Religion and Literature I: Pre-20^th Century

Session Coordinator: Douglas Harrison
Florida Gulf Coast Univ.

dougmail@earthlink.net

“Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wallace Stevens: From Faith to Fiction”

This essay examines and compares the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wallace Stevens, and focuses on the ways in which these poets address religion. The paper specifically focuses on these two poets because they represent the generation just before and just after the scientific and philosophical discoveries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While they are not that far apart, chronologically speaking, Hopkins and Stevens represent the changes and adaptations necessary for religious poetry to exist after the deep rift in orthodoxy that a mere half century created. The essay first briefly identifies the interesting and somewhat unusual form of orthodoxy found in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In Hopkins’ view, a constant divine force is necessary for humans to apprehend the natural world. Through his concepts of “Instress” and “Inscape,” Hopkins asserts that the structure and character of all natural phenomena relies on this divine force. The paper then shifts focus to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and his adaptation of Hopkins’ ideas. Stevens feels, as Hopkins did, that the apprehension of reality is impossible without spiritual assistance, and yet he lacks the religious orthodoxy that would simplify such a belief. By examining Stevens’ concept of the “Supreme Fiction,” the paper illustrates how Stevens adapted spirituality to a modern world that would no longer accept belief in a literal deity.

Doug Hattaway

Florida State University

dnh05@garnet.acns.fsu.edu

“The Quest for a Secular ‘Paradise’: Romantic Satanism and Felix Culpa

in Keat’s ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’”

Weary and disillusioned with the rationalism and mystifying Christian doctrine of the Enlightenment, Romantic writers sought, in the words of M. H. Abrams, to “naturalize the supernatural and humanize the divine” (68). Out of this new system of secularization emerged the concept of “Romantic Satanism,” or the newfound emphasis on Milton’s Satan from Paradise Lost as a sort of epic hero. John Keats, who was “much less directly and persistently Biblical than any of his great fellow-poets” (Abrams 33), attempts to confront and ultimately destroy Milton’s distinctly Puritan values and images through his poem, “The Eve of St. Agnes.” Keats metaphorically recasts the character of Satan as Porphyro, who seduces Madeline and causes her to disobey God and sin, thus mirroring Eve’s Fall from Eden. As a Satanic hero-figure, however, Porphyro simultaneously liberates Madeline from her own oppressive piety. For Keats, this results in felix culpa, or “fortunate fall,” the ancient tradition which understands the Fall as an ultimately positive event, creating more good than would have been possible without it. This challenges the idea that Adam and Eve’s actions only produced evil and suffering, while destroying humanity’s chance at immortality. Milton chooses to emphasize the felix culpa at the end of Paradise Lost as a way of justifying God’s actions. Keats, however, inverts this doctrine: the fortunate fall occurs when Porphyro and Madeline ultimately gain their freedom from an antiquated, ascetic Christian doctrine. Furthermore, Keats’s concept of heaven does not correlate to the traditional Christian ideal; rather, his “heaven,” emerges as a paradise distinctly liberated from theology but still rich in human spirituality and pleasure.

Amber MacDonald

West Carolina University

macdonald@email.wcu.edu

“An Unorthodox Interpretation of Faith: Sins of the Fathers & Erasmus’ Enchiridion Militis Christiani in L’Heptaméron”

Although at first glance an entertaining collection of tales of intrigue, greed, romance, trickery, and lust, L’Heptaméron by Marguerite de Navarre highlights the complex search for spiritual truth during the French Renaissance. Devoted followers of Christ and the Church began to return to the Holy Scriptures as a way to experience a deeper relationship with God through reading and meditation. Marguerite de Navarre was familiar with this “unorthodox” interpretation of faith, and her ties to the Circle of Meaux beginning around 1521, influenced her beliefs as well as her literary work (Mathieu-Castellani, 730). She was also undoubtedly familiar with the works of Desiderius Erasmus, one of the most significant theologians of the early Catholic reform and one of the first proponents of a return to the Scriptures. Marguerite illustrates the precepts of Erasmus’ Enchiridion Militis Christiani through the discussions of the dévisants and in the subject matter of the tales. She reveals the weaknesses, faults and sins of “bons pères”, transforming their shame into a didactic lesson from which every Christian may profit. She illustrates the relevance of a return to the Holy Scriptures to avoid the sins of pride, lust, and avarice, and the necessity of God’s grace.

