In the early 1960s the students at Columbia College demanded that a course in modern literature be introduced into the English curriculum. Acceding to this demand, the English Department reacted strongly: “Very well, if [students] want the modern, let them have it—let them have it, as Henry James says, full in the face. We shall give the course, but we shall give it on the highest level, and if they think, as students do, that the modern will naturally meet them in a genial way, let them have their gay and easy time with Yeats and Eliot, with Joyce and Proust and Kafka, with Lawrence, Mann, and Gide.” So remembers Lionel Trilling in his essay, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature.”¹

Why, you may ask, were Trilling and his colleagues reluctant? They clearly were not questioning the value of the literature itself. Their doubts referred instead to the “educational propriety” of studying this literature in college. A strange kind of doubt, you may say. Strange indeed—and an even stranger kind of “despair” came over Trilling when he anticipated teaching the course. Why despair? It was not because students fail to respond to ideas, but rather, he said, “because they respond to ideas with a happy vagueness, a delighted glibness, a joyous sense of power in the use of received or receivable generalizations, a grateful wonder at how easy it is to formulate and judge, at how little resistance language offers to their intentions.”

This insight into the way youthful students approach literature proved only prefatory to the uneasiness Trilling himself confessed to regarding his own personal relation with the works that were to form the course. Struggling to come to terms with this personal involvement, Trilling explained that these modern works had been “involved with” him for a long time:

I invert the natural order [he wrote] not out of lack of modesty but taking the cue of W. H. Auden's remark that a real book reads us. I have been read by Eliot's poems and by Ulysses and by Remembrance of Things Past and by The Castle for a good many years now, since early youth. Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me and to understand my hidden meanings. Their nature is such that our relationship has been very intimate. No literature has ever been so shockingly personal as that of our time—it asks every question that is forbidden in polite society. It asks us if we are content with our marriages, with our family lives, with our professional lives, with our friends. … It asks us if we are content with ourselves, if we are saved or damned—more than with anything else, our literature is concerned with salvation. No literature has ever been so intensely spiritual as ours. I do not venture to call it actually religious, but certainly it has the special intensity of concern with the spiritual life which Hegel noted when he spoke of the great modern phenomenon of the secularization of spirituality.

What Trilling calls for in his remarkable essay is “the necessity of bearing personal testimony.” He summons students to have a look into the Abyss, even if only to listen for a voice from its awful depths saying, “Interesting, am I not? and exciting, if you consider how deep I am and what dread beasts lie at my bottom.” Moreover, he summons the teacher who, having analyzed all the formal matters about verse-patterns, metrics, prose conventions, irony, paradox, etc., now must needs look into the same Abyss and bear personal testimony to it. Granted, student and teacher do this only at considerable cost to their privacy. But how does one say Lawrence or Kafka or Conrad or Faulkner are right unless, as Trilling says, “one speaks from the intimacies of one's own feelings, and one's own sense of life, and one's own wished-for way of being.”

In placing this kind of summons before student and teacher alike Trilling struck the note that now is beginning to be heard round the critical world. It calls readers to get into literature, to observe and to feel and to judge from the middle of things. We are, as it were, called upon by the work itself to fill in, add, judge, compare, intuit. We are compelled to meet it halfway. Failure to consider one's own life results in failure to meet the demands of the literary work.

Here, then, is the reply to the formalist critics who would preserve the autonomy of the well-wrought urn by expunging from it the consciousness of both maker and viewer. Here is the call to find the jinnie in the urn, to be conscious of the artist's consciousness “in an identical transparency,”² to unite subjectivity with subjectivity. In response a number of critics are now saying that their enterprise is not only to observe the artist's spiritual adventure but to pursue their own as well. This dissolution of their role as a mediate entity is implicit in the Geneva School of critics described in Sarah N. Lawall's study, Critics of Consciousness (1968). Related assumptions underlie Walter J. Ong's The Barbarian Within (1962), Morse Peckham's Man's Rage for Chaos (1965), Norman N. Holland's The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968), and Walter J. Slatoff's With Respect to Readers (1970). What these critical works have in common is the assumption that books serve as guidelines, reference points, and touchstones—as I, the reader, meet the present.

