ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on art and literature and explores what light they shed on the Christian doctrine of Redemption. The art of redemption is art immediately under the grace of God. This art is not informed by the innocence of delight that characterizes the art of creation but by a glory transfigured out of pain. More recently, there is the genre of the novel to consider: both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, for example, were concerned in their different ways with guilt and redemption, especially in Crime and Punishment and Resurrection. Beethoven's Fidelio might be described as an opera of liberation, and Wagner's Parsifal one of redemption. Novelists and dramatists, of course, have a restricted canvas: the human heart and what stems from it, especially human relationships. But perhaps this is as good a place as any to start from, if one is trying to discern possibilities of redemption.