This is the third of a series of weekly posts on the book Critical Terms for Literary Study.
Donald Pease begins his overview of this crucial term with five questions that he argues are connected to the term’s definition.
- Is an individual self-determined or determined by material and historical circumstances?
- Is the human self infinite or finite?
- Can an individual ground political authority on individual creativity?
- What is the basis for human freedom?
- Can any artist claim absolute originality?
These questions are profoundly religious. The first touches on divine sovereignty and human responsibility. The second deals with the connection between humanity and divinity. The third is about corporate life. In dealing with freedom and originality in the last two, Pease asks questions that will have different answers if approached with a Christian worldview.
Yet God is oddly missing from this article.
Instead, we get a genealogy of the term from the classical to postmodern world. We get etymologies and an engagement with Barthes Foucault. It is true that we get an admission that God is connected to the medieval conception of the term, yet this admission only makes God’s absence more conspicuous.
Pease writes:
Whereas individuals within medieval culture could interpret their lives in terms that elaborated or reenacted the sayings of the ancient auctores, only the monarch, as God’s representative, could claim divine sanction for his everyday actions.
Pease’s argument is that the medieval use of the term is fundamentally political. That’s the implication of Pease’s questions about freedom and material/historical determination too. Yet, Pease does not tease out further connections between theology and the term.
Roland Barthes, with whom Pease engages, knows the real stake of the word. Here’s a telling sentence from his famous article “Death of the Author” where he makes clear what such a death would:
Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a “secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.
Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author” (emphasis added)
The Death of the Author is to explore what it would mean if God were dead. Authors are visible representations to us of God’s authority.
The discussions of “authorship” in the New Testament all concern Christ.
- Christ as the author of life (Acts 3)
- Christ as the author of salvation (Hebrews 2)
- Christ as the author of faith (Hebrews 10)
The concept is inescapably theological, and a critical definition of the term from a Christian perspective will reflect that.
Some initial answers to Pease’s questions then:
If that individual is the man-god Jesus Christ, before whom every knee will bow. I don’t think that’s the implication here though.
Ethical transformation through the power of the Holy Spirit, viz. the ability to walk in accordance with God’s written word. Human freedom begins with spiritual transformation.
Experiments in Criticism 