A student of mine recently made a list of such books, trying to understand what it was that gave intensity to her reading them, and sensing all the while that behind each book was a mind at work on something of value: the roar beyond the silent word. Her list consisted of Middlemarch, Auden's poetry, The Prelude, Moby Dick, Young Man Luther, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Robert Cole's Children of Crisis, and The Way of All Flesh. Somewhere in this student's life, perhaps as in that of Martha Quest in Doris Lessing's novel, The Four-Gated City, “it had been instilled into her, or she knew it by instinct, that one should never read anything until one wanted to, learn anything until one needed it. She [Martha] was in for another of the short intensive periods of reading during which she extracted an essence, a pith, got necessary information” (italics mine). What my student wanted and needed was to reach something new—something, she said, that might someday come to her at forty. Thus she ruminated:

I suppose what I would like to cast off are the remnants of my adolescence: defensive postures; silly, nervous behavior; myopic vision; the desire for crashing chords and sounding trumpets. I would like to cast off introspection carried to absurd lengths, an introspection which (as Blake might put it) keeps me locked in my skull and away from a clear, lively sense of the outside. And I would like to feel that should I read Lawrence now, for the first time, I might read him with a few nagging suspicions and perhaps a tinge of irritation—instead of wholesale surrender. And I would also like to think that George Eliot and Jane Austen have more to do with where I am going than Lawrence. All of this is to say, I think, that my fanciful daydreams about being older are daydreams about experience which has a different taste to it, a different set of possibilities, preoccupations, responsibilities and passions.

I think Lionel Trilling would find this student ready for his class in modern literature and ready too for what he called the “intensely spiritual” quality of it. Were he so inclined, his defense against having to speak personally about the literature, and her defense against having to do the same, would be to approach it in as “literary” a way as possible. This, he said, he did the first term, only to discover it went against his “personal grain”—and, moreover, “it went against the grain of the authors themselves” whose words were not pyramids or triumphal arches, static and commemorative, but mobile and aggressive; “and one does not describe a quinquereme or a howitzer or a tank without estimating how much damage it can do.” Clearly, Trilling was prepared to do battle, hiding neither his intimate relationship to the literature, his commitment, his fear, nor his ambivalence. In having her literature “full in the face” my student was ready to accept these same conditions.

Lest we get distempered about this business of spiritual adventure, about damnation and salvation which Trilling finds in much modern literature, we need to remember that battles in general—literary ones and particularly religious ones—are hardly as exciting as we might suppose. As any soldier knows, just as any religious man knows, for every battle or even skitmish, there are long and bleak periods of entrenchment, or troop movement, or even of activity having nothing to do with the war. Certainly both critic and saint, teacher and student, while they pursue the spiritual struggle—their own or that of the poet—and while they celebrate the lucidity of united consciousness, must also know the flatness and even sheer boredom of what Auden calls “the Time Being”:

In the meantime There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem From insignificance. The happy morning is over, The night of agony still to come; the time is noon: When the Spirit must practise his scales of rejoicing Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure A silence that is neither for nor against her faith That God's Will will be done, that, in spite of her prayers God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph. “For the Time Being”

For most of us the time is noon. And even should we suffer, Auden reminds us, “someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Moreover,

dread martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. “Musée des Beaux Arts”

What I have said up to now argues for literature as an experience, not as an object separate from the human consciousness that creates it or confronts it. This attitude looks back to the work of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre; draws upon the literary tradition of anti-formalism embodied in Romantic and surrealist literature; grows out of existential speculation during and after World War II; and stands, therefore, in radical opposition to the analytical, logical-positivist attitude shaped in England and America. The argument I propose fosters the kind of literary experience that touches not only the tone of a work but the voice and the vision impelling it, and leads the reader to what Walter J. Slatoff calls a “heightened sense of self,” even when such a sense includes that of noonday flatness or of silence for the Time Being.

