Y CORFF A’R YSBRYD: DARLLEN DYLAN THOMAS A W. D. DAVIES WEDI’R HOLOCOST

This is a version of the Cymmrodorion annual lecture which was presented at the National Eisteddfod, Tregaron, in August 2022. It considers the relationship between the religious thought of theologian W. D. Davies (1911–2001) and the poet Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), who met during Thomas’s third visit to the United States. Davies’s seminal Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (1948) explored the emergence of Pauline Christianity from Rabbinic Judaism. While Judaism is the religion of a particular people and of the body, Christianity claims a universality of the spirit. It is argued that a tension between these forces manifests itself in the thought of W. D. Davies and in the poetry of Dylan Thomas. While the Jewish insistence on the particularisms of culture carry a significant critical force against the disembodying and assimilative tendencies of Christianity, neither the particular nor the universal are devoid of their own dark and frightening aspects.

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