Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13

Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory

10.1057/9780230294684 - Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory, Edited by Cassandra Falke



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Edited by

Cassandra Falke




Selection and editorial matter © Cassandra Falke 2010 Individual chapters © contributors 2010

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–23480–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Intersections in Christianity and critical theory / edited by Cassandra Falke. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–23480–2 (hardback) 1. Christianity and the social sciences. 2. Critical theory. 3. Religion and sociology. I. Falke, Cassandra, 1977– BR115.S57158 2010 261.5—dc22 2010027501 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


For my family





Acknowledgements

ix

Notes on Contributors

x

Introduction Cassandra Falke

1

Part I Theory 1 Reading Theologically: Reduction and Reductio Kevin Hart

11

2 After Theory, After Modernity: Reading Humbly Jessica Hooten

23

3 An Ache in the Missing Limb: Biblical Origins of English Literary Criticism Stephen Prickett 4 Good Reading: The Ethics of Christian Literary Theory Cassandra Falke 5

6

33 46

Sites of Resistance: Christ and Materiality after the New Historicism Mitchell M. Harris

57

Post-Secular Queer: Christianity, Queer Theory, and the Unsolvable Mysteries of Sexual Desire Norman W. Jones

70

Part II Applications 7

Dil Ulenspiegel: The Inverted Gospel and an Early Modern Clown Thomas Lederer

89

8 Take and Eat: Eve, Mary, and Feminist Christianity Martha Kalnin Diede

106

9 Humans, Animals, and Others Philip Sampson

120

10 Theologizing Horror: Spirituality and the Gothic Andrew Ng

135

vii



Contents

11

12

The Secular Dream of a Christian Utopia: American Studies and Political Theology Is¸ıl Özcan

148

Heaven Came Down: Deconstruction, Christianity, and George Herbert’s ‘The Collar’ Michael Mattek

162

Bibliography

175

Index

194



viii Contents

I am grateful for the inspiration and assistance I have received as this book grew from an idea into a draft and finally into the finished manuscript. I gathered ideas from the Cultural Studies Now conference hosted by the University of East London and the Conference on Christianity and Literature sessions at the 2007 MLA conference. These ideas were refined through conversations with my students, my department, and my husband, and I wish to thank them, Damon especially, for being patient with me if I steered too many conversations back to the topics of this book. Colleagues Michael Vander Weele and Lloyd Davies also assisted and encouraged me with their conversations. Working with contributing authors has been a pleasure and an education. I’m thankful for their enthusiasm for this project and for the friends that they have become over the past two years. Finally, I wish to thank the editorial staff and outside reader for Palgrave for their discernment and professionalism and for the spirit of charity that they have consistently demonstrated.

ix



Acknowledgements

Martha Kalnin Diede is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Northwest University in Kirkland, Washington. A Baylor PhD, she teaches Medieval and Early Modern Literature. She wrote ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledgeable Body’ and has presented numerous papers on both the body in literature and women’s studies. Cassandra Falke (PhD, University of York) is Assistant Professor of English at East Texas Baptist University. She has published and given conference presentations on nineteenth-century literature and culture, Christian aesthetics, and the liberal arts in higher education. She is currently working on a study of liberal education in nineteenth-century England. Mitchell M. Harris holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and is Assistant Professor of English at Augustana College (Sioux Falls, SD), where he teaches courses on early modern English literature, critical theory, and religious culture. A contributing author to The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, he is currently co-editing a volume titled ‘Resurrecting the First Five Hundred’: The Church Fathers in Early Modern England and finishing a manuscript on Augustinian ethics in Tudor-Stuart literature. His articles and reviews have appeared in journals such as Seventeenth-Century News, Sixteenth Century Journal, and Christianity and Literature. Kevin Hart is the Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia. He has published eight books of poetry, six edited essay collections, many articles, and several books of criticism including Postmodernism: A Beginner’s Guide, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred, Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (with Yvonne Sherwood), and The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy. His poetry has won a number of prizes, including the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for poetry. Jessica Hooten is an Assistant Professor at the University of Mary HardinBaylor where she teaches courses on medieval and twentieth-century literature. She is the director of the Writer’s Festival and contributing editor to Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature. In 2009, she received the x



Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors xi

Norman W. Jones holds a PhD from UCLA and is Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University. He has previously taught English at UCLA. His book, Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction: Sexual Mystery and Post-Secular Narrative was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007. He has published and given conference presentations about post-secular queer theory and the place of Christianity in the public university. Thomas Lederer has a master’s degree in English and Classics from the University of Salzburg, Austria, and a doctorate in English from the University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany. From 2007 to 2009, he taught at Seattle Pacific University; currently he works in the publishing industry. His research interests include early modern civilization and the interface of religion and culture. He has published a book-length study of early Anglican biography, a monograph and several articles on poetry by Lutheran writers in early seventeenth-century Austria, and, most recently, an essay on neo-Latin theatre in Mozart’s Salzburg. Michael Mattek has a PhD in nineteenth-century American literature, and is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Washington County. He has recently presented papers on the Davidic characteristics of James Agee, and on Catholic humility in the short stories of J.F. Powers. Mattek also hosts a series of conversations on Christianity and Literature for community-based reading groups. He is currently researching Congregationalist churches in the greater Boston area during the 1820s. Andrew Ng is Senior Lecturer in literary studies at Monash University, Malaysia. His publications include Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives (2004) and Interrogating Interstices (2007). Is¸ ıl Özcan is a Research Assistant and a doctoral student in American Studies at Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir, Turkey. Her master’s thesis was on Paul Auster. Her dissertation will be on contemporary American literature. Stephen Prickett is Regius Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Glasgow and an Honorary Professor at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Until 2008 he was Margaret Root Brown Professor and Director of the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University in Texas.



Sarah Gordon Award for best graduate essay on Flannery O’Connor. Her dissertation explored the connection between O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and she is expanding the project to include other Southern writers, including Walker Percy.

He has published one novel, ten monographs, seven edited volumes, and over ninety articles on Romanticism, Victorian Studies and related topics, especially on literature and theology – as well as editing the World’s Classics Bible. He was General Editor of the Macmillan ‘Romanticism in Perspective’ Series, and the Baylor University Press ‘The Making of the Christian Imagination’ Series. His latest book is Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition: Backing into the Future (2009). Philip Sampson holds a first degree in mathematical physics and retains an active interest in this area. After working as a statistician at the University of Sussex, he trained in psychotherapy, and gained a PhD in the social sciences. He practiced as a psychotherapist and family mediator in various settings, and was research fellow in social sciences at the University of Southampton. He is currently a writer and lecturer. He gave a keynote address on postmodernity at the 1993 Lausanne Conference, and co-edited the proceedings with Vinay Samuel, published as Faith and Modernity. His Six Modern Myths was published in 2000. His articles, reviews and journalism have appeared in a variety of publications including Faith and Thought, Third Way and Kunstforum International. He is currently working on a book on animal theology.



xii Notes on Contributors

Introduction

I would prefer to write about rivers than roads. Their motion is more relaxing. They inspire me to stillness whereas roads, when they inspire me at all, breathe only the restless longing for elsewhere. But I have had to put personal preferences aside in conceiving this collection because I could not honestly write about a confluence of Christianity and critical theory. Although they have come together many times in history and come together with encouraging frequency in contemporary writing, Christianity and critical theory remain theoretically separable because of their unequal claims to our allegiance and their different trajectories (Milbank, 2006, p. 429; Jacobs, 2001, p. 144). Like divergent roads, they begin and end in different places. As Graham Ward succinctly puts it: ‘The presupposition of [Christian] hermeneutics is that universal meaning exists independent of but accessible through, all local expressions of meaning. The presupposition of the critical tradition is that meaning is constructed – by the way we perceive, conceive and think (Kant) and by our language (Derrida)’ (2000, p. 6). And so, I find myself writing about roads instead of rivers, intersections instead of confluences. This collection features essays that examine the ways that Christianity and critical theory have intersected in history, and ways that they continue to intersect in the study of works of literature, genres, and cultural themes. Certainly there are intersections between Christianity and critical theory that this collection does not treat, and certainly every intersection it does treat inscribes on the figurative plain of inquiry new quarters for further exploration. The purpose of this book is not so much to survey comprehensively where these intersections have happened and draw conclusions, but to introduce readers to the diversity of work being performed and inspire further inquiry. 1



Cassandra Falke


Like all intersections, the ones described in this book are kinetic. They will look different ten years from now than they look today, even if the intersection between theory and Christianity being examined occurred hundreds of years ago. This is because my position and the positions of other authors represented herein are not the positions of theorists floating above these intersections in some objective space. We have approached the intersection we write about via one road, although we may have approached from another road in the past. We have waited at the intersection to watch other people pass, but we of course have not seen everything that has happened or could happen at the intersection of queer theory and Christianity, or Marxism and Christianity. Nor are we in total agreement about what the road of Christianity looks like. I would like to suggest, however, that the multiplicity of perspectives related in this book and the open-endedness of some of our inquiries are not only advantageous to the examination of Christianity and critical theory, but necessary. ‘Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone’ (1 Cor. 12: 4–6; all direct quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version). Certainly, the variety Paul speaks of is evident in this collection, but that does not, I hope, disturb the unity of the spirit of the book. The spirit that we hope binds the collection together is the spirit of charity. Deploying a spirit of charity in criticism means two things. First, it affects our manner of representing critical and literary texts. Critics do not always read others as they would be read, but we have made this sort of charitable reading a goal. In a second sense, this collection is charitable in that it is a gratuitous offering. It does not seek to correct the trajectory of either the Christian hermeneutic tradition or the critical tradition. Indeed, as an offering, it has no particular designs on readers of any tradition. The teleology of argument, that is to say the attempt to persuade a reader to a singular, predetermined point of view, is incompatible with charity. John Milbank identifies this property of charity when he writes that charity is originally the gratuitous, creative positing of difference, and the offering to others of a space of freedom, which is existence. As an infinite serial emanation, charity does not lay down a fixed, as opposed to an educative hierarchy, and every position it establishes is of equal importance, and of equal necessity to all the other positions,



2

Introduction 3

In elucidating twelve different theoretical positions, the following chapters strive to create the ‘space of freedom’ that Milbank discusses for the purposes of education – of ‘leading out’ new theories and applications at the intersections of Christianity and critical theory. In the remainder of this introduction, I will summarize briefly what each of the positions offered in this collection is. But first I should say a word about the two-part division of the volume. The chapters comprising Part I are broadly theoretical, considering what Christian critical theory has looked like or can look like. Part II of the volume, in contrast, includes the application of theories that are indebted to both Christian and secular theorists to specific literary texts or themes. The division here is muddy, with each of the applications chapters in Part II including a statement of the author’s theoretical position. Some of the chapters in Part II also apply the theories they expound much more specifically than others: Martha Diede, for example, examines the broad theme of women and eating while Michael Mattek looks at a single poem, George Herbert’s ‘The Collar.’ Nevertheless, dividing the book into two parts allowed me to classify the contributions according to their differing goals. The chapters in Part I elaborate for the reader some of the broad tenets of various kinds of Christian criticism. Part II deduces and displays the practices that arise from these tenets. Beginning Part I, Kevin Hart’s chapter, ‘Reading Theologically: Reduction and Reductio,’ examines what it might mean to read poetry theologically. It begins by considering several assumptions that have governed the reception and understanding of religious poetry in modern times, assumptions that have tended to denigrate the category of ‘religious poetry.’ It then proceeds to consider ‘reduction’ as a way of answering the most persuasive of these assumptions, that religious poetry cannot be rooted in experience of God: both Husserl’s notion of reduction and also (and more importantly) Bonaventure’s are considered. Hart examines differences between counter-experience and the phenomenality of affect and assesses them as alternative ways of ‘reading theologically.’ Jessica Hooten’s ‘After Theory, After Modernity: Reading Humbly’ recommends a return to St Augustine’s De Doctrine Christiana for an articulation of the Christian literary commentator’s role as reader rather than critic. Much of Augustine’s method of reading, she points out, is re-energized in the writings of George Steiner and C.S. Lewis.



even if there remain inequalities of ability and necessary inequalities of function. (2006, p. 422)


The hermeneutical principles of all three center around a reader who approaches the text with selfless love. C.S. Lewis encourages readers to empty themselves before reading. This involves what George Steiner calls an internalization and digestion of the text itself, so that it becomes part of the reader’s life, enhancing what she knows of herself, God, and the world. Hooten looks closely at G.K. Chesterton’s readings of Dickens as an example of selfless reading. According to the technique she identifies, the text remains ‘living and active’ as Hebrews 4:12 states. Stephen Prickett’s chapter, ‘An Ache in the Missing Limb: Biblical Origins of English Literary Criticism,’ investigates the connectedness of biblical criticism and literary theory as the two emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England and Germany. Citing Lowth, Coleridge, Keble and others in England, and members of the ‘Jena’ group in Germany, he argues that many of the period’s most influential literary critics were ‘cross-cultural thinkers,’ who assimilated the techniques of biblical exegesis from extra-national literatures and incorporated these techniques in their theoretical writings about their home literatures. In pointing out the cross-cultural origins of seminal literary theoretical ideas, Prickett reveals the tendency of new trends in literary theory to come from the margins of national culture. In pointing out the historical relationship between biblical and literary criticism, he questions the autonomy of literary theory as a secular pursuit. ‘Good Reading: The Ethics of Christian Literary Theory,’ by Cassandra Falke, proposes that New Testament paradigms of the bodily and communal self provide sites for productive engagement between secular searches for ethical literary theories and Christian scholarship. In his Ethics, Dietrich Bonheoffer proposes a dichotomy between judgment through the knowledge of good and evil, and action in accordance with God’s will. One of the implications of this dichotomy for Christian literary scholarship is that such scholarship requires us to treat ourselves, the authors we study, and their implied readers as potential sites of bodily action. Defining a ‘quixotic critic’ based on Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Falke examines the ethical pitfalls of divorcing a performative critical self from an empirical historical one. Bonheoffer’s dichotomy further demands that critics consider the ways reading bodies are situated in literal communities as well as the figurative Christian community. Jonathan Swift’s modern spider provides an instructive character through which to examine the significance of community to criticism. While focusing on embodied action and community places Christian literary scholarship in sympathy with certain cultural materialist and new historicist claims, it also underlines the freedom and diversity of scholars engaged in Christian



4

literary criticism. Rather than an individualized freedom from communal restraints, the freedom of a Christian scholar is the freedom to act out of a situated personal background that only he or she possesses in the interests of a Christian community that stretches before and beyond us in time. Paul reminds us we ‘are the body of Christ and individually members of it’ (1 Cor. 12: 27). Mitchell M. Harris’s ‘Sites of Resistance: Christ and Materiality after the New Historicism’ offers a sympathetic reading of Žižek and Badiou’s relationships with Christianity and uses their adaptations of the concept of materiality in history to contest the Foucauldian paradigms of New Historicism. Turning to Badiou’s use of set theory, Harris argues for the extraction of an operative dialectic between materiality and metaphysics that is consistent with the Christian legacy of the incarnated Logos. According to Badiou, any particular historicized narrative is only one expression of the set that is always there. Based on this insight, Harris contends that some readings of texts limit themselves unnecessarily. Furthermore, by placing materialism and a metaphysical universalism in conversation with one another, Harris uses Žižek and Badiou’s theories to articulate the ways in which belief supplements all forms of critical discourse. The last chapter in Part I examines the intersections between queer theory and Christianity. Norman W. Jones’s ‘Post-Secular Queer: Christianity, Queer Theory, and the Unsolvable Mysteries of Sexual Desire’ argues that queer theory and Christianity regularly ‘speak’ in similar kinds of ways. To support this, Jones discloses that contemporary ways of understanding sexuality have their origins in Christian theology. Furthermore, he argues that mainstream, traditional forms of Christian discourse, and mainstream, traditional forms of queer discourse share much in common including representations of the self that depend on powerfully productive, transcendent mystery; personal ethical transformation narratives (coming-out stories and conversion stories); and representations of communities defined by nonbiological kinship bonds that are more created than found but are nonetheless foundational (often associated with Eucharistic symbolism). The second section of the volume begins with Thomas Lederer’s ‘Dil Ulenspiegel: The Inverted Gospel and an Early Modern Clown.’ In this chapter, Lederer analyzes a historical carnival text with the goal of exemplifying a Christian cultural materialism. Lederer explores the Ulenspiegelian carnival as an inverted or transformed gospel. The coarsely aggressive anticlerical jokes of the Ulenspiegel stories align it with the scatological, anti-papal tirades produced by the Reformers a generation



Introduction 5


later. Yet again, when read as an inverted gospel, claims Lederer, the story reinforces the freedom we find in truth – a freedom based on Christ’s mediation, not only of our relationships to him and to one another, but also of our relationships to the material world. Following this is Martha Kalnin Diede’s ‘Take and Eat: Eve, Mary, and Feminist Christianity.’ Diede begins with the persistent sub-textual comparison of women to Eve or to Mary and the untenable positioning of women between the two models that is now commonly recognized in postmodern, feminist thinking. Instead of focusing on the sexual nature of Eve’s sin and Mary’s virtue, however, Diede recommends that critics consider the relationship between women, appetite, and food. By determining that the relationship between women and food is primarily one of sexual appetite rather than physical appetite, critics have ignored, she worries, the potential for self-determination and power that the kitchen represents. For indeed, women are the ones who prepare and serve. But they are also the ones who eat. Moreover, through the sacrament of communion, Christians symbolically repeat not only Christ’s offering of his body and blood for salvation of sin, but also the redemption of Eve’s original act of eating. For women, Diede argues, the act of eating – physically sustaining, necessary, and salvific – is a way of becoming a subject rather than an object, and, in Communion, being served rather than serving. Philip Sampson’s ‘Humans, Animals, and Others’ seeks to engage with the theme of Otherness, especially animate ‘Otherness’ as it developed in critical theory. His analysis includes discussion of both the Frankfurt School’s emphasis upon inter-personal, communicative exchange, and the late twentieth-century turn to constitutive Otherness. He argues that both the French and German philosophical traditions bequeathed to critical theory a preoccupation with the Self–Other relationship. However, critical theory transformed it into distinctive forms, initially against the background of ‘disaster triumphant’ in Europe from the 1930s, and the question of how the land of Kant and Aufklarüng could have given birth to the Third Reich. But, as Samson points out, Christian theology had already articulated a complex discourse of ‘Otherness’ over many centuries, in both the relationship between Creator and created, and that between humans and brute beasts. Samson examines this discourse, and then, drawing on Levinas, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the ethical regard between humans and animals rooted in the communality of all creation before the transcendent Creator. In Andrew Ng’s ‘Theologizing Horror: Spirituality and the Gothic,’ the link between horror and spirituality as contra-rational experiences



6

is explored. He proposes that tales of horror share with the Bible ‘the insistence that there are human dimensions beyond the visible and admissible, the material and the rational.’ Using Derrida’s conceptions of friendship, Ng reads moments of horror within The Exorcist and Beloved as occasions of profound self-emptying in which characters open themselves to receive spiritual and human others. Through their actions, they not only attain freedom for themselves, but also freedom for others in their community. In order for this to happen, the character has to not only abandon himself to the power of a spiritual other, but also acknowledge the non-equivalence between that other and himself, and by extension, the non-equivalence between himself and other members of the community. Thus, Ng ends by finding not only a similarity between spirituality and the Gothic, but also between the Christian notion of transcendence and deconstructive indeterminance. Next, ‘The Secular Dream of a Christian Utopia: American Studies and Political Theology,’ by Is¸ıl Özcan, charts the academic effort to establish an integrated approach to the study of American national culture from its beginnings in the 1920s. Within American studies, she argues, scholarship on American Puritans stands out as an exceptionally significant branch because the theories and methodologies of American Studies have associated seventeenth-century Puritanism, positively or negatively, with the definition of American character. Özcan focuses on the idea of a utopic Christian nation as it was conceived by the Puritans and demonstrates its influence on the secular myth and symbol school of American studies. She asserts that American studies have helped maintain the myths of manifest destiny, the view of America as a chosen nation, and the American Dream, by rearticulating the Puritan myth of the Christian nation established by John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards. Finally, Michael Mattek’s ‘Heaven Came Down: Deconstruction, Christianity, and George Herbert’s “The Collar” ’ explores the tension between two oppositional logics suggested in Herbert’s poem – the logic of his reason and the unreasonable blessing that results from relinquishing his will. Mattek examines the ways that this tension both resonates with and supersedes deconstruction. He offers a deconstructive reading of the poem in order to exemplify the distinctions between Herbert’s understanding of language and the understanding of language advanced by Saussure and Derrida. The chapter focuses especially on the poem’s last lines wherein the hermeneutic circle of language, which Herbert has presented up to this point in the poem as operating in much the same way the deconstructionists understand it to operate,



Introduction 7


is broken by the Lord calling to his ‘child.’ Mattek explains the leap of faith that hearing this call entails as the speaker of the poem must acknowledge that he only thinks he hears the voice of the Lord and that there can be nothing beyond this perception of the voice to trust in. Although modern language theory would demand that Herbert’s understanding is constrained by the limitations of language, the very act of responding to a divine call – even though Herbert’s response is in the form of human language itself – presents Herbert as one who has faith that a personal relationship with God is not curtailed by the limitations of human language.



