters of the Spirit (Washington, DC: Corpus, 1968).Google Scholar

26 See Ricoeur, Paul, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

27 See Tracy, David, A Blessed Rage for Order (New York: Seabury, 1975), esp. pp. 32–34, 43–56, 64–81, 91–109, 119–36.Google Scholar

28 Ricoeur, , Interpretation Theory, pp. 89–90.Google Scholar

29 Scott, Nathan A. Jr., “Day By Day: On Plotting the Dialogue Between Christian Theology and Modern Literature in the Midst of the Rough Weathers of the Present Time,” The Christian Century (15 October 1980), 966.Google Scholar