Ironies of Faith: The Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature - Hardcover

Anthony Esolen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1933859210 ISBN 13: 9781933859217

Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007

Synopsis

In Ironies of Faith, celebrated Dante scholar and translator Anthony Esolen provides a profound meditation upon the use and place of irony in Christian art and in the Christian life. Beginning with an extended analysis of irony as an essentially dramatic device, Esolen explores those manifestations of irony that appear prominently in Christian thinking and art: ironies of time (for Christians believe in divine Providence, but live in a world whose moments pass away); ironies of power (for Christians believe in an almighty God who took on human flesh, and whose “weakness” is stronger than our greatest enemy, death); ironies of love (for man seldom knows whom to love, or how, or even whom it is that in the depths of his heart he loves best); and the figure of the Child (for Christians ever hear the warning voice of their Savior, who says that unless we become like unto one of these little ones, we shall not enter the Kingdom of God).   Esolen’s finely wrought study draws from Augustine (Confessions), Dante (The Divine Comedy), Shakespeare (The Tempest), and Tolkien (“Leaf, By Niggle”); Francois Mauriac (A Kiss for the Leper), Milton (Paradise Lost), and Alessandro Manzoni (The Betrothed); the poems of George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Edmund Spenser (Amoretti); Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol), Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov), and the anonymous author of the medieval poem Pearl, among other works. Readers who treasure the Christian literary tradition should not miss this illuminating book.

About this title

About the Author

Anthony Esolen, Professor of English at Providence College, is the editor and translator of the Modern Library edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He has published scholarly articles on Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante, and Tasso in various journals and is a senior editor and frequent contributor to Touchstone Magazine.

From Booklist

Widely regarded as the exclusive property of sophisticated skeptics, irony yields surprising treasures to a devout Christian. And in reclaiming irony as a mode of divine revelation, Esolen rehabilitates a body of Christian literature often reduced to deceptive illusions by modernist critics. In Shakespearean plays—for instance—in which au courant theorists see only the corrosive ironies of power politics, Esolen discovers a joyfully ironic perspective on how the rhythms of mere time resound with the harmonies of eternity. Similarly, while other readers see in Dostoevsky's probing fiction only the grim realities that compel any mature adult to reject God, Esolen discerns in the narratives of Alyosha Karamazov and Father Zossima the ironically superior wisdom of childlike faith. Christian irony likewise transforms the apparent contradictions of Spenser's erotic poetry into an astonishing affirmation of holy love. The artistry of Dante (Esolen's specialty), Hopkins, Herbert, and a dozen other authors likewise glows with new radiance as their ironies awaken readers to the hidden powers of God's grace. Even the ironies of pagan authors such as Virgil, Sophocles, and Lucretius look richer from a perspective of Christian faith that recognizes the redemptive influence of an Unnamed God. A bracing challenge to the orthodoxies of literary secularism. Christensen, Bryce
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1933859210
• ISBN 13: 9781933859217
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 350