8


Part I Theory





Reading Theologically: Reduction and Reductio Kevin Hart

The idea of ‘reading theologically’ of course applies first and foremost to the Bible, and represents an alternative to the historical-critical method. It also marks a critique of that method, one that proposes to return it to within its proper limits so that one can appeal to a wider sense of evidence and Evidenz than is countenanced by almost all the method’s practitioners. For how can one pass from a verse or several verses of Scripture to a position of belief in the revelation of God to Jews or of Christ to Christians by narrowly and exclusively following the historicalcritical method? And since the Bible is an ensemble of texts about belief in the God of Jews and Christians it seems unreasonable that the historical-critical method should be the sole way of reading Scripture practiced in colleges and universities. To read the Bible theologically bespeaks a range of reading styles, from the elaborate allegoreses of Origen and the Victorines to the new phenomenology. So does reading ‘secular literature’ theologically, although here we are not speaking about revelation but intentionalities, some of which may be informed by having taken the Bible as revelatory. I shall confine myself here to secular literature, especially religious poetry, and in particular I shall address how the new phenomenology – the ways of thinking being developed by JeanYves Lacoste, Jean-Luc Marion, and others – can be of use when reading secular religious poetry. How phenomenology, whether old or new, can help theology is one of the issues that will be addressed. I begin by reflecting on a constant theme of literary criticism over the past several centuries. I could say that this theme is a prejudice against religious poetry, but that would be neither accurate nor fair. Several of the most authoritative and influential critics of modern times have offered arguments either against the very idea of religious poetry or for confining it to the status of minor poetry. On the face of it, this seems 11



1


to have been an odd thing to do. I cannot think of literary critics who have argued against the appropriateness or the success of medieval lyrics such as ‘I sing of a maiden’ or ‘Quia amore langueo’ on the ground that they are religious. That Piers Plowman is an intensely religious poem goes without saying, although there is a good deal to say about the ways in which it is religious (for example, Rhodes, 2001). The same may be said of Dante’s Commedia, and for many other medieval poems, whether lyric or narrative or visionary. The unease that critics have felt with religious poetry is confined to poetry of the modern era, and doubtless this unease is a characteristic of modernity itself. Given this, it would make sense if the critics I have in mind were all partisans of the secular enlightenment, people who hold that religion is delusion, an opiate, or a form of social repression. But I am not thinking of Voltaire or Gibbon or any of their successors. On the contrary, the critics I have in mind are known either for the depth of their commitment to a positive religion or the seriousness with which they take religion and their admiration for its finest exemplars. So I begin my reflections in perplexity and, as soon as I take my first step to resolve it, I find myself all the more perplexed. The best way to understand the issue is to listen to the arguments proposed against religious poetry. There are four main ones. I will take them in historical order, and then I will examine the arguments that have been given. The first maintains that intercourse between man and God cannot be poetic. ‘Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than poetry can confer,’ we are told (Johnson, 1967, I, p. 291). Religious poetry is deemed inappropriate from the side of religion, then, but the argument is in fact stronger than this. It has a second line of attack: religious poetry cannot invent, and invention is the defining mark of poetry. And so religious poetry is inappropriate on the side of religion and on the side of poetry. In form at least this is a very powerful argument, and the fact that a critic of great authority has proposed it should make us attend to it with care. That critic is Samuel Johnson. Now Johnson was a devout Christian, and the depth and sincerity of his belief helps to explain why he deems religious poetry to be out of place from the side of religion. Yet he is also a poet of considerable power, and some of his readers would have little hesitation in claiming ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ (1749; Johnson, 1903) as a religious poem, although, to be sure, the rightness of the adjective can be contested and, even when admitted to the company of the noun, it calls for clarification. The second argument holds that religious poetry is at best minor poetry because poets who write ‘religious poetry’ write about how they want



12

to feel, or want to be seen as feeling, and not how they actually feel. Religious verse, you might say, is constitutively prone to phenomenological failure; it involves a fundamental dishonesty in seeing oneself and describing one’s thoughts and feelings. Religious emotion in poetry tends to be worked up, placed in frames that are more or less conventional, and indeed religious emotion is only a small part of the wide range of feelings that characterize being human. I am paraphrasing an early view proposed in ‘Religion and Literature’ (1935; Eliot 1951) by T.S. Eliot, another critic of undoubted authority and influence: since 1927 a devout Anglo-Catholic, and the author of ‘Ash-Wednesday’ (Eliot, 1930) and Four Quartets (1943; Eliot 1976), two poems that have claim to be among the strongest religious poems of the last century (Eliot, 1951, p. 390; see also Eliot, 1957). The third argument maintains that ‘religious poetry’ is a category mistake, and that the discerning reader is always faced with a choice. You can say that all strong poetry is sacred or that all strong poetry is secular, but it is deeply confusing to say that some strong poetry is religious and some is not. The first aim of the argument is to worry any distinction we might wish to make between biblical and non-biblical literary art: there is one canon, and one canon only, and however one carves it up it includes all strong secular writing and all strong biblical writing. As you will have recognized by virtue of the language I have been using, the proponent of the argument is Harold Bloom (Bloom, 1989, p. 4). No conventional religious affiliation, his – he styles himself a Gnostic Jew – yet he takes religion very seriously, affirming the ‘American religion’ of experience that stems, he thinks, from Emerson, and denigrating faiths that are centered on creeds, that is, he thinks, on second-hand experience (Bloom, 1992). Not a poet himself, he is, however, the editor of American Religious Poems (Bloom and Zuba, 2006). I assume that the title was foisted on him by his publisher, the Library of America, since it is not one that he can strictly affirm while being consistent with his critical principles. The huge pool of poems to choose from would be either sacred or secular. If Bloom thinks that all poetry is sacred then the proper title of his anthology would be American Poems. The fourth and final argument has two forms. We are urged to agree that poetry, like all art, distracts us from our ethical obligations, or that poetry, like all art, distracts us from religious devotion. In making or attending to religious art we grasp the shadow rather than the prey. In the first statement of the argument it is conceded that some art can distract us less or even aid our ethical engagement in the world. For that to happen, the artwork must have avoided becoming whole or perfect;



Reading Theologically: Reduction and Reductio 13


it must somehow include a critique of art or refer to itself as a craft or as a historical artifact (Lévinas, 1987). No concession is made in the second statement of the argument: art is constitutively a distraction from devotion, and hence ‘religious poetry’ is the name of a state to be diagnosed and not a description of a particular sort of writing (Hill, 1978). The proponents of the fourth argument are respectively Emmanuel Lévinas and Geoffrey Hill. Lévinas is, as we all know, a Jewish philosopher of great profundity who has attempted to rethink religion without the phenomenality of revelation, while Hill is a poet whose volume Tenebrae has claim to be one of the finest collections of contemporary religious verse, indeed a new style of religious poetry, one that calls itself into question in the very act of articulating itself. I will not respond to these arguments in detail, but a few comments will lead us directly to what is essential. To Johnson one might object that religious poetry is not in competition with dogma; rather, it is a mode of fides quaerens intellectum (‘faith seeking understanding’), as St Anselm’s motto has it. One seeks to understand one’s faith in the writing of poetry, just as one does when writing theology or philosophy. Clearly, one can pray in verse: think of the psalms. And equally clearly invention is important in any prose that seeks to be memorable. Would anyone say that sermons by Augustine, Donne, Eckhart, Edwards, Gregory of Nazianzus, Origen, Rahner, Tauler, Tillich, and Whitefield (the list could go on and on) are not inventive? Nor does prose give one access to a higher state than poetry. Indeed, one might say that adoration involves metaphor and other figures by dint of the intensity of the relation of faith as well as by the demands of analogy. The important word here is ‘relation.’ As a placing shot, one might say that religious poetry helps to make our relation with God appear, a relation that changes, to be sure, precisely because of the fluid exchange between faith and understanding. To Eliot one can respond by underlining the oddity of introducing insincerity as a criticism of religious poetry but not of, say, political poetry or love poetry. Are all love poems sincerely felt by those who write them? Are all political poems sincere? More particularly, it is worth noting the assumption that poetry turns on experience, and that religion is restricted to second-hand experience, as though religious faith is invariably a response to events represented in Scripture, and not something worked out in a life of prayer. What is needed, it seems, is a broader and finer account of ‘experience.’ It may be observed, with respect to Bloom, that the notion of ‘literary art’ as he uses it is a highly Romantic one. If one extends the notion of literature across the board, then of course the Bible becomes literature,



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and it will not be a surprise to discover that the best literature in the Bible is in the Hebrew Bible: the stories of Jacob and the angel, Joseph and his brothers, David and Goliath, Jonah and the whale, and so on. Being called a Romantic is not likely to disconcert Bloom, nor would he disown the adjective ‘Emersonian.’ What is interesting, though, is how closely he agrees with Eliot, of all people, in appealing to the category of experience. Cued to a creedal religion, Eliot finds religious poetry insufficiently able to claim a wealth of experience. Bloom, objecting to creedal religion, looks to experience as the criterion of spiritual intensity in religion. And finally, we may turn to Lévinas and Hill. As Lévinas says, poetry may indeed distract us from ethics: so too, though, may philosophy or theology. One may read or even write Totality and Infinity (1961; Lévinas 1969) while people are sleeping outside in the street with nothing in their stomachs. Also, it is a false distinction to say that critique is on the side of ethics and that poetry has no element of critique. One might say that modern poetry, from the Jena Romantics to the present day, has stressed that literature must become the ‘literary absolute’ by incorporating critique, including self-critique, in art (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1988). Lévinas would hardly disagree, for the notion of art with which he works is precisely that ventured by Jena Romanticism, and this leads him to adopt an uncritical attitude to the avant garde. If we look back before the late eighteenth century, we find that poetry had already honed a critical edge: think of Dante’s Commedia with respect to Virgil, among others. For his part, Hill is perfectly correct to say that art can distract us from devotion. The beauty of an icon can make one’s mind wander during prayer, but so too the sheer ugliness of many churches can be distracting. In order to be a poem, a religious poem must be a work of art. Does that necessarily detract from the religious dimension of the work? Only if one assumes a complete and radical disjunction between art and religion. That seems implausible: when Jesus related the parables, he told them as very good stories. Did Jesus’ listeners hear the parable of the prodigal son, and say, ‘That rabbi has great narrative style; it’s a pity that he lets art take over from religion’? I doubt it. Being acutely self-conscious about the distinction between art and religion is a modern phenomenon, and one that needs to be relaxed before neurosis sets in. None of the arguments I have given against religious poetry strikes me as convincing, nor are they any more convincing when taken all together. It does not follow from their failure that a large number of religious poems – let us say ‘devotional verse’ of the sort one finds in Keble’s The Christian Year (1827; Keble, 2007) – can suddenly appear





as good poems rather than bad ones. However, it does remove certain powerful framings of memorable religious poems. Reasons why one should immediately regard George Herbert or Gerard Manley Hopkins as minor poets need to be re-examined, and indeed the category of ‘minor poetry’ needs to be inspected as well. More importantly, doubts about the strength of the arguments against religious poetry should make us more critically aware of ways in which modern secular literary criticism relies, often covertly, on ideas of experience. Not that one should therefore dismiss ‘experience’ from the field of literary criticism. On the contrary, one should seek to see in what way it has been delimited and promoted, and inquire if there are other ways of developing the notion. In the area that interests me here and now, the conjunction of poetry and theology, one needs also to investigate the way in which experience has been proposed and developed in theology. My suspicion is that, over the last couple of centuries, we would find quite close agreement between some literary criticism and some theology over the topic of experience. One would find two main positions. On the liberal side, one will find a prizing of experience over creed; while on the conservative side, whether Catholic or Protestant, one will find an elevation of creed or Scripture over experience. As with literary criticism, one will find that ‘experience’ is considered quite narrowly, as Erlebnis, and centered on feeling, with the consequence that experience is regarded as homogeneous in itself and an equalizer of subjects, both constituting egos and fields of discussion. Is it an accident that the first critical work on poetry and theology was devoted mostly to Wordsworth? (Brooke, 1880) Modernity offers us an appealing way of taking experience seriously, of seeing its extent and its different modes. It goes by the way of the word ‘reduction.’ It is in passing from what Husserl calls the ‘natural attitude,’ the default appeal to modern science as a way of explaining phenomena, to the phenomenological gaze that we can begin to identify the various ways in which being is given and can at once expand what counts as experience and respect its varieties. How I experience my body is different from how I experience numbers, values, and trees; how I anticipate an event is not the same as how I remember it; how an artwork gives itself to me in a gallery differs from how it is given to me when I read about it in a catalogue. The absence of my friend is presented to me in one way when I recall him in memory and in another way when I look at a photograph of him. And so on. When I pass from the empirical aspect of my ego to its transcendental aspect I can see the intentional relations by which I deal with things in the world, and can bring to light those



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intentional relations that tend to be blocked, especially by the blaze of perception. What I see may be what I desire, and yet that desire might need to be nudged by reduction in order to become apparent. Experience, then, is a matter of intentional acts, and the meaning of experience is a question of recognizing that one is co-constituting meaning by way of intentional relations. Not all experience can be accounted for by analyzing the gaze, however. Some phenomena exceed its horizon, coming over or under it, overwhelming or disappointing one, and then one must speak of those phenomena appearing in the figure of counter-experience (Marion, 2002a, pp. 215–16). Now ‘reduction’ neither began with Husserl nor has it remained the same after him: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and Marion, have all modified it to a greater or a lesser extent, and these modifications are certainly of sharp interest to anyone intent on reading literature. Yet it is also instructive, for literary criticism as well as for theology, to return to the first formulations of reduction, which took place in a quite different context than the post-Kantian philosophy of Husserl. They first appear in Hugh of St Victor, especially in his commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who, after St Gregory of Nyssa, is the person we look to for a classical account of Christian apophaticism. In his discussion of the Celestial Hierarchy Hugh orients himself by citing the first chapter of the epistle of St James, ‘Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning’ (James 1: 17; King James Version), and he speaks often of reductio, of leading back to the God who is the source of all gifts and all light (Hugh of St Victor, col. 937c, and col. 933b, 936a–b, 937c). It is St Bonaventure, though, who develops Hugh of St Victor’s ideas to their highest pitch in medieval theology. Perhaps we tend to think of St Bonaventure, a little crudely, as the conservative counterpart to St Thomas Aquinas. Where Aquinas draws on the newly discovered philosophy of Aristotle and allows philosophy an independent role to play in the quest for truth, Bonaventure remains highly dubious of Aristotle and rejects the duplex veritate, the twofold truth of philosophy and theology. For him, the truth is given and protected by theology. Rather than directly combat this caricature of both Bonaventure and Aquinas, I propose to look briefly at a little treatise by Bonaventure, and ponder how some of its ideas can be re-launched and revived today. The treatise I have in mind is De reductione artium ad theologiam, which in English is On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology. Now ‘reduction’ here does not mean abbreviation but leading back. It is Bonaventure’s contention that





all disputes in the arts and humanities can be led back to assumptions that are at heart theological. Two things are at issue. The first is that for Bonaventure this reduction was a leading back to propositions that had already received adequate expression in creed and dogma. And the second is that reading, when performed properly, will always take us back to the Word. One can re-think the first of these views within the context of reading literature, and one can learn something from the second, although I will not engage in it here and now. When Husserl introduced his version of the reduction, he made a point of saying that it allows us to step back from the ‘natural attitude,’ that set of unexamined assumptions and habits of perception that characterize our existence when we think on automatic pilot (usually as uncritical empiricists or dogmatic physicalists). The reduction is not an act that one performs once and for all, no more so than cleaning the house is something one does once and for all. One’s consciousness is altered by repeated acts of reduction performed from various positions and angles. Having made the reduction, Husserl says, we can see the ways in which our intentional acts are embedded in hidden or neglected horizons: we can discern how our perceptions, desires, memories, and so on are intimately involved with what they aim at. It seems to me that when reading literature we perform the reduction to a greater or lesser extent; indeed, the reduction has already been performed, at least in part, in the very act of writing or reading a poem. When we read Wordsworth at all well we engage in a non-thetic experience of various theses about the world (to do with the relation between consciousness and nature, say). We do not read him within the natural attitude, as though ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ (1798; Wordsworth, 1985) is a guide to the landscape of that part of Monmouthshire or Henry VIII’s negative estimation of the value of Cistercian religiosity or thoughts about the nature of ruins. Rather, we see how Wordsworth, in the writing of his poem, constitutes a place, and memories of a place, and a relationship with his sister, as meaningful in highly particular and powerful ways. Among other things we follow a religious moment in the poem, the lines about ‘a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.’ The sublime is more deeply infused in reality than beauty or reason or common sense. Passing from the natural attitude to the phenomenological gaze is not the only movement of importance in phenomenology, though. Many Christians are beset with what I call ‘the supernatural attitude,’



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a cluster of theses about the nature of reality that derive from an average knowledge of the doctrine of God, Christology, soteriology, eschatology, and so forth. It may well be that these theses are perfectly correct at the level of a theology; but they lack concreteness. To write within the supernatural attitude does not lead to memorable religious verse (think of Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1821–22; Wordsworth, 1849), for example). And to read within it does not lead to worthwhile literary criticism. A reduction is needed to allow us to step back from the supernatural attitude in order to have a non-thetic experience of the theses that compose it, that is, to have concrete experience of the Christian life, an experience that has a critical edge because it enables us to see the horizons in which our hopes and faith, our desires and loves, are embedded. To step back from the supernatural attitude is to pass from theology as so many theses to reading and writing theologically. Religious poems are seldom, if ever, read well in the natural attitude or in the supernatural attitude, and the history of modern critical attitudes to religious poetry, as I have outlined it, bears this out in figuring theology as so many theses in which the question ‘what?’ is central, rather than reading theologically, as I understand the idea, in which the question ‘how?’ is central. We do not get far in reading Herbert or Hopkins (to take very straightforward cases) by bringing a template of creed and dogma and laying it over the lyrics. Metaphor and context, tone and stance, all subtly modify words that may be drawn from creed or dogma. A good religious lyric has already performed a reduction, removing us from the natural and supernatural attitude alike, in order that the author may disclose one or more aspects of the Christian life in full phenomenological concreteness. Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ is not about the sovereignty of Christ; rather, it is an exploration of the experience of lordship in many of its facets, none of which can be artificially removed from the experience of the natural world. In turn, we as readers perform another reduction so that we can explore what has been given to us as another’s experience. Reading any poem requires us to respect the region of being in which other persons are given to us. In each case the reduction is, perhaps more than Husserl would have licensed, a spiritual exercise. The reduction that leads us away from the supernatural attitude allows one’s relation with God to appear, creature to Creator, much as it does when stepping back from the natural attitude in prayer. It is, as Blanchot (1993) would say, an infinite relation, meaning by that that it is discontinuous. Origen (1956, p. 280) said much the same thing when he evoked the life of prayer as something like a game of hide and go seek.





Now it will be said that there is a disanalogy between Husserl’s reduction and Bonaventure’s, that the former leads us to a state without presuppositions whereas the latter requires us to make a very considerable theological presupposition: that there is a God, indeed a God who is a Creator. This distinction between the two thinkers requires some clarification. Husserl’s insistence on a lack of presuppositions has a quite specific meaning, namely that we are not to take naively propositions from within the natural attitude; we do not make assumptions about the existential status of any what but rather consider its how. In attending to modes of givenness, not the factuality of what is given, we adopt a critical attitude to presuppositions. The same is true of a revived understanding of Bonaventure’s reductio. We are less concerned about the ‘what’ of reality than in how it is made manifest to us: as language, as image, in relations with another person, in the complex structure of liturgy, in the call and response of prayer, and so on. As Bonaventure asks in his commentary on the Hexameron, ‘Of what use is it to know many things and to savor nothing?’ (Bonaventure, 1996, p. 10) The reductio is precisely what enables us to read theologically, to see things as created, sustained and judged by God, to pass from what St Augustine called ‘evening knowledge,’ the knowledge of things in themselves, to ‘morning knowledge,’ the awareness of things as created, linked to their Creator (Augustine, 2002b, pp. 22, 39). We savor things when we perceive them theologically. We see them in their true light, or, if you prefer, we grasp their phenomenality. Husserl restricted the range of phenomenality so that it would accord with the positive sciences, and maintained that God’s transcendence of the world removed him from phenomenological investigation. God may abide in consciousness but not as part of an immanent mental process (Husserl, 1983, §51 note). Yet we, contemporaries of Marion and Lacoste, may see no coercive reason to restrict phenomenality to the objectness of the object, and may not wish to deny it to prayer, liturgy, lectio divina, or whatever. And yet it is characteristic of intentionality that we can intend more than we are sometimes given, and this is almost always true of the life of faith: we intend love towards God, and the level of evidence we get is insufficient to be turned into a firm foundation of knowledge. What counts as ‘evidence’ may be the life, or an event in the life, of someone we know; it may be what we take to be answered prayer; it may be a certain affect; or it may be an iconic moment, when we sense that we have become a subject of the divine gaze. Only for the very few will it be an audition or a vision, and even



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then the intuition will not be a complete fulfillment of the intention. Partial or incomplete evidence, in the phenomenological sense of the word (Evidenz), is precisely what makes the life of faith a life of faith and not knowledge. We pass from faith to understanding, not to knowledge, and so we always remain in faith. Much more could be said about faith at this point, but I want to keep in view the place to which Bonaventure’s reductio leads us as readers: to theology, not to faith. In looking over the arguments against the possibility or the desirability of religious poetry one may be led to recognize that theological distinctions are at the basis of modern unease with it: modern ‘experience’ is a contraction of what theology can allow it to be because theology indicates a range of regions of being that modernity (including some modern theology) has bypassed, excluded, or abbreviated. To read theologically is, minimally, to be aware of invisible curtailments on our reading that we have inherited. Above and beyond that, it is the rethinking and revival of those theological categories in a concrete manner. I would not want to suggest that we relaunch a theology of experience, along the lines of Schleiermacher or Rahner. On the contrary, attention to ‘experience’ means, among other things, thinking of what Lacoste calls the ‘non-event’ and what Marion calls ‘counter-experience’ (Marion, 2002a, pp. 215–16; Lacoste, 2004, §23). The encounter with God, Lacoste tells us, is usually a non-event: we find ourselves before God, not having experience of God, which is not to say that there is no phenomenality of God (Lacoste, 2008). If we expand the category of experience to include non-experience, as Blanchot commends as well as Lacoste, might we have a better understanding of the terrible sonnets of Hopkins, and widen the category of religious poetry? I think so. And the same would be true if we incorporate Marion’s notion of ‘counter-experience,’ which is the experience of what runs counter to the conditions of possibility for experiencing objects. In a world whose vanishing points were put in place by Kant, any experience of God is precisely counter-experience, and the ways in which perceptions, feelings, desires run counter to the ways in which we ordinarily experience things and one another give us clues to how to read the poems we call religious. And not just canonical religious poems, which are, after all, already partly framed by traditional theologies. Equally of interest are those works in which counter-experience is registered in one or more ways but without God being named. The narratives of Blanchot, for example, are touched by counter-experience of the Outside. It is not God. It is, for Blanchot, what would make us





hesitate in talking of God in the first place. But it calls to be considered in terms of theological categories, including the sacred, sacrifice, and transcendence, even if these categories are to be reset. Reading theologically may point us to reading or re-reading poems of faith more closely, and it may also point us to reading better the literature that has no part of faith.



