As a child, the artist David Jones (1895-1974) heard his mother, a gifted painter herself, ask her Quaker doctor why it was that Quakers had no sacraments. He replied, “But Mrs. Jones, surely the whole of life is a sacrament.” Rev. Hester Jones’ presentation explored some of the ways in which the whole of life, when represented through the artist’s transforming lens, becomes sacramental for David Jones. This sense of unity at the heart of things underpins all of Jones’ thought, and it is a response to the integrating vision of Samuel Coleridge, John Ruskin, and above all, the understanding of sacramental inscape in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The talk indicated how that densely physical sign is frequently configured in the image of the all-encompassing “deep,” encircling, eluding, and transcending the historical realm within which such sacrificial actions take place.
For Jones, “the deep” is also associated with authenticity, Celticity, beginnings, and often the close embrace of a feminine figure or symbol. It is fluid and contradictory - the place both of trial and of transcendence. The deep exists in tense relation with, and sometimes in opposition to, the forceful march of time associated in Jones’ mind with Roman Imperium, or with all-conquering movements. In her presentation, Rev. Jones suggested that David Jones plays fruitfully with the fluctuating meanings of depth, both the deep sea and the rich deposits of time, and in this respect has more in common with postmodern theology than might be imagined. Michael Scott, director of the Future of the Humanities Project, provided opening and closing remarks, and Rev. Joseph Simmons, S.J., moderated a Q&A session following the presentation.
This event was sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative; the Georgetown Master’s Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities; Campion Hall, Oxford; and the Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, Oxford). It is part of a two-year-long series on the Christian Literary Imagination.
Featured
Rev. Dr. Hester Jones is a senior lecturer in English at Bristol University and vicar of Abbots Leigh and Leigh Woods in the Church of England Diocese of Bristol. Her Ph.D. thesis focused on literature of friendship in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in particular on the ways in which Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift drew on existing largely single-sex models of friendship, so as to include women as well as men within this broader imaginative epistolary address. Jones’ reading challenged and complicated conventional accounts of their work as misogynist in its portrayal of the feminine. She has also published on a range of female poets and writers including Christina Rossetti, Adrienne Rich, Octavia Hill, and Josephine Butler. She is currently completing a study of a number of twentieth-century poets who recreate the idea of depth in poetry.
Rev. Joseph Simmons, S.J., (moderator) is an American Catholic priest currently writing his doctoral thesis at Campion Hall, Oxford, under the supervision of Professor Graham Ward. He is exploring the Christian imagination and the fertile place where belief and unbelief touch in the fiction of Virginia Woolf and Marilynne Robinson. Simmons previously studied theology at Boston College and the Harvard Divinity School. His Licentiate in Sacred Theology thesis, “Via Literaria: Marilynne Robinson's Theology Through a Literary Imagination,” explored the convergence of literary and Christian imaginations.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user KotomiCreations
