Seeing Christ on the Battlefield : Sign-Making, Sacrament and Conversion

Book chapter


Evans, Stephen. (2016). Seeing Christ on the Battlefield : Sign-Making, Sacrament and Conversion. In Conversion and Church: The Challenge of Ecclesial Renewal pp. 65 Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004319165_007
AuthorsEvans, Stephen
Abstract

The developments in Roman Catholicism in the past century can be characterized by a growing awareness of the unity of faith, on the one hand, and the historical and political context in which that faith is lived and testified to on the other. In this contribution, I illustrate this by presenting a portrait of David Jones, a British soldier in the First World War who painted and wrote poetry about his experiences during that war. He is virtually unknown outside of Britain where he is considered to be one of the main modernist writers, alongside T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. Shortly after the Great War, he converted to Catholicism. He did not convert because the faith would help him cope with the horrors of the war. Rather, he engaged with the Catholic tradition through his encounters with friends. Only after his conversion, the Catholic vision offered him a different perspective on the brutal reality of war. This newly obtained vision did not contradict the horror, but instead showed him the inescapable meaning of it, and challenged him to respond with a creative answer. Jones painted and put into words a changing reality and, in doing so, has imparted history to us. He understood that history had changed forever, because it had changed in and with him. He did not merely want to report or describe the war, he wanted to show the sacralised reality that paradoxically manifested itself on the battlefield, even though it took him twenty years to realize this. In doing so, he became one of the forerunners of a new Catholic culture, at the core of which is a sacramental world vision.

KeywordsRoman Catholicism; David Jones; conversion; First World War
Page range65
86
Year01 Jan 2016
Book titleConversion and Church: The Challenge of Ecclesial Renewal
PublisherBrill
Place of publicationUnited States
Edition2
SeriesBrill's Studies in Catholic Theology
ISBN978-90-04-31916-5
ISSN2352-5746
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004319165_007
Web address (URL)https://brill.com/display/title/33324
Research or scholarlyResearch
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All rights reserved
File Access Level
Controlled
Output statusPublished
Publication dates
Print2016
Publication process dates
Deposited26 Apr 2024
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Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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