Literature in the Divinity School

Is William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury a religious novel? Faulkner himself was a somewhat cynical agnostic, and few readers would find much spiritual comfort in his dour chronicle of the Compson family. But to Professor Nathan Scott of the University of Chicago Divinity School, the answer is clearly yes. Behind the novel's secular fa?ade, he argues, lies a poetic expression of what theology calls kairos--the divine gift of time span in which man exists on earth.

Aeschylus to Altizer. Scott, who has a B.A. in English literature and a Ph.D. in religion from Columbia University, is a leading exemplar of a fast-growing speciality in U.S. seminaries and universities: the joint study of literature and theology. Pioneered by Chicago, which inaugurated its first course in the field in 1950, literature-and-theol-ogy is now being offered by eight other U.S. universities and divinity schools.

Taught mostly at the graduate level, the programs require students to be as familiar with secular writing as sacred. At the Methodists' Emory University in Atlanta, the first-year curriculum includes a study of drama from Aeschylus to Shakespeare; next spring, the university's celebrated Christian atheist, Thomas Altizer, will lecture on the theological and artistic expression of nihilism, concentrating on Baudelaire, Kazantzakis and Nietzsche.

By far the toughest and most developed program is at Chicago, which currently offers 17 courses, ranging from a seminar on Moby Dick to a study of the novel and urban imagination dealing with Dickens, Balzac and Fitzgerald. Along the way to their Ph.D.s, students must master, among other things, five fields of religious study, including the Bible and the history of Christianity, the position of one major modern theologian or the entire body of one major writer's work, and one classic of criticism--plus two foreign languages, usually German and French. The most harrowing obstacle is an oral examination during which the candidate must defend a paper explaining his critical principles before a panel of twelve professors from both the divinity and English faculties.

Repository of Insight. The field of study is so new that there are only about 20 literature and theology Ph.D.s in existence (15 of whom are Chicago graduates). Most are professors in divinity schools or English departments at secular universities. Tom Driver, who heads the L. & T. curriculum at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, teaches five courses, among them "Doctrines of Man in Modern Drama," and is a well-known freelance drama and film critic; he has written reviews for the Reporter and the Christian Century.

Underlying all literature and theology programs is the premise that insofar as a novel or play says anything significant about life, it has a religious meaning--which the theologian has as much right to explicate as a critic. Says Chicago's Scott: "The great canon of modern literature is a repository of an enormously profound insight into what it means to be human. It is through the study of literature that some of the most genuine and revealing points of contact between religion and art are likely to be found in our time."

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