I agree with you, Carrie, that this chapter seems to be placed oddly within the book. Parker brought up the Christian imagination in his introduction, so we know it will come up, but why nod toward the assumptions we make about the relationships 17-18th c writers have toward Christian imagery and content, only to provide a thorough explication so much later? This chapter could have been placed earlier and formed the conceptual backbone of the entire work.
I think of these as "Mr. Wizard moments." Remember how Mr. Wizard would try to get a neighborhood kid to perform a physically impossible task, like blowing a balloon up inside a bottle, and then, after the kid's red in the face and frustrated, he'd say, "But I didn't say you couldn't use a straw!" From the beginning, Parker's using tools he hasn't shown us yet.
It's possible that framing the entire book as an argument about the persistence of Christian thought in late Renaissance aesthetics might have taken away from the "triumph" narrative suggested by the title. "The Decline and Fall of the Christian Imagination" might seem too daunting.
As far as the "mixture" of the poles you suggest, I wonder if their appearance in secular poetry and prose is less "mixed" than it is in actual theological prose like Bunyan's, which clearly crosses all kinds of exegetical boundaries.
Something that strikes me as odd about the content and placement of this chapter is that we know from the following chapters that the real focus for the remainder of the book will be on fideism and its applications within a limited period of time. Thus the definition of the other poles seems necessary more for contrast than because of a developed argument about the content to be found in the writers listed. Probably this is one of the drawbacks of writing a tightly focused book--no room to expand as one would like.
These questions of organization and ordering, especially when it comes to one's chronologies, are some of the hardest decisions one makes while writing a book, and yet they're only rarely remarked upon.
BP deserves some credit for risking our surprise by breaking chronology and placing this chapter here, but this still feels like a transitional chapter between the first and second halves of the book, the "eclipse of analogy, rise of empiricism" portion, and now the "fideism" portion. Clearly, these topics have a historical and logical relation to one another, but I wonder if this organization is working against him.
For one thing, these typologies and diagrams were illuminating in a structuralist sort of way, but as Carrie H. noted, these ideal-types don't map particularly well onto figures like Bunyan, and they don't seem particularly helpful for understanding the previous group of representative poets; rather, they're most helpful for those reading ahead, trying to understand the significance of the fideism in the remainder of the book.
Perhaps one issue here is that much of BP's argument feels evolutionary and unilinear to me, filled with amphibious, transitional figures, but the discussions in the subsequent portions of the book really are springing from a more serious or rupture than he acknowledges. This is why this section feels like a second "introduction" to what follows. Did others get the same feeling that we were starting over again?
Another issue: I don't consider myself particularly materialist, either, but the picture of religion offered here feels almost entirely intellectualized and individualized, without much grounding in collective religious practices or institutions, which might have anchored these discussions in different ways. This is one reason why the sectarian impulses Carrie H asks about don't seem present at all in this picture.
Having said that, I think the discussion of fideism is the real payoff here and in the next few chapters, because it creates a rich context for understanding multiple literary works and careers, especially Johnson's.
DM
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