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After Theory, After Modernity: Reading Humbly Jessica Hooten

In English departments across America, literature has been consumed by theory. Valentine Cunningham outlines the situation this way: ‘A critical Rip Van Winkle waking up now after fifty years of slumber wouldn’t recognize the critical tower of Babel he’d returned to […] Theory is everywhere’ (2002, p. 13). Cunningham points out how modern critics have replaced those readers who enjoy poetry: ‘Literary Theory in fact diminishes the literary, diminishes texts, by reducing them to formulae, to the formulaic, to the status only of the model, of models of literary functions, even of the literary at large, but still only a model’ (2002, p. 122). Literary study has come to be dominated by theorists rather than poets, critics rather than readers. Modern and postmodern critics assume that the task of the critic is to master the text. According to George Steiner, ‘criticism is ontologically, parasitic’ because it relies on and must draw from the text. Steiner (1987, p. 81) emphasizes the point: ‘The critic is not the maker.’ However, a person may choose to be a critic or a reader: ‘[Whereas] the critic is judge and master of the text, the reader is servant to the text’ (Steiner, 1987, p. 95). The critic focuses on the need to exhibit her autonomy. Yet, because the critic derives her work from that of the other, she resents the other, and thus sets herself opposed to the other. Steiner (1987, p. 81) writes, ‘[P]recisely because it knows itself to be simultaneously magisterial and parasitic, prescriptive and dependent, normative and occasional, criticism harbours inside itself strong solicitations to autonomy.’ This type of criticism leads to dethroning of the author, deconstructing of the text, and ironically, doubting of the critic. First, the critic dethrones the author. To increase her own significance, the critic gradually decreases the role of the author, until, as Roland Barthes does, she declares the author’s death. The struggle between author 23



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and critic is one for power and authority. Barthes contends that the author originally possesses god-like power, which he determines to remove. Barthes’s capitalization of ‘A’ in author illustrates this connection, as does his depiction of the relationship between an author and a book which appears like one between a father and a child: ‘The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child’ (1988, p. 121). Here, Barthes invokes scriptural notions of the Father and His Son. In the Christian tradition, the Son is also the Word, a link that fortifies Barthes’s comparison between a book and a child. Barthes draws the resemblance in order to offer both – the author and the Author – on the critic’s altar. Barthes proclaims, ‘[T]he birth of the reader must be at the cost of the Author’ (1988, p. 123). While Barthes uses the word ‘reader’ in place of critic, his reader aligns more closely with Steiner’s notion of a critic. Because the critic relies on the existence of another’s text, authoritative autonomy seems contradictory in an act of criticism. However, Barthes subsumes this authority by asserting the critic’s choice ‘to give a text an Author’ (1988, p. 122). Moreover, the choice to annihilate the author completely also resides with the critic. This choice places all the power with the critic. With the dissolution of the author’s authority, little protects the unity of the text. Barthes views the text as ‘a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture […] The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost’ (1988, pp. 122–3). Since the text exists in fragments, the critic has the responsibility to interpret the pieces. The newly-crowned critic, ‘[i]n a mode of narcissistic terrorism,’ according to Steiner, ‘now proposes to “deconstruct” and to “disseminate” the text, to make of the text the labile, ultimately contingent sources of its own prepotent display’ (1987, p. 82). In Buberian terms, the critic creates an I-It relationship with the text, which treats the text as an object. As such, the text may be read according to the terms of the critic. Cunningham reports, ‘[T]he whole history of criticism, of theorizing, is merely a history of the varying, shifting preoccupation across the ages with [the author, text, or reader], and with these three alone’ (2002, p. 29). Now that all three have been dismantled, one must ask, what is the end of literary criticism? In this ‘post’ culture that is after theory and after modernity, ground must be regained from the past, and critics must remember how to be readers. Becoming a reader rather than a critic involves all three aspects of reading – author, text, and reader. The purpose of literary criticism becomes



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to know the text, which includes an internalization and digestion of the text itself, so that it becomes part of the reader’s life, enhancing her knowledge of herself and the world. Readers suspend their claim to authority when reading the work of another author. Readers renounce their interests to those of the text. And, readers thus discover more about their selves. In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis writes, ‘[I]n reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself, and am never more myself than when I do’ (1961, p. 141). Paradoxically, by abdicating the authority of the self, the critic becomes more herself through reading another’s work. Lewis compares this type of reading with worship, love, and moral action, a comparison Alan Jacobs appropriates forty years later in A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love. Contrary to the hermeneutics of suspicion, Jacobs’s hermeneutics proposes that the reader encounter each work with charity. He writes, ‘As interpreters of texts, then, we should “test the spirits” (1 John 4:1) present in what we read; but such testing will be nothing more or less than sin if we do not simultaneously offer up our own spirits to be tested, both by the works we read and by the righteousness of God that is our proper rule and standard’ (2001, p. 33). In league with both Steiner and Lewis, Jacobs proffers a reciprocal relationship with the work. His analogy is friendship – the critic treats the book like a friend. The authority of the author, the unity of the text, and the susceptibility of the reader must all be considered. No single category gets stressed or devalued. Rather, a reader tests the text in so far as the text tests her. The three aspects of reading – author, text, reader – exist in tension with one another like three points of a triangle. The author may not suppress the response of the reader, nor may the reader manipulate the text. Selflessly reading a text does not mean passive acceptance of an authorial position or textual message but active acceptance. To passively receive a text would be to allow the text or its author dominance, and the history of literary criticism has also shown this to be a dangerous position, wherein female or minority voices previously have been silenced. However, active acceptance asks a reader not to be silent, but to humbly engage. Hebrews 3:7–8 (New International Version) reads, ‘Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.’ Charitable reading asks that readers do not harden their hearts with presuppositions or premeditated agenda. After reading charitably, the reader may dislike an author or oppose a text, but both would have received fair hearing.



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Unlike Steiner, Lewis (1961) and Jacobs (2001) derive the notion of selfless or charitable reading from the selfless love of Christ. Jacobs explicitly states such a purpose in his first chapter and continues to draw from Scripture and the Judeo-Christian tradition throughout his book. He founds such notions of charitable reading in religious traditions, giving the example of the Jews’ exaltation of the Torah: ‘The phenomenon of revering a text – bowing humbly before its wisdom and authority – is familiar to us chiefly through religious traditions’ (Jacobs, 2001, p. 101). Here, the reader retains freedom from the domination of the author and text, while choosing to renounce the prideful position above either. In the remainder of this chapter, I propose a Christian way of reading based on patristic readers such as Augustine, and modern readers, such as C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, who appropriate his methods. Although Augustine writes primarily about how to read Scripture, his instruction is applicable to secular texts. In On Christian Doctrine, he clarifies the task of a reader, outlining how to approach a text and with what ends. While modern critics, such as Steiner and C.S. Lewis, perpetuate much of his advice, it is beneficial to start with an examination of Augustine’s hermeneutical principles. His method of reading provides a model for contemporary practice. Thus, against all notions of chronological snobbery, to use Lewis’s words, one must undertake to connect the precepts of St Augustine with modern interpretation. First, according to Augustine, a reader should approach a text as neither fully subject nor object. James J. O’Donnell notes that in On Christian Doctrine, Augustine ‘is claiming that the deepest of philosophical chasms, the distinction between subject and object is itself an illusion born of sin and not an inherent quality of reality’ (1985, p. 23). The sin of pride compels a reader to place herself above the text when interpreting it; this sin alone creates the breach between subject and object. Instead, the reader should approach the text humbly, perceiving it as a fellow autonomous subject. This recognition of the text’s autonomy, and consideration of the text as a subject, respects the authority of the author. In People of the Book, David Lyle Jeffrey suggests that great literature ‘written in the shadow of the Book of books […] depends for its own authority on the spiritual capital of a biblical tradition to which it may now no longer owe any conscious fealty’ (1996, p. 377). The pre-modern readers of Scripture assumed its authority, and this attitude accompanied them in reading other texts. Although postmodern critics are rediscovering the Bible as a model, they disregard this authority in preference for their own.



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Following Augustine’s principle of humility, Steiner explains that the text should be an incarnation of meaning for the reader who ‘opens himself to the autonomous being of the text’ (1987, p. 86). The reader must overcome the I-It relationship to text that critics propound and, rather, assume an I-Thou stance toward the text. Critics Edith Wyschogrod and Emmanuel Lévinas describe this encounter as one with the ‘face’ of the text. Wyschogrod compares the appropriate stance of a reader to that of a saint in her book Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy. For Wyschogrod, as summarized by Wesley A. Kort ‘the face of the other is the point of exit that lures the saint out of cultural conventions, institutional limits, social abstractions into postures, relations, and actions that have moral power’ (1996, p. 90). Since postmodern critics concern themselves greatly with the power of dominating traditions and communal ties, the reader must discover how to absolve herself of such limiting affiliations and rise above. Wyschogrod proposes that imitating a saint moves the reader toward this end. For Lévinas, the obligation to view the text as a face draws also from moral ends: ‘the ethical is located outside of the thinking project and with the other’ (Kort, 1996, p. 93). The face metaphor safeguards the unity of the text: ‘As lived by the true reader, the text is irreducible to, inexhaustible by, even the most penetratively diagnostic, explicative of visions – be they linguistic, grammatological, semiotic, historicist, sociological, “deconstructive,” or what you will’ (Steiner, 1987, p. 87). Choosing to look only at the eye or lip of a face disregards the beauty of the whole; no one who singles out a piece, even for moral ends, may truly know a text. Houston Baker also vests interest in the unity of the text when he suggests that narratives are bodies that should not be dismantled or lynched by critics. Concerned with the domination of ideological theory in American criticism, Baker writes, ‘It would be fair to say, I think, that “theory” has implied – especially in its poststructuralist manifestations – an ideological and sometimes willed blindness to any version of the past that suggests real events, actual human bodies or a responsibility to such phenomena on the part of literary scholars themselves’ (1988, p. 340). Critics focus on the theory more than on the experience of the literature and its relationship to reality. Baker advocates renewed vision by which we see the body of the text ‘situated outside written language [which] means that we must find ways alternative to a strictly literary critical attention for perceiving it’ (1988, p. 348). In addition to the example of the African body, Baker upholds Christ’s body as a body that emerges from a text.





Baker’s notion of the body correlates with Augustine’s determination that readers take into account the complete text. Readers may err if they do not: ‘In asserting rashly that which the author before him did not intend, he may find many other passages which he cannot reconcile with his interpretation’ (Augustine, 1997, p. 31). All pieces of a text should be interpreted within the structure of the whole. John J. O’Keefe and R.R. Reno indicate how Augustine’s principles of interpretation are consistent here with pre-modern readers whose ‘goal was to establish an overall interpretation of Scripture’ (2005, p. 24). According to O’Keefe and Reno, the techniques of the ancient readers ‘were all oriented toward developing a take on the Bible as a whole’ (2005, p. 25). They saw the text as an embodiment of unified truth, and thus they read and interpreted it as such. While the patristic writers primarily dealt with Scripture, their way of seeing the text as unified applies to secular texts. The New Critics, such as Cleanth Brooks, echo Augustine in their recognition of textual unity. According to Brooks, since the text is an experience filled with tensions and irony, paraphrase is impossible. Brooks writes, ‘[W]e read literary works not so much for instruction in ideas as to learn – through a kind of dramatic presentation – what it feels like to hold certain beliefs, including the pressure exerted against belief’ (1963, p. 128). Moral understanding is a natural effect of an experience with a text, an effect which is hindered when texts are broken into pieces. For many of the aforementioned critics, the moral end is inseparable from the text. Flannery O’Connor concurs: ‘The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is’ (1969, p. 96). Drawing from these premises, O’Connor implies that the role of the critic is not to explain this meaning but ‘only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.’ A reader experiences the meaning, inseparable from the text, and any moral changes occur as an effect in that reader. Furthermore, to experience the text, the reader should dismiss alternative motivations when approaching it. Not that a reader may remove personal history from the experience of the text, but the reader should not consciously approach the text with certain objectives. For instance, Rudolf Bultmann approaches texts with the existential question of how the text applies to him. Bultmann (1972) distinguishes the kergyma, the message of Scripture, from the text itself. He advocates that readers too approach a text with the question of how it applies to them. However, Augustine asserts a more humble, selfless approach. The switch is one of direction – rather than the reader seeking out a personal message



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from the text, Augustine sees the text as seeking to read him. O’Donnell notes, ‘[T]he only question that means anything [to Augustine] is the one that asks whether the Word of God is acting in the reader’s soul right now’ (1985, p. 25). In approaching the text selflessly, Augustine assumes that he will be read by the text as well as read it. Although Augustine bases his premises on reading Scripture, the premises are universally applicable. In accord with Augustine, C.S. Lewis encourages readers to empty the self before reading. He writes, ‘We must not let loose our own subjectivity upon the [texts] and make them its vehicles. We must begin by laying aside as completely as we can all our own preconceptions, interests and associations’ (1961, p. 18). Unbiased reading may not be possible, and every person retains a subjective framework. Nevertheless, Lewis advises that readers try to read texts without the antagonism of Barthes or presuppositions of Bultmann. Lewis records in a letter that ‘the first real work of the Gospels on a fresh reader is, and ought to be, to raise very acutely the question, “Who or What is this?” ’ (1966, p. 345; emphasis added). Notice the preposition ‘on,’ which assumes the place of the reader is beneath the text. Instead of the reader approaching the text with previously contrived questions, the text raises questions in the mind of the reader. Contrary to the motivation of critics, readers renounce their pride in order to relate more equitably with the text. However, a reader may only submit to the text following selfexamination. Jeffrey draws this connection in the life of Augustine who, after writing the Confessions, ‘comes to the reader now as a man among men, mastered by the text he reads and with no pretense to be master of it’ (2003, p. 52). After writing his spiritual autobiography, through which he discovers weakness in his own subjectivity, Augustine holds no pretenses about his ability to master a text. About five years prior to writing An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis also wrote a spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, in which he describes the effects of reading on the course of his life, specifically on his conversion from a citizen of self to one of God. Lewis describes his childhood reading experiences as already planting in him a desire for transcendence: ‘[T]here came a moment when I idly turned the pages of the book and […] was uplifted into the huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described’ (1955, p. 17). The experience becomes part of him. He labels this experience as a desire for joy, and it follows him throughout his life until he becomes a Christian. Later in life, the works of Christian authors G.K. Chesterton and George MacDonald also profoundly affect him. Lewis wittily advises, ‘[A] young





man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere – “Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,” as Herbert says, “fine nets and stratagems”’ (1955, p. 191). Such submission and self-effacement only come from love, and it defeats not only the modern exaltation of the self but also the dilemma of subjectivity. Love exists truly not between a subject and object, but between two subjects. Augustine proposes this hermeneutic of love in On Christian Doctrine: ‘[W]hen anyone knows the end of the commandments to be charity […] and has related all of his understanding of Divine Scriptures to these three, he may approach the treatment of these books with security’ (1997, p. 33). Love respects the nature of the other by submitting to the authority of the author and respecting the unity of the text. As Lewis writes, ‘Now the true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can’ (1961, p. 11). The task for the reader becomes to understand rather than to dominate. This position of the reader in submission to the text demands selflessness rather than self-focus. Thus, for readers, the self becomes relegated to the consideration of the text, the other. According to Lewis, ‘In love we escape from our self into one another. […] Good reading, therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three’ (1961, p. 137). If we read texts with love, with the appreciation of the other, then we will first lose ourselves and find ourselves in the reading, thereby coming to greater self-awareness. For Lewis, the human being should return to a notion not of self but of Christian personhood, fallen but capable of transcendence through selfless love. At the end of People of the Book, Jeffrey sums up this type of criticism: Whether calculated allegorically, as in Augustine’s belabored but intentionally charitable hermeneutic, or pseudo-objectively, as in the textual piety of the New Critics, or dialectically in a still more belabored consciousness of the infinite regress in fallen human perception and expression both, as among many of the shades of poststructuralist theory, the commitment to love with words one’s neighbor as oneself can remain lively only so long as the greater Love which precedes it has not been lost. (1996, p. 378) In other words, while there may not be one method, there is one purpose: caritas. Literary criticism, whether for Augustine, the New Critics,



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the poststructuralists, or any other critics who evolve in the twenty-first century, should have its end in love. G.K. Chesterton is a reader who exemplifies the selfless, loving end of literary criticism, composing a critical work on Charles Dickens in which Chesterton shares his experience of the literature. While Chesterton approaches the text selflessly, he writes about Dickens according to his experience of the novels. John Coates calls this criticism ‘a talent for pregnant and exciting generalisation’ (1998, p. 261). Yet, his criticism reflects the internalization that Steiner and Lewis spoke of and that Augustine alludes to; he has communed with the work so fully as to find it affecting life and notions of reality. Chesterton begins his book on Dickens by defining the word ‘great.’ According to Chesterton, ‘The term is found to fit a definite thing. Dickens was what it means.’ Chesterton does not hesitate to begin with the author and to align the author intimately with his works. Even less than fifty years after the death of Dickens, Chesterton considers him as classic, ‘as a king who may now be deserted, but who cannot now be dethroned’ (1925, p. 2). The type of criticism that dethrones an author does not apply to Chesterton, for he exalts the author to a seat of authority. Unlike the New Critics Chesterton considers the life of the author. Chesterton structures his criticism by starting with ‘The Dickens Period’ and continuing to ‘The Boyhood of Dickens,’ then ‘The Youth of Dickens,’ and finally a section on ‘Later Life and Works.’ For Chesterton, the reader of Dickens must recognize how ‘it required a tragedy to bring out this man’s comedy’ and how ‘the little Dickens Dickensized London’ (1925, pp. 22, 34). The man could not have been the author without living as he did, and so the novels would not be what they are without this background. Chesterton writes of his own method: ‘I have deliberately in this book mentioned only such facts in the life of Dickens as […] illustrated my own immediate meaning’ (1925, p. 150). For Chesterton, the author creates a world from his own world, and the text may be judged according to how truthfully it portrays that world. Finally, Chesterton sees his role as reader to read the text. Many of Chesterton’s mistakes in reiterating passages of the text stem from his internalization of the works. Rather than study texts at a distance, Chesterton, like Lewis, knows them from reading them, even if he does not know them perfectly. Chesterton himself comments on this: ‘[T]he moment we believe a thing ourselves, that moment we begin easily to overstate it; and the moment our souls become serious, our words become a little wild’ (1925, p. 13). The life of Dickens’s narratives has consumed Chesterton the reader, and his criticism reflects





this intoxication with the text. As David Whalen points out, ‘[T]he issue of Chesterton’s inaccuracies is a telling one for it reveals a bit of what he believed was important in the role of the “critic” ’ (1995, p. 36). The critic should be caught up by the text, read by it. ‘Where conventional critics seek to open a text with analysis, Chesterton seeks to open one’s eyes with a text’ (Whalen, 1995, p. 40). Even more so, Chesterton seeks for his own eyes to be opened by the text. He writes on Dickens’s texts with open vision concerning the world and the human soul. Chesterton’s literary criticism corresponds more with pre-modern principles of reading than with those of his own generation. Like St Augustine, Chesterton empties himself before approaching a text, such as a Dickens novel, in order to take in the world and to experience the other. This hermeneutic of love which Chesterton exemplifies seems to be the only method of returning the text’s author to a place of authority, of reuniting fragmented texts, and of overcoming unrestrained, subjective interpretations. Feminist and postmodern critic Patricia Yaeger advocates for such criticism, describing it as ‘dirty’ and ‘messy.’ Yaeger confesses that she longs ‘for writing that is improper, unclean, illogical, politically suspect, full of raunchy anecdotes and abortive logic’ (1994, p. 7). What she calls for is interactive criticism that engages the text. Such messiness only occurs when the guard is down, and the reader engages the text openly as a friend. For Yaeger, interacting with texts in this way does not oppress the reader. Quite the opposite, the interaction endorses the life of the reader beyond the text. When readers begin to write about the text, they ‘partake of the new Oprah-culture, but [they] also insist that [their] lives depend on the dramas that happen behind the kitchen sink’ (1994, p. 22). Like Lewis and Chesterton, who describe how texts have read them, Yaeger suggests readers should express their relationship to the text in the criticism. Although Yaeger may suspect words like submission and renunciation, this type of reading supports her proposed method of criticism. Instead of viewing a text or an author as an opponent, or viewing themselves as gods of the critical universe, critics should become readers again. We should replace any antagonism with love, respecting texts as ‘living and active,’ as it says in Hebrews 4:12. This verse intensifies Steiner’s concept of internalization, for the text does not simply enter the reader’s self, but as a ‘double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing the soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attributes of the heart’ (1984, p. 88). Augustine, Lewis, Chesterton, and others follow the biblical model suggested in Hebrews. For them, to be a reader is to renounce the obsession with self, and instead, in love, try to understand the other.



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An Ache in the Missing Limb: Biblical Origins of English Literary Criticism Stephen Prickett

Hans Frei’s neat encapsulation of the asymmetrical development of biblical and literary criticism in Britain and Germany in the eighteenth century is typical of the way the historical growth of critical thought is often described: In England, where a serious body of realistic narrative literature and a certain amount of criticism of the literature was building up, there arose no corresponding cumulative tradition of criticism of the biblical writings, and that included no narrative interpretation of them. In Germany, on the other hand, where a body of critical analysis as well as general hermeneutics of the biblical writings built up rapidly in the latter half of the eighteenth century, there was no simultaneous development of realistic prose narrative and its critical appraisal. (1980, p. 142) Although the passage contains no question mark, the implied question of how and why this asymmetry came into being is clear enough. Frei himself supplies some answers. Yet the larger question, that of the relation between the emergence of biblical criticism and general literary theory remains unanswered. While cultural and national traditions clearly play a profound part in this history, we should, I think, be wary of seeing them in too great isolation. That by the end of the eighteenth century English literature was the richest and most complex in Europe is a matter of publishing history; that the German states produced more books and periodicals at this period than anywhere else in Europe is similarly documented (Palmer, 1971, p. 233); that many of the most widely-read British literary critics of the period 1750–1850, such as 33



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Lowth, Coleridge, Hare, Keble, MacDonald, Newman or Arnold, were also heavily involved in biblical studies of one kind or another is also a matter of record. What is less commonly noted is that all these – together with such figures as De Quincey or Dallas – were all what one might call ‘crosscultural’ thinkers, heavily influenced by developments in other languages and cultures – biblical and near-eastern in the case of Lowth; biblical and classical for Keble and Newman; German for Coleridge, Hare and MacDonald; or French for Arnold. If we take into account the impact of the many translations of Herder in the early years of the nineteenth century1 (Prickett, 2009, ch. 7), culminating in James Marsh’s massively influential translation of The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry in 1833, what becomes increasingly clear is not so much the isolation of English criticism, but its interconnectedness. Historically, literary theory has tended to arise not so much within centers of national culture, as at its margins. It commonly develops where cultures, ways of thinking, or aesthetic assumptions, have been challenged or changed by outside influences, be they from other contemporary literary cultures, other disciplines (such as science, philosophy, or history) or by the Bible itself. The story of the ‘Higher Criticism’ of the Bible is a perfect example of this emergence of theory from the cultural margins – in this case, the marginal conflicts of Christianity itself. In 1678 a French Oratorian, Richard Simon, published what he called a Critical History of the Old Testament. Its purpose was specifically anti-Protestant: to destabilize and subvert the belief that Scripture alone was necessary for salvation. By applying the scholarly techniques then being developed in the study of classical texts, Simon set out to show that so far from being directly dictated by the Holy Spirit, biblical writings had origins no less human, complex, and variable than the classics, and that only with the guidance of the Catholic Church could a reader grasp their real meaning. With this in mind he challenged such traditional beliefs as that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, arguing that that the five books in question were more likely to be a composite creation of scribes and those whom he called ‘public writers’ (Deconnick-Brossard, 1991, pp. 136–43). The result, however, was not quite what he anticipated: Simon was expelled from his order, and the book was banned in France before it had time to circulate. It was, ironically enough, a French Protestant Huguenot librarian, Henri Justel, who saved the book for posterity by smuggling two copies to England, where a translation was published in 1682. A subsequent volume with a more tactful title, A Critical History of the Text of the New



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Testament, was published in England in 1689 – the same year as the first French edition. Both volumes received a mixed reception in England, Europe’s foremost Protestant country. Some, such as Edward Stillingfleet, Dean of St Paul’s, read them as Simon intended: as an attack on the authority of Holy Scripture. Others, such as Locke and Dryden – the one of Deist leanings, the other shortly to become a Roman Catholic – while not necessarily accepting all Simon’s conclusions, were both deeply impressed by his methodology and scholarship. Another admirer of Simon’s English translation was William Lowth, father of Robert Lowth, whose epoch-making Oxford Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (delivered as lectures from 1741; see Lowth, 1816) were to transform biblical scholarship. Unlike Simon, Robert Lowth had no axe to grind. An orthodox churchman and scholar (later to be Anglican Bishop of Llandaff and then of London), he was interested not in destabilizing Scripture, but, as a translator and historian, in establishing a sound text and setting the contents within a clear historical framework. He who would perceive the peculiar and interior elegancies of the Hebrew poetry, must imagine himself exactly situated as the persons for whom it was written, or even as the writers themselves; he is to feel as a Hebrew […] nor is it enough to be acquainted with the language of this people, their manners, discipline, rites and ceremonies; we must even investigate their inmost sentiments, the manner and connexion of their thoughts, in one word, we must see all things with their eyes, estimate all things by their opinion; we must endeavour as much as possible to read Hebrew as the Hebrews would have read it. (Lowth, 1816, pp. 113–14) Although the word ‘hermeneutics,’ to be popularized by Schleiermacher a generation later,2 had not yet entered the English language, it would be hard to think of a better definition. What was revolutionary about this, of course, was its stress on historical understanding. Whatever the contemporary relevance of its message (and Lowth was keenly interested in prophetic interpretations) the Bible was no longer free-floating and timeless, but was the product of a specific culture and historical period. The Word of God itself had a textual history – and could therefore be subject to textual criticism. What is also significant is that by linking ‘the peculiar and interior elegancies’ of Hebrew poetry with his historical approach Lowth has not merely suggested the psychological3 power of his texts, but also the



