In the midst of Ph.D. work I discovered the scholarship of David Lyle Jeffrey.  I am very thankful I did.  His books that I have read (and he has written others), The People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture and Houses of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading, are simply excellent.  I recently read his Andrew Lang Lecture, given at University of St. Andrews in 2004.  It is titled "Tolkien and the Future of Literary Studies," and appears in Tree of Tales: Tolkien, Literature, and Theology (Baylor University Press, 2007). . . 

 I am writing my own monograph on the relationship between the gospel and the intellectual life, and I knew my thinking would be sharpened by reading Jeffrey.  Here is what he has to say about the the relationship between Christianity and the reading of great texts: "in our guild, we have had an extreme scruple where the 'book of the Gospel' and Western literature is concerned.  Notably, professional aversion to our own traditional 'governing' book is proving to be coincident to an ongoing crisis of coherence for our profession . . ." (61).  Jeffrey also writes of George Steiner and Terry Eagleton, literary theorists who both lament but are still beholden to Matthew Arnold's agenda of loosening literature from biblical revelation: "Each [person] laments but also remains locked into the Arnoldian legacy, despite ardent attempts to rise above it . . . .  Each staggers under the professional burden of a discourse without rankable values, the Babel-effect of a secular religion gone wrong on both truth and beauty, and whose acolytes, cheerless in their alternate fits of denial and despair, discourse incommensurably even with each other, let alone with an increasingly indifferent world" (67).  Jeffrey continues, "the best hope for literature as a secular discipline is for it to reacquire its access to some sort of moral and rhetorical authority; the rush to trade such authority for power has proved to be a very bad bargain indeed" (68).  Jeffrey concludes his essay as follows: "I am inclined to consent with Jacques Maritain (against Arnold) that 'it is a deadly error to expect poetry to produce the supersubstantial nourishment of man.'  That higher, more noble nourishment lies with the Greater Book.  At the same time I also believe in the power of literature to enable our will to truth.  I am convinced, however, that without intellectually accountable access to a full range of texts that encounter and explore the supernatural--even in its horrible aspects--very many lesser, yet still very great, expressions of truth may go without understanding, and eventually even unread and unreprinted, like unto the beasts which perish.  That would be for far more than ourselves a tragedy; it might also, and perhaps irredeemably, further diminish the residual authority of our fragile discipline" (70).

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