W. B. Yeats's poem "Adam's Curse" provides Donoghue with motif and
incentive. In Genesis God says to Adam: "Because thou hast harkened
unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I
commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the
ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of
thy life." Yeats put it this way: "It is certain there is no fine
thing / Since Adam's curse but needs much labouring." Based on a
conversation he had with his beloved Maud Gonne and her sister
Kathleen, Yeats's poem thinks about how difficult it is to be
beautiful, to write great poetry, to love. In his Erasmus Lectures,
Donoghue thinks about the lasting difficulties involved in
understanding, and living with, cultural, literary, and religious
values that are in restless relation to one another. On these and
related matters, Donoghue enters into conversation with a variety
of writers, some of them-John Crowe Ransom, Hans Urs von Balthasar,
William Lynch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Emmanuel Levinas, Andrew
Delbanco, and Robert Bellah-signaled by the titles of the seven
lectures. Into the thematic space suggested by each of these titles
Donoghue invites other writers and sages to join the
conversation-Henry Adams, William Empson, John Milbank, Czeslaw
Milosz, Seamus Heaney, Gabriel Josipovici, and many more. The
"talk," as you might expect, keeps coming around to the reading of
specific literary texts: passages from Paradise Lost, Stevens's
"Esthetique du mal," fiction by Gide and J. F. Powers and J. M.
Coetzee, to name only a few. In Adan's Curse, Donoghue brings his
special intelligence to bear on some of the intersections where
religion and literature provocatively meet.
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