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aesthetic. This is one of the first statements of what was to become a core value of Romantic biblical criticism: that just as the prophets of ancient Israel were also its poets, so, for Lowth and his followers, the biblical texts are themselves in the highest degree ‘poetic’ (Prickett, 1986, ch. 2). From the very first, religion and aesthetics were interconnected in the new historical criticism. Probably the first critical fruits of this new nexus of religion, history, and aesthetics were Hugh Blair’s anodynely titled Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783; Blair, 1829) – a whole chapter of which was devoted to summarizing and commenting on Lowth’s Lectures. Blair was minister of the High Kirk (St Giles Cathedral) in Edinburgh and subsequently also the Foundation Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University – a post with a good claim to be the world’s first Chair of English Literature. Not merely did this serve to make Lowth known to a wider audience before the first English translation of his work, but it was also the source of much of the theory behind Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Thus if Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s statement that he took up the Bible ‘with the purpose to read it for the first time as I should any other work’ (Coleridge, 1840, p. 49) still caused a frisson, and even scandal, in some conservative quarters when it was posthumously published in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840), the way had, in effect, been clearly pointed by Lowth almost a hundred years before. But meanwhile Lowth’s historical criticism of the Bible had fallen on even more fertile ground elsewhere. Originally published as Lowth had given them, in Latin,4 his lectures were reprinted verbatim with extensive notes in Germany in 1758 by the pioneer biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis, whose own compendious Introduction to the New Testament had appeared in 1750, and who, having visited England in the 1740s, had then translated Richardson’s Clarissa. These notes on Lowth were, in turn, to be a major influence on the new generation of German biblical historians and critics such as Eichhorn, Gesenius, Lessing, and, above all, Herder, who explicitly acknowledged his debt to Lowth in the preface to The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–83) – the translation of which into English by James Marsh (noted above) was to play such a large part in the history of English criticism. It was this subsequent explosion of German biblical criticism, together with the relative lack of German prose fiction, in the second half of the eighteenth century that led Frei to his observation on the difference between the development of English and German criticism. Yet, as we have seen, the development of the so-called ‘Higher Criticism’ was not so much a German cultural phenomenon, as something that



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occurred at the intersection of no less than three European cultures – French, English, and German – all of which played their part in the critical revolution that ensued. Indeed, it would be fair to say that it was neither a Catholic nor a Protestant phenomenon (for their own different reasons, neither party initially wished to destabilize traditional literal readings of the Bible) but rather one that grew more or less spontaneously out of the culture wars that followed the Reformation. Nor, despite a growing nationalism in much Romantic criticism, were these cultural cross-currents to decline in the next few years. If, for Andrew Bowie, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy the immediate origins of modern critical theory lie with the German Romantics, its leaders were all heavily influenced by other literatures – mostly, again, English. It was the so-called ‘Jena’ group, gathered in the German university town of that name, partly because of the proximity of Herder and Goethe in nearby Weimar, who invented the term ‘Romantic’ as a label for themselves. Centered around the Schlegel brothers, August and Friedrich, together with Caroline Michaelis and Dorothea Mendelssohn (later to marry Friedrich Schlegel), it included Schleiermacher the theologian, the poets, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Tieck, and more loosely philosophers including Brentano, Hegel, and Schelling. It was always a fluid group, whose members were never all present at the same time: Novalis and Schleiermacher, for instance, never actually met. Nor was there unanimous philosophical or aesthetic agreement among its members, but for a few years around the turn of the nineteenth century with the publication of their journal, The Athenaeum, it acquired a powerful intellectual and critical momentum. It was here, in the pages of The Athenaeum, more than anywhere else, that the seeds of modern critical theory were born. Though Friedrich Schleiermacher, together with the Schlegel brothers, was one of the principal contributors to The Athenaeum, he was in many ways the odd man out. A committed Christian and ordained pastor of the Reformed (Calvinist) Church, his friends were mostly antipathetic to religion – and especially to the established Lutheran Church of the day. On the morning of Schleiermacher’s birthday, 21 November 1797, a group of his Jena friends burst into his flat in Berlin, where he was working, to hold a surprise party, during which they repeatedly urged him to justify his position as a Christian by writing a book (Forstman, 1977, pp. 65–6). To encourage him, Friedrich Schlegel moved in with him for the next eighteen months. The resulting book, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, appeared in 1799. It was to change the direction of religious thought for most of the coming century – and beyond.





Not all the Jena Romantics had been cultured despisers, however. Such was Novalis’s irony that controversy still rages over the implications of such (unpublished) sketches as Christendom or Europe – ostensibly an attack on Protestantism – but before his tragically early death he seems to have moved increasingly in the direction of some kind of medieval mysticism (O’Brien, 1995). Nor were the Schlegels unaffected by this unexpected ‘religious turn’: in 1807 both Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel became Roman Catholics. In a letter to a friend Dorothea wrote ‘If only because it is so ancient, I prefer Catholicism. Nothing new is of any use’ (Eichner, 1970, p. 106). Schleiermacher’s preparation for his defense of Christianity had been two translation projects, both drawing on his very considerable knowledge of English. The first involved two volumes of English sermons, by Hugh Fawcett and Hugh Blair respectively; the second, a massive (and unfinished) history of the English colony of New South Wales. Interestingly, Blair’s theology had played a key part in the latter work (Prickett, 1998), but there is little doubt that Schleiermacher was also well acquainted with the critical premises of Blair’s literary Lectures. Certainly the critical nexus between literary theory and theology lies right at the heart of Schleiermacher’s lifelong work on hermeneutics – as the publication of his original lecture notes as late as after World War II by Heinz Kimmerle and Manfred Frank was to show (Jerond, 1986; and Palmer, 1969). Meanwhile, a French émigré in exile in England, René François Auguste de Chateaubriand had produced one of the most astonishing, bold, and comprehensive defenses of Christianity ever attempted. The Genius of Christianity, published in 1802, aimed at nothing less than to prove that the Christian religion, of all the religions that ever existed, is the most humane, the most favourable to liberty and to the arts and sciences; that the modern world is indebted to it for every improvement, from agriculture to the abstract sciences […] that nothing is more divine than its morality – nothing more lovely and sublime than its tenets, its doctrine, and its worship; that it encourages genius, corrects the taste, develops the virtuous passions, imparts energy to the ideas, presents noble images to the writer, and perfect models to the artist; that there is no disgrace in being believers with Newton and Bossuet, with Pascal and Racine. (Chateaubriand, 1856, pp. 48–9) To be the finest, most perfect revealed religion, Christianity, for Chateaubriand, must also embody a similarly all-embracing aesthetic,



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allowing it to create the greatest art. His agenda, in short, is nothing less than a total re-appropriation of literature, philosophy, and even science into a single, all-embracing Christian historical perspective. This is a point he illustrates with considerable critical flair, arguing that just as the modern characterization of drama, vastly more ‘inward’ and subtle than that of the ‘shame culture’ of the classics, was the product of an inward and Christian culture, so the criticism that could appreciate it was also part of that same matrix (1856, pp. 232 ff). Though too close in time to the German Romantics for there to be much cross-cultural influence, the presence of Lowth’s aesthetics is, again, unmistakable. Coleridge, Chateaubriand’s contemporary, and arguably both the greatest English literary critic of the period and the greatest theological thinker, advanced a similarly historicized aesthetic. In his 1811–12 Lectures on Shakespeare he sees Shakespeare not so much as an individual writer on his own, but as an example of the flowering of literary tradition (Coleridge, 1960, Vol. II, p. 188). few there have been among critics, who have followed with the eye of the imagination the imperishable, yet ever-wandering, spirit of poetry through its various metempsychoses, and correspondent metamorphoses; – or who have rejoiced in the light of clear perception at beholding with each new birth, with each rare avatar, the human race frame to itself a new body, by assimilating materials of nourishment out of its new circumstances, and work for itself new organs of power appropriate to the new sphere of its motion and activity. (Coleridge, 1960, Vol. I, p. 174) This close cross-reference between the inner development of the poet and the outer framework of the tradition within which he worked is of enormous significance – not merely in the development of Coleridge’s own critical theory, but also in the way it shaped the thinking of later critics. Creativity is not just the mark of the great writer, but of the sustaining literary tradition. Here Coleridge resorts to a Goethe-like image of organic and vegetable growth. Moreover, this is not, we notice, a pluralistic or fragmented line, but a theory of the main stream of developing human consciousness: ‘the spirit of poetry.’ The true critic sees ‘with the eye of the imagination’ a continuing process of organic growth, in which each new ‘avatar’ involves a re-creation of all that has gone before in a form appropriate to its time and purpose. Although this constant aesthetic re-creation can be interpreted in an idealist, almost Platonic way (and there are times in Coleridge’s periodical,





The Friend, when he seems to be implying this), the general trend of this argument is increasingly concrete and historical. The model, of course, is the similarly evolving sense of the historical development of Christian doctrine. This is even more marked in the criticism of Coleridge’s most immediate disciple, Julius Hare. A fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, and later rector of Hurstmonceaux in Sussex, Julius and his brother Augustus in 1827 published a collection of essays, aphorisms, and observations, entitled Guesses at Truth. Despite its modest title it was to go through a second, much enlarged edition in 1838, a third in 1847, and reprints in 1867, 1871, and 1884. These essays are perhaps the best source of second-generation Romantic critical theory in English, and may best be seen as an extended critical dialogue with the fragments in The Athenaeum – on which it is clearly modeled. Julius Hare’s aphoristic criticism reveals a sense not merely of the enormous range and diversity of his own literary heritage, but also of how far it had developed and changed over the years. This shift in perspective is very clear in a lengthy piece devoted to a comparison between ancient and modern poetry: Goethe in 1800 does not write just as Shakespeare wrote in 1600: but neither would Shakespeare in 1800 have written just as he wrote in 1600. For the frame and aspect of society are different; the world which would act on him, and on which he would have to act, is another world. True poetical genius lives in communion with the world, in a perpetual reciprocation of influences, imbibing feeling and knowledge, and pouring out what it has imbibed in words of power and gladness and wisdom. It is not, at least when highest it is not, as Wordsworth describes Milton to have been ‘like a star dwelling apart’. Solitude may comfort weakness, it will not be the home of strength […] In short, Genius is not an independent and insulated, but a social and continental, or at all events a peninsular power […] Now without entering into a comparison of Shakespeare’s age with our own, one thing at least is evident, that, considered generally and as a nation, we are more bookish than our ancestors […] While the conflict and tug of passions supplied in Shakespeare’s days the chief materials for poetry, in our days it is rather the conflict of principles […] This appears not only from the works of Goethe and others of his countrymen, but from the course taken by our own greatest poets, by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Landor. They have been rebuked indeed for not writing otherwise: but they have done rightly; for they have obeyed the impulse



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If there was any doubt about Coleridge, there is no doubt at all about Julius Hare’s commitment to a progressive and historical, rather than an idealist, aesthetic. This strong historical sense, coupled with a wide reading in both English and German theology, is impelled by a thoroughly English pragmatism. The development of human sensibility is indeed closely enmeshed with the particular conditions of time and place, rather than with any abstract Hegelian outworking of the spirit of the age. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Landor, are not just products of the prevailing Geist, but of specific and concrete historical and cultural conditions – and none the less great for that. This is not merely a retrospective explanation of why Goethe in 1800 should differ from Shakespeare in 1600, it lays down the principle of why Goethe had to differ. The same work written two hundred years later would be, of necessity, a different work simply because of its context – or, in T.S. Eliot’s words ‘it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art.’ Perhaps the most unlikely German Romantic influence on critical thought in the English-speaking world, however, was that of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). Given the relatively tiny number of British who knew German at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, Herder’s influence was considerably more pervasive than that of the Jena Romantics. Coleridge (of course!) was reading the Ideen as early as 1799, and the collected Marginalia reveals an extensive knowledge of Herder by the early 1830s (Coleridge, 1956, p. 535; and Coleridge, 1980–2001, Vol. II, pp. 1048–88). Carlyle was reading Herder in the early 1820s when he was at work on his translation of Wilhelm Meister (Shine, 1950, pp. 3–33; and Wellek, 1965, p. 89). Felicia Hemans (1793–1835), one of the most popular poets of the day, was also reading Herder in German at much the same time (1825, p. 106). For those outside the relatively elite circle of those who could read German, a whole chapter of On Germany, the best-seller by Mme De Staël was devoted to a eulogistic introduction to Herder and his ideas. Marsh’s full English translation of The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, however, was not published until 1833, fifty years after it had appeared in Germany. James Marsh (1794–1842) was a New England Congregationalist minister, who had been first Professor of Philosophy and then President of the University of Vermont (1826–33). Unhappy at being classified as an



of their nature, and the voice of their age has been heard speaking through their lips. (Hare and Hare, 1867, II, pp. 136–40)


Emersonian Transcendentalist, Marsh was a key figure in the introduction of Coleridge’s philosophy to American readers, producing editions of Aids to Reflection, The Friend, and The Statesman’s Manual (Harding, 1979). Though careful to distance himself from Herder’s assumptions that the Old Testament was symbolic rather than historical, Marsh makes an effective bridge between Herder and Lowth, bringing the aesthetic criticism of the Hebrew psalms into the mainstream of English poetic criticism at the very time when the Evangelical revival, which reached its peak in fervor if not in absolute numbers around the 1850s, meant a resurgence of interest in the Bible after the all-time low in church attendance and religious practice at the beginning of the century. Because for many twentieth-century social commentators and historians ‘Victorianism’ has come to include assumptions of widespread religiosity, it is easy to forget how unlikely such a revival would have (and did) seem to many contemporaries in the first half of the century (Currie et al., 1977). The cumulative effect of such figures as Coleridge and Julius Hare and the translations of Herder prepared the way for the religious debates over ‘faith and doubt’ that were to occupy so much critical and novelistic energy, as well as for Arnold’s critico-theological writings: St Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), and God and the Bible (1875). The most original, if not the most popular, piece of religio-poetic theory of the first half of the century, however, was from the bestselling poet of the century,5 John Keble. Like Robert Lowth before him and Matthew Arnold after him, he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. His Lectures on Poetry (De Poeticae Vi Medicae) given between 1832 and 1841, were published, as they were delivered, in Latin in 1844. Dedicated to Wordsworth, the lectures take up the Wordsworthian idea of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. But whereas, for Wordsworth, the image behind that phrase seems to be a spring, or natural fountain, for Keble, writing at the height of the railway boom, the metaphor appears to suggest the safety-valve of a steam boiler. To J.T. Coleridge (nephew of the poet, and later to be Keble’s biographer) in 1832 Keble writes: ‘My notion is to consider poetry as a vent for overcharged feelings, or a full imagination, and so account for the various classes into which poets naturally fall, by reference to the various objects which are apt to fill and overpower the mind, so as to require a sort of relief’ (Coleridge, J.T., 1869, p. 199). Poetry, for Keble, was the product of tension or repression, issuing in disguised or ironic utterance. Someone who, under emotional stress, can find



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easy expression for their feelings is, by definition, no poet (Keble, 1912, Vol. 1, p. 36). ‘Poetry is the indirect expression in words, most appropriately in metrical words, of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or feeling, the direct indulgence whereof is somehow repressed.’ Repression or reserve – tension between what is felt and what finally finds expression – is at the creative heart of ‘the poetic’ – a quality, incidentally, not peculiar to poetry. All art forms, including not only literature, but also music, sculpture, painting, and even architecture had, according to Keble, a ‘poetical’ (and therefore ironic) element in them. ‘What is called the poetry of painting,’ he says, ‘simply consists in the apt expression of the artist’s own feeling’ – feeling, of course, expressed under tension (Keble, 1912, Vol. 1, p. 38). Such a radical re-shaping of genres would make meaningless the traditional categories that had dominated criticism ever since Aristotle. In this new ‘expressionistic’ framework ‘there will be as many kinds of poems as there are emotions of the human mind’ (Keble, 1912, Vol. 1, p. 88). For Keble there were two main classes of poets: Primary and Secondary. The Primary are ‘those who, spontaneously moved by impulse, resort to composition for relief and solace of a burdened or over-wrought mind’; the Secondary, ‘those who, for one reason or another, imitate the ideas, the expression, and the measures of the former’ (Keble, 1912, Vol. 1, pp. 53–4). His list of Primary poets was strictly classical, ending properly with Virgil – though Dante seems to have been added as an afterthought (Keble, 1912, Vol. 2, p. 471). There seem to have been problems, however, with Keble’s favorite moderns. Wordsworth, despite having had the published lectures specifically dedicated to him, remains tactfully unlisted by category. As a poet, he obviously belonged to the Primary, but, as a man, he suffered from the grave disadvantage of being neither an ancient Greek nor a Roman. Although Keble toyed with the idea of substituting ‘modern examples for the Greek and Latin,’ mentioning Byron and Shelley as those ‘mentally affected’ by the intolerable tensions of their art, he never included them in the text of the Lectures (Coleridge, J.T., 1869, Vol. 1, p. 240; and Keble, 1912, Vol. 2, p. 339). Keble classifies poetry by the writer’s emotions, which give relief and health through disguised utterance. In other words, irony, the language of disguise, is not merely intrinsic to poetry, it is also the key to mental health. Poetry is, par excellence, the healing art. For M.H. Abrams, writing on Keble in the mid-years of the twentieth century, this constituted nothing less than a ‘radical, proto-Freudian theory, which conceives





literature as disguised wish-fulfillment, serving the artist as a way back from incipient neurosis’ (1958, p. 145). How radical we can see from Keble’s definition of poetry itself. ‘Each several one of the so-called liberal arts,’ he declares, ‘contains a certain poetic quality of its own, and […] this lies in its power to heal and relieve the human mind when agitated by care, passion, or ambition’ (1912, Vol. 1, p. 53). This is such a bold and unexpected inversion of standard Romantic aesthetics that it is easy to miss what Keble is actually saying here. He does not believe that one of the powers of ‘the poetic’ is that it can heal or give relief to the person under strain; he believes that we must define ‘the poetic’ by this healing power. Ibi ars medica, ubi poesis. Where there is healing, there is the poetic. The theological implications of this are obvious – and were at once picked up by Newman. The Church itself is ‘poetic’ – and therefore the ultimate source of healing (Prickett, 2009, ch. 9). Religion is no longer the model for aesthetics, but aesthetics for religion. The critical nexus that began with Lowth has come full circle. Moreover the fact that Keble has problems with what an earlier generation would have called the relation of ‘the ancients and the moderns’ points to the fact that behind this apparently psychological theory of poetry lies a nascent theory of literary history. Just as developmental histories of human society, such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Education of the Human Race, Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man, Chateaubriand’s Genius of Christianity or Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art all stressed the idea that art and literature could only be properly understood in historical terms, so Keble, for all his apparent medievalism, sees the historical development of human consciousness as at once both aesthetic and religious. For those whom we might call ‘children of Lowth’ the notion of ‘literature’ in its modern sense scarcely existed. The idea of ‘writing which has a claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect’ is, according to the OED, ‘of very recent origin […]’ The first recorded usages belong only to the early nineteenth century. For most of the critics mentioned, distinctions between the religious and the poetic were still unclarified. Indeed, the idea of writing that had value in itself over and above its ostensible subject was in origin a direct transfer from the value-laden words of Scripture. It is hardly surprising that, of all forms of aesthetic criticism, that of literature should have retained the closest links to the book that gave rise to it. The emotions engendered by literary theory still suggest that the ache in the missing limb – that of biblical criticism – has never really faded.6



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1. By the early 1830s some dozen or so were available (see Morgan, 1965). 2. ‘Hermeneutics’ was a German coinage of Sigmund Jacob Baumgarten in the mid-eighteenth century. 3. The word had not yet, of course, been coined, but, not least because of Lowth’s powerful influence, it would follow shortly. The OED gives its first use as 1776. Coleridge, writing in The Friend in 1818, writes ‘Shakespeare was pursuing two methods at once; and besides the Psychological Method he also had to attend to the Poetical’ (Discourse on Method, ii, p. 40), adding the note: ‘we beg pardon for the use of this insolens verbum; but it is one of which our language stands in great need. We have no single term to express the Philosophy of the Human Mind.’ 4. Though they had been excerpted earlier, the first (and only) full English translation was that of G. Gregory in 1787. 5. Published in 1827, The Christian Year was to sell an average of 10,000 copies a year for the next 50 years – a figure only distantly challenged by Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and far greater than anything ever achieved by Wordsworth. 6. For a more detailed discussion, see Prickett (2002, Ch. 6).



