Wrestling with God. Literary Encounters with the Divine from Jacob to T.S. Eliot
Malta University Publishing, 2019 (available in hard bound and soft bound editions).
In this book, Peter Vassallo focuses on poetry and surveys some of the significant ways in which the major poets, through the ages, strove to come to terms with the inscrutability of God, the question of ineffability, the impugning of Providence, and the disappearance of God in a sceptical age.
These literary encounters with the Divine, symbolised in Alexandre-Louis Leloir's painting of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1865), have necessitated the metaphorical journey through various routes: the way of dispossession and self-annihilation (John of the Cross); the cosmos of theological meditation (Dante); the straight road of righteousness (Milton); the slippery path of apostasy (Donne); the calm waters of acquiescence (Herbert); the fields of pious sentiment (Crashaw); the mystical heights of symbolism (Blake); the visionary natural landscape (Wordsworth and Coleridge), the sea of darkness (Newman); the seductive Arcadian pastures of paganism (Swinburne); the slough of despondency (Hopkins); the winding labyrinth (Thomson); the mire of Philistinism (Arnold); and the fluctuating sea of philosophical speculation (Eliot).
Wrestling with God will be of special interest to students of literature and to all those who in their own way have felt the need, at some time or other, to 'wrestle with God'.
Peter Vassallo is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Malta.