Abstract
In the last dozen or so years, a wellspring of scholarly work has renewed the field of religion and literature. The diverse essays collected in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion offers a welcome addition to previous anthologies like The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (2007), The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion (2016), and the special issue of Religion and Literature 41.2 (2009). Like the latter two, The Routledge Companion represents an array of faith traditions; as a whole, it offer an excellent overview of this rich and variegated field of study.
To speak of “religion and literature” as a unified field is perennially problematic: the conjunction “and” can seem to bind the disciplines loosely. As convener of the conversations that made this volume possible, editor Mark Knight navigates the terrain deftly, ever aware of “fluidity and movement between the disciplines” (4). Lori Branch’s “Postsecular Studies” complements Knight’s introductory essay by providing a detailed review of studies in religion and literature over the last 25 years. “[B]oth descriptive and proscriptive,” Branch’s overview “testifies to a fertile field under significant cultivation” (92). She recognizes the academy’s suspicion toward religion, and that most active literary scholars “were trained after 1970 in methodologies that assumed the truth of the secularization thesis” (93). As Tracy Fessenden wrote in 2007, “Of all the binaries to which critical suspicion directs our critical scrutiny, the secular/religious binary is last to yield to critical pressure because it lies closest to the heart of professional identity” (93). Postsecular studies—represented widely in this anthology—has done much to complicate this recalcitrant binary.
Knight’s division of the 39 essays into five parts clarifies the complexity of the field’s contemporary “state of play,” and this brief review will point to salient examples from each section. Part I tells “The Modern Story of Literature and Religion,” commencing with Joshua King’s analysis of Matthew Arnold’s 1880 prophecy that “most of what now passes with us as religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry” (15). Arnold believed that his call for “an inward turn” would provide the impetus for “the ethical resurrection into moral life” (22). In the years that followed, Arnold seemed to have been prescient: “the rise of English studies” proved inhospitable to religion, as Dayton Haskin observes in his essay. But one Harvard graduate, Thomas Stearns Eliot, swam against the stream, and his “theological modernism” insisted that “‘all manner of thing shall be well,’ but only when seen from the perspective of Christian salvation history” (Anthony Domestico, 45). C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien agreed, and their “literary achievement is contingent upon its mythic penetration to the heart of the Christian evangel” (Trevor Hart, 55).
Part II focuses upon “Theory” and includes Kevin Hart’s essay on the renewed interest in “Phenomenology,” here applied to the poetry of George Oppen, and William Franke’s on the resurgent attention to the Apostle Paul by theoreticians like Badiou, Agamben, and Žižek. Jens Zimmerman helpfully reminds readers of “The Importance of Philosophical Hermeneutics for Literature and Religion.” Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1969) receives a well-warranted re-appreciation for its “thesis that all human knowing is a form of interpretation, wherefore neither religion nor science can claim absolute certain knowledge” (103) and Gadamer’s insistence that “reading texts with enduring insights … is always transformative in the same way that a conversation with another human being can be transformative” (109). As someone who has taught “great books” curricula for almost 30 years, I concur: the attentive, collaborative study of classic texts—so many of which grapple with religious questions—can play a vital role in a student’s formation.
In part III, a focus upon “Form and Genre” commences with the indispensable Stanley Hauerwas, who makes a persuasive case that “a theological sentence that does its proper work does so just to the extent it makes the familiar strange” (169). The craft of composing such sentences takes time and practice, “the result of a lifetime of training necessary to produce a soul capable of seeing through the sentimentalities we use to hide our mortality from ourselves” (174). Hauerwas’s exemplar is a sentence wrought by theologian Robert Jenson: “God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt” (174): for Hauerwas, this sentence communicates God’s transcendence of our comfortable categories even as it suggests God’s sustaining presence in a world “out of control” (176). Also noteworthy is Peter Hawkins’s beautiful overview of “Epic,” commencing with Gilgamesh, running on through Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton. Crucial to the latter two is the “theological revision of epic” St. Augustine presents in his Confessions, in which “God works within human motives and actions, playfully making use of moral foibles to bring about a providential plan” (207). Ben Saunders turns to “Religion and Literary Tragedy” by focusing upon King Lear. Like Saunders (and many others), I am moved by that play’s apophatic valence. I’m not quite persuaded by Saunders’s claim that Lear’s “relentless insistence on the reality of meaningless suffering can help us,” but agree that it challenges viewers to “let go of all our preconceived notions of God as we move closer to the experience of true divinity” (223).
Part IV explores “The Literary Afterlives of Sacred Texts and Traditions.” It includes an analysis of the Bhagavad Gita’s influence on the American Transcendentalists, and an exploration of “the varied manifestations of midrash” (Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg, 320), types of which can be found in the poetry of Marge Piercy, the fiction of Allegra Goodman, and the criticism of Harold Bloom. Andrew Tate looks at twenty-first-century literary representations of Christ, specifically Naomi Alderman’s “specifically Jewish vision of Jesus and his era” (326) and Philip Pullman’s solely human rendering. Both authors “defamiliarize specific events from the life of Jesus” (339), but “re-mythologize the old story” (341). Given my scholarly interests and personal commitments, I found especially compelling Valentina Izmirlieva’s analysis of the way Christ offers the “scandal” of radical hospitality, as mediated by Sonya in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In Sonya’s receptivity to Raskolnikov, and her responsive, incantatory reading of John 11, she participates in the incarnate Logos: “The Word now pulsates and breathes with Sonya’s hesitation, emphases, and triumphs; it has the tempo and temperature of her voice … [T]he scene demands a response to the Word and challenges us to act as responsible and hospitable readers” (286).
Part V navigates “The Politics of Religion and Literature” in varied ways. The Jewish-Buddhist strains of Leonard Cohen’s poetry (and lyrics) elicit an interfaith “social critique” that emphasize mercy and compassion (Peter Jaeger, 430). A neglected slave narrative, The Life of Mary McCray, Born and Raised a Slave in the State of Kentucky (1898), is revealingly read as hagiography, “tailored to the African-American experience” (Yolanda Pierce, 401). The political potential of holiness found expression in McCray’s radical sense of agency and identity which she forged apart from the bonds of denomination. Ecumenical tensions emerge in John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” and represent a Christian faith “riddled with doubt, self-deception, violence, sophistry, and the fallout of Reformation divisions” (Susannah Monta, 397). And although Anglo-Saxon England adopted a view of itself as “the chosen nation, a New Israel” (Samantha Zacher, 373), “it was also the first country to banish its Jewish population, as well as the first to accuse them of the most horrific and implausible crimes against Christians” (375).
While the five-part division is helpful, many of the essays speak across the different sections, and evince parallel streams and cross-currents. For example, as in Dostoevsky’s novel, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale evinces a pattern of radical hospitality (John Cox). The Beat poets celebrate “religious pluralism” (Luke Ferretter), even as their Americanized Buddhism ignored the central ethical concerns of that Eastern tradition (James Najarian). Mark Eaton focuses upon “9/11 and its Literary Aftermaths” in well-known novelists, whereas Arthur Bradley and Abir Hamdar’s “Imagining Islamism: Representations of Fundamentalism in the Twenty-First Century Novel” focuses upon Arabic fiction largely unknown by Anglophone readers, but which “offers a sustained interrogation of the relationship between Islam and Islamism” (454).
The Routledge Companion is a consistently edifying volume, and while its price may preclude adding it to one’s personal collection, readers of Christianity and Literature ought to ensure that its college or local library has a copy. This anthology contributes richly to a continuing conversation, one that will last as long as literary artists represent and give form to the human experience of the transcendent.