Literature and Religious Experience

Beyond Belief and Unbelief

Matthew J. Smith, Caleb D. Spencer, Matthew J. Smith, Caleb D. Spencer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350194021
• eBook ISBN: 9781350193932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book challenges the status quo of studies in literature and religion by returning to "experience" as a bridge between theory and practice. Essays focus on keywords of religious experience and demonstrate their applications in drama, fiction, and poetry. Each chapter explores the broad significance of its keyword as a category of psychological and social behavior and tracks its unique articulation by individual authors, including Conrad, Beecher Stowe and Melville. Together, the chapters construct a critical foundation for studying literature not only from the perspectives of theology and historicism but from the ways that literary experience reflects, reinforces, and sometimes challenges religious experience.

1 Revelation: Mallarmé and the Negativity of Prophetic Revelation in Modern Literature

William Franke

1. From Dante to Mallarmé via Shakespeare’s Hamlet

In the modern era, divine revelation encounters new possibilities for expression along the path of poetry.¹ Modern poets ply a revelatory poetic art self-consciously produced by human inventiveness and indelibly marked by individual talents. In doing so, they reconfigure that which since ancient times has been called “prophecy.” Literature begins to recognize its capacity to mediate an event of the divine Word and even to contribute to its richness, although not without some risk of distortion and even of falsification of the supposedly divine revelation conferred. In any event, a theologically revealed Word cannot escape the mediation of profane words. Only through human language, thanks to some form of “sacramentality” in the mode of its employment, can such a theological Word of revelation be deployed and become incarnate.²

Dante Alighieri is the incomparable pathbreaker of a particular modality of prophetic poetry that convoys theological revelation, as it was known anciently, especially in classical epic and in the Bible, toward modernity. He already discovers certain subjective and auto-reflexive aspects of poetic representation as constitutive of theological revelation in the human work of art, at least when such artwork aims at the highest ends and purposes imaginable, signally universal salvation. Dante is, in this regard, the first of a long line of modern prophetic poets, as was recognized by certain German Romantic critics such as Friedrich Wilhelm Josef von Schelling and the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August Wilhelm. They newly appreciated the prophetic potential of the poetic act and tried to realize it in turn in their own texts, treating history as a kind of retrospective prophecy.³

The German Idealists added to the speculative philosophical project of self-reflection, such as Dante had already discovered it, an explicitly modern dimension of the autonomous subject, following the lead of Immanuel Kant. But they also remained aware of self-reflection’s analogous relation with and even derivation from the Christian theology of the Trinity. The Trinitarian model for self-reflexivity of the subject is theorized in finely articulated ways by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.⁴ The Trinitarian analogy might have seemed simply a dogmatic reflex in Dante, but it is unveiled as a universal structure of consciousness by his Romantic successors, who are also architects and founders of the modern, secularized world. Even so, the role of theology is still far from obsolete, as Romanticism in particular made evident.

Victor Hugo took up the torch of prophetic poetry, carrying forward its miraculous aspect as revelation, especially in La légende des siècles (1859–83). In opening with “La vision d’où est sorti ce livre” and in concluding with “La pente de la reverie” as a sort of dream-vision frame for the whole, his work offers a project of epic proportions and prophetic tonalities. However differently, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, as well as that of Arthur Rimbaud and the symbolistes, is characterized by the aspiration, if not the pretension, of being visionary (“voyante”). These are the vestiges of a tradition of prophetic poetry going back certainly to Dante and even further. The descent into hell is one of its indispensable recurrent themes. Rimbaud’s “Une saison en enfer,” as also Baudelaire’s “Les fleurs du mal,” with its urban degradations decked out in infernal imagery replete with litanies to Satan, are among the most flagrant testimonies of a self-consciously revelatory poetic.

However, the modern poet inhabits a different world determined by very different cultural and metaphysical presuppositions. This is dramatically illustrated by William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with all its archetypal value for the modern age. And already during the waning of the Middle Ages, Geoffrey Chaucer reverses Dante’s inspiration from above. In parodying the human and social comedy, he discovers the means of revealing a vision of the world that completes and counterpoints—when it does not directly contradict—the latter’s orientation to the unattainable height of a Truth presumed to be divine. In The Canterbury Tales, the poignancy of human reality is exposed nakedly, thanks to poetic imitation that creates a relation—even if only a negative relation—with the ultimate truth of the Holy Scriptures. This Truth is represented most explicitly at the end of the work in The Parson’s Tale. Given that their doctrine can no longer be rationally demonstrated, nor even as such be known, the Holy Scriptures can no longer be believed except by taking recourse to an irrational faith and thus through a sort of fideism.

