God as Form: Essays in Greek Theology with Special Reference to Christianity and the Contemporary Theological Predicament

Curtis Bennett

jun 1976 · State University of New York Press

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In God as Form, Curtis Bennett discusses the nature of godhead, the function of image for art and religion expressive of its instinctive functioning in dream imagery, the radical distinction between the Greek and Christian views of incarnation, Xenophanes' disclaimer of the Greek human forms for divinity, Sappho's Hymn to Aphrodite, The First Olympian, and more.

"Seeing the modern predicament not in the revolt of human will against God but in its rebellion against its own givenness, in the reversal not of values but of effect and cause, God as Form pushes hard against the limits of the exploratory essay. What rises in the memory, though, with the force of the 'realized' image as one lays down this book, are the readings of poetic texts from which the thesis springs: dawn breaking for immortals and mortals alike, the hall of the symposium, Sappho and Pindar in consonance across millennia with Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens. Demonstrating the claimed relation between poetry and theology in the critical act itself, these readings may one day do for literary criticism and the theory of poetry what Erich Auerbach's Mimesis has done in its time." — from the Foreword by Gregor Sebba