Course Name
The Great Tradition: Christian Thought in Western Literary Classics
Description
Focuses on one overarching theme: how Christian thought is embedded in some of the greatest literary classics of the Western World, selected from the Patristic period up to the twentieth century. These include such diverse genres as St. Augustine’s autobiographical ruminations in his Confessions; Dante’s Divine Comedy; Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; Goethe’s Faust; Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles; and T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. This course deals with questions such as: What are we referring to when we speak of the mind? What is the nature of the human mind? Does it have a nature? Does it exist as something separate from the human brain? Is it a property of the human brain? Is it identical to the human brain? Or is it merely an abbreviated way of talking about bodily behaviours? More particularly, how is our phenomenologically rich and existentially weighted point of view on the world related to the neurophysiological conditions that underwrite it (or as one writer put it, “how is the water of the brain transubstantiated into the wine of consciousness?”)? How does the way we understand the answers to these questions inform the Christian belief that humans bear God’s image? And how does theology bear on our understanding of our bodies’ relationship to our minds?.