SOURCE: "Cleanth Brooks: Mr. Eliot's Christian Critic," in Southern Review, 1982, pp. 73-83.

[In the following review, Clark examines several books and essays by Brooks, illustrating Brooks's belief that religion and art are complementary in man's search for truth and meaning.]

An especially persuasive reading of the concluding lines of Pope's The Dunciad stresses the apocalyptic nature of the poet's gloomy account of the collapse of the Republic of Letters, and, by extension, of the imminent extinction of enlightened civilization itself:

      Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
      And unawares Morality expires.
      Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
      Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine,
      Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restored;
      Light dies before thy uncreating word:
      Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
      And universal Darkness buries All.

Such a reading no doubt derives much of its force from the modern reader's awareness of the accelerated fragmentation of Western tradition in our own century, and, accordingly, I should like to suggest that there is something of the same sense of apocalyptic gloom and urgency in T.S. Eliot's essay "Religion and Literature." Writing nearly two hundred years after the publication of Pope's dismal prophecy of the demise of genuine humanism, Eliot likewise surveyed the literary scene of his time from an embattled and pessimistic perspective. Indeed, there is, beneath the authoritative urbanity characteristic of Eliot's mature prose style, an undercurrent of defensiveness about "Religion and Literature" that sets it apart from most of his earlier excursions into prose, and this fact suggests that it is, on one level at least, an intensely personal document in the guise of a public call for action.

Eliot is aware of the affective power of literature and of the fact that, though literature like any art is in one sense autotelic, it is impossible to insulate the literary experience from the moral dimension of man's being. Literature affects the whole man; what we read (or, more properly, how we assimilate what we read) manifests itself for better or worse in what we think and do. There is no "harmless" book, Eliot rather waggishly maintains, unless it be totally unreadable. Indeed, the more powerful writer has an almost demonic capacity to possess the weaker, less critical, consciousness of an inexperienced reader, a fact that poses an especially troublesome threat at a time when there is no solid moral center from which literature originates. As Eliot sees it, the state of contemporary literature is a kind of Babel of voices, a world in which each writer presents his private vision. Since few of these figures are blessed with truly Blakean powers, the result is literary confusion in a moral vacuum. The principal villain in this chaotic drama is "Secularism," with its insistence upon the cult of progress and democratic individualism, an unrealizable dream given the sad fact of man's imperfectibility. As a result, Eliot is deeply distrustful of the social consequences of much twentieth-century literature. He admits that certain "individual modern writers of eminence can be improving," but he nevertheless asserts that "contemporary literature as a whole tends to be degrading." Even the "better writers" can have a "pernicious" effect upon a reader who is ill-equipped to understand them in the proper light. Eliot confesses that his own work, improperly assimilated, might have such a negative influence.

Given this state of affairs, the role of the critic becomes crucial. In earlier essays like "Hamlet," Eliot had argued that the literary critic's "first business" was "to study a work of art." And in "The Perfect Critic" he had criticized the tendency of Coleridge to leave off literary criticism in favor of "a metaphysical hare-and-hounds." But in "Religion and Literature," Eliot insists that the critic's role is fraught with significant social responsibility. This seeming discrepancy in his portrayal of the ideal man of letters may well be essentially a matter of emphasis, yet it serves to underscore the extent to which the author moved from aesthetics to broader cultural concerns by the 1930's. The younger Eliot's search for unity, order, and tradition in art carried with it an awareness of the desirability of a similar wholeness in the social realm, a wholeness he saw as woefully absent in the modern world. However, things are not entirely hopeless. The critic, especially if he can ground himself in the firm stance of an integrated world-view like that offered by Christian orthodoxy, can learn to read and evaluate modern literature in a positive way. Eliot sees this as not only desirable, but necessary if traditional values are not to be totally engulfed by the materialism of modernity. Eliot cautions the Christian reader to be forever "conscious of the gulf fixed between ourselves and the greater part of contemporary literature" so that he is prepared to "extract from it what good it has to offer." Though he does not draw the analogy explicitly, Eliot is evoking here a modified version of the ancient patristic practice of reading the pagan authors in the light of Christian revelation—"despoiling the Egyptians." As early as 1930, Eliot had demonstrated such an approach in his discussion of Baudelaire, whose apparently godless world nevertheless held a valuable lesson for the discerning reader: "His [Baudelaire's] business was not to practice Christianity, but—what was much more important for his time—to assert its necessity." In short, Baudelaire's malaise, his visions of despair and disgust, argued powerfully for a return to healthy orthodoxy.