Notes

Good Reading: The Ethics of Christian Literary Theory Cassandra Falke

Over the last decade, critical theory has taken what some have called an ethical turn, a turn away from poststructuralist play and back to questions of ethical representation, ethical conceptions of beauty, and ethical ideas of the self. New ethical criticism invokes two themes consistently: the body as a site of empathy and the communal self. This chapter investigates the way these two themes are handled in the New Testament and proposes that New Testament paradigms of the bodily and communal self provide sites for productive engagement between secular searches for ethical literary theories and Christian scholarship. Christian literary scholars need not enter critical conversations about the body and the communal self as outsiders to the topic. The Pauline letters frequently refer to the Christian community of believers as the body of Christ in a metaphor that unifies these two major concerns of ethical criticism (Rom. 12:4–5; Eph. 4:14–16; I Cor. 12:12–31). Augustine examines language as a bodily phenomenon and discusses its role in shaping human experience (2002a, pp. 60–71). In her essay ‘The Body and Human Values in Augustine of Hippo,’ Margaret Miles points out the centrality of embodied experience to Augustine’s theology saying, ‘He […] understood that the Christian doctrines of creation, the Incarnation of Christ, and the doctrine of the resurrection of the body all imply that the body has a high metaphysical status and is an integral and permanent part of human being’ (1990, p. 60). More recently, C.S. Lewis, writes that ‘Good reading […] though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three’ because Christian activity in love, justice, or reading ‘involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity’ (1961, p. 138). Putting ourselves into an author’s or a character’s place involves more than an act of self-subordination; 46



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it involves acknowledging that we only are selves as participants in the body of Christ on earth. We must build empathy and evaluative criteria on that basis. Christian literary scholarship, I will propose, promotes action in accordance with God’s will. Such scholarship requires that we treat ourselves, the authors we study, and their implied readers as bodies as well as souls, and it demands that we consider the ways these bodies are situated in political and materially hierarchical communities as well as the figurative Christian community. My development of this idea is indebted to two theological authors, John Milbank and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and two literary authors, Miguel de Cervantes and Jonathan Swift. I will follow Milbank’s suggestion that Christian ethics are radically non-violent (2006, pp. 401–2, 416; Rom. 12:18; Ps. 34:14; Matt. 5:9) – that is to say they demand not only non-violence in terms of our physical relationships to one another, but also in terms of our discourse. Milbank points out the need for an ‘idiom’ of non-violence through which we can discern ‘the shape of a non-antagonistic social practice’ (2006, p. 402). I attempt, in this chapter, to espouse a literary critical practice that moves toward developing this idiom. In part, non-antagonistic social practice (including literary critical practice) is a matter of language. Language, of course, mediates our social practice, but as Milbank points out, it also affirms the communal nature of our self-development: All personal relations embody an ‘indirect’ moment insofar as they are mediated by language, which is the residuum of previous social encounters. In this way, historical characters (persons) are only constituted through a plot, but, at the same time this plot-stricture is nothing but the outcome of the totality of interactions between person and person, and person and nature. (2006, p. 237) Our social relations are not, however, limited to linguistic relations. Rather they encompass all the bodily actions (including speech and writing) that we perform in the presence of, or through the assistance of others. For this reason, it is not sufficient for Christian criticism to propagate non-antagonistic language; it must promote non-antagonistic actions that go beyond language. As Bonhoeffer writes, ‘it is as whole men, who think and who act that we love God and our brothers’ (1995, p. 56). Knowledge is an action (Milbank, 2006, pp. 433–4), but its action is not sufficient for the fulfillment of our call to charity. If it is



Good Reading: The Ethics of Christian Literary Theory 47


by our charity that we will demonstrate our membership in the body of Christ (John 13:34–5), then this charity will ideally form the basis of all of our actions. Our selfhood is always already bound up in this larger body. Moreover, because we act on behalf of a body that goes beyond our individual bodies, our actions must also derive from and contribute to charitable actions being performed by the larger body. Bonhoeffer explains the practical outcome of this belief as it connects the action of knowledge to other physical, relational acts. He begins his book Ethics with the reflection that the first task of Christian ethics is to invalidate the knowledge of good and evil. ‘Already,’ he writes, ‘in the possibility of the knowledge of good and evil Christian ethics discerns a falling away from the origin. Man at his origin knows only one thing: God […] The knowledge of good and evil shows that he is no longer at one with this origin’ (1995, p. 21). Bonhoeffer surmises that our disunity with God leads to the injunction that we ‘Judge not’ (Matt. 7:1; all direct quotations are from the Revised Standard Version). ‘This is not an exhortation to prudence and forbearance in passing judgment on one’s fellow-men […] It is a blow struck at the heart of the man who knows good and evil’ (1995, p. 34). In judging, we focus on our own knowledge of good and evil rather than acting out of the communal knowledge of the body of Christ preserved in Scripture and the Church. Furthermore, we often use our own knowledge as leverage against the object of our judgment – be that another person, ourselves, or a book we are reading – and in this we act out of authority derived from an earthly, antagonistic hierarchy rather than the measure of our faith (Rom. 12:3). Judging, for Bonhoeffer, is the opposite of acting, and what we should be busy with is acting in the will of God. Much action, of course, begins with judgment, but for Bonhoeffer, acting that begins in the judgment of the knowledge of good and evil is not true action (1995, p. 35). True action is only accomplished through the will of God, and when we act based on our own judgment, we are acting outside of his will. The question of good reading, or good Christian reading, now becomes a question of reading without judgment – a question of how to read in a way that encourages godly action. While this sort of reading, with its emphasis on the will of God, may seem immeasurably separated from recent critical discourses about the ethics of reading, I do not think that it is so far removed that proponents of the action-oriented Christian criticism and proponents of secular ethical criticism cannot benefit from discourse with one another. In Bonhoeffer’s words, ‘there are not two scales of values, one for the world and one for the Christians, but there is the one and only word of God,



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which demands faith and obedience, and which is addressed to all mankind’ (1995, p. 354). Before proceeding, I should perhaps distinguish my use of the term ‘judgment’ from ‘discernment,’ which I use to describe the act of arriving at a decision without recourse to our own knowledge of good and evil. Naturally, even as we attempt to discern godly actions, our efforts are confounded by the flawed inheritance we receive from the Church, which is in some ways bound in time and earthly constructs, and by our own fallible exercise of discernment. The Christian search for ethically informed critical methods is as necessarily utopian as other searches for ethically informed criticism. The most significant difference between judgment and discernment as I use the terms is in the way that the critic positions him or herself in relation to knowledge. In the act of judgment, the critic understands knowledge as a human construct – historically contingent but open to the influence of our free will. The critic therefore bears the authority of a creator. With this comes the evaluative right of a creator in his or her capacity as a theorist and the evaluative right of a co-creator with the author of a literary work in his or her reading of a literary text. In the act of discernment, the critic understands all knowledge (including the knowledge of good and evil previously mentioned) as a divine construct and therefore performs an act of discovery rather than creation. This places the critic in a subordinate rather than authoritative position. Furthermore, in contrast to the secular construction of ethical ideals, ‘Christianity does not claim that the Good and the True are self-evident to merely objective reason, or dialectical argument. On the contrary, it from the first qualified philosophy by rhetoric in contending that the Good and the True are those things of which we “have a persuasion”, pistis, or “faith”’ (Milbank, 2006, p. 401). The act of discernment is always therefore an act of faith, performed from within the discourse community of the Church, in relation to Scripture, and from the unique material-historical position of our bodily existence. Our mortal situation, then, of being indebted to God, to the transhistorical Christian community, and to our future community of readers, reminds us that in spite of the physical limits of our bodies, our critical acts are always intersubjective. We are indebted to God for faith that our critical acts can contain positive ethical and inspirational value; we are indebted to the transhistorical Christian community for a large part of our linguistic and symbolic inheritance; and we are indebted to our future community of readers for their reactions to our scholarship. We hope, of course, that they will see, beyond our attempts at linguistic




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to act is to act on others, and so always from the very outset of the act, the act is as much that which is received by others as that which is intended. […] To be open to the reception of grace in a preparedness to act, is, therefore, to be open to the risk that another may immediately ruin the gracious character of our ‘poetic’ performance. (Milbank, 1997, p. 126) This implies, for the critic, responsibility for the wider effects of our critical acts and a risk that the charity we had hoped to promote through our critical act will come to naught. Turning from these general principles to the literary critical act more specifically, there are at least two kinds of reading that we need to not do if we will read to encourage godly action. We do not need to read as though our critical selves exist separately from our teaching-eatingshopping-dying-everyday selves. And, we do not need to read as though we are outside of a community of readers, writers, and thinkers. Being an English teacher and a reader of old books, I have found literary analogies for the two sorts of readers Christian critics need not be – Quixotes and Swiftian spiders.

The Quixotic critics Don Quixote lives in a world of his own. His author, Cervantes, tells us he ‘plunged himself so deeply in his reading of these [old] books, as he spent many times in the lecture of them whole days and nights, and in the end, through his little sleep and much reading, he dried up his brains in such sort as he lost wholly his judgment’ (1957, p. 19). Our knight Quixote has thus escaped the burden of judgment – a positive step according to Bonhoeffer – by floating free of reality altogether. He uses his knowledge of literature to construct a system of values and interpretation that appears to give continuity to an ultimately incongruous world. His text-derived system of values and interpretation is internally consistent, and, being unimpaired by judgment, Quixote acts in accordance with his text-derived system. If he sees giants threatening the land, he bravely rides forth to fight them because doing so is consistent with the ethical code of knighthood to which he subscribes. Not every critic is so brave. Some, like Quixote’s squire Sancho Panza, would rather just discuss ethics and not imperil themselves by acting on



beauty and philosophical truth, ‘God’s better beauty, grace’ in our acts (Hopkins, 1995, p. 84). But,

them. Sancho Panza has judgment, and consequently, when Quixote faces giants, his squire shies away from action. Upon Sancho expressing his reluctance to fight the giants Quixote sees, our knight denounces his squire’s apparent fear: ‘If thou beest afraid, go aside and pray, whilst I enter into cruel and unequal battle with them’ (1957, p. 60). Here, Quixote’s lesson for the Christian critic is that we must press on however unequal our battles may be. Even his exhortation to pray is an exhortation to action. Criticism that encourages godly action may conflict with administrative giants in the process of canon revision, or with political giants in laying bare an author’s process of composition, but Quixote models the action a Christian critic should take – he steadies his lance and spurs Rozinante forward. But there is a problem with Quixote’s decision, too – brave, active, and judgment-free as it is. As you may remember, the giants Quixote rides forward to fight are not giants at all, but windmills. Quixote would be the model critical theorist if only his theories corresponded with the world in which he lives. As it is, however, his theories, themselves a distillation of patterns repeated in books he has read, only match up with his theories. It may seem that there is no danger here for the critical theorist. As much as most of us seem to move in our own worlds, we would not, I think, mistake windmills for giants. Most of us would not do battle with either. But even critics concerned with ethics have, quixotically, advocated distance, even disjunction, between our work as critics and the reality of the rest of our lives. Edward Said, for example, whose The World, the Text, the Critic and Humanism and Democratic Criticism deal explicitly with ethics, says that we construct critical selves on a textual basis in a process not unlike Quixote’s. Our disciplinary linguistic base, Said argues, ‘and not a psychological, social or historical one’ supports the construction of ‘the critic’s proper self,’ which is neither ‘an empirical self (the same self that eats, goes shopping, breathes, dies) nor an official persona’ (1983, p. 147). Our use of a common, theoretically informed language allows us to construct authoring identities that are incongruous with what Said calls our ‘empirical’ selves. Situated in vistas we construct on a disciplinary linguistic base, the characters, authors, and historical readers that theorists imagine begin to look as untenable as Quixote’s giants. This is where the reminder that we are corporeal creatures becomes important. The body is important to ethical criticism in two ways. First, our bodies remind us that we cannot, after all, be separated into a critical self and an empirical self. Our body unites us, quite objectively. Symbolized by our personal names, it persists even if we wish to shake





off our names, as Alonso Quixana shakes off his to become Don Quixote (or some of us shake off ‘Mrs’ to become ‘Dr’). Quixote’s confidence that he can elect a new identity while his niece and housekeeper can see from his thin, tired body that he is the same Alonso Quixana they love is what convinces the women he is crazy. Critics like Paul de Man (1986, pp. 39–43) and Edward Said (1983, p. 147) may not be crazy for advocating ethical reading while simultaneously maintaining that our critical selves float free of sodden materiality (none of them, as far as I know have gone tilting after windmills). However, they do nullify the most basic means we use for holding one another ethically accountable when they dismiss the body’s ontological unity with the soul. By articulating a tendency within our discipline to use language for the construction of specialized critical selves, they, to their credit, have made us aware of a potentially unethical use of language. As Christian critics we should be careful of what we say, of course, but also of how we say it. When our specialized disciplinary language does not enable thoughts we could not say any other way but instead distracts us from our own ordinariness, we should drop it. Furthermore, we can only depart on chivalric crusades in ethical criticism if we are also committed to performing ethical action in our lives as teachers, mothers, husbands, consumers, and colleagues. The second reason bodies are important for criticism that encourages godly action is because they provide the means through which we empathize with others. In his 2003 book, After Theory, Marxist critic Terry Eagleton asserts that the body must be understood as the basis of ethical universalism because ‘It is the mortal, fragile, suffering, ecstatic, needy, dependent, desirous, compassionate body which furnishes the basis of all moral thought’ (2003a, p. 155). When Christians look for the universal source of our ethical beliefs, we look past the body merely, to the Creator, and through the Incarnation, the Participant in our bodily form. Yet Eagleton claims that our ‘capacity for fellow feeling’ forms the basis of our moral values and that our bodies provide the capacity for fellow feeling. Loving our neighbors as we love ourselves likewise demands a capacity for fellow feeling, and Christ does present our shared embodiment as a criterion for ethical action (Matt. 19:19). What father among us, he asks, would give his son a stone when he has asked for bread (Matt. 7:9). No loving father who has ever been hungry. And when the rich man, who had walked so many days by Lazarus starving at his gate, learns to care for someone other than himself, it is because he has learned how a tongue can thirst for water (Luke 16: 19–31). As Christian critics we are bound to aesthetics informed by ethical empathy for fellow bodies.



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Romantic as his adventures may be, then, we must not be Quixotes in our criticism. Moving forward precisely one hundred years from Don Quixote, we must also keep from becoming Swiftian spiders if our goal is to use literary criticism to promote godly action. In his 1704, ‘Battle of the Books,’ Jonathan Swift enters the contemporary debate about the value of ancient versus modern knowledge. The ancient books, bickering with the moderns shelved near them in the St James’s Library one Friday afternoon, hear a ruckus in a corner and look up to see a bee and a spider having words with one another. The bee has flown into the outer edge of the spider’s web, and the latter castigates the intruder (with too many expletives to quote it here) for sullying his spun palace. As their argument unfolds, we see that the spider, perched atop a complex web spun of his own secretions, represents the moderns and the bee, who finds sustenance among the flowers and produces wax (light) and honey (sweetness), the ancients. The spider’s home is described as a castle ‘with ports to sally out upon all occasions of prey and defense’ (2003, p. 7). Corpses litter the web. Excepting his prey, he relies on no one. He directs his energies toward sustaining himself by himself and dwells in peace and plenty. The bee he calls a ‘vagabond’ and a ‘freebooter’ since he has no home to himself and lives off the flowers’ production of nectar (2003, p. 8). Nevertheless, the bee clearly triumphs in the dispute. He ends their debate with this summation of two kinds of learning – the learning that puffs up its possessor and traps others in ignorance versus the learning that gleans the best from what has come before in order to advance sweetness and light. ‘In short,’ begins our bee The question comes to this: whether is the nobler being of the two, that which by a lazy contemplation of four inches round; by an overwhelming pride, which feeding and engendering on itself, turns all into excrement and venom; produces nothing at last, but flybane and a cobweb: or that, which, by an universal range, with long search, much study, true judgment, and distinction of things, brings home honey and wax. (2003 p. 9) Swift’s favor (and ours) falls to the bee. I am not the first to find this passage exceptional. Stephen Jay Gould, the late evolutionary biologist, writes, ‘No one has ever set forth the



The Swiftian spider


issue more incisively’ (2003, p. 149). Nor am I the first to see in the bee’s two kinds of learning a description, not only of the ancients and the seventeenth-century ‘moderns,’ but also two sorts of critics. In his 1869 Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold identifies the critic’s most important task as the identification and preservation of ‘sweetness and light.’ He converts the bee’s honey and wax into beauty and wisdom (Arnold, 1932, pp. 43–72). But the lesson bears repeating, particularly now that pressures to develop and publish novel arguments over the theory and interpretation of literature pervade our discipline. We are tempted to become experts in our ‘four inches round’ of specialized knowledge, tempted perhaps to prey on the flaws in someone else’s argument rather than risk our own interpretations. But such preying, of course, neither is nor encourages godly action. As participants in a Christian community that stretches before and beyond us in time, we don’t want to supply our community with ‘excrement and venom’ but with sweetness and light. Paul reminds us that we are to think on ‘whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things’ (Phill. 4:8). This accords well with the bee’s injunction to bring home honey and wax. While it may at first seem that Paul offers here a limp commentary on the power of positive thinking, he in fact suggests a means by which we can perform criticism in a spirit of discernment rather than judgment. Judgment, as defined earlier in this chapter, necessarily involves violence because it requires the judge to imagine him or herself in a position of arbitrary authority over text and reader and to impose his or her will upon it. Even if this violence is not physically enacted, and even though it cannot be intellectually efficacious without the reader’s consent, it nevertheless encourages a critical habit of violent interaction with others that is opposed to the ideal of a Christian community. Since our critical selves are not separable from our sleeping-eating-shopping-dying ‘empirical’ selves, we are as accountable for the violence that we enact in our criticism as we are for the violence produced through our physical participation in oppressive hierarchies or violent regimes. If, however, we read, we think (and write) on what is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, we will be subordinating ourselves to the sources from which we learn to discern the true, the honorable, the just, the pure, the lovely – in essence, the godly. In the verse that follows this, Paul situates the actions of true, honorable, just, pure, and lovely thinking in a continuum with what we have learned from the Christian community that



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precedes and lives with us, and that which we bestow upon the Christian community that surrounds and will outlive us. He writes: ‘What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, do’ (Phill. 4:9). The four sources of knowledge here (learning, receiving, hearing, seeing) reinforce the conception of knowledge as action and provide guidance for discerning the true, the just, and so on. The actions that we are here instructed to perform are things that we have not only learned from others, but actively received into ourselves. They are things that Paul not only preached as worthy, but also performed. They come to us from the Christian community and through our bodily selves (hearing and sight). This makes our understanding of the pure, lovely, just, honorable, and true historically contingent and fallible. Certainly, we have learned and received flawed doctrines and admired flawed deeds. But placing ourselves in the position of recipient and admirer makes us less likely to perform violence in our criticism than if we were to position ourselves as judge. It enables us, in fact, to discover cause for loving our neighbors because it helps us discern properties of the divine (true, just, lovely, and so on) in them. Our criticism, then, becomes a performance of a just, true, lovely, and in short, godly act capable of inspiring more such acts as discerning readers learn and receive whatever is godly in our work. As an idea is sifted through critic after critic searching out godly relational acts and acting on that in his or her own writing, reading, teaching, mothering, dying, and so on, then it will, we hope, become more pure, more just. Perhaps more importantly, however, we will contribute through this process to the growth of Christian practice in the realm of literary criticism and, as Paul writes in the conclusion of the passage from Philippians that I have been quoting ‘the God of peace will be with [us].’ I have only a couple of thoughts on this before I close. Being ‘members in particular’ of Christ’s body (1 Cor. 12:27), the specific ways we go about our teaching, reading, and writing will necessarily differ. If we desire to move beyond criticism that focuses on our own knowledge of good and evil or our own knowledge of genre precedents, then the first godly action we must take is to ask ourselves what kind of members we are in Christ’s body. What have our own bodies gone through to uniquely equip us as empathetic readers? What does our position in the historical and contemporary Christian community enable us to contribute to the Christian communal body? ‘In much wisdom is much vexation,’ the ecclesiast tells us (Ecc. 1:18). So it may be with wisdom about our plain bodies and small communal influence. We may feel at first that we can’t do much. But he says





again, ‘Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do […] Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might‘ (Ecc. 9: 7–10). The place we want to get back to as ethical critics is that place where we began, the garden, where Bonhoeffer tells us we saw only God and performed only God’s ordained actions. Our bodies and our membership in the Christian community then are not what we’re looking at, but what we’re looking through to find those enjoyable actions God has long ago approved.



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Sites of Resistance: Christ and Materiality after the New Historicism Mitchell M. Harris

Slavoj Žižek has been, and continues to be, harshly criticized for the two nominal presuppositions of his work – his odd mixture of Lacanianism and Leninist Marxism vis-à-vis Hegel’s dialectical materialism. Who can forget the startling merger of these two in his short treatise, On Belief, where he decided to denounce academic post-secular spiritualism as an empty construct, a fetish which he terms ‘Western Buddhism’? ‘One is almost tempted,’ he begins, ‘to resuscitate here the old infamous Marxist cliché of religion as the “opium of the people,” as the imaginary supplement of the terrestrial misery: the “Western Buddhist” meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist dynamic while retaining the appearance of mental sanity’ (2001b, p. 13). This intentionally realized, politically incorrect reading of ‘Western Buddhism’ appears counter-intuitive to those who have come to believe emergent spirituality to be a means of sanctuary from Western, Eurocentrist, colonialist ideology. Žižek maintains, though, that such sanctuary is a fantasy-construct – inauthentic, a mere semblance. Hence, ‘Western Buddhism’ fits the fetishist mode of ideology, where the fetish ‘is effectively a kind of inverse of the symptom. That is to say, the symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed Other Scene erupts, while fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth’ (Žižek, 2001b, p. 13). For Žižek, then, Western Buddhism and myriad other spiritualisms of our time embody the ‘Lie’ insofar as they permit their adherents to ‘fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that [one] is really not in it’ (2001b, p. 15). In order to counteract the hegemony of post-secular spiritualist discourse in the Western academy, Žižek thus responds in the unlikeliest 57



5


of ways: by asserting the philosophical and socio-political viability of Christianity, the old, quaint religion left behind by the more ‘sophisticated’ and ‘intellectual’ forms of New Age spiritualisms. In his preface to The Fragile Absolute, he turns to what he terms ‘the old liberal slander which draws on the parallel between the Christian and Marxist “Messianic” notion of history’ (2000, p. 2). Instead of adopting a ‘defensive stance,’ the explicit denial of Marxism’s intersecting interests with the Christian religion, materialists must be willing to risk the opposite stance, if their critical enterprise is to have any substantial bearing on late-capitalist culture. Materialists should explicitly endorse, he argues, the very thing they are accused of validating in the first place – that is, their Christian legacy. ‘Yes, there is a direct lineage from Christianity to Marxism,’ he writes. ‘Yes, Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade’ (2000, p. 2). Needless to say, the unexpected camaraderie of materialist critique and a religion whose fundamental theological tenets are steeped in metaphysical speculation is bound to turn heads. Does not the act of joining Christians on the other ‘side of the barricade’ announce the death knell of a materialist critique that was once void of religious sentiment – a critique that prided itself on its abstemious rejection of the maligned ‘opiate’ of the masses? And does not the act of tying Christianity to a materialist worldview fundamentally threaten to occlude and erase this religion’s metaphysical traditions – for example, its theologies of Incarnation, Resurrection, and the Atonement of the Cross? Indeed, for the majority of Žižek’s critics, his relationship with Christianity is ill-conceived. From the secular rationalist position, he dallies with rather bothersome notions of universality. From the austere fideist perspective (which takes on two competitive forms: conservative fundamentalism and liberal neospiritualism), however, he delimits the metaphysical scope of spirituality: there is no transcendent God. Thus, on the one hand, Christian content is violently stripped of its proper theology; but, on the other, the specificity of Christianity disrupts politically correct (pseudo-)universalism.1 One might posit, then, that in announcing a new brotherhood between materialist critique and Christianity, Žižek is an unrelenting philosophical opponent of fetishism (political, philosophical, and religious): he is committed to disavowing himself of the Lie/fetish, even if it risks appearing or sounding politically incorrect, Eurocentric, colonialist, or, in this specific instance, metaphysical or Christian. His theoretical matrix is determined by one’s ability to find and announce, in the symptomal mode, the ‘exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed Other Scene erupts.’ And



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here, I would argue, the repressed Other Scene which most interests Žižek as of late is none other than Christianity. My aim in this chapter, then, is to do three distinct yet interrelated things that point out how Christianity and critical theory intersect in Žižek’s work and how this particular intersection can highlight an important theoretical gap in New Historicism, one of the poststructuralist theories which dominate much of the landscape of literary scholarship today. In the first section, I unfold how Žižek came to see Christianity as the philosophical means to mediate the gap between the material and the metaphysical, and thus the means to develop a philosophy that counteracts the deadening ideology of Western liberalism. As I will demonstrate, Žižek’s turn to Christianity is largely indebted to the ontological philosophy of Alain Badiou. Thus, in order to get to Žižek’s treatment of Christianity, I believe one must first establish how Badiou’s figuration of Christianity operates. In the second section of this chapter, I examine how Žižek and Badiou reorient the critical conversation regarding historicity, power relations, and revolutionary acts – a conversation which, to this point in time, has largely been dominated by the poststructuralist philosophy of Michel Foucault. Because Foucault played such a large role in establishing the theoretical underpinnings of the New Historicism, I find it necessary to stress the glaring differences between his material philosophy and the material philosophy of Žižek and Badiou. This articulation of philosophical differences then leads me to the final section of the chapter, where I convey how Badiou and Žižek’s philosophical visions open up a space in which one can critique the new historicism. In turn, I believe that this offers the opportunity to articulate how the Christian legacy remains relevant to literary studies, not simply as a site for cultural reflection but as a living component of critical theory.

