Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry: Austin Farrer’s The Glass of Vision with Critical Commentary ed. by Robert MacSwain (review)

Literature amplifies critical sensitivity to the multifarious perspectives that contribute to the development of Christianity in the Atlantic archipelago during the early modern period, and stands as an urgent reminder that religious experience was far from monolithic, even and perhaps especially in this relatively small grouping of islands. Registering a richly varied range of religious and ethnic affiliations—Irish Catholic, Anglo-Norman Irish Catholic, Anglo-Irish Puritan, English Catholic, English reformer of various stripes, Welsh Anglican Royalist, Scots Presbyter, Scots Presbyter in Ulster, just to name a handful of the combinations explored in this volume—Coleman’s collection alerts us to the shifting and sometimes contradictory allegiances that obtained in the work of self-definition in early modern England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and beyond. What emerges is a view of culture that does not overlook the simultaneously binding and separating influences of geology, and presents to our understanding an archipelago of identities held centripetally together by lines of continuity between cultures, religions, and histories, even as differences threaten to whirl them centrifugally apart. Kimberly Johnson Brigham Young University Robert MacSwain (ed.). Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry: Austin Farrer’s The Glass of Vision with Critical Commentary. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. 221. $105.70. ISBN 978-1-4094-5083-2. Robert MacSwain’s new edition of Austin Farrer’s The Glass of Vision brings together an introduction, scholarly annotation, and six essays that trace the critical discussion of Farrer’s 1948 Bampton Lectures from the first critique of Helen Gardner in 1956 and the first defense by Frank Kermode in 1979 to Douglas Hedley’s 2006 engagement. The volume also includes a thorough bibliography of Farrer’s works and of the secondary scholarship from the fields of biblical criticism, philosophy, and literary studies. As MacSwain’s title tells us, it is the interactions of those three fields of inquiry and Farrer’s foundational interest in each that make the volume a welcome addition to the Ashgate series, Studies in Theology, Imagination, and the Arts, as well as to interdisciplinary studies in general. This particularly fecund cross-fertilization of fields also should make the volume of continued concern to the readers of a journal such as Christianity & Literature. Farrer himself should be of especial interest to those who pursue Inkling Studies since Father Farrer, who has often been cited as one of the more important 20thcentury Anglican theologians, was good friends with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as being well acquainted with Charles Williams. The Glass of Vision, for example, was read with appreciation and disagreement by Lewis, as were other sermons and works by Farrer. The introduction to MacSwain’s edition places The Glass of Vision in its cultural context and explores in sufficient detail the nature of the lectures’ genre, that of the sermon, then moves forward to set the three themes of MacSwain’s title in their 136 Christianity & Literature 64(1) place in Farrer’s discussion. MacSwain’s notes, too, are particularly helpful for each of the eight lectures. He judiciously adds references to Farrer’s own potential sources—Katherine Farrer’s translation of Gabriel Marcel’s Being and Having is of import—and also takes the time to explain the occasional awkward or nuanced statement. MacSwain also includes a summary footnote at the beginning of each of the six commentaries upon Farrer’s work. These taken together help trace the scholarly discussion across fifty years. The period of debate over the meaning and relationship of nature and grace repeatedly shapes Farrer’s Bamptons. His opening lecture is a defense of natural revelation with the influence of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner in mind. (Their celebrated debate had been translated into English in 1946.) Farrer stresses the double agency of God, who is able to continually act within the created order and also to work through other secondary agents, human and otherwise. Farrer expands the possibilities of this insight in his second lecture, building up a portrait of the human body and mind as hierarchal. Human inspiration draws off both directions of the hierarchy—the lower preternatural and the higher apex of the supernatural. Yet there...