There are any number of practicing critics today who might aspire, consciously or otherwise, to Eliot's criteria for the Christian critic, but none, I believe, better realizes that role than Cleanth Brooks, who, as an active conservative layman in the Episcopal Church, shares Eliot's traditional theology, as well as many of his basic literary and social assumptions. Brooks too has felt, at times painfully, the cultural crisis confronting the man of letters in the contemporary world, where scientism and utility seem firmly in the saddle. Restating Eliot's denunciation of "Secularism" in more precise terms, Brooks attacks millennialism—the prevailing assumption that man can achieve perfection, realize the City of God as it were, on earth. Brooks's sense of human limitations, his religious awareness that fallen man cannot save himself, leads him to regard the pursuit of material utopias as folly. Yet, Brooks is aware that his position is a minority opinion; the work of the social engineers goes on.

In Brooks's view, among the inevitable by-products of millennial thinking and planning is the disruption of any genuine sense of community based upon the interaction of socially-responsible individuals. The traditional humanistic ideal of the social organism, the body politic, is thus replaced by a mechanistic surrogate. In a panel session at a conference on Southern literary study held at the University of North Carolina in 1972, Brooks decried the notion of a perfect society in which men and women would operate with the efficiency of IBM machines. Such a society, were it ever to be fully realized, would, he maintained, spell the "end of literature," for Brooks believes that poetic expression is directly related to a culture's grasp of its own humanity. In "The Modern Writer and His Community" (A Shaping Joy), Brooks paraphrases Yeats to the effect that the "plight of the poet" is a reliable "measuring stick for the health of the civilization," and for Brooks the state of poetry and the state of language are intimately interdependent. In "The Uses of Literature" (also a part of A Shaping Joy), he observes that "our generation inherits a language that has lost its hold on concrete reality, that is slack and imprecise, and that reflects a culture that lacks any commonly accepted value-system." A world in which the concreteness of language is eroded constantly by the abstracting tendency of scientism, statistics, and sociology is a world where literature and, presumably, the other arts must lose much of their force. By implication, it is incumbent upon the writer and the critic to fight what Brooks elsewhere calls a "rear guard action," not only in order for literature as we know it to survive, but in order to preserve man's sense of himself as man.

This predisposition on Brooks's part to connect the problematic future of society with that of poetry is nothing new, although recent developments in world history have no doubt served to focus his attention increasingly on the social sphere. Yet the misconception that Brooks is a critical "monist" with an ivory-tower obsession with the poem as a cold artifact existing in a kind of inviolable isolation (a misconception derived from a careless reading of his early books) persists even today in some circles. While it is true that Brooks has always insisted that the poem is a thing-in-itself, defying any biographical and historical reductionism, his criticism has never been limited to close analysis alone. Indeed, like Eliot, he often brings a rather sweeping perspective to bear on the interrelationships between art, the artist, and the age. His first book, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), with its emphasis on metaphysical poetry and the understanding of modern writing within the context of what preceded it, can be read to advantage as an extended study in cultural history. Even The Well Wrought Urn (1947), in which Brooks established himself as the master explicator, is a book that assumes a priori that understanding the "poem as poem" is a matter which bears directly on the future of the humanities as a discipline. In an appendix to that book, "Criticism, History, and Critical Relativism," Brooks makes the case for the relevance of his approach to literature unmistakably clear: "The Humanities have suffered under a variety of attacks which stem perhaps from the very nature of our age and of our civilization. But they have not been better defended, it seems to me—at least more effectively defended—because the teachers of the Humanities have tended to comply with the spirit of the age rather than to resist it." Instead of assimilating the methods and assumptions of the social reductionists under the aegis of critical relativism, the literary critic would do well, in Brooks's view, to insist upon the unique contributions to our intellectual and cultural life that he alone can make: "If the Humanities are to endure, they must be themselves—and that means, among other things, frankly accepting the burden of making normative judgements."