History and power relations To demonstrate the meaningful impact Žižek’s philosophy can have upon critical theory, let me first return to his rhetoric, which is intent, in part, upon denouncing identity politics. Because of our Western locus, the hegemonic ideology that most concerns Žižek is, of course, late capitalism – the true target of his materialist discourse. In turning to postmodernity’s near-indivisible contract with late capitalism in light of the Christian legacy, Žižek is perceptive enough not to ask the tired question of ‘What would Jesus do?’ but ‘What does Jesus do?’ – already, here and now, at this moment. Foremost, according to Žižek, the person of Christ carves out an interpellative space from which one can criticize



Christ and Materiality after the New Historicism 59


the concept of ideological interpellation itself. Through the person of Christ, he argues, we are able to witness ‘a commitment, an engaged position of struggle, an uncanny “interpellation” beyond ideological interpellation, an interpellation which suspends the performative force of the “normal” ideological interpellation that compels us to accept our determinate place within the sociosymbolic edifice’ (2003, p. 112). Žižek’s work, however, was never fully capable of articulating the possibility of this interpellation beyond imminent ideological interpellation until it focused in detail on the ontology of power relations, and it did so, in part, by becoming familiar with the philosophical work that Alain Badiou was doing in France. What Žižek inherits from Badiou is a notion of an evental vision of historical rupture, thus permitting him to further clarify Lacan’s notion of the rude intrusions of the Real into the Symbolic edifice and, in turn, to identify the ontological process of subjectivization. Antagonisms, or historical ruptures, are evental forces – what Badiou terms ‘Events’ or ‘Truth-Events.’2 Žižek’s interest in Badiou’s concept of the Truth-Event becomes apparent through his materialist determinations. In his concern for St Paul’s functional status as vocalizer of the Truth-Event within the Christian tradition, Žižek finds through Badiou the analogical means to understand how one can replace an ideological paradigm (‘make things new’) and develop a universal ‘Event’ available to all. As Badiou plainly acknowledges, his philosophical project risks the return to regressive, absolutist ideas – for example, the return of the Cartesian subject – but ultimately circumvents this fate by articulating an ontology of the subject from the ‘more-than-modern’ position (2004b, p. xv). In order for being (and, hence, subjectivity) to be thinkable, he posits, ‘it has to be considered on the basis of the mathematical theory of multiplicities’ (2004b, p. xv), where it is reduced to its barest core, an unrecognizable and unnameable ‘something,’ and, as two of Badiou’s latest translators comment, ‘such being could only be described as an “inconsistent multiplicity” ’ (Feltham and Clemens in Badiou, 2004a, p. 13). In turn, in order for truth, as such, to ‘come forth, a hazardous supplementing of being is required, a situated but incalculable event’ (2004b, p. xv). The subject then can be ‘constituted’ when he or she effects ‘a multiplicity that is anonymous and egalitarian, which is to say, generic,’ or, ‘For-All’ (2004b, p. xv). As Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens note, Badiou ‘takes it as given that in the contemporary world the subject can no longer be theorized as the self-identical substance that underlies change, nor as the product of reflection [pace Descartes], nor as the correlate of an object [pace



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Derrida and, somewhat differently, Foucault]’ (2004a, p. 3; also 1991). However, it is these very givens that delimit poststructuralism’s implicit ontology. Because there is no substance, because there is no self-reflexivity, and because there is no object (and, likewise, no stable correlate of the object), the distinction between the field of ontology and the theory of the subject vanishes into thin air.3 While this loss may be championed by the very poststructuralists who brought it to fruition, it is not without its dire philosophical consequences: foremost, it creates inherent problems surrounding the issues of identity and agency. If there is no selfidentity, how does one explain autonomous rational action, especially in the realm of the ethical? When we strip the question of its implicit political ties (its neoconservative intent), one can see that the question properly enunciates a major gap in poststructuralist thought. The identification of this gap becomes the driving force behind Badiou’s and, subsequently, Žižek’s ontological formulation of the Event. And it also becomes clear that in the back of their minds looms the figure of Michel Foucault – in part, because power was inseparable from subjectivity for Foucault. As Feltham and Clemens are quick to point out, during the middle period of his career, Foucault ‘argued that networks of disciplinary power not only reach into the most intimate spaces of the subject, but actually produce what we call subjects’ (Badiou, 2004a, p. 5). However, Foucault was content to claim that power itself ‘produces resistance’ (Badiou, 2004a, p. 5; Foucault, 1978, p. 95). The inconsistency is obvious. One cannot make sense of the subject as a simultaneous – and, for that matter, simultaneously independent – locus of power and resistance, especially when the subject is neither self-reflexive nor the correlative of a stabilized object. Foucault desperately needed to carve out either a space independent of power or to articulate the relationship between resistance and independence. He did neither, and, in his later career, only dealt with the problem of agency by ‘assigning agency to those subjects who resist power by means of an aesthetic project of selfauthoring’ (Badiou, 2004a, p. 6). One can thus fairly claim that he never realized the ontology of such an agency – that is, he never investigated why some subjects take on a project of self-authoring while others do not. In this regard, then, Badiou re-exerts a philosophical counterbalance to poststructuralism’s split issue of identity and agency. By returning to the issue of ontology – more specifically, the issue of an ontology of the subject in tension with a general ontology – Badiou reconfigures the position from which one could – and, perhaps, should – address the current issue of ethics. He proposes that one work directly from the being of subjectivity in relation to being in general. For his





theoretical purposes, ‘the question of agency is not so much a question of how a subject can initiate an action in an autonomous manner but rather how a subject emerges through an autonomous chain of actions within a changing situation’ (2004a, p. 6). How does this function? In mathematical set theory, the multiple cannot be reduced to the specific, or the individual. All things are of a multiple, a set, and all sets are multiple multiplicities stretching from infinity to infinity, so to speak. As Žižek recently summarizes this position from a psychoanalytic lens, reality is the multiplicity of multiplicities which cannot be generated or constituted from (or reduced to) some form of Ones as its elementary (‘atomic’) constituents. Multiplicities are not multiplications of One; they are irreducible multiplicities, which is why their opposite is not One but Zero, the ontological void: no matter how far we progress in our analysis of multiplicities, we never reach the zero level of its simple constituents – the only ‘background’ of multiplicities is thus Zero, the void. (2009, p. 90) Hence, applied to ontology, set theory allows Badiou to conceive of the ‘situation’ without reference to history, or, perhaps more specifically, a particular historicized narrative, because such narratives are merely one emanation of the set that is always there. Badiou thus is free to claim that ‘every situation, inasmuch as it is, is a multiple composed of an infinity of elements, each one of which is itself a multiple’ (2001, p. 25). In this regard, all things (multiple multiplicities), including history, are immanent for Badiou – present and available in the now: ‘Infinite alterity is quite simply what there is. Any experience at all is the infinite deployment of infinite differences’ (2001, p. 25). Thus, he argues that ‘[e]ven the apparently reflexive experience of myself is by no means the intuition of a unity but a labyrinth of differentiations’ (2001, pp. 25–6). As the multiple multiplicities stretch out in the ever-moving now, it becomes apparent that the subject is not confined to history as such; rather, history is merely, in Badiou’s jargon, the structuration of the situation as it orients itself around an Event, and the Event can only be determined by the fidelity of a subject to it. Thus, in any given moment, Badiou realizes that radical change is possible. Or, to put this in Žižek’s terms, there is an uncanny interpellative space that stands apart from ideological interpellation, and Christ, above all other historical figures, best occupies it.



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So let us seek out what a Badiouian-Žižekian critique has to do with historicity, especially in a Christian context and within the confines of literary criticism. For one, I would like to suggest that such a critique becomes a means by which one can seriously challenge the stranglehold Anglo-American liberal neohistoricism has maintained in literary studies for the past quarter century without reverting to a naive moral formalism. To clarify the nature of this possibility, let me turn to some formative meta-commentaries that emerged after the rise of the New Historicism by two of its most notable practitioners in Renaissance studies, Louis Montrose and Stephen Greenblatt. In his introduction to The Purpose of Playing, Montrose succinctly clarifies the New Historicism’s ultimate relationship with the subversioncontainment debate by conceding that at one point the ‘binary logic of subversion/containment’ created ‘a closed conceptual structure’ (1996, p. 9). Hence, he would come to believe that ‘any strict argument for the containment of subversion that views power as crystallized in the state apparatus is inconsistent with Foucault’s own view that volatile and contingent relations of power saturate social space’ (1996, pp. 9–10). In turn, Montrose exonerates Stephen Greenblatt’s early formulations of ‘containment’ by reminding us that Greenblatt ultimately found intellectual repose in Shakespearean Negotiations, where, unlike in his earlier versions of the oft-cited essay, ‘Invisible Bullets,’ he ‘repudiates the strong form of the containment argument’ (Montrose, 1996, p. 9, n. 11). As Greenblatt plainly acknowledges in his introduction to Shakespearean Negotiations, if it was once ‘important to speak of power in relation to Renaissance literature’ in the act of devising a cultural poetics, then ‘it was equally important to resist the integration of all images and expressions into a single master discourse’ (1988, pp. 2–3). Like Foucault before them, Greenblatt and Montrose emphasize that [p]ower’s condition of possibility […] must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. (Foucault, 1978, p. 93)



Christ, Paul, and the singular soul of revolt


For Montrose, ‘power is never monolithic, and power relations always imply multiple sites not only of power but also of resistance, sites that are of variable configuration, intensity, and effectiveness’ (1996, p. 10), and for Greenblatt, ‘[e]ven those literary texts that sought most ardently to speak for a monolithic power could be shown to be the sites of institutional and ideological contestation’ (1988, p. 3). As terms like ‘monolithic’ and ‘primary existence’ became anathema to Foucault, and subsequently the New Historicism (and is this not then the exact point at which the need to erase Christianity, the totalizing religion, and Hegel, the totalizing atheist, from critical theory became necessary?), how one could understand subjectivity and power relations was suddenly, and paradoxically, predetermined and codified. This moment was anticipated by Greenblatt’s earlier work, Renaissance SelfFashioning. Here, however, a familiar problem becomes apparent. The concept of ‘self-fashioning’ becomes enclosed in its own discourse. How so? Like Montrose, Greenblatt hides the self-enclosed, self-referential discourse of neohistoricism behind the accusation that true Marxist, materialist critique is the self-enclosed culprit – and the accusation, given the power of the poststructuralist condition, is thus more powerful than the evidence rendered visible. After all, Greenblatt claims that ‘[s]elf-fashioning is in effect the Renaissance version of […] the cultural system of meanings that creates specific individuals by governing the passage from abstract potential to concrete historical embodiment’ (1980, p. 3). Marxism is a foil to this line of logic, because, as Greenblatt acknowledges, ‘Marx himself vigorously resisted this functional absorption of art [into culture], and subsequent Marxist aesthetics, for all its power and sophistication, has never satisfactorily resolved the theoretical problems raised in the Grundrisse and elsewhere’ (1980, p. 4). What truly frightens Greenblatt, then, is not selfenclosure, but the ghost of the universal metanarrative: ‘We drift back toward a conception of art as addressed to a timeless, cultureless, universal human essence or, alternatively as a self-regarding, autonomous, closed system – in either case, art as opposed to social life. Self-fashioning then becomes a subject only for sociology, literature for literary criticism’ (1980, p. 4). But why, one might ask, does Greenblatt choose to focus upon ‘canonical’ or ‘great’ literature in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (More, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare)? As he himself admits, ‘in part because […] great art is an extraordinarily sensitive register of the complex struggles and harmonies of culture’ (1980, p. 5). But a followup question begs to be asked here: how does art become ‘extraordinarily sensitive’ in the first place? This very question renders noticeable



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the false either-or at the heart of Greenblatt’s construct. The possibility of a third is totally erased. Like Foucault, New Historicism suspends the question of the ontology of the subject: why do More, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare take on the project of self-authoring, while others do not? In this regard, Greenblatt’s supposed ‘dialectic’ is too neat, too efficient, and this is precisely where one should assert into literary studies the dual testimony of materialism and Christianity. In reassessing the ontology of the subject, Žižek and Badiou provide us with a means to reassess power relations as a whole. How so? Recall one of Foucault’s famous dictums regarding power in the first volume of his History of Sexuality. ‘Where there is power, there is resistance,’ he writes, ‘and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (1978, p. 95). Foucault surmises that all points of resistance operate within the nexus of power networks. ‘Hence,’ he concludes, ‘there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary’ (1978, pp. 95–6), and because he sees resistance as diffuse and disorganized, he maintains that radical ruptures are merely occasional. ‘Are there no great radical ruptures,’ he asks, ‘massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance’ (1978, p. 96). Badiou and Žižek, however, ardently disagree. From the ontological perspective, radical ruptures are always possible and plausible because of the dynamism of multiple multiplicities, and when these ruptures occur, they occur in the process of the self-realization of one’s own agency. Hence, to turn Foucault’s dictum on its head, there can be a single locus of great refusal, a soul of revolt, a source of rebellion, and a pure and realized law of the revolutionary. This, indeed, is where Christianity comes back into the fold. Badiou realizes this soul of revolt through the material structuration of Christianity. For him, St Paul is the ‘poetthinker of the event,’ because he ‘brings forth the entirely human connection […] between the general idea of a rupture, an overturning, and that of a thought-practice that is this rupture’s subjective materiality’ (2003, p. 2). Paul is able to make this connection between the general idea of a rupture and its subjective materiality, because he separates ‘each truth procedure from the cultural “historicity” wherein opinion presumes to dissolve it’ (2003, p. 6). As such, he presents a historical model for envisioning the possibility of realizing a ‘universal teaching within history itself’ (2003, p. 5). It is the very possibility of this teaching’s universality, however, that separates the systematic thought





that arises from the Pauline legacy from the implicit systematicity of neohistoricism, which, for Žižek and Badiou, is embroiled far too often in notions of cultural relativity, the political, and identity politics. As Badiou argues, truth procedures cannot ‘take root in the element of identity.’ Truth always erupts as a singular entity amidst the cogent set of multiplicities, and if it is singular at the point of eruption, then its ‘singularity is immediately universalizable’ and subsequently and necessarily ‘breaks with identitarian singularity’ (2003, p. 11). As it were, Paul adheres to this principle of singular eruption and immediate universalization. For him the truth of Jesus Christ is not to be codified through the ethnic identity of the emergent religion’s adherents. Rather, the truth of Jesus Christ is immediately stripped of its ethnic situation. Badiou deduces this equation from Paul’s maxims that ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female’ (Gal. 3:28; all direct quotations are from the New International Version), and ‘glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For God does not show favoritism’ (Rom. 2:10–11). As a result, a materialist reading of Paul and his political situation establishes a verifiable procedure for announcing truth from the ‘more-than-modern’ perspective. Here, then, we are increasingly distancing ourselves from the Foucauldian notion of power relations that the New Historicism appropriates. If Christianity has anything left to say in the realm of literary criticism, then, it seemingly has something to say about subjectivity, and, in the eyes of Badiou and Žižek, it does not recoil from the materialist project. Indeed, the Incarnation instantiates the materialist project as such. The last question to ask, then, is: what is it that Christianity-cum-materialism can say in the realm of literary criticism?

The Christian legacy and literary criticism To answer this very question, I’d like to propose that the procedure of truth that Badiou outlines from reading Paul through a strict materialist lens generates a new way to confront historicist nominalism. It is only fitting that I return to the New Historicist accounts I have been considering in order to express the points of departure Žižek and Badiou allow us to make. Let us remember, first, the apprehension neo-historicists express when approaching the ‘ineffable’ genius of the literary artist. ‘The invocation of “genius” normally marks the limit of understanding,’ Montrose contends. Nevertheless, he believes that ‘genius,’ properly understood, presupposes ‘historical conditions of possibility,’ which ‘we



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should endeavor to specify before we genuflect to the ineffable’ (1996, p. 206). Ascertaining these historical conditions of possibility aids in one’s ability to suggest that the special qualities of Shakespeare’s corpus ‘emerged and developed within an individually configured framework of determinate historical and material conditions’ (1996, p. 208). The core of this argument, however, is ‘self-consuming,’ so to speak. One would do well to remember that earlier in The Purpose of Playing, Montrose claims that the possibility of reeling in ‘determinate historical and material conditions’ is complicated by cultural dynamism. His second of three New Historicist methodological propositions declares that ‘the apparent systematicity of society is perpetually produced, adjusted, and transformed by means of the interactive social practices of individuals and groups’ (1996, p. 15). To reproduce any ‘determinate historical and material conditions’ (my emphasis), then, is to betray the dynamic circulation of social energies that he and Greenblatt advance. Greenblatt, however, anticipates the widening gyre, cutting off debate by asserting that the ‘whole point’ of the four essays in Shakespearean Negotiations ‘is that they do not sketch a unified field’ (1988, p. 19). The propositions Montrose and Greenblatt make with regard to materialist history thus directly reveal the very same problem Badiou and Žižek find in Foucault’s philosophy. From their perspective, Montrose and Greenblatt would fail adequately to make sense of the Shakespearean situation precisely because they see his identity as being formulated by power and resistance. Agency is quietly pushed aside. Could it be that the true ‘genius’ of Shakespeare is that he, like Paul before him, is a subject to truth – that he too finds respite in an uncanny form of interpellation that is outside ideological interpellation? Indeed, this is where I believe the intersection of Christianity with Žižek and Badiou’s materialism is most applicable to literary studies. How so? Let me turn to the outline of truth procedures that Badiou produces through the person of St Paul.4 Like Paul before him, Shakespeare adheres to the principle of singular eruption and immediate universalization. For him the truth of the new drama is not to be codified through the ethnic identity of the emergent stage’s participants. Rather, the truth of Shakespearean drama is immediately stripped of its ethnic situation – that is, for Shakespeare, all the world’s a stage. Hence, England is universalized through the process of playing out in that world – Athens, Cyprus, France, Rome, the New World, and so on. Like Paul before him, Shakespeare understands that the early modern stage cannot be supported by a preconstituted subset. Thus, he simultaneously permits classical and medieval conventions to circulate in his drama, while





resisting the temptation to incorporate their substance into the process of truth. Moreover, since truth is a universal singularity, Shakespeare rises to meet four distinct criteria. (1) Shakespeare does not pre-exist the event he declares (in this case, he does not pre-exist Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, and others). (2) Truth is entirely subjective (that is, it happens at the level of the individual; in this instance, Shakespeare generates himself against his classical and medieval predecessors). (3) Shakespeare is faithful to the declaration, understanding the truth of his stage to be a process, not an illumination (for example, he demonstrates his fidelity to the truth of the theater by demonstrating his commitment to the process of the stage: Aristotle’s unities become less and less important as his career advances, the soliloquy emerges mid-career, and so on. In other words, Shakespeare doesn’t happen; he develops over time). And (4) truth is indifferent to the state of the situation (Shakespeare will look and not look to his peers; he will look and not look to the crown). Indeed, Žižek argues as much in, of all places, his small monograph, Violence, by embracing the core Marxist argument Greenblatt (apropos Foucault) had to reject in Renaissance Self-Fashioning. ‘Surely Marx already pointed out how the true problem with Homer was not to explain the roots of his epics in early Greek society, but to account for the fact that, although clearly rooted in their historical context, they were able to transcend their historical origin and speak to all epochs,’ Žižek writes. ‘Perhaps the most elementary hermeneutic test of the greatness of a work of art is its ability to survive being torn from its original context’ (2008, p. 152). This, then, is why one can rightly suggest that there ‘is a romantic Shakespeare and a realist Shakespeare’ (2008, p. 152), and, I would add, a New Historicist Shakespeare. What I am proposing, then, is not an absolute rejection of historicity as such, but a frank admission that the New Historicism is incapable of articulating its foundational logic without acknowledging materialism’s need to be supplemented by the metaphysical, or, to be more abrupt, Christianity. If we are to believe that there is no Shakespeare without historical conditions, then we must also accept that there are no historical conditions without the Event called ‘Shakespeare.’ Christianity rightfully restores a much-needed dialectical balance here. In this way, the old, quaint religion still speaks to literary criticism.

Notes 1. For a more thorough explanation of the fideist and secularist objections to Žižek’s treatments of Christianity, see Creston Davis’s introduction to The Monstrosity of Christ (Davis, 2009, esp. pp. 5–14).



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2. Peter Hallward offers one of the more succinct definitions of the ‘Event’: ‘For Badiou, first and foremost, an event is “purely haphazard [hasardeux], and cannot be inferred from the situation”.’ It ‘is the unpredictable result of chance and chance alone. Whereas the “structure” of a situation “never provides us with anything other than repetition,” every event is unprecedented and unexpected’ (2003, p. 114). For a greater understanding of the Event, see Badiou (2006, passim). 3. Here I am greatly indebted to Feltham and Clemens’s helpful ‘An Introduction to Alain Badiou’s Philosophy,’ in Infinite Thought (Badiou, 2004a, pp. 1–38). 4. Here I systematically follow Badiou’s three rules regarding subjectivization that emerge from his study of St Paul. To see the philosophical correlates of these literary theses, see Badiou (2003, pp. 14–15).