Aubri McVey Leung

Indiana University

amcvey@indiana.edu

“Democratic Legitimacy and the Shapes of Religious Self Realization: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William Wells Brown on ‘Higher Law’”

In his first major address to the Senate on March 11, 1850 New York Senator William Henry Seward issued a speech that came to be memorialized in dozens of national newspaper reprints and some 100,000 pamphlet copies circulated in its wake as Seward's "Higher Law" address. It was an address that directly challenged the Congressional passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, invoking what Seward stated was a higher law than the United States Constitution. He called this law "the law of our Creator: the law of humanity, justice, equity, the law of nature and of nations."  I trace the ways Seward's construction of a higher law influenced three distinct figures on the Massachusetts Lyceum Circuit between 1852-54, each of whom used the idea as a way to reconfigure Christendom and the pious materialism of United States planters and industrialists alike, neither with any real commitment to human manumission. These writers were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William Wells Brown.  Arguing for civil noncompliance toward the Fugitive Slave Law, Emerson reclaimed the embattled legislative buzz-word of 'higher law' to rescind both his earlier affiliations with the dominant Unitarian tradition of conservative anti-slavery moral suasion, and also the very tenet of cosmic political detachment he had advocated a decade earlier. Similarly, Thoreau would issue his own challenge, contrasting the United States constitution with the "eternal and only just constitution, which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being."   Finally, William Wells Brown, a fugitive slave and author of the first novel ever to be published by an African American, Clotel (1853), drew directly upon Seward's concept of higher law to argue for a practical Christian ethics that would not only transform the heart but transform the government through decisive personal and political action. Writing during a crucial juncture for national life, Brown, Emerson, and Thoreau used the theme of "higher law" to argue for a living reconfiguration within religion. Their literatures are an arena for deliberations about citizenship and the specific forms of religious praxis that could (and I argue actually would) go on to alter the course of antebellum American life.

Judith Mulcahy

Graduate Center of the City University of New York

judith.mulcahy@gmail.com

Religion and Literature II: Early to Mid-20^th Century

Session Coordinator: Douglas Harrison
Florida Gulf Coast Univ.

dougmail@earthlink.net

"Jesus in Chicago: Christian Socialism and the Laboring of the Christ"

The propaganda literature of American Christian Socialists at the turn of the century is an artistically meaningful instance of what Warren Susman describes as making "a mythic vision of the past function as history." Manifest in published sermons, pamphlets and dedicated newspapers, the literature of the movement embodies, in the words of Protestant minister and Christian Socialist writer W.D.P. Bliss, a mission, "not to reconceive, but to reapply the Christ." As mainstream, nineteenth-century Protestantism increasingly pitched its sermons to the middle classes, and the revolutionary rhetoric of the American Socialist Party spooked the factory workers of the American metropolis, Christian Socialism's appropriation of the historical "Carpenter Christ" revealed itself as a custom-fitted antidote for the working class, secularizing Protestantism and producing Christ Himself as infallible spokesman-god for the American Left. Utilizing Michael Denning's conception of "the laboring of culture" along with Herbert Gutman's analysis of the myth-making power of social movements, I read the Socialist Christ as a figure of uncommon cultural dexterity. This Christ that was simultaneously radical and familiar, laboring and benevolent, suggested a narrative of reform to the working class in which their interests were not only central but exalted, a new testament written in common language and mandated by the divine national hand.