In Literary Criticism: A Short History (written in collaboration with William K. Wimsatt, Jr.), Brooks provides an extreme instance of how aesthetic questions can be confused with scientific concerns and distorted into something else altogether:

… in the 19th century, the decay of metaphysics and the extraordinary growth of the physical sciences gave a special stress to affective theories of criticism. Gustav Fechner, for example, took the problems of aesthetics into the laboratory … The methods of investigation were to be empirical and inductive. There were to be "controlled" experiments to determine what percentage of human beings find the rectangle a more pleasing shape than the square or what percentage prefer rectangles proportioned to the golden section as compared to rectangles of other proportions.

However interesting the results of such tests might be in purely psychological terms, their significance in terms of understanding a given work of art is dubious at best. In stressing that a poem, like any other work of art, be understood on its own terms, Brooks is clearly assuming that literary criticism has a special role to fulfill, a role that cannot be subsumed under the banner of science. This explains his distrust of the more extreme instances of "psychologistic" tendencies in I.A. Richards' criticism, as well as his disapproval of Northrop Frye's efforts to make literary study "for the first time into a true science" so that it can at last take its place "among the other social sciences." Science has its uses, Brooks would admit, but to apply its methods to literature and to accept its insights uncritically is to surrender to the very forces that would render genuine "literature" impossible. Such a course of action represents an abdication of the literary critic's responsibilities as a humanist.

If criticism is not a science (at least not in the modern sense of the word), neither is it the handmaiden of religion. In "Religion and Literature," Eliot stresses the point that writing based upon theological and philosophical premises with which he is in substantial agreement is not, by virtue of that fact alone, literature of the first order. He cites the stories of G.K. Chesterton as an example. While he admits his delight in reading such fiction, Eliot nevertheless is unwilling to make great claims for its ultimate value in artistic terms. Brooks follows Eliot closely in this regard. Both critics are determined to keep the natures and functions of poetry and religion distinct. Thus Brooks, like Eliot, resists the temptation to make a religion of art along the lines envisioned by Matthew Arnold, who felt the need for literature to fill the vacuum created by the supposed death of traditional faith. Religion, like literature, may have a common enemy in the forces of modernism, but they are hardly interchangeable, and for Eliot and Brooks, faith is hardly dead. Yet religion and literature do have an important relationship with one another, which poses two important questions: What is the nature of that relationship? and, What is the proper role of the Christian critic?

Brooks addresses himself to the first of these questions in his own essay entitled "Religion and Literature" (Sewanee Review: Winter, 1974). While insisting that "it is in everybody's interest to maintain the distinctions between logic and ethics, science and religion, poetry and philosophy," he concedes that literature and religion "do overlap at points and they do have much in common." In earlier times, the roles of artist and priest were often merged in a single "spiritual leader of the people." This is natural enough, in Brooks's view, since both religion and literature are "suffused with terms that appeal to the human heart." Since "the literary artist brings together events and observations and moods into a pattern which has its coherence of attitude," the literary work provides the reader with "a value-structured experience" akin to that which is at the basis of religion. Yet, unlike religion, the coherent attitude provided by a poem, novel, or play need not make any "ultimate claim on our belief." One can read and respond to Herbert's poem "Love," Brooks suggests, without being "compelled to believe in Herbert's God of love." Like Eliot, Brooks knows that literature inevitably reflects the values and beliefs, however implicit, of the author. Yet, once again in full accord with Eliot, Brooks would not make the reader's adherence to the author's values and beliefs a basis for experiencing or evaluating the work itself.

Religion, by its own nature, does however make a very definite claim on our belief. In Brooks's words, "It demands a commitment" on the part of the believer. It requires "something more than a temporary suspension of disbelief." And herein lies the essential difference between the religious and the literary modes of human experience. Brooks thus implies that religion provides the reader with an absolute world-vision that has the power to inform his life, to enable him to translate attitude into action, whereas the literary experience does not necessarily require more than a momentary surrender of the reader's philosophical biases. While maintaining the separateness of religion and poetry, Brooks nevertheless insists upon a vital relationship between the two. Far from possessing the potential to replace religion, poetry, in fact, "needs religion" for "the relationship between religion and poetry is a polar relationship in something of the same sense in which we speak of the poles of an electric battery, one positive and the other negative, poles that mutually attract each other and thus generate a current of energy."