To what extent, then, can literature be religious? Trilling, we remember, would not venture to call modern literature “actually religious,” but he did consider it “intensely spiritual.” The so-called critics of consciousness seek to blend subjective, humanistic, and religious elements in their literary responses and pronouncements. Cleanth Brooks, a formalist whose book about five modern authors he calls The Hidden God (1963), suggests Paul Tillich's Theology of Culture as “one of the best introductions to Hemingway.” Still another critic, Denis de Rougemont, asserts in his essay “Religion and the Mission of the Artist”³ that criticism is both technical and metaphysical—“which is to say, in the end, theological.” In recent years studies relating literature and theology have increased to the point that one needs a Barthian appetite to read them all. In the latest book of Nathan A. Scott, Jr., The Wild Prayer of Longing (1971), he makes rather wild if not prayerful claims for Theodore Roethke as a visionary of the sacramental. Another recent effort to bridge secular literature and religious experience is R. J. Reilly's book, Romantic Religion (1971), a study of Owen Barfield and the fiction of C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J. R. R. Tolkien in terms of “theologized romanticism.” Implicit in all these studies is a bridge between secularity and the religious vision. Using various critical strategies as well as emphasizing the subjective, all these critics have attempted, as it were, to reach beyond literature by extending its aesthetic dimension into that of religion.

I am not certain any of these efforts is successful, primarily because I doubt that success along such lines is possible. My doubts stem from the nature of language itself. For at best, language is always limited—and whether it be that of Shakespeare or Keats, Dostoevsky or Faulkner, it can be neither the means of religious vision nor its adequate testimony.

For the present, however, we can leave the argument open in order to examine what might be considered a theological basis for an interfusion of the secular and the sacred. One such basis might be the ideas of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. More relevant to art are those of Tillich to whom religion is synonymous with ultimate concern. Unlike someone who remains unconcerned about the meaning of existence, a religious person in Tillich's view squarely confronts existence and finds in it a dimension of depth which only the word religion can describe. Because Picasso's “Guernica” depicts so much of existence—its despair and estrangement—Tillich, in Theology of Culture (1959), calls it “a great Protestant painting.” He regards it as perhaps “the outstanding” expression of the human predicament and one of this century's great religious works of art. The important point is that he finds the religious and the secular in the same realm insofar as both have roots in the experience that forces a person to ask questions about beingness and nothingness. Whenever ultimate concern about man's condition is manifested with high seriousness and intensity—as it is, say, in the best modern writers—Tillich would call their works religious and, as a theologian, would read them for the profound feelings of existence these works quicken within himself.

His essay, “Existential Aspects of Modern Art,”⁴ is especially helpful to a person wanting to establish a theological or religious basis for literary criticism. What Tillich discusses as the four levels of relationship between religion and artistic painting apply as well to literature. On the first level—nonreligious style, nonreligious content—is art depicting landscapes, human scenes and events, only indirectly related to the meaning of existence. The second level he describes as religious style, nonreligious content, the existential level of Picasso's “Guernica,” the level in which life is seen as atomized, disrupted, and the questions of human existence brought to the surface. The third level is what Tillich calls nonreligious style, religious content, the level of pictorial Madonnas, religious “best-selling novels,” calendar and Sunday School art, the “junk” of religious art, most of it “dangerously irreligious” because it hides the fact that “religious content in itself does not give a religious picture.” The fourth level—religious style, religious content—is the expressionism of El Greco's “Crucifixion,” Mathias Grünewald's “Crucifixion” on the Isenheim Altar, and Rouault's “Miserere” series, or in literature, N. Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ.

