ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the work of S. T. Coleridge and his understanding of the living power of language, and the underlying sacramental quality of theologians’ reflections on literature and theology as they are rooted in Romanticism and the theology and writings of the Oxford movement. Christ is present in the sacrifice of Mass' in the person of the priest, in the 'Eucharistic species', in word and sacrament, Christ speaking when Holy Scripture is read in the church and in the community of those gathered as the Church. Modern science, caught in its own ambivalences and still the child of Enlightenment reason, has perhaps missed the necessary paradox and true scandal of the sacrament, born upon the chariot of language. The chapter describes the field of literature with a sacramental theology that was inherent in theologians’ deliberations in Durham from the very beginning, all in the key figure of John Henry Newman.
