ABSTRACT Professor Peter Steele S.J. cuts a fascinating figure both in contemporary scholarship and poetic achievement. His work extends over a vast range of genre from poetry to criticism, public address and intellectual journalism. Some of his huge literary output is published, some of it awaits publication, and much of it is either uncollected or held in archival situations. Steele is a writer who matters today not only by virtue of his leading a distinguished academic career, and being a widely published poet, but also because for some two decades he has been a focal figure in the Society of Jesus in Australia and New Zealand and has had extensive experience as he would say 'plying his priesthood' in various British and American Jesuit institutions. This has resulted in a large volume of mostly unpublished writings ranging from prayers, liturgies and reflections to homilies for private and public occasions. The challenge of addressing Steele�'s literary achievement lies in the fact that his spiritual insights form the basis of his poetic, academic, and ethical imagination. This thesis has attempted to identify the core nature of these insights and to trace the way in which they ramify into the world of people, events, and art, especially literature. The basic issue concerns the principle of radiance, how it finds expression through Steele�s major motifs or figures of Jester, Pilgrim Expatriate, Celebrant and Word or Witness, and how this principal operates as the unifying basis of his thought. The thesis tries to investigate this unifying vision within the subtle diversity of the many ways Steele encounters the modern world. In identifying Steele�s structure of thought as a radiant entity focused on the theocentre of God and emanating to the Incarnate God, to the writers of the gospels and epistles, to St. Ignatius, to St. Edmund Campion and to all people especially artists, it has been necessary to shape each chapter in a roughly parallel manner and to organise it according to these stratafications. Each chapter places the individual motif within Steele�'s individual and Ignatian milieux, and examines the function of the particular figure or motif under investigation. Each chapter will then trace the figure (Fool, Pilgrim / Expatriate, Celebrant or Word Witness), as Steele sees it manifest in God, in Christ, in the scriptures, and as he understands it imparted to Campion, to Ignatius as he writes the Spiritual Exercises and to writers (and readers) of literature. Each chapter also has variations appropriate to its subject matter and medium so that for instance the chapter treating Steele�s Pilgrim figure will consider his treatment of it in both p oetics and homiletics and that treating the Word or Witness will predominantly relate to that figure to his critical appraisal of Peter Porter�s p oetry and the organisation of the latter will break from the established pattern of organisation in several major ways. This thesis offers a study of a rich Australian talent operating intellectually, academically, imaginatively and spiritually. If one were to seek to place Steele amongst similarly minded writers one would have to locate him in the community of writers recognised for their classical and contemporary sophistication, writers such as Peter Porter, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott and Anthony Hecht. In this sense Steele is international rather than Australian in his emphasis; but being a true international he also includes Australia in his thinking.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/215944 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Rayment, Colette Eleanor |
| Publisher | University of Sydney, Religion |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English, en_AU |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Rayment, Colette Eleanor;http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/copyright.html |
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