Phillip Maciak

pjmaciak@gmail.com

“Shantih, shantih, shantih: Global Consciousness in ‘The Waste Land’”

In 1957, R. Baird Shuman writes: “Buddhist elements have been found in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, notably in Part Three of ‘The Wasteland.’” Much early criticism regarding Eliot and Indic traditions, including Shuman’s work, focuses on source studies and the “mystic” quality of eastern religions. More recent critics, however, have moved beyond fascination to consider the complex and subtle ways that Eliot engages with Indic traditions throughout his career. This paper attempts to integrate a cultural-historical reading of “The Waste Land” as public elegy for World War I with a consideration of how Vendanta (the philosophical basis of Hinduism) and Buddhism fundamentally shape the text by engaging concepts such as karma and life-as-suffering. Offering readers a paradigm of the universe based on absence, suffering, community and non-linear time, Eliot’s poem instills a sense of worldliness across eastern and western thought without adhering strictly to any particular religious tract. The invocation of Indic tradition remains flexible, and the mantra “shantih” is echoed in other expressions of mourning such as Eliot’s famous rendering of Philomel’s cry, “Jug jug.” Formulating an argument that ultimately concerns language rather than religion, Eliot utilizes Indic traditions in order to move beyond them to create a public elegy not only for the victims of World War I but also for generations before and after. “The Waste Land” transforms the western elegy into an Indic-inspired elegiac mantra that questions the foundations of language – and religious practice – within a poetic work that demands an effort to encompass suffering on global level.

Sarah Turner

Northwestern University

sarah-turner@northwestern.edu

“Christ and Bacchus: Comedy and the Half-Life of Religious Thinking in C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia”

Scholars have noted various ways in which the richness of C.S. Lewis' imagination stretched the boundaries of his religious orthodoxy. Lewis critics of a Protestant bent point, for example, to the purgatorial overtones of The Great Divorce; those made uneasy by universalism draw attention to the entrance of Emeth, who is no lover of Aslan, into real Narnia in The Last Battle. This paper proposes to examine an unexplored crucible wherein Lewis' imagination and orthodoxy converge: narrative moments in The Chronicles of Narnia during which Christianity collides with comedy, moments that witness the metaphorical meeting of Christ and Bacchus. The paper will analyze Bacchus' appearances in the Chronicles, connecting them with Bacchus'/Dionysus' role in the development of comedy in ancient Greece. Such an analysis will reveal ways in which the spirit of comedy exists in tension with the ethos of Christianity. The paper will also employ humor theory to investigate humorous moments in the Chronicles, from the First Joke in The Magician's Nephew to Aslan's romp in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Explorations of Bacchus, comedy and humor in The Chronicles of Narnia will reveal the half-life of Lewis' religious thinking, recapitulating Saint John Chrysostom's accusatory question, "Christ was crucified by thy ills, and dost thou laugh?"

Samuel Joeckel

Palm Beach Atlantic University

SAMUEL_JOECKEL@pba.edu

“Religious Reimaginings in D.H. Lawrence's Apocalypse”

In my paper, I examine the contestations between the literary imagination and religious orthodoxy in D.H. Lawrence’s Apocalypse, published posthumously in 1931. Melding textual commentary and cultural and religious analysis, Lawrence mounts a blistering polemic against what he sees as the destructive “Christianity of self-glorification” that is championed by the Book of Revelation. In his view, Revelation’s central revenge narrative—profoundly inimical to the “Christianity of tenderness” embodied in the Gospels as well as to his own psycho-mythical understanding of individual consciousness—is a corruption of an older, pre-Christian apocalyptic vision that embraces instead a far more harmonious conception of the universe. To counter John of Patmos’s “misreading,” Lawrence attempts to read beyond the distorted rhetoric of Revelation and to restore what he sees as the original and authentic narrative of the apocalypse in order to make it relevant to—and hopeful for—his historical moment, threatened as it is by its positioning between two world wars. In particular, I look at Lawrence’s acts of reading in relation to Paul Ricoeur’s ideas on the dialectic between “external” and “internal” critique of religion, which leads to a new hermeneutics of the religious text and, consequently, a reassessment of the contemporary relevance of the “language of faith.” Ricoeur’s ideas are especially cogent to Lawrence’s antipathy to “fixed” symbolic language and simplistic, rigidly moralistic allegorical interpretations of religious texts. I argue that Lawrence’s Apocalypse, despite its anti-Christian polemic, is a profoundly religious work that re-imagines and revises a central Christian text in order to accommodate it to what Lawrence believed to be the most urgent questions of modern human experience.

