David Jones: Deep Calls to Deep

The Christian Literary Imagination Series

Continuing from the previous academic year, over the course of the 2021-22 academic year the Future of the Humanities Project is sponsoring a series of webinars on the Christian literary imagination in collaboration with Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. The ‘Christian Literary Imagination Series’ will explore the role and function of the arts and humanities in the development of the individual and society.

The hour-long virtual events will be followed by a Q & As chaired by Professor Michael Scott and Rev Fr Joseph Simmons SJ. These events are free and hosted on Zoom by Georgetown University.

 

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 will explore 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 will indicate 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 will suggest 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.

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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.

Michael Scott (moderator) is senior dean, fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, college adviser for postgraduate students, and a member of the Las Casas Institute. He also serves as senior adviser to the president of Georgetown University. Scott previously was the pro-vice-chancellor at De Montfort University and founding vice-chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University.

 

Upcoming events:

1 March:
Michael Collins on Two Welsh Poets – R S Thomas and John Ormond’

15 March:
Bridget Keegan on James Field Stanfield

Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk