Wagner and Miles, the primary servants in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, derive their function and identity from their masters. Since both Faustus and Bacon are magicians, their servants are influenced by contact with magic. Although they are less significant figures than the protagonists, the servants help to determine the outcome of their respective plays. By examining Wagner and Miles as servants of both their masters and of magic itself, we can see how Faustus and Bacon fail as magicians, as masters of magic. In comparing the “good” servant, Wagner, whose master is overcome by magic, to the “bad” servant, Miles, whose master renounces magic, we can arrive at an understanding of true service and its relationship to magic.

This essay is a close reading of A River Runs Through It taking Maclean’s opening line, “In our family there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing” is a guide to three elements in the novel: biblical siblings in the Old and New Testament as prototypes of Norman and Paul, the futile efforts of both to be brother’s and brother’s-in-law keepers and fly fishing as curative and restorative remedy.

Before we bring a moral verdict on Thomas Becket’s progress as an evolved character, it will help to see the rationale of non-attachment in the light of verses from the Bhagavad-Gita. The passages on knowing-not, knowing, and action/suffering are re-examined here. All by himself, Thomas knows little. What he would know differently, both of/ for himself and others, requires that he seek his dharma by discovering how false or illusory his knowledge has been, and why. This essay tries to capture the pedagogic logic of learning what we know and what we do not. Learning by reciprocal exchange becomes a model for those who are averse to arguing from results. Intertexts like W. B. Yeats’s “Vacillation” and E. M. Forster’s “Hymn Before Action” help them read the Archbishop’s Christmas sermon all afresh. This essay concludes by arguing how Eliot himself found dramatic poetry an ideal vehicle for presenting action precisely the way the Gita exhorts us.

One does not read very far in the second and by far the longest section of Herbert’s The Temple before the single-minded exhortations of the speaker in “The Church Porch” and the early Lenten “complaints” of Christ to his people in “The Sacrifice” turn to the unpredictable elements of the speaker’s human condition: puzzlement, striving, grief, joy. The quick movement between these elements is due not only to Herbert’s poetic sensibility, I argue, but also to his anthropological understanding and his interest in early Christian precedent. I focus on remnants of Prudentius’ 5th-century Psychomachia in Herbert’s poetry and prose and suggest that they open a new vista onto Herbert’s performance of the unsteady dual state of the temple builder, whether poet or reader.

This article argues that The Merchant of Venice’s dramatic action invites consideration of the philosophical questions of human agency and intelligibility. The play’s dialogue provokes the reader or auditor to consider what may obstruct or allow for both meaningful action in the world and a genuine understanding of that world. Since these issues were also a major sticking point in Catholic/Protestant controversies, the piece also argues that these issues can be analyzed in light of such theological tensions. One of the article’s main conclusions is that Shylock’s radically individualistic view of law and obligation explodes intelligibility, and by extension meaningful action as well. This destruction lays the groundwork for a world in which conflict can only be resolved via violence. In this sense, the play reveals what is at stake in the questions.

The Anglican religious writer, Evelyn Underhill, (1875-1941) is best known as a scholar of mysticism and an advocate for the practical mysticism for ordinary people. What is less well-known is that in her own spiritual crisis she sought out the assistance of the Catholic, Baron Friedrich von Hugel. However, before she requested his counsel she was greatly influenced by her work on a biography of the thirteenth century Italian poet and mystic, Jacopone da Todi who wrote in the vernacular. This essay details how Jacopone and his predecessor Francis of Assisi, brought Underhill to her contemporary, von Hugel, who himself was influenced by the Franciscan tradition.

This essay accounts for the rhetorical impact of Thomas Merton's inclusion - and later exclusion - of his 12C predecessor, Isaac de l'Etoile, in "In Silentio."

An interview with the author of Dante’s Indiana, Randy Boyagoda, conducted by Peter Spaulding.

Dante’s Virgil is, according to Virgil, among the most hopeless souls in the Commedia. As he tells us himself, he and the other virtuous pagans in Limbo who lack baptism yet have not sinned live “sanza speme . . . in disio” (“without hope . . . in longing”). Virgil believes himself to be eternally damned, and he seems to have convinced everyone from Dante the pilgrim to Cato to Statius to almost all readers of Dante’s poem that he is right. This essay, however, will challenge the assumption that we must take Virgil’s hopeless self-assessment for granted as ultimate truth by exploring other possibilities which are opened up by Virgil’s disappearance in its immediate context. In Purgatorio 29, just before he makes his exit, Virgil stands face-to-face a scene of his own making remade on the banks of Lethe. When Virgil looks across this mystical river now flowing through Dante’s Eden, what does he see? And what might be the implications of his vision?

By his transformation and suggestive associations of the Christian and Pagan sources and influences in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare both revivifies the social message of Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians for his own age and creates a transformative theatre that closely aligns the “magic” of theatrical performance with the spiritual tenets of Christian salvation and community.

Born the son of an Evangelical Anglican minister, Montague Rhodes James, "Monty" to family and friends, was arguably the best educated ghost story writer who ever lived: "He had all sorts of letters after his name." His tales, collected in four slim volumes, often touch upon, lightly for the most part, biblical motifs or themes. In his most celebrated horror tale, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," James alludes—subtly as was his wont—to the story of Thomas, the disciple who, "skeptical about the resurrection," demanded tangible proof of the event, an actual "touching," before he would deign to believe in the miraculous. In James's most famous effort in the supernatural genre, another doubting Thomas, in this case an arrogant disciple of modern science and its methods, demands the same proof, a "touching," before he will believe. And when that proof comes, it changes him forever just as it did "Thomas, one of the twelve."

As Death Comes for the Archbishop approaches one hundred years of critical scrutiny, it still speaks to readers in much the same way it did in the 1920s. A critical response to early twentieth-century materialism and mendacity, the story of nineteenth-century New Mexico Archbishop Jean Marie Latour and his friend and Vicar, Fr. Joseph Vaillant affirms as it dramatizes friendship and renunciation while simultaneously celebrating the centrality of the transcendent self and the richness and value of lived personal experience.

The predominant imagery of progress in western mystical writing usually describes some form of ascent. The Subida del monte Carmelo by San Juan de la Cruz certainly suggests the notion in Spanish mystical writing. While San Juan proffers ascent (subida) in the title of the commentary on “En una noche oscura,” the poem proper does not present a sense of verticality at all but, rather, an essentially horizontal passage from the “casa sosegada” to (re)union with the Lover in a static apotheosis described in the final strophes. Similarly, a paradoxical presentation of movement appears in the Cántico espiritual. This article considers San Juan’s use of verbs of movement, especially within the Cántico espiritual, as metaphors for the underlying mystical message he ascribes to his poem. It also demonstrates the presence of the same extended metaphor in other poems of his, including “En una noche oscura” and the “Llama de amor viva.

Though the word "atonement" does not appear in King Lear, the concept is present, along with related ones, like sin, justice, redemption, and sacrifice. Like other plays, Lear alludes to various atonement theories, setting them in dramatic conflict or cooperation and subjecting some to critique. Besides revealing the inadequacy of models based on payment or punishment, the play reinterprets the sacrificial theory of atonement by presenting sacrifice (especially that of Cordelia) as gracious and redemptive self-offering, not as a punishment or payment that satisfies anger or offended honor. Though the play’s religious references, including to Christ, are pervasive, ultimately atonement takes place at a human level, in the healing of relationships and inner maladies. Yet such atonement involves what may be called “ethical transcendence,” a transcendence consisting not in an ascent beyond the human condition, but rather in the offering of oneself in relationship and service to others.