Theological criticism of literature pertains most closely to Tillich's second level. It is here that the religious themes in secular literature emerge. Or it is on this level that one supposedly recognizes the great themes of literature to be also the great themes of religion. Thus the critical basis in William R. Mueller's The Prophetic Voice in Modern Fiction (1959) is an analysis of how six Biblical themes shape six modern novels. Professor Mueller finds the theme of vocation (as a calling) to be dominant in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; the theme of the fall in Camus' The Fall; the theme of judgment in Kafka's The Trial; the theme of suffering in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury; the theme of love in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter; and the theme of the remnant in Ignazio Silone's A Handful of Blackberries. Again, the list of critics hypothesizing a secular-sacred interfusion lengthens. Not one to venture far beyond his own brand of humanism, even Howard Mumford Jones in Belief and Disbelief in American Literature (1969) suggests that although no trace of theology went into the writing of Saul Bellow's Herzog, this novel resembles John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in that the central theme in both works is “the problem of salvation.” No author worth his salt, says Jones, “fails to grapple with one or more of the great themes of theology—God, man, and the universe.”

As I suggested earlier, this kind of criticism leaves me uneasy. Such was not the case a few years ago when I was avidly reading one book after another by Professor Scott and other theological critics of literature. I think the trouble for me now comes in what I sense to be their own vagueness and sense of power in structuring generalizations that would supposedly bridge literature and religion. I am also less comfortable with Tillich than I used to be. For I am orthodox enough to think there is a distinction between the profane and the holy, nature and spirit, man and God, imagination and revelation, just as there is a difference between naming religious themes in literature and experiencing their actuality in the human heart. Furthermore, I am not sure that the ultimate concern which Picasso expresses in “Guernica” is necessarily religious, restricted as it is in this case to the hell of human imprisonment, darkness, fragmentation, and chaos. To call this painting religious as Tillich emphatically does is to deny the transcendence inherent in religion itself. Tillich's ground of being is hardly St. Paul's “King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God” (I Tim. 1:17).

What can be said is that Picasso's painting is disruptive, and perhaps this is the central quality of modern literature. The age-old notion that literature shows order obviously needs revision, especially when we think of literary experience in terms of subjectivity and human consciousness. As Walter Slatoff suggests, literature may show instead of order a more significant rage for disorder. He correctly points out that the soliloquy of Ahab or Lear reveals a far more tormented soul than what we are likely to encounter in everyday life. In many literary works, Slatoff says, “it is the suffering itself which is etched most deeply in our minds.” Literature generates anxieties, fears, conflicts. And does anyone think that Kafka, for example, went on to resolve the problems of human existence? Even though an artist like T. S. Eliot may witness to Christian reconciliation he can only take the reader to the edge of this experience. An artist may show us the human problems but he will never reconcile them except through art. But art neither demands the commitment nor fulfills the promise of religion. Contrary to Nietzsche, art does not staunch the eternal wound of being.

To say that the study of imaginative literature fits people for the grasping of sacred truth is not to say that people thereby grasp it. That knowledge of ourselves and of God constitutes true and solid wisdom does not mean that such knowledge is all of one order. What can be said is that language, even the richest metaphoric language, is never more than the “occasional” cause, as distinct from the “efficient” cause, of religious experience. Here, I think, is as far as literature can go. It can show us our darkness, it can fashion the occasion in which we might better see the light, but it cannot cause the light. Only some power beyond and outside language can do that.

Here, then, is one limitation of language and literature. Words do not cause the light; for all their rhetorical power they do not imbue the heart with what Jonathan Edwards called religious affections. After the artist has provided the so-called verbal environment (the occasional cause), another power (the efficient cause) must intervene if the beholder is to collect out of it the conception.