Jenny Lee

Northwestern University

jenny-lee@northwestern.edu

“James Baldwin: A Guide for Uncovering Judeo-Christian Principles in Contemporary American Literature”

For at least thirty years, literary critics have suggested that American writers have rejected religious orthodoxy, particularly the principles of Judeo-Christianity. For instance, in writing about African-American literature, critic Doris Grumbach said in 1970 that for contemporary black writers, unlike their historical predecessors such as Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, Christianity no longer served as a faith that sustained them. Instead, Christianity was “seen to be delusive in nature [and]degrading because it was a denial, in the [racial depiction] of its central figures, of black selfhood, the cause of black spiritual and psychic sickness” (210). In 1998, critic Philip Ryken, in reviewing The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, decried what he saw as the decline of a Christian worldview in American literature in general. According to Ryken, “the history of African-American letters is one chapter in a story of the long, slow decline of Christian influence on American culture. This same decline can be traced in American literature in general.” However, writer James Baldwin, whose first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain appeared in 1953, actually shows critics how elements of religious orthodoxy, particuarly Judeo-Christianity, manifest themselves in the works of American writers of all racial backgrounds. Baldwin grew up as a boy preacher, but he eventually left the church, disappointed at what he believed was its hypocrisy. Despite his leaving, though, Baldwin exalts what might be called the essence of spirituality in Judeo-Christianity--the life of spiritual service, what is described in Greek as “kenosis.” This word appears in Philippians and means “to empty oneself,” to balance self-interest with the good of others. Baldwin himself revealed how important it was for him to lay down selfish pursuits, particularly when considering his work as a writer: “‘What is important about my work, which I realized when I was a little boy, partly from the Church perhaps, and whatever happened to my mind all those years I was growing up in the shadow of the Holy Ghost, is that nothing belongs to you; it belongs to everybody. My talent does not belong to me, you know; it belongs to everybody’” (292). In valuing service, Baldwin reveals to critics that whenever writers dramatize service, dramatize ways that individuals reach out in service to their families and communities, these writers are presenting an essential element of Judeo-Christian practice.

Francine L. Allen

Kennesaw State Univ.

fallen@morehouse.edu

Religion and Literature III: Late 20^th Century to Present

Session Coordinator: Douglas Harrison
Florida Gulf Coast Univ.

dougmail@earthlink.net

“Passionate Priests:  Religious Life and Moral Redefinition in the Novels of Iris Murdoch”

Iris Murdoch is essentially a religious writer, and her moral theory, which focuses on the preeminence of the concept of goodness, intimates one of the most modern concepts of post-Christian religious attention. Though her novels possess a marked secularity, her works systematically connect to principles of the divine and examine the complex and often-misunderstood relationship between religion and reality, revealing a multifaceted spirituality not often expressed in modern fiction. Remarkably, Murdoch maintains a lexical continuity with Christianity and comfortably synthesizes the salvific doctrine of Christian conversion and the Platonic mythology of moral transformation. Exchanging repentance for epiphany and self-understanding, Murdoch reworks the Christian model of salvation through faith in a suffering Christ into a self-annihilating ordeal that serves to deflate the ego and bring about moral progress. In her novels, The Bell (1958) and Henry and Cato (1976), Murdoch concerns herself with the suspension of two failed priests between the polarities of faith and sexuality. She creatively intimates their struggles and calls for a redefinition of practical faith, appealing to a broader sense of goodness and moral engagement as the criteria for the good life rather than conformity to a religious discipline that fails to address the most basic elements of the human condition. God is transformed into deified Go(o)d, and traditional religious thought is redefined through the superimposition of her moral philosophy on the older, decaying infrastructure of orthodoxy.

