On the last page of New York Jew (1978), the third installment in Alfred Kazin's account of his life's journey from the slums of Brownsville to the slopes of Parnassus, the author finds himself at a literary party high above Lincoln Center. Across the Hudson, on the shores of New Jersey, a fire rages. It is sometime in the seventies, the era of the New York fiscal crisis and of general urban decay, and the flames impart an aura of apocalypse, an intimation that the last days are at hand. Amid cocktail-party chatter that could come from a Woody Allen soundtrack ("people arguing about movie reviews, Lina Wertmuller, the 'neurotic guilt of survivors'"), Kazin looks out at the burning sky and thinks about grander, graver matters—that "blaze was always my word for joy" and about the "Lord who made Himself known as fire." This unlikely moment of sublimity culminates, in the book's penultimate sentence, in a startling complaint: "I want my God back."

"I want my God back." Perhaps no other single sentence of the thousands—variously dazzling, puzzling, well wrought, over-wrought, classical, romantic and baroque—that Kazin has written over more than half a century so clearly reveals his affinity with the writers who have preoccupied him for much of that time. In a famous passage from his Preface to On Native Grounds (1942), the book that established him as the pre-eminent lay interpreter of the American literary canon—and that also established, in tandem with F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, what that canon would consist of for decades to come—Kazin defined as "the greatest single fact about our modern American writing—our writers' absorption in every last detail of their American world together with their deep and subtle alienation from it." A principal detail in the American world as absorbed by writers from William Bradford in Puritan Boston to John. Up dike in its promiscuous modern suburbs has always been religion. And yet the experience of many American writers with the religious culture of their native land has embroiled them in paradox: Most of the citizens of a country founded on (in Tocqueville's words) "the boldest political theories of the eighteenth-century philosophers" persist in modes of belief those philosophers would have regarded with suspicion. And perhaps more profoundly, the writing of imaginative literature is a wholly secular activity continually shadowed by theology. "Language is fossil poetry." wrote Emerson, in Kazin's eyes (as in Whitman's) "the actual beginner of the whole procession." A corollary, of which Emerson was surely aware, is that poetry is fossil scripture. The writer's act of world-making tends to circle back toward an anxious reckoning with the divine act it mimics: In the beginning was the Word.

"The individual on his way to becoming a writer," Kazin concludes in God and the American Writer, a late and elegant elaboration on themes that will be familiar to readers of his earlier books,

was all too conscious that it was his ancestral sect, his early training, his own holiness in the eyes of his church that he brought to his writing. He became its apostle without having forever to believe in it, in anything—except the unlimited freedom that is the usual American faith.

So Emerson, who found even the thin, residual sacraments of New England Unitarianism too confining, set out to create a religion of spiritual self-reliance, to preach the "usual American faith" (generally understood in crudely economic terms) with Orphic intensity. And so T. S. Eliot, whose forebears were among the leading lights of that same Unitarianism, rebelled against its formlessness and embraced the stringent orders of classicism in art, royalism in polities and Anglo-Catholicism in religion while arguing for the "extinction of personality" in poetry. And so the great mocker Mark Twain, like Eliot a native of the state whose motto—"Show Me"—proclaims the skeptic's insistence on empirical realities, still needed God, if only as a scapegoat for human hypocrisy and fraud. And so Kazin himself, at the climax of his own peculiarly American success story, feels the stirrings of an atavistic awe.

But even though the first great American psychologist, Jonathan Edwards, was a philosopher of religion, and the greatest American philosopher of religion, William James, was a psychologist, American religion has never confined itself to matters of individual belief. One important motif in this suggestive, occasionally diffuse series of meditations involves the existential ordeal of dwelling in a metaphysically uncertain universe—what Melville described as "the intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity." But another, more central concern, one that links the chapters on Emerson, Hawthorne, Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe with those on Twain and Faulkner, is with a more worldly ordeal, and with moral rather than metaphysical paradoxes. While the writer as a private individual may have agonized about what the old textbooks call "the problem of belief," the public life of the nation at the moment of its literary awakening was racked by the problem of human slavery, the legacy of which convulses it still.

"One cannot think of the long, long story of black bondage and the war that ended it without a shiver of awe," Kazin writes in his brilliant chapter on Lincoln. "It is the one chapter in American life that brings us back to biblical history." The abiding religious significance of the Civil War is a reflection of its religious character: "A great many people were certain that they lived and died overseen by God, for purposes instilled in them by God." Stowe claimed that the Lord was the real author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and she the mere amanuensis. Thoreau, paradoxically a fervent believer in the abolitionist cause even as he came to oppose the war that would accomplish its ends, linked Brown's hanging with the crucifixion of Christ in "A Plea for Captain John Brown." And Julia Ward Howe imagined not only that the Grand Army of the Republic was visited by the incarnate Christ ("I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps") but that its soldiers would be themselves His virtual incarnation: "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.

Much as Kazin marvels at the righteousness that propelled both armies into battle, he recoils from the public religiosity of the present, directing several pointed rebukes at the "politicized, intolerant, and paranoiac" faith that characterizes the Christian right of the nineties. But many in that movement claim, with some historical accuracy, to find precursors in the Christian left of the 1840s and '50s. Kazin is not interested in the kind of historical analysis that would elucidate such connections, or that might treat religious expression in politics or literature as a manifestation of ideology. He prefers to address it in its own terms. When he calls Uncle Tom's Cabin "New England's last holiness," for instance, he means with minimal irony to indicate a dimension of literary and moral value that once flourished on native grounds, but is now lost.

