Religion in Morley Callaghans Such Is My Beloved

Abstract

When we follow Wilfred Cantwell Smith in making faith and cumulative tradition the focus for our study of religion, we are committed to adopting an indirect procedure to isolate the nature of faith. Such an approach is applied to Callaghan’s novel about a priest and two prostitutes, first of all by showing that Callaghan explicitly presents an alternative to Marxist and Freudian explanations of human behaviour, and then by considering the novel as a commentary on the Song of Songs, using the four traditional modes of exposition: historical, allegorical, tropological and anagogical.