A second limitation is that literature never provides adequate testimony of the light. In this regard there is a stunning similarity between the views of Edwards and Kierkegaard. For both thinkers the true sense of ultimate concern, which they would insist has to do with purity of heart, is conveyed by one's life, not by one's words. It was for good reason that of his twelve “Distinguishing Signs of Truly Gracious and Holy Affections,” Edwards devoted (in Religious Affections) his chief attention to the last one, “Christian practice,” which takes up one-third of the total discussion. But more importantly, both men knew that if a person aspires to religious experience he will have to discover that the prerequisite is a renewed heart and a giving up of everything for its sake. Kierkegaard believed that for the poet this means relinquishing his art, and, in what would be analogous for the preacher, a giving up of his “artistic” sermon. Once a poet experiences religious vision, once he exists religiously, he either stops writing or regards words as incidental, even as accidental. A prolific writer himself, Kierkegaard rejected the creative life. An eloquent preacher, Edwards spurned the self-conscious artistry of the seventeenth century Anglicans. For both men the point of reference was God, not aesthetic beauty. If, according to Kierkegaard, a poet seeks through his natural imagination to unite with the religious, “he succeeds only in establishing an aesthetic relation to something aesthetic.” If, on the other hand, the poet through grace lives in a relationship to the religious, if in truth the religious is the religious, then he will know that true existence “does not consist of singing and hymning and composing verses.” Kierkegaard then noted that if the poet's productivity “does not cease entirely, or if it flows as richly as before, [it] comes to be regarded by the individual himself as something accidental” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson; italics mine).

Again, Kierkegaard's emphasis rests on the point of reference: if it is beauty, then what is essential is poetic productivity, not the mode of existence; if, on the other hand, it is God, then existence within this relationship is essential and words are only “accidental.” Another way of expressing this distinction is to say that whereas art as pure aesthetics seeks to preserve, stabilize, and imbue with significance man's experience, religion shows the inadequacy of the human as an explanation of the way things are, and instead forces an alien vision upon man, undermines him, and finally discloses meaning only as he relates to the disclosure.

Getting to the heart of the matter, Edwards like Kierkegaard warned that words provide no foundation for faith. They are neither the “efficient” nor the redemptive means of it. They do not excite the saving sense of God's glory. Any strategy designed to have them do so—to have them weave, for example, some incantatory spell in order that the mind be infused with a sense of the supernatural—he considered dangerous deception. Granted, he supposed that words do indeed prepare the mind for a sense of God's glory. They herald something like an aesthetic vision of it. As Herbert Read points out, an aesthetic awareness of space prepares a person for a religious awareness and transcendence (Icon and Idea: The Function of Art in the Development of Human Consciousness, 1955). But art neither encompasses the religious vision of this glory nor does it incarnate it. However subtle there yet remains the radical distinction between the human and the divine, art and religion. Even though aesthetic awareness prepares a person for religious awareness, the former is not the means to the latter nor does the former stand in logical relationship to it, as if religion were the consequence of art, and true joy the consequence of Tolstoy and Eliot. True joy remains unspeakable. Not words but grace enables one to experience it, and its only incarnation is Christ. Using other terms, we might say that although an aesthetic dimension exists in religion, religion is something more than aesthetics, and aesthetics something less than religion. In van der Leeuw's terms beauty is holiness but holiness is not wholly beauty.⁵

I have enlarged upon this point in order to modify the perspective proffered by those who with grateful wonder demonstrate how easy it may be to join literature and religion. It would be instructive to trace the way other critics, similarly confident about the marriage, analyze the Bible as secular literature, troubling themselves with the same literary problems they might treat in an Emily Dickinson. Not one to join this company, C. S. Lewis affirmed that the Bible “is so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does not invite, it excludes and repels, the merely aesthetic approach.”⁶ But this is another subject. What I have attempted to suggest in this essay is the profound involvement modern literature demands of its readers, yet to affirm certain distinctions between the literary and the religious experience that make any bridge between them very tentative and perhaps impossible.

Notes

1. Essay included in Beyond Culture (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 8.

2. W. K. Wimsatt, “Battering the Object: The Ontological Approach,” in Contemporary Criticism, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 12, eds. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (London: Edward Arnold, 1970), p. 66.

3. Essay included in Spiritual Problems in Contemporary Literature, ed. Stanley Romaine Hopper (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), p. 182.

4. Essay included in Christianity and the Existentialists, ed. Carl Michalson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956), pp. 128-147.

5. Gerardus van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art, trans. David E. Green (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), p. 266.

6. Quoted in Amos Wilder, Early Christian Rhetoric (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. xx.