Matthew Shaw

Ball State University

mcshaw2@bsu.edu

“Tobias Wolff’s ‘In the Garden of the North American Martyrs’: A Lesson in How to Resurrect a Dead Religious Genre”

Tobias Wolff’s short story “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” provides a highly successful demonstration of how an outmoded religious literary genre, in this case, that of the virgin martyr’s saint’s life, can be successfully revitalized and rendered in culturally relevant terms.  Wolff shifts the site of resistance from the medieval ground of sexual chastity to more contemporary concerns of personal and intellectual integrity, but he retains all of the key features of the genre, including the “virginity at risk topos,” a clash between irreconcilable religious and pagan values, and a culminating martyrdom. Life-and-death contests centering on the preservation of chastity as an expression of religious belief may fail to inspire modern audiences as credible or personally meaningful, so Wolff instead centers the story’s conflict on a contest concerning academic and personal integrity.  But these secular struggles have spiritual dimensions as well: Mary, the story’s protagonist, clearly represents Christian (or at least biblical) values, while her opponents are portrayed as representatives of pagan values.  By shifting the values being contested from those of a religious institution (the church) to those of a secular institution (the academy), Wolff enables the reader to suspend disbelief so as to enter imaginatively and affectively into the protagonist’s struggles, so that the reader sides with and cheers for his saintly protagonist as the story reaches its surprising, satisfying, and rather “inspired” conclusion. 

Anita Helmbold

Taylor University College

anita.helmbold@taylor-edu.ca

"Grace in a Hail of Bullets: Habits of Calvinist Thought in True Crime Cinema"

In the opening of Quentin Tarentino’s Pulp Fiction, a hail of bullets miraculously fails to kill two professional hit men, both depraved actors in a self-destructing, fallen world. From this initial providential moment, the principal tenets of the Synod of Dort reveal themselves in the inscrutable mechanisms of redemption now commonplace in true crime narratives. By the end of the movie, one undeserving hit man is saved, but the other is damned.  After the lifting of the Hayes Code (a kind of cinematic Arminiansim) Hollywood redemption plots began to turn increasingly on saving transformations that were unmerited by deeds but somehow enabled alongside spiritual (and pseudo-spiritual) revelation.  The real legacy of American Puritanism – transmitted via eighteenth-century revivalism, nineteenth-century reform movements, and twentieth-century recovery discourse – consists not of proverbial examples of sexual, cultural and social repression but rather of habits of public confession, faith in uncanny “moments of clarity,” and dependence upon providential intervention that saves when human will alone fails.

Meredith Neuman

Clark University

MeNeuman@clarku.edu

“The re-gendered Magnificat of Rachel Ingalls’ ‘Blessed Art Thou’”

Anglo-American author Rachel Ingalls’ novella “Blessed Art Thou” (later a movie, A Question of Faith) concerns a monk in a California monastery who is visited—and apparently impregnated by —the archangel Gabriel. I shall argue that on one level, the story is merely an ironic, macaronic re-telling that depends for its comic momentum on a re-gendering of an old story. But on a deeper level, the story seeks to de-familiarize (Schklovsky’s term) the “impossibilities” of the Gospel narrative—the immaculate conception of Mary, the virgin birth of Christ, the Incarnation itself. That is, the novella tries to re-“scandalize” the events for an audience that has grown wearily accustomed to the true “scandal” of the Gospels. My paper will takes up both ancient heresies surrounding the hermaphrodite and the modern obsession with gender to situate the novella’s engagement with a contemporary audience

Kathleen Marks

St. John's University

marksk@stjohns.edu