But Chaucer’s fideism is only the beginning, a precursor of the Renaissance, which will usher in an erosion of all dogmatically assured prophecy and inaugurate its replacement by another sensibility. The “renaissance” sensibility manifest programmatically in Hamlet oversees the staging of a tragic drama pivoting on the loss of prophetic truth that characterized the preceding period. The medieval world is incarnated by the defunct King Hamlet, the prince’s father, who has become a specter. The nascent scientific age that now propagates its outlook, emanating from university centers such as Wittenberg, where Hamlet and Horatio are students, brings on an irresistible current of religious skepticism that undermines the ancient, and especially the biblical, bases of belief in revelation. The new mentality strives, instead, to establish an experimental basis for knowledge. Still, the denouement of the play sets the scene for a new kind of faith, a blind faith in providence, a new and still groping kind of confidence in the good order of things.⁵

That prophecy turns from positive prediction to simply relating oneself to the unknowable, and even to unmasterable chance, with a certain degree of trust, as Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), at the heart of his poetics, affirms is the measure of its becoming modern. We find this transformation acting in original ways in Hamlet. The prince comes not only to doubt but even to despise all supposed forms of predicting the future. By the time of the last Act, he declares, “We defy augury” (V. ii. 199). The word “augury” suggests a certain low, materialistic understanding of prophecy. Not the inspired interpretation of history in its ultimate ends and purposes, as with Virgil and Dante, but a crude pretense to foretelling facts is the degraded form of prophecy as it comes to be understood in the age of the scientific paradigm of knowledge. However, a new practice consisting in a certain readiness to attune oneself to the inscrutable purpose of heaven also comes on the scene with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Devoid of determinate content regarding the future, nevertheless a faith in providence enables an embrace of the future, whatever it holds. This fundamentally reorients prophecy to unknowing. In a virtually delirious sort of rhapsody, Hamlet declares,

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be. (V. ii. 199–203)

The sparrow here is reminiscent of the imagery of the Gospels: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father” (Matt. 10:29).⁶ The spirit of letting be and acceptance, of faith in a higher purpose and order controlling human life, can be based precisely on insuperable ignorance, just as it was once supposedly based on indubitable revelation. In this way, the reality of eternity is affirmed even as unrevealed—as concealed behind the veil of time.

The new possibilities for expressing theological revelation in poetry that are going to emerge paradoxically in a sort of visionary blindness are powerfully represented after Shakespeare by John Milton, among others, during the seventeenth century at the time of the rise of modern science. In Milton and more generally in baroque poetry, especially in England and Spain, the radical insufficiency of human words to describe or illustrate the divine results in the use, in a negative register, of a deliberately and ostentatiously subjective and emotional mode of expression. This leads, furthermore, to an iconoclastic and even self-subversive imagery—to what can be called a “self-consuming artifact” in the idiom made famous by Stanley Fish.⁷

Following Milton, certain Romantic poets like William Blake, whose spiritual and prophetic inclinations relaunch the ideal of theological inspiration for poetry, fashion new allegorical techniques of mythic symbolization and attempt once more to force open the gates of heaven. Nevertheless, “heaven” is now understood within a dimension immanent to human consciousness extended to infinity. For Blake, “all divinities reside in the human breast” (“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”). If we can draw this conclusion concerning immanence, it is thanks to the new bases of prophecy that are announced by Shakespeare’s Hamlet and then fleshed out as a consequence of developments rendered possible in its wake.

In a preceding work, I have studied the heirs of Dante as prophetic poet among modern secular poets in a lineage reaching from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake to Giacomo Leopardi, Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson, and W. B. Yeats.⁸ In the present essay, I propose to pursue this line in modern poetry understood as prophetic revelation along a different trajectory from Dante to Mallarmé. Of great importance for understanding the stakes of the poetry of Mallarmé as prophetic and perhaps as, in some ways, a revelation, yet secularized, is also its reception among contemporary French political philosophers.⁹ These thinkers and critics interrogate the revolutionary as much as the revelatory, the political as much as the religious, potential of the poetic work of Mallarmé. Mallarmé emerges as offering the ultimate disclosure of the potency of poetic language for bearing—and transforming—religious significance in modern literature and in a secular society.

2. From Dante to Mallarmé’s Hamlet via the Experience of Nothing

Revelation understood as positive dogma on the model of the authority of Holy Scripture is eclipsed, but a new dimension of negativity in language that is itself immanent to the speaking subject opens up. This dimension is already opened and exploited by Dante, especially in his Paradiso. His ascen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Reflections and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “The data of our feelings”: Beyond Belief and Unbelief
• Overture: Prayer: I Will Love You in the Summertime
• 1 Revelation: Mallarmé and the Negativity of Prophetic Revelation in Modern Literature
• 2 Blessing: Shakespeare’s Benedictional Designs
• 3 Longing: Young Geoffrey Hill and the Problem of Religious Poetry
• 4 Interruption: Conversion as an Event in Paul of Tarsus and Paul of Burgos
• 5 Vision: Building into the Blue
• 6 Metanoia: Tales of Transformation in Harriet Beecher Stowe and Wendell Berry
• 7 Belief: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and James Wood’s The Book Against God
• 8 Turning: Alabaster’s Wager and the Experience of Conversion
• 9 Guidance: Understanding Providence in George MacDonald’s Fiction
• 10 Silence: Kidnapping, Abuse, and Murder in Early-Twenty-First-Century White Evangelical Fiction
• 11 One: Poetic Love in Ibn ʿArabī
• 12 Humankindness: King Lear and the Suffering, Wisdom, and Compassion within Buddhist Interbeing
• 13 Gift: The (Im)possible Conditions of Grace in Herman Melville
• 14 Fantasy: Magical Experiences and Postsecular Fiction
• 15 Idolatry: Meaning, Power, and “Ideas” of Idolatry in Heart of Darkness and Demian
• Afterword (Terry Eagleton)
• Index
• Copyright Page