In keeping with his characteristic practice of reinforcing such a generalization with an appeal to concrete specifics, Brooks takes a close look at three poems by Yeats that illustrate to varying degrees the symbiotic interrelationship between religion and poetry, and he concludes that poetry needs religion in much the same way that it needs other concrete modes of human experience, "for poetry is a dramatization of, and thus an indirect commentary upon, characteristic human action." Furthermore, religion can free the poet from the burden of "justifying a particular course of action" rather than exploring, through his imagination, a broader range of alternatives. Throughout his essay, Brooks implicitly assumes that, based upon a hierarchical ranking, religion, with its demand for total commitment, must necessarily supersede poetry, yet he argues that "We need both of them." And this need is not merely personal, it also has important social and cultural dimensions. Literature takes on a special role in reflecting the society out of which it grows, for it reveals that society's relative state of health. It is "diagnostic," not "prescriptive." Religion, however, complements the work of the imaginative writer, for it provides us with "final commitments" and enjoins us to "specific actions."

Although Brooks does not specifically describe the role of the ideal Christian critic in "Religion and Literature," he has consistently assumed that role throughout his career, and a look at his methods reveals the extent to which he, like Eliot, can read literature from a Christian perspective without losing his objectivity or distorting an author's vision into something else in the name of orthodoxy. Indeed, Brooks has been a perennial enemy of propaganda art, whatever its ideological basis, preferring literature that embodies an "earned vision" like that extolled by his friend, colleague, and collaborator Robert Penn Warren—a literature that is metaphysical in the sense of utilizing tensions and ironies rather than excluding them. Thus, Brooks has less interest in a poet like Emerson who, in his view, has little awareness of the dialectical complexities that make great poetry than in a poet like Yeats, whose "saving physicality" acts as a check upon his tendency toward visionary abstraction. As a practicing Christian, Brooks naturally rejects both the romantic neo-Platonism of Emerson and the eccentric theosophy of Yeats. But as a critic, Brooks takes the work of literature on its own terms, evaluating its success or shortcomings on aesthetic, not moral or theological, grounds. This enables him to discuss Christian elements in Faulkner, for example, without making undue claims for the author's orthodoxy. He can resist the temptation many critics have felt to turn Joe Christmas into a full-blown Christ figure and point out the weaknesses of A Fable in spite of its explicit reliance upon the Christian mythos. He can say of the Catholic novelist Walker Percy, "… he takes seriously the metaphysical underpinnings of a society. He thinks dogma is important—and so do I." Yet, he refrains from tying his appreciation of Percy's fiction to their shared vision.

Nevertheless, like the critic Eliot calls for in "Religion and Literature," Brooks is especially skillful when it comes to determining the religious significance at the heart of avowedly secular, even consciously "anti-religious," fiction and poetry. Nowhere is this skill more in evidence than in The Hidden God (1963), a collection of lecture-essays on Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren which bears the telling dedication "In memoriam patris qui cum libros me docuit amare tum librum librorum." Acknowledging once more the shortcomings of modern secular society, Brooks, nevertheless, asserts that "a Christian looking at modern literature ought to find a great deal that is heartening and hopeful," and he proceeds to illustrate what he means by bringing a Christian consciousness to bear on writers who, with the notable exception of Eliot, are hardly Christian in a conventional sense. As we have seen, Eliot read Baudelaire's verse as a desperate dramatization of the need for religious values in a godless modern world. Similarly, Brooks, drawing upon the writings of Paul Tillich, sees Hemingway as reacting violently to the dehumanizing forces underlying our present technological society, and he further suggests that Hemingway demonstrates an essentially Augustinian awareness "that duration of time does not make a satisfactory life but that a satisfactory life is made rather by a complete satisfaction of spirit." In examining Faulkner's peculiar reliance upon certain tenets of Calvinism, especially the notion of Original Sin, Brooks quite significantly evokes the name of T. E. Hulme, whose defense of classicism over romanticism and faith over secularism had such a profound effect on the young T. S. Eliot. Similarly, Brooks places Yeats against the backdrop of intellectual history and views him as a man "robbed" of religious faith by Victorian skepticism. In Brooks's mind, the poet's subsequent interest in mysticism and private revelation represents a compensatory searching after God, a searching that results in an art that "asserts the dignity and power of the human spirit against the spiritual and intellectual corruption of our time." Warren, too, is portrayed as a searcher after the ultimate meanings at the core of human experience. Brooks sees a close analogy between the search for self-knowledge that is Warren's great theme and the Christian quest for redemption. Both represent an attempt to find a way out of the dilemmas confronting modern man.

