“It is a fact widely acknowledged that man’s common intellectual heritage suffers from a dearth of theological analyses of Sherlock Holmes. Emboldened by the direness of the need, I will overlook the inadequacies of my own pen and turn now to make some small redress of this lamentable paucity.
“Sherlock Holmes is, like any artist, a keen observer of the material world, and he uses his art to reconstruct and anticipate malefactors’ movements by analyzing the physical traces left by their patterns of behavior. Some mistake his art for mechanism, considering Holmes to be a prophetic voice for twenty-first century scientific determinism, able to solve crimes because he knows that the world of men is reducible to mere matter and the physical laws that govern it; the delightful pair of Robert Downey, Jr., Sherlock Holmes movies take this idea to its entertaining extreme. But in Doyle’s vision, his master detective is no materialist; he is merely a man who understands the meaning of the body.”
In a recent commentary, Brother Gabriel Torretta, O.P., reflected on the similarities of the understanding of the human body by Sherlock Holmes and Blessed Pope John Paul II.
To access Br. Gabriel’s complete post, please visit:
Dominica: Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Body (17 FEB 12)
Background information:
Wikipedia: The Adventure of the Empty House
eNotes: The Best of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Empty House
Love & Responsibility Foundation: JPII: Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body
EWTN: General Audiences: John Paul II's Theology of the Body
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