Post-Secular Queer: Christianity, Queer Theory, and the Unsolvable Mysteries of Sexual Desire Norman W. Jones

What could Christianity and queer theory possibly have in common? The two are often considered anathema to each other. Queer theory is generally committed to an existential skepticism regarding the possibility of a transcendent, divine source of meaning. Its intellectual lineage can be traced to Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously articulated such skepticism by asserting, ‘God is dead.’ Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals provides the template for queer theory’s assertion that the concept of an ethically normative hierarchy of hetero- versus homosexuality is the contingent product of a specific historical context. While many Christians consider this and other ethically normative concepts to be non-contingent in the sense of being ‘natural’ or divinely mandated, Nietzsche insists that ethical norms are merely the invention of human cultures in particular historical moments – they have a genealogy, a history. In The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault (1978) develops this thinking in regard to sexuality, arguing that sexual morality and indeed the very concept of sexuality have a history. This argument, one of the defining landmarks of queer theory, entails not just empirical but also epistemological claims: it assumes the kind of existential skepticism toward transcendent sources of meaning emblematized by Nietzsche. Thus in contemporary US politics, debates concerning sexual ethics are often stymied by an underlying disagreement about the epistemological grounds of the debate itself: by definition, it seems, Christianity and queer theory are not on speaking terms. Despite appearances, however, the two can and do regularly speak much the same language, using vocabularies sufficiently translatable into each other’s terms as to enable more productive conversations than are typically assumed possible. While Christianity and queer theory do exhibit significant differences, they also share significant commonalities evident in two 70



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widespread rhetorical practices that constitute primary aspects of contemporary discursive formations of Christian and queer subjectivities in the US: conversion and coming-out narratives.1 I use queer here in a broad sense that potentially includes but also pre-dates queer theory: the term has been used since the early twentieth century as slang for homosexual (even before gay was used in that sense). While comingout narratives are more often associated with lesbian, gay, and bisexual self-identifications than with queer theory, such narratives nevertheless reflect an important aspect of queer theory, as I elaborate below. Coming-out narratives share key formal and thematic similarities with the kind of conversion narratives characteristic of many Protestant communities in the US (although such conversion narratives are not exclusive to Protestants). This chapter aims to show how these two different types of personal transformation narrative, considered as rhetorical practices, tend to imply similar kinds of epistemological justifications for the worldviews they articulate and the ethical commitments they valorize.2 This is not to claim that conversion and coming-out narratives implicitly endorse the same worldviews or ethical systems but that they hold more in common, both epistemologically and ethically, than is typically imagined. In analyzing coming-out and conversion narratives as homologous rhetorical practices, I mean to defer evaluations of the respective truth-claims made by such narratives – evaluations of whether the personal transformations commonly described in such narratives constitute accurate representations of actual changes, or whether the worldviews valorized in such narratives are more or less true than any other worldview – in favor of illuminating the theoretical and theological commitments (regardless of whether one considers such commitments true or false, right or wrong) implicit in how these specific types of personal transformation narrative function rhetorically as widespread cultural phenomena within the discursive communities they help constitute. I therefore discuss some fiction as well as nonfiction narratives because both perform very nearly the same rhetorical function in these communities. My argument thus resonates with phenomenological approaches to religious studies in general as well as with what George Lindbeck, in The Nature of Doctrine (1984), describes as a cultural-linguistic study of Christianity, though a thorough engagement with these larger methodological contexts is beyond the scope of this brief chapter. Finally, I do not address conversion and coming-out narratives by queer Christians because I aim to analyze homologies in the most common features of these two sets of rhetorical practices especially when they seem most divergent from each other.



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Narratives of personal transformation are common in many different cultural traditions and come in many different forms, but they are especially distinctive of a variety of Christian and queer communities – so much so that such narratives can be said to enact a sense of self, a rhetorical identification for which ‘I am a Christian’ or ‘I am a lesbian’ is merely shorthand. Indeed, the telling or writing of such stories frequently gets cast as an ethical imperative implicit in the practice of evangelizing as well as in the politics of ‘coming out of the closet’ emblematized in such slogans as ‘Silence ⫽ Death’ (‘coming out’ was once less ethically charged, as it originally referred not to a closet but to being presented to society, as at a debutante ball). As Keith Yandell explains, ‘Christian theology has always been narratively shaped,’ especially as a result of its emphasis on ‘personal conversion’: ‘the believing individual sees her life as a converted person having its source and pattern in the life of Christ. The cosmic story (history as strung between Creation and Judgment) is mediated to one’s personal story as a member of the Christian Church through biblical stories’ (Yandell, 2001, p. 8). In various kinds of lesbian, gay, and/or queer communities, coming-out stories have long worked in similarly foundational ways: they are rhetorical practices that, in effect, help create the subjectivities and communities they represent. In fact, these stories often play such a powerfully constitutive role that they can be experienced as uncomfortably coercive, in queer as well as Christian communities. As one of the participants in Vera Whisman’s Queer By Choice laments, for her, ‘There’s no story that equals “lesbian” […] it would be nice to have a story’ (Whisman, 1996, pp. 119–20). Despite their potential to compel an oppressive conformity, the form and content of typical coming-out and conversion narratives vary considerably. One of the most common variations concerns whether the personal transformation is depicted as sudden or gradual, radical or subtle, sure or wavering, linear or nonlinear. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christianities, with their emphasis on the type of ‘born again’ narrative that represents conversion as a dramatic one-time event, have raised general awareness of the place of conversion narratives in most Christian traditions. Yet such stories (Jerry Falwell’s, for example, or Charles Colson’s, which tend to take the conversion of the apostle Paul as their model) differ from the type of conversion story often associated with Catholic traditions, which ‘emphasizes lengthy preparation and searching for God’ – Thomas Merton’s, for example, or Dorothy Day’s, which implicitly or explicitly take the conversion of Augustine as their



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model (Holte, 1992, pp. x–xii). Empirical research into the development of lesbian and gay self-identifications describes similar variations in coming-out narratives: some depict alternations between questioning and self-identification; others, a one-time transformation of selfawareness and acceptance; and still others maintain ‘they had always been “out” to themselves, if not to others’ (Diamond and Savin-Williams, 1999, p. 247). Christian conversion narratives generally hold to a three-part structure: ‘life before the conversion, the conversion experience itself, and life after the conversion’ (Holte, 1992, p. xii). Yet even within Protestant conventions that emphasize a dramatic conversion experience, there are important variations. Some stress the sinful pre-conversion life, for instance, whereas others (such as typical Pentecostal narratives) stress miraculous post-conversion experiences. Nevertheless, such conversion narratives generally share a three-part structure that depicts a personal transformation resulting in a new worldview: conversion in this tradition constitutes a new recognition of a pre-existing truth – a return to that truth. Thus Paul, in 1 Thessalonians 1:9–10, describes conversion using language employed at the time by missionary Jews, which centers on the biblical Hebrew word transliterated šûb: ‘turn back’ or ‘return’ (Brown et al., 1990, p. 775). This return entails strong ethical implications. Common Christian conversion metaphors describe a ‘genuine interior change of attitude that issues in a revolution in personal conduct’ – a new ethical orientation for one’s behavior (Brown et al., 1990, p. 1307). ‘I once was lost but now am found’: in the words of the old hymn, ‘Amazing Grace,’ the spatial metaphor attests to the ethical emphasis on one’s practical reorientation in the world. By metaphorically suggesting the speaker now possesses an accurate picture of the lie of the land – an accurate map or compass, as it were – the famous lyrics illuminate the strong epistemological claim underlying this transformation. Ritch Savin-Williams’s research on coming-out stories told by gay youths finds that these stories, like many conversion stories, typically center on ‘turning points,’ ‘notable events that alter the youths’ life course,’ which transformational events generally are cast as occasioning new recognitions of pre-existing truth (Savin-Williams, 1998, pp. 7–8, 45). Almost without exception, however, the youths do not attribute their gay self-identifications to any such single event. Instead, they recount how their life-altering identifications gave meaning to previously misunderstood or actively avoided experiences of desire, which ‘emerged as gradual, inevitable, and not particularly surprising’ (Savin-Williams, 1998, pp. 3, 45). Like conversion narratives, the stories





thus tend to emphasize the newly recognized implications – especially the practical, ethical implications that most commonly begin with becoming willing to take the often high-stakes risk of simply telling the story itself – of pre-existing truths of which the narrator became fully aware only as a result of the coming-out transformation. While some researchers have created highly structured four, five, or even six-stage models to describe these coming-out narratives, Lisa Diamond and Ritch Savin-Williams’s overview of psychological research concludes that a two-stage model more accurately describes the typical range of variations: ‘sexual questioning’ and ‘disclosure to others’ (Diamond and Savin-Williams, 1999, pp. 247–50).3 A wide range of thinkers increasingly recognize that such narratives constitute a valid epistemology, a mode of knowing that is not merely a subjective and therefore logically inferior version of more rigorous analytic modes. On the contrary, these narratives constitute examples of what Charles Taylor calls ‘transition arguments,’ which he describes as a form of ‘practical reasoning.’ Such arguments are inherently relative and therefore always potentially contestable but can be nonetheless useful and effective: a narrative transition argument ‘aims to establish, not that some position is correct absolutely, but rather that some position is superior to some other’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 72). They stage what James Phelan (2008) describes as a contest between narratives, and they work rhetorically to persuade the reader or listener that one particular narrative deserves to win that particular contest. Autobiographical narratives such as coming-out and conversion stories typically explain how someone experienced a shift from one perspective or worldview to another, and how the transition resulted in a more compelling and useful view of the world. Indeed, what often distinguishes coming-out and conversion narratives from the more general patterns of autobiography is that the former types of narrative usually focus more pointedly on and even thematize one central narrative contest. As the narrative theology movement (associated especially with Stanley Hauerwas and the ‘Yale school’) insists, narrative is especially crucial for ethical reasoning.4 Drawing on the work of Bimal Krishna Matilal, Gayatri Spivak likewise valorizes what she terms ‘practical ethics’: ‘narrative instantiations of ethical problems’ (Spivak, 1993, p. 19). Narrative theorists such as David Herman arrive at similar conclusions based on empirical cognitive science research. Narrative is not a ‘cognitive crutch for those who cannot manage to think in more rigorous ways,’ Herman’s Story Logic demonstrates; rather, it ‘is an unreplaceable resource for structuring and comprehending experience, a distinctive



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way of coming to terms with time, process, change’ (Herman, 2002, pp. 23, 24). While such arguments about the validity of narrative argumentation do not suggest that any given example of narrative argumentation is necessarily compelling, they do support taking seriously – on their own terms, so to speak – conversion and coming-out narratives as forms of argumentation. Acknowledging the epistemological validity of such forms of narrative argumentation resonates with a broader trend among both secular and Christian theorists of rejecting classical foundationalism, the epistemological view (exemplified in the work of René Descartes) that a belief can be rationally justifiable only if it derives from absolutely certain foundations. Phelan’s account of narrative as rhetoric, for instance, rejects classical foundationalism but also rejects the pragmatist conclusion (exemplified for Phelan in the writings of Stanley Fish) that there are no strong epistemological grounds for choosing one discursive framework over another (Phelan, 1996, pp. 17–18). Christian critics of classical foundationalism include Alasdair MacIntyre, Alvin Plantinga, Charles Taylor, and Nicholas Wolterstorff.5 Some Christian scholars who subscribe to reformed epistemology additionally reject evidentialism – the view that a belief not based on evidence is irrational; instead, reformed epistemology favors externalism, the view that beliefs may be rationally justified even though one cannot prove them. In this view, such justification can come from outside a believer’s own conscious knowledge. This is to say, rationally justified beliefs may depend on unsolvable mystery.6 To illustrate, consider the French and Spanish verbs meaning to know: connaître versus savoir, and conocer versus saber. The former denote knowledge by familiarity and experience, the kind of knowledge characteristically articulated in narrative form; the latter denote knowledge by logical proposition or factual knowledge. Drawing on a point made by William James, C. Stephen Evans explains how the former, experiential mode of knowing (connaître or conocer) can create trustworthy knowledge despite its inherent uncertainties: in making a new friend, I must trust the new friend without knowing for certain that she is trustworthy; indeed, if I were to demand absolute certainty of her trustworthiness before committing to the friendship, then I would end up friendless (Evans, 1998, pp. 51–2). Friendships worth trusting do exist – one knows this (at least provisionally) from experience – but one must take a leap of faith, so to speak, to create them. Phillip Cary similarly holds that unsolvable mystery inheres in our knowledge of other persons. He specifically associates this mode of knowing with narrative argumentation. Cary contends





that we must trust a person’s statements about herself in order to get to know her (he acknowledges that there are other ways to learn things about a person but insists that these other ways by themselves are always substantially incomplete). Our decision to trust another person’s account of herself is based on reasons that ‘typically take the form of a narrative’ (Cary, 1996, p. 83).

Spiritual mystery, sexual mystery, and identification Catholic mystical theology focuses on a particular kind of relationship between two persons – namely, that of being in love – as exemplifying the kind of knowledge of another person that best approximates the kind of knowledge one can have of God. Drawing on biblical precedent in Old Testament depictions of Israel as the wayward lover of a jealous God, New Testament depictions of believers or the Church as the bride of Jesus, and similar allegorical interpretations of the erotic Song of Songs, St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross characterize the ultimate form of this relational knowledge of God in romantic and even erotic terms as a spiritual marriage. In consonance with Plato’s Symposium, romantic love here symbolizes the experience of coming to know a truth that cannot be fully known. As a trope for spiritual desire, sexual desire conveys the sense of a truth knowable not so much algorithmically or abstractly as relationally and bodily – a truth that is never finally possessed but rather experienced phenomenally and repeatedly. Christian narratives have a long and well documented history of using sexual tropes; yet scholars under appreciate how frequently ostensibly secular lesbian, gay, and queer narratives use spiritual tropes in ways that cannot be dismissed as merely ironic. For example, the role of romantic love in coming-out narratives is often significantly homologous to the role of God’s love in conversion narratives. Both typically portray a protagonist’s will being challenged or even thwarted – by the overwhelming love and power of God, or the overwhelming power of sexual desire and romantic love, both of which are usually represented as mysterious phenomena. Thus the Luke-Acts writer describes Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus in terms that evoke the call of prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Jonah, in which God’s power seems to compel their response to the call. Apart from the disciples’ calls, arguably the other most famous Christian conversion narrative is Augustine’s Confessions; it, too, depicts the imposition of God’s will on Augustine to some extent, most dramatically in the miraculous and mysterious voice of a child singing to him to read the Bible, which



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occasions Augustine’s conversion choice (Augustine, 1961, pp. 177–8). Sexual desire often plays a similar role in both fiction and nonfiction coming-out stories in that it serves as a mysterious narrative element that impinges on the protagonist’s will and helps lead to a personal transformation. Savin-Williams notes this as a feature of most of the coming-out stories told by participants in his research (1998, p. 45). Yet in coming-out and conversion stories, it is theoretically possible to refuse this ‘call’; such stories often include a character who refuses the call and thereby serves as a foil for the protagonist. Take two examples: E.M. Forster’s Maurice is typical in that one character (Maurice) answers it while another (Clive) rejects it; likewise, in the Synoptic Gospels, a rich young man feels inspired to follow Jesus but ultimately chooses instead to keep his wealth (Matt. 19:16–22; Mark 10:17–22; Luke 18:18–23). Romantic love or God’s love in such narratives functions rhetorically to help represent the storyteller’s conviction about the depth of the epistemological claim implicit in the conversion or coming-out narrative: the choice to come out or believe is depicted as only partly attributable to the protagonist’s will, which implies that the choosing enables the protagonist to recognize a truth that exists prior to and independently of that choice. Queer theory, which generally criticizes representations of lesbian and gay identifications, perhaps surprisingly shares much in common with representations of this mysterious mix of the voluntary and the involuntary typically found in lesbian and gay coming-out narratives. In Queer Theories, for example, Donald Hall inadvertently illuminates this in the coming-out narrative he uses to help introduce his overview of queer theory. Hall recounts how, as a fifteen-year-old in rural Alabama in 1975, he was challenged by a classmate: ‘Are you a queer?’ When that failed to elicit the hoped-for response, the classmate asked, ‘Well, are you gay?’ (Hall, 2003, p. 17). In keeping with Savin-Williams’s study of coming-out stories told by gay youths, Hall describes his transformation from a fifteen-year-old who denied being gay or queer into an eighteen-year-old who publicly identified as gay to a thirty-year-old who publicly identified as queer. While his story emphasizes the ethical aspect of this transformation, it does not define, explain, or otherwise speculate on the origins of the feelings that led him to these identifications. Any such explanations or origins are left unknown even while the feelings, as a rhetorical element, constitute the primary justification for the narrative’s strong claim that his denial to his classmate was a ‘lie’: he ‘certainly was queer’ at age fifteen, ‘long before’ he made a decision to identify publicly with that word (Hall, 2003, pp. 17–18). Like many





lesbian and gay coming-out narratives, Hall’s queer coming-out narrative thus conjoins strong ethical claims with an avoidance of the etiology or ontology of sexual desire, despite the fact that his desires serve as the evidence for his ethical claims. This conjunction of ethics and mystery is characteristic of queer theory, which rejects the idea that sexual identifications describe biological, spiritual, or otherwise pre-culturally given aspects of one’s essential being. In the early 1990s, the first self-described practitioners of queer theory such as Teresa de Lauretis, Sue-Ellen Case, Michael Warner, and Eve Sedgwick defined their projects in terms of the rejection of a simple identity politics based on minoritizing notions of lesbians and gay men as a special-interest group. They were inspired by the radical politics of activist organizations such as Queer Nation and ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which were devising innovative ways to re-conceptualize and resist US politicians’ indifference to the steadily increasing death toll resulting from the AIDS epidemic. Born out of this ethical challenge, queer theory sought to undermine and reject systematic categories for and definitions of sexuality – especially the binary hetero/homo categorization scheme that defined an oppositional identity politics. Valorizing the ways in which sex resists categorical definition, queer theory arose as a challenge to any sense of ‘identity’ – heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or anything else – as naming something fixed, natural, or normal. It drew especially on feminist criticism and theory to argue that any identification is a social construct. While some lesbian and gay coming-out stories indeed offer what might be termed essentialist etiologies or ontologies of sexual identification,7 many – like Hall’s story and the stories Savin-Williams documents – do not. Hall interprets his coming-out story as resonating with queer theory; many lesbian and gay coming-out stories similarly represent the self as queer in the sense of being complex, multidimensional, contextually situated, and anti-systemic. These narratives often make ethical claims rhetorically grounded in the unsolvable mysteries of sexual desire rather than in pretensions to etiological or ontological certainty. As Linda Garber demonstrates in Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory (2001), landmark comingout narratives such as Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera show that any hardand-fast sense of an oppositional framing of queer versus lesbian and gay identifications falsifies much of the historical record. Recognizing this can help counter a common misconception about queer theory – that its postmodern theoretical commitments are ultimately politically



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defeatist because their embrace of uncertainty undermines strong ethical claims. As illustrated by the similarities between coming-out and conversion narratives, strong ethical and epistemological claims are often depicted as drawing support from an experience of unsolvable mystery. Indeed, theorists who heavily influenced the development of queer theory argue explicitly for the ethically productive role of unsolvable mysteries. Judith Butler, for instance, acknowledges that narratives of the self are inevitably partial and limited, but she nevertheless insists that the ‘limits of self-knowledge’ can help produce or give rise to ‘a conception of ethics’ and ‘responsibility’ (Butler, 2005, p. 19). Likewise, Jacques Derrida argues that in order to make an ethical commitment, one must also commit at least provisionally to an imaginative concept of the larger social space and temporal framework within which one acts: a narrative of the past and of possible futures is necessary for making sense of an ethical commitment in the present. Yet such narratives are inherently unstable and unsure; they are always potentially contestable.8 Put differently, they are epistemologically mysterious because uncertain. Nonetheless, the inherent contestability of narratives informs but does not necessarily negate the ethical commitments they enable. Derrida uses the metaphor of the specter to explain how such narratives are able to articulate numeric frequencies that represent ‘the visibility of the invisible,’ as it were – nameable electromagnetic frequencies we know exist but that nevertheless remain invisible to the human eye because they fall outside the visible spectrum (Derrida, 1994, p. 100). The ethical commitments typically enacted by coming-out narratives include not only telling the story – countering the historical silencing of what Lord Alfred Douglas described as ‘the Love that dare not speak its name’ – but also claiming an expansively open-ended sense of community, of identification, with others. This sense of community is often so strong that anthropologists such as Kath Weston claim it constitutes a form of non-biological kinship. In Families We Choose (1991), Weston documents this widespread phenomenon, explaining the social context in which the popular slang expression to be family can denote lesbian or gay, as in, ‘She’s family,’ or ‘Is he family?’ – not unlike the sense of non-biological kinship denoted by traditional Christian uses of brother and sister. Despite the fact that many conservative Christians today define the family as one man and one woman united for the purpose of producing their own biological children, in fact Christian traditions share with lesbian and gay traditions a strong emphasis on a sense of family created not by bloodlines but by chosen affiliations and elective affinities. Both generally subscribe to an ideal of creating an expansive





practice of such voluntary kinship. As Julianne Pidduck argues, while a deep ambivalence characterizes the ‘critique of heteronuclear family common to feminist, lesbian and gay liberationist, and queer analysis,’ nevertheless these traditions variously attest to ‘the transformative possibilities associated with families of choice’ (Pidduck, 2009, p. 464). As I elaborate at length in Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction (Jones, 2007), the practice of non-biological kinship formation as a topos in queer narratives promotes an expansive, open-ended sense of identification with others, which is one of several ways in which such narratives share with traditional Christian theology what Phillip Blond describes as a sense of ‘the endless relationality of creatures’ (Blond, 1998, p. 50). Michael Warner attests to this similarity in queer and Christian notions of the self, maintaining that queer theories generally ‘attribute as much moral importance to self-dissolution as fundamentalist religion does’ (Warner, 1996, p. 43). The claim holds true not just for fundamentalists: a central element in many Christian traditions holds any human sense of self to be at least partially false and incomplete. Tanya Erzen documents examples of this in her work on contemporary ex-gay ministries; like Warner, she concludes that Christian representations of the self can therefore be considered ‘queer’ (Erzen, 2006, p. 14). Indeed, some of the most challenging and productive work among queer theorists today focuses on conceptualizing and analyzing the discursive formation of sexual subjectivities as part of a broader domain of inquiry that is defined by an expanding array of identificatory markers of social and cultural differences, including race, class, gender, ethnicity, age, disability, and affiliation with religious or spiritual traditions. Put differently, queer scholarship continues to expand what it means to be family. Critics such as M. Jacqui Alexander and Eithne Luibhéid develop earlier queer theoretical articulations of the unsolvable mysteries of sexual desire, articulating increasingly expansive concepts of sexual subject formations and identifications. In 2000, eight years before Luibhéid introduced the readers of GLQ to queer migration scholarship, Bruce Smith defined the history of sexuality as a lacuna; ten years before that, Sedgwick argued that the history of homosexuality (and its closeting) has been shaped by a knowledge-ignorance binary that entails ineradicable ignorance. Lee Edelman’s 1994 Homographesis contends that ‘the signifier “gay” comes to name the unknowability of sexuality as such, the unknowability that is sexuality’ (Edelman, 1994, p. xv).9 Queer migration scholarship reiterates and develops this longstanding emphasis on sexual mystery in queer theory, insisting that such mysteries are not an impediment to – are not merely the limit of – understanding but



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Post-secular queer A postcolonial perspective on the valorization of unsolvable mystery in sexuality studies suggests that such valorization constitutes an imaginative return to what one might call premodern or non-modern ways of knowing that pre-date the rise of secular epistemologies characteristic of Western modernity. Inasmuch as such a return cannot literally turn back the clock, so to speak, and so is inevitably also a new turn, I describe them not as premodern but as post-secular ways of knowing.10 Take, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000), which argues that the articulation of subaltern subjects and their histories depends on valorizing anti-systemic, narrative modes of knowing – valorizing what he describes as older, premodern hermeneutic epistemologies as distinguished from modern analytic ones. Modern Western distinctions between sacred and secular tend to rely on dichotomizing these two in a hierarchy by which narrative argumentation is cast as inferior to abstract, systematic analysis: as Phillip Stambovsky contends, the former is typically seen as ‘primitive,’ ‘naïve,’ and ‘fuzzy-minded’ because it is epistemologically uncertain (Stambovsky, 2004, p. 4). Chakrabarty argues that historians should eschew this modern understanding of a sacred-secular divide because, as Stambovsky similarly argues, these two modes of knowing – narrative and systematic analysis – do not actually oppose each other in a dichotomous hierarchy but rather complement and depend on each other. Chakrabarty demonstrates, for example, that ‘the capacity (of the modern person) to historicize actually depends on his or her ability to participate in nonmodern relationships to the past that are made subordinate in the moment of historicization’ (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 101). Indeed, the very idea of the secular derives to a significant degree from Protestant Christian thinking, as Chakrabarty (among many others) attests.11 There are differences between secular and spiritual worldviews and vocabularies, but these differences are not as extensive as they might seem – especially in the case of ostensibly secular discourse concerning sexuality. Sexuality is often assumed to be irrational or pre-rational much as spirituality is: both have long been associated with experiential, intuitive ways of knowing, which, for predominant academic epistemological assumptions today, can seem suspiciously mysterious to



can actually help broaden and deepen queer theoretical projects and their relevance to pressing ethical questions. This insistence resonates with the rhetorical role of sexual mystery in typical coming-out narratives.


