Book Review: Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry: Austin Farrer's the Glass of Vision with Critical Commentary

Abstract

Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry: Austin Farrer's The Glass of Vision with Critical Commentary. Edited by Robert MacSwain. Ashgate Studies in Theology, Imagination and the Arts. London: Routledge, 2013. 234 pp. $149.95 (cloth).Theology is a long, prayerful, unfinished conversation, a conversation not only between the theologians, but between each theologian and his or her sources. It is also a conversation in each of us, between text and context, between reason and imagination and the revelation that they seek to apprehend. And in all that conversation our individual and collective thinking is underpinned and enabled by the God in whom we live and move and have our being, so that theology is, finally, a conversation with the God who is its subject.This important book enables us not only to overhear, but to engage in an important part of that conversation. Indeed its form and content model the notion of theology as conversation. At the core of the book, and comprising its first part, is a critical edition of Austin Farrers neglected masterpiece The Glass of Vision, the series of eight Bampton lectures he gave at Oxford in 1948. These lectures explore the problems and then the mystery of how we come to know and trust revelation; explore the senses in which scripture is inspired; and explore how that inspiration is distinct from and yet related to the inspiration of poetry. Farrar considers with grace and clarity the very way in which grace itself becomes clear to us, and at the heart of his work is the conviction that the divine mind works in and through the workings of both reason and imagination, especially when they are working together, and that revelation in its deepest sense is given by image and vision, even and especially where that image and vision are conveyed verbally, as in the parables and teachings of Jesus. It follows that the imagination, and particularly the poetic imagination, which makes and interprets metaphor out of image, is an essential element in our reception of and response to revelation. As Robert MacSwain points out in his introduction, this strong emphasis on image, imagination, and metaphor, this central place for poetry in the making of theology, anticipates many currents and concerns in contemporary theology. In that sense Farrer's book was in advance of its time, and MacSwain s painstaking and scholarly work in making it available in this critical edition is timely.But that is only part of what is on offer here, for this edition models theology as conversation in more ways than one. There is the conversation embedded in The Glass of Vision itself, Farrer's conversation with his original hearers, a conversation with the poets, prophets, and gospels he cites, and indeed a conversation with God, for these are lecture-sermons and each closes with a different and ever more beautiful doxology. …