To speak of a literary work in terms of its holiness is to speak in an idiom quite alien to what most literary critics use. In a sharp review of An American Procession (1984), Denis Donoghue once noted Kazin's tendency to stray from the analytic and evaluative tasks of criticism in his pursuit of narrative sweep and rhetorical elevation. "All that his writing undertakes to be is fecund," Donoghue rather archly remarked. But that of course is the point. In describing On Native Grounds as "an effort at moral history," Kazin signaled at the start of his career that he would not be bound by the usual conventions of literary discussion, any more than Emerson, forsaking the ministry and determining to follow "the laws of the soul," was bound by the doctrines of New England Christianity.

And now, in the twilight of that career, Kazin writes more than ever in an Emersonian key. "The maker, of a sentence," Emerson wrote, "launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight." These words nicely describe Kazin at his best, as does his own reminder that Emerson in the Divinity School address "was not delivering an academic lecture, he was rhapsodizing out of his heart and soul, communing with himself in order to address his audience."

Sometimes, of course, for Kazin as for Emerson, the result of such rhapsodizing is confusion. "There is no argument—one sentence does not necessarily connect with another." Thus Kazin on Emerson, in words that apply to some of his own passages. Reading Kazin's essays, like reading Emerson's, means submitting to a wild, chaotic ride replete with inductive and associative leaps, dense thickets of allusion and sudden shifts from anecdote to prophecy. Henry James Sr. (father of the novelist and the Philosopher, and a fellow-traveling Transcendentalist) is said to have called Emerson a man without a handle; at times the shape and direction of this book seem equally difficult to grasp.

For one thing, Kazin's two main concerns are pursued mostly along parallel tracks, so that the individual and the social manifestations of religious crisis seem almost entirely unrelated. The moral dilemma posed by slavery animates the chapters on Stowe, Lincoln and Faulkner, and figures significantly in those on Hawthorne, Emerson and Twain. The metaphysical dilemma of the individual's response to the intense otherwise of nature, the universe and the mind, on the other hand, recurs for Melville, Dickinson, James, Eliot and Frost. The lovely chapter on Whitman, like the Good Gray Poet himself, stands alone, a cosmos, containing multitudes, blithely self-contradictory. The ordering of the chapters, while roughly chronological, suggests not so much a procession as a portrait gallery; there are intimations of influence and resemblance, but each figure is framed and composed largely apart from the others.

One can't help but notice an empty space on the gallery wall. Taking Thoreau to task for his idealism, Kazin declares that "what is missing in [Thoreau's] opposition to slavery … is the presence of an actual, living, breathing slave." And what is missing in a book so admirable in its understanding of the role of racial injustice in the shaping of American self-expression is the recognition of an actual African-American presence. I don't mean simply to reiterate the familiar (and important) plea for a more inclusive canon. I mean rather to suggest that one writer in particular—Frederick Douglass—would fit seamlessly within the lines of Kazin's own argument. Douglass's autobiography is after all a product of the literary moment that produced Uncle Tom's Cabin, Walden, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter and Leaves of Grass. Like Stowe, Douglass was pre-occupied with the need for providential justice in a world corrupted by sin; like Hawthorne and Melville, he investigated the dialectic of free will and social constraint; and like Whitman, Thoreau and Emerson (and Kazin), his deepest literary undertaking was the invention, and revision, of himself.

The omission of Douglass is regrettable, but forgivable—he is in a sense implicit in Kazin's treatment of his contemporaries, and Kazin has perhaps wisely emphasized the writers he feels most at home with. But Kazin's palpable sense of affinity—of communion—with the writers he does consider raises intriguing questions. All these writers belong, by ancestry if not by active belief, to the predominantly Calvinist tradition of American Protestantism. Among the few voices heard from outside this tradition—and these only marginally, by way of commentary—are the atheist Edmund Wilson (descended, as it happens, from Cotton Mather himself) and the Catholic Flannery O'Connor. These two stands as complementary figures of certainty in a landscape of longing and doubt. Wilson had no need of God; O'Connor's faith in hers was absolute. The rest had lost or abandoned theirs, and, whether they knew it or not, wanted Him back.

And so does Kazin. But is it the same God? What's a good New York Jew doing communing with all these anxious goyim, for Christ's sake? The answer is suggested by the mad diasporist in Philip Roth's Operation Shylock. For him, the great modern American Jewish hero was Irving Berlin, who in composing "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade" brazenly laid claim to the holiest days on the Christian calendar, and then returned them wrapped in the vestments of American Universalism. Kazin belongs to a generation of writers and critics who have accomplished an analogous task: They rescued American literature from the genteel tradition and restored to it its difficulty, its strangeness and its power. Think of Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling and Leon Edel conspiring to elevate Henry James, who would never have set foot in a club that admitted them as members, to the status of a high cultural icon. Think of Leslie Fiedler lighting out for the territory with Huck and Jim. Think of Saul Bellow who for a time managed to unite the opposed sensibilities of James and Dreiser in a single dapper body. Think of Allen Ginsberg, the second coming of Whitman, or Norman Mailer, and Ahab smashing through the pasteboard mask of the American dream. And think of Alfred Kazin, like so many immigrant children at once in love with and estranged from America, who discovered in the work of its most exalted native sons and daughters the mirror of his own anxieties and hopes.

These are all Jews, all men, mostly gone. The religion they shared—although, in the time-honored fashion, they sometimes despised each other's versions of it—had only tangentially to do with Judaism. What they worshiped was literature. This faith has fallen on hard times—mocked on one side by a self-defeating iconoclasm, travestied on the other by a reactionary orthodoxy. But like all faiths, its next great revival is always imminent. It is not necessary to defend every aspect of the creed to appreciate what it has achieved, any more than it is necessary to believe you are reading the transcript of divine dictation to be moved by the death of Little Eva. But we should nonetheless be glad that a great prophet of the old religion is still among us, and still able, by the power of his preaching, to stir even the badly lapsed to momentary belief. We should, perhaps, thank God.