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Is Nothing Sacred? Christ’s Harrowing through Lewis’s Gothic Lens
Author(s) -
Griffin Melanie
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.2009.00955.x
Subject(s) - nothing , doctrine , philosophy , protestantism , argument (complex analysis) , middle ages , art , literature , theology , epistemology , chemistry , biochemistry
“Is nothing sacred? Christ’s Harrowing through Lewis’s Gothic lens” examines the anti‐Catholic symbolism and distortion in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk . While it is acknowledged that extensive past research on the perversions of Catholic dogma in the text already exists, this article focuses specifically on the text’s inversion of one piece of Catholic doctrine that has yet to be sufficiently examined – Christ’s Harrowing of Hell – and how Lewis inverted this doctrine to illustrate the Protestant view of Catholicism as selfish, cruel, and hypocritical. Research includes documentation to support claims about the general knowledge of the Harrowing doctrine during Lewis’s time, including the Catechism from the Council of Trent, to shore up the argument that the Harrowing doctrine (and general knowledge of it) would have survived through the Middle Ages to Lewis’s time.