Brooks's discussion of Eliot is, as might well be expected, especially insightful. Eliot, as a prime example of the Christian artist at work in an intellectually hostile environment, is praised for his "method of indirection." Since he cannot depend upon a receptive audience for his message in its most explicit terms, he is faced with the problem of how "revealed truth" is best "mediated to the gentiles." At a time when the traditional symbols of faith have lost much of their force and effectiveness, Eliot succeeds in evolving new symbols to embody ageless truths. Throughout his discussions of these writers, Brooks exemplifies the role of the Christian critic as Eliot conceived of it. He never seeks to impose an arbitrary set of theological assumptions upon the works in question; rather, he shows how they inevitably generate their own theological dimensions. Yet, free as they are from a restrictive sectarian bias, Brooks's observations are, nevertheless, the clear outgrowths and expressions of an unmistakably Christian sensibility. His criticism is informed by the kind of "final" commitments he describes in "Religion and Literature" and elsewhere.

One overriding aspect of Brooks's critical strategy that makes it peculiarly Christian stems from his temperamental distrust of abstractions, whether they be literary or ideological. In a special sense, the old Imagistic dictum "Go in fear of abstractions" and its poetic corollary "The natural object is always the adequate symbol" might well serve as epigraphs to a compendium of Brooks's thought. As early as Modern Poetry and the Tradition, Brooks had adopted John Crowe Ransom's distinction between the abstracting functions of science and speculative philosophy and the concreteness of religious and poetic modes of knowledge, and he has consistently maintained in his later writings that "poetry—whatever else it is—is incorrigibly concrete." To illustrate the extent to which this emphasis upon the concrete, an emphasis Brooks shares with Eliot and Allen Tate as well as with Ransom, is a manifestation of an essentially religious consciousness, I should like to appeal to the work of the distinguished Jesuit critic William F. Lynch. In Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination, Father Lynch shows how many of the greatest writers, instinctively turning away from fantasy and vague symbolism, ground their visions in what he calls the "generative finite." His notion of the "literary process" as a "highly cognitive passage through the finite and definite realities of man and the world" is remarkably akin to Brooks's own. Father Lynch goes on to say that the concréte images born of human limitations "are in themselves the path to whatever the self is seeking," whether it be "insight," "beauty," or, ultimately, God. For Father Lynch, as for Brooks,

This path is both narrow and direct; it leads … straight through our human realities, through our labor, our disappointments, our friends, our game legs, our harvests, our subjection to time. There are no shortcuts to beauty or insight. We must go through the finite, the limited, the definite, omitting none of it lest we omit some of the potencies of being-in-the-flesh. This does not mean that we should go through it violently, looking for a means to a breakthrough … The finite is not itself a generality to be encompassed in one fell swoop. Rather, it contains many shapes and byways and cleverness and powers and diversities and persons, and we must not go too fast from the many to the one.

This statement of the proper Christian approach to the world and (to use Ransom's phrase) to the "world's body" has its parallels throughout Brooks's writing, and it sheds light on the remarkable consistencies between Brooks's literary criticism and his social and religious pronouncements. Thus Brooks's disparagement of propaganda art and "pure" poetry is of a piece with his warnings against the abstracting trends at work in the modern world. Thus Brooks's early insistence that the careful study of a poem as "poem" bears upon the very future of humanism seems perfectly logical.

Near the end of The Hidden God, Brooks says that the role of the writer is "to give us an awareness of our world, not as an object viewed in clinical detachment, not as a mere mechanism, but of our world as it involves ourselves—in part a projection of ourselves, in part an impingement upon ourselves. In making us see our world for what it is, the artist also makes us see ourselves for what we are." In this same regard, it should be remembered that Eliot, in "Religion and Literature," suggests that the strength of the Christian critic is dependent upon his capacity to know not only what he is but what he should be. Cleanth Brooks is such a critic. Like Eliot, he is no apostle of "progress" and its attendant millennialism, but rather an orthodox believer who recognizes the necessity of maintaining a traditional set of values in the face of an increasingly relativistic secularism. Yet Brooks's attitude toward modern literature is more sanguine in the final analysis than is Eliot's. The Christian's position in the contemporary scene is an embattled one to be sure, but he can find powerful allies in a group of major writers who, while they may not always share his faith, share his awareness of man's absolute need for spiritual meanings beyond the constrictive limits of contemporary ideology. For Brooks, the best of modern writing is, or at least can be, an invaluable "religious" resource.