the point of being untrustworthy. Writings I describe as ‘post-secular queer’ thematize this mysteriousness as being ethically and epistemologically productive: they affirm strong ethical commitments not despite but rather through uncertainty and ambiguity, locating meaning in mystery – especially in the mysteriousness of sexuality, the strange and subversive erotic otherness suggested by the term queer. These writings explicitly invoke spiritual themes or symbols in ways that implicitly undermine contemporary epistemological distinctions between spiritual and secular. This is not to say such texts are necessarily spiritual or religious according to common definitions of those terms. More frequently, they tacitly undermine the proclivity shared by both ‘sides’ of the secular-spiritual binary to see the ‘other side’ as an other – as definitively not family. The post-secular queer is part of a growing tendency among queer writings to explore the ways in which Judeo-Christian and other spiritual traditions attest to affinities between sexual and spiritual ways of knowing – including Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, neo-pagan, American Indian, and other indigenous spiritual traditions.12 There are potential examples of post-secular queer writings that invoke each of these traditions, sometimes singly and sometimes in various combinations. In keeping with the focus of Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory, the present chapter frames its introduction of the post-secular queer in terms of Christianity, but one could effectively introduce and explore it in terms of various engagements with other spiritual traditions as well. Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (2003b), for instance, invokes Buddhist traditions while displacing the question of belief in the supernatural (specifically reincarnation) that, for many, would neatly distinguish whether her interest in Buddhism were secular or spiritual. She achieves this displacement by emphasizing that certain Buddhist pedagogies embrace epistemological mystery by endlessly deferring answers while nevertheless fostering productive change and learning – pedagogy as a process that does not arrive at a definite answer but can nonetheless keep moving in useful ways. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is one of the most widely known contemporary examples of post-secular queer literature. The play invokes multiple spiritual traditions in ways that are at once radical and traditional – that challenge and critique those traditions (especially in terms of sexuality) while also endorsing some of them to an uncertain extent. It opens by transforming the space of the theater into a religious service in which the play’s audience is cast as mourners gathered in a synagogue: the rabbi speaks directly to the audience (this effect is lost in the



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film version). The two-part play ends by similarly breaking the fourth wall as a character, Prior, addresses the theatergoers and pronounces a formal blessing on them. In between these opening and closing invocations of spiritual rites, various spiritual traditions get critiqued and even lampooned. Yet as emphasized by its opening and closing recasting of seemingly secular theatergoing practices as sacred liturgical rites, the play does not completely reject spirituality but leaves the audience in a productively uncomfortable tension between secular and sacred vocabularies and rituals.13 Post-secular queer writings are not necessarily new; they simply have not been fully recognized as such. The disarmingly intimate relationship between Christianity and queer sexualities has long been explored by such influential writers as Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster, Radclyffe Hall, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Andrew Holleran, Alice Walker, and Jeanette Winterson. In Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction, I offer extended analyses of how Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, and Walker’s The Color Purple specifically thematize the homologies between coming-out and conversion narratives (Jones, 2007). The post-secular queer, by illuminating such interconnections between spiritual and sexual ways of knowing, helps develop an alternative narrative to what Michael Lackey terms the ‘overstated fiction’ that is secularization: in a review of recent scholarly efforts ‘to complicate and unsettle the traditional secular/religious binary’ (such as Vincent Pecora’s Secularization and Cultural Criticism, 2006), Lackey describes secularization as ‘a fiction that has prevented us from seeing the degree to which Western culture continues to be dominated by a religious mentality and sensibility’ (Lackey, 2008, pp. 815, 824). The epistemological valorization of the insistent yet unsolvable mysteries of sexual desire – evident especially in the similarities between conversion and coming-out narratives, the latter of which, as I have argued, reflect a key aspect of queer theorizing – suggests that the existential skepticism that defines so much queer theory is descended from and shaped by a more Kierkegaardian existentialism in which unsolvable mystery can be ‘just as full of content as the silence of the night is full of sounds for someone who has ears to hear’ (Kierkegaard, 1989, p. 258).14

Notes 1. I use David Herman’s definition of narrative as ‘a mode of representation that is situated in – must be interpreted in light of – a specific discourse context or occasion for telling, and that cues interpreters to draw inferences about




2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory a structured time-course of particularized events (in contrast with general patterns or trends). In addition, the events represented are such that they introduce conflict (disruption or disequilibrium) into a storyworld, whether that world is presented as actual or fictional, realistic or fantastic, remembered or dreamed, etc. The representation also conveys what it is like to live through this storyworld-in-flux, highlighting the pressure of events on (in other words, the qualia of) real or imagined consciousnesses undergoing the disruptive experience at issue’ (Herman, 2007, p. 314). I follow David Solomon (2003) and Alasdair MacIntyre (1984), among others, in rejecting sharp distinctions between ethics and morals; therefore instead of defining ethics in highly abstract terms that distinguish it from common morality, I define it simply as distinguishing better from worse behavior (which may include habits of thought). It names the evaluative process of choosing how to act. Diamond and Savin-Williams note that these two stages do not necessarily represent one-time events that occur in a rigid sequence; they can ‘exist in a dialectic relationship’ with each other (Diamond and Savin-Williams, 1999, p. 250). The March 2003 issue of Theology and Sexuality (volume 9, number 2) offers a variety of possibilities for thinking about how narrative theology can be used to explore questions of sexuality and sexual identification. It also raises important caveats; as noted above, narrative argumentation should not be conceptualized as being exclusive of or opposed to abstract analytical reasoning. This valorization of unsolvable mystery also resonates with weak theology, although the poststructuralist commitments of weak theology as framed by John D. Caputo (2006) and others are not necessarily shared by those who subscribe to reformed epistemology. Phillip Stambovsky laments that the ‘unknown has become less an inexorable limit than an opportunity that looms as the “not-yet-known”’; I mean mystery here in the former sense (which is why I frequently append ‘unsolvable’ to it), not the latter (Stambovsky, 2004, p. 1). Yet I do not mean mystery to denote specifically religious or transcendental mysteries; such a definition would beg the question at issue. In Essentially Speaking (1989), Diana Fuss productively complicates any simple opposition between notions of ‘social constructionism’ and ‘essentialism.’ See, for example, James Phelan (2008), ‘Narratives in Contest; or, Another Twist in the Narrative Turn.’ Of course, non-narrative forms of knowledge are also contestable. Narrative or hermeneutic modes of knowing tend to foreground their contestability more than analytic modes such as classification systems or logical algorithms; yet the extent to which they are all potentially contestable suggests one of the ways in which hermeneutic and analytic modes of knowing are not opposed to each other but are different aspects of an epistemological continuum. Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon make a similar argument in ‘Queering History’ (2005). See also William S. Wilkerson’s 2007 Ambiguity and Sexuality: A Theory of Sexual Identity, which contends that there is a fundamentally unknowable ambiguity in sexual desires and identities. David Halperin’s What Do Gay Men Want? likewise promotes an anti-systemic understanding of sexuality by forwarding not a theory of sexuality but a ‘critical anti-theory’



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10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

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that ‘reminds us of what we do not know’ – reminds us of the mystery of sexuality (Halperin, 2007, p. 103–4). There is a growing body of academic writings on the subject of the ‘postsecular.’ I first came across this term in John A. McClure’s ‘Postmodern / Post-Secular: Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality’ (1995), but my use of the term to designate an epistemological valorization of unsolvable mystery is my own. Talal Asad (2003) and Saba Mahmood (2006) similarly critique the distinction between secular and sacred to which most Western academics consciously or unconsciously subscribe (see also Asad et al. (2009)). One cannot do justice to the scope of such writings with a brief representative list, so I instead offer the following names of writers as merely a few possible starting points for further exploration: Rebecca Alpert, Sandi Simcha Dubowski, Jyl Lynn Felman, Mark Jordan, Judith Katz, Badruddin Khan, Winston Leyland, Stephen D. Moore, Devdutt Pattanaik, Lev Raphael, Will Roscoe, Elisabeth Stuart, and Karen Tulchinsky. A full argument for this interpretation of the play would require another essay; yet in its necessarily brief defense, consider critics’ debates about the extent to which the play critiques or endorses the spiritual traditions it thematizes: the existence of such debates attests to the ambiguity the play creates around this very question. See, for instance, Geis and Kruger (1997). For an account of how the kind of epistemological valorization of unsolvable mystery implicit in coming-out and conversion narratives can be considered Kierkegaardian, see Evans (1998).








Part II Applications





Dil Ulenspiegel: The Inverted Gospel and an Early Modern Clown Thomas Lederer

Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. (T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, ll. 208–11) For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Cor. 13.12; King James Version) The glass, the mirror in which early modern Europe was called to contemplate itself was provided in the collected pranks of the jester Till Eulenspiegel, a widely popular and wildly funny book. Eulenspiegel, Eulen-Spiegel, Owlglass: the mirror of the owl. He is the prototype of the satirist, the poignantly ironical critic of society and civilization. Whether or not he is, at his core, a historical figure (Krogmann, 1932/3), his name has become proverbial in German (Röhrich, 1999, pp. 406–7) and has developed into a common noun/adjective – espiègle – in French. Under the name of Dil Ulenspiegel, an archaic, dialectal form, the jester first appeared in print in the printshop of Johannes Grieninger (or Grüninger) in Strasbourg: Ein kurtzweilig Lesen von Dil Ulenspiegel geboren uß dem land zu Brunßwick: Wie er sein Leben volbracht hatt. The oldest extant printing dates from 1515. Ulenspiegel’s early modern German vita was soon translated into several European languages. The Amsterdam printer Jean van Doesborgh (fl. 1505–30) printed the first English translation, of which only a fragment has survived (Brie, 1903, pp. 126–38) 89



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and which was reprinted in London, probably in 1528, by Wyllyam Copland under the title A Merye Jest of a Man that was called Howleglas.1 Ulenspiegel has since then appeared frequently and in various guises in literature from Ben Jonson to Hans Michael Moscherosch in the seventeenth century to the Belgian Charles de Coster in the nineteenth to German writers like Gerhard Hauptmann, Wolf von Niebelschütz, Christa and Gerhard Wolf in the twentieth, not to mention his career in children’s fiction. Their artistic merits notwithstanding, however, these texts all fall short of the original as regards profile, dimensions, momentum, and philosophical significance of the protagonist. None of the adapted Ulenspiegels, neither de Coster’s Flemish nationalist nor Hauptmann’s discharged First World War fighter ace nor the Wolfs’ cunning social rebel, is much more than the mouthpiece of an author’s particular grievance. By contrast, the Ulenspiegel of 1515, a relentless destroyer of any kind of human certainty, speaks to and about the human condition as such, sub specie aeternitatis. The aim of this chapter is twofold. On the level of textual work, it seeks to improve our perception of an important historical text and its significance within the framework of the early modern. On the level of cultural theory, it will provide material for furthering the project of Christian critical theory. I will attempt to expand the position of cultural materialism – a critical approach that by definition pays attention to silenced voices – by heeding the voice of Christianity, a voice not commonly heard under the widely agnostic, positivist conventions of current scholarly discourse. One hardly needs to rehearse the most important names in this process. After Giordano Bruno, Diderot, Hegel, and Nietzsche, it is no longer possible to make a belief-based argument that at the same time conforms to the rules of academic precision. Yet likewise, the Christian condition after Barth and Bonhoeffer forbids Christians to introduce apologetics into scholarly debates and thus to re-create problems that have long been resolved. This is good. It prohibits an abuse of God and God-language as stopgaps. Yet at the same time, an aggressive secularism and with it the silencing of the voice of Christianity is a loss of scholarly openness. My objective is what materialist critic (and idiosyncratic defender of Christianity) Slavoj Žižek defines in terms of metaphorically ‘cross[ing] wires that do not usually touch’ – of bringing into close, reactive contact two domains commonly considered disjunct. The one domain here is the text of Ein kurtzweilig Lesen: a marginalized text, long rejected by the establishment as merely ‘popular’ entertainment. The other domain is Christianity, the Christian legacy. The wires are crossed, to stay within



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the image, in the name and under the header of cultural materialism or materialist cultural studies. Both Christianity and the materialist project will be revaluated through Ulenspiegel, the Eulen-Spiegel, the owlglass, the strigidian mirror in which early modern readers were called to see, however ‘darkly,’ what they may have liked to ignore: the ‘vanity of vanities’ that, as Ecclesiastes tells us, is the condition of human beings (Ecc. 1.2). The (H)Owlglass is thus shown to be integral to the Christian legacy. It turns quite naturally, and quite literally, into the ‘Holyglass,’ as which certain Renaissance editions (for example, Cranstoun, 1891, p. 354) render the jester’s name: St Paul’s theological mirror. For what is here proposed I want to use the term ‘a Christian’s materialism’ rather than ‘Christian materialism.’ My aim is to show that it is possible to ‘do’ cultural materialism in a Christian way. This task is quite different from what is called ‘Christian materialism’ in current philosophical debates: a theistic monism that seeks to remove the notion of an immaterial soul from Christian anthropology (Taliaferro and Goetz, 2007/8, discuss this). Nor can it be what French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin attempted to do in the last century: a search for ‘the heart of a god’ in the ‘heart of matter.’ Rather, my approach moves in the opposite direction. Instead of subtracting something from a traditional Christian position, I add Christianness to a previously a-Christian thought. Of matters theological – let it be stated unambiguously – I do not propose to speak with any authority other than the freedom invested in ‘the priesthood of all believers, ipso facto in the right of all believers to think theologically’ (Berger, 1997, p. xii). In short, this chapter stands in conscious opposition to much of recent and current cultural materialism (to which, however, it is gratefully indebted) and to recent and current Ulenspiegel scholarship and interpretation (which it seeks to enrich).

Reading Ulenspiegel: Christianity and cultural materialism Cultural materialism in literary studies2 is most succinctly defined by Raymond Williams’s claim that ‘we cannot separate literature and art from other kinds of social practice, in such a way as to make them subject to quite special and distinct laws’ (1980, p. 44). A text is not an isolated entity with a privileged status and in its own right: there is no distinction made between ‘literary’ and ‘nonliterary’ texts. Rather, it is an integral part of the material realities or realia that surround it, the workings and relations of power and ideology, and the fields of meaning – or ‘webs of significance,’ in Clifford Geertz’s much-quoted



Dil Ulenspiegel: Gospel and an Early Modern Clown 91


words (1973, p. 5) – that are there in a culture or society. Texts have to be interpreted within contexts. This does not mean that contextual analysis is at all an objective way to establish any one valid meaning of a text. What it can do is grant new insights into the genesis and working of signification by stripping a text of its isolated, near-sacrosanct status as ‘high art’ or of its status as being ‘merely entertaining’ and therefore inconsequential. In the case of Ein kurtzweilig Lesen, materialist criticism has almost exclusively construed the text as ecclesial satire – making the book a Continental kind of Martin Marprelate Tracts – or as social criticism, as estates satire: an acrimonious cross-section through late medieval society, from a somewhat clueless pope to conceited, gullible monarchs to degenerate noblemen to greedy burgesses and crude peasants. The text has been read as a document of incipient class awareness and class struggle, either as an attack from the ‘left’ upon the ruling classes or as a defense of these from the ‘right,’ a satire by the empowered against the underprivileged. In her study Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature, Linda Woodbridge assesses Ulenspiegel/Howlglas in terms of conservative satire. The vagrant Ulenspiegel, Woodbridge argues, is shown as ‘lazy, irresponsible, brutal, vengeful, dangerous to employ’ and thereby ‘ratifies humanists’ worst stereotypes about vagrants’ (2001, p. 145). Interpretations of the text as left-wing social satire have influenced Christa Wolf and Gerhard Wolf’s film treatment Till Eulenspiegel, which presents, under mottoes from Marx and Engels, a subversive and elusive, and highly political, clown who sides with the poor to fool the governing ‘classes’ in order to prepare for revolution.3 Of course, such interpretive contradictions are not problematic in themselves. They do not devalue interpretation. Texts are polyphonic for a materialist no less than for any other critic; and an analysis, like a text, ‘in order to say one thing, has at the same time to say another thing which is not necessarily of the same nature; it unites in a single text several different lines which cannot be apportioned’ (Macherey, 1978, p. 99). What limits such interpretations as Woodbridge’s is rather that they are the result of a reductionist reading. When Woodbridge speaks of which traits of ‘reform theology’ she sees in the book, she cites the usual convenient handles of anti-Roman polemics: ‘comical assaults on clerical lechery, greed, levity, and hypocrisy’ (2001, p. 142) – as if theology meant drawing up rules for appropriate behavior, and as if the Reformation were a mere anticlerical rebellion. They assume culture and matter, the material realia that surround the text, to relate more or less exclusively to economy and power politics. This is a widespread



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phenomenon. Cultural materialism, a school of interpretation that calls for, indeed that depends on dialogic and transdisciplinary approaches, has proven itself to be strangely exclusivist when it comes to certain subjects, primarily that of religious faith. It is secular in a strangely dogmatic way, counting time, as it were, in the Nietzschean fashion from the end of Christianity onwards (Nietzsche [1895] 1966, p. 1235). This ‘hollow’ secularism (Marsden, 1997, p. 3) results in misrepresentation and misinterpretation, in misunderstandings and incompleteness, and in simple factual blunders (which occur with surprising frequency in works such as Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory, 2001, and ‘The Wound in the Wall’, 2000).4 It almost goes without saying that, with all its (polemical) digressions, the project of materialist cultural theory has much in common with the Christian legacy. For one thing, both provide similar positions on the nature and intrinsic value of art. Its faith forbids Christianity to indulge in an estheticism that would judge art for art’s sake and under laws and principles of its own. It shares with cultural materialism its protest against what a great Christian reader and writer of the last century dismissively called ‘that boundless overestimation of literature,’ ‘Diese maßlose Überschätzung der Literatur’ (Klepper, 1955, p. 651). At the same time, Christianity is deeply concerned with matter. It is unique, writes Žižek, in that it ‘offers Christ as a mortal-temporal individual, and insists that belief in the temporal event of Incarnation is the only path to eternal truth and salvation’ (2000, p. 96). Of course one does not need Žižek to establish the connection between materialism and Christianity. It is quite obvious that a person who believes in a God whose care for the material world is boundless (Matt. 10:29) has to consider that material world with great care, as something ethically and epistemologically valuable. A believer will have to understand that humankind and the material world are inextricably connected and may not be perceived and studied separately from one another (Rom. 8:22–3). Biblical faith is opposed to the Greek idealist anthropology that understands human beings as perfect spirit temporarily incarcerated in material bodies (for example, Plato, 1998). Christianity holds that humans are fully part of the material universe, that they are historical beings and complete individuals, in the world yet always aware of this, and in constant danger of surrendering to the world (1 Cor. 7:31). Yet there is also the obvious difference that for a Christian reader, reality, realia, what is real, will not comprise created matter alone. To a believer, the material, physical, economic, political realities are by no





means everything in which as humans we ‘live, and move, and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). Rather, a believer will include Christ and the Church among the facts with which cultural materialism operates, as valid analytical instruments, as real as are bacteria, economic situations, nutritional conditions, power relations, and technologies. To assume that and to act upon it in practicing cultural studies means to expand the tools provided by conventional cultural materialism, and at the same time to offer a potent challenge to it. Nietzsche was certain that if only one of the tenets of Christianity were replaced by one single reality, if the Christian Church were effectively confronted with one hard fact, it would tumble into nothingness (1895; 1966, p. 1201). This Church is spoken of by theologians as the visible Body of Christ, or more precisely, the Body of the exalted Christ occupying earthly time-space (Bonhoeffer, 2005, p. 241). I distinguish it from the reality of the churches as they function as legal and social corporations. No one would deny the materiality of these. With Althusser, we can define them as a system of institutions that constitutes the religious branch of ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (2004, p. 42). They are related to the Church as, according to Paul Ricoeur, Christendom is related to Christianity. Christianity ‘is not exhausted, and has not exhausted its specifically religious creditability, in the production of the particular historical configuration that we call Christendom’ (2007, p. 95). To borrow again from Althusser: ‘Of course, presented in affirmative form, this thesis is unproven. I simply ask that the reader be favourably disposed towards it, say, in the name of materialism’ (2004, p. 45) – or, for our sake, a Christian brand of it. A few words of explanation may be in order here. Distinguishing between the Church, which stands on a par with Ricoeur’s Christianity, and the church(es), which exist on the level of Ricoeur’s Christendom, does not mean relapsing into a simplistic neo-Platonism. The Church and the church(es) do not coexist in the way that, for example, a Platonic idea coexists with the phenomena that betoken it. Nor is it possible to establish a clear separation between any traits and actions (and doctrines) that belong to Ricoeur’s ‘Christianity’ and others that should be labeled as belonging to ‘Christendom.’ Rather, I want to assume that Church and church(es), Christianity and Christendom, coexist simultaneously and inseparably, not connectedly but contingently. This is one of the paradoxes of the Christian existence. It is related to Martin Luther’s paradoxical anthropology, which claims that a human being is both slave and free, both sinner and saint, at once depravity incarnate and God’s favored, holy innocent, truthful, peaceable, and



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gracious (1982, 1, pp. 243–4). Here, the source of Luther’s thought is, of course, St Paul and his contrasting of human life in the flesh and human life in the Spirit (Rom. 7:5–6). Luther’s Christian is evil and good simultaneously, not partially but both totally, much in the way that the hapless cat in physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment is simultaneously alive and dead, or better, is a blend of dead cat and living cat.5 In an image remarkably close to the polyphonic view of culture that materialist critics have, Bonhoeffer spoke of cantus firmus (God) and counterpoint (the many and multifarious voices that constitute human life) to describe the both/and status of Christian existence (1951, p. 158). Yet to return to our text. A critic who agrees to take these steps, to attempt a wire-crossing between the Ulenspiegel tale and Christian theology, and who does so in the name of cultural materialism, will have to begin by asking – much in the manner of a new historicist – certain quite ‘old-fashioned’ questions (Thomas, 1989, p. 184). Primary among these is that for the relationship between the discourse of Christianity and this text. To ask that question in an old-fashioned way, ‘[W]hat concord hath Christ with Belial?’ (2 Cor. 6:15). How can there be a predication of God in this collection of crude jokes, bilious satire, aggressive jesting, and off-color humor?

‘What concord hath Christ with Belial?’: the inverted gospel of Dil Ulenspiegel Ein kurtzweilig Lesen von Dil Ulenspiegel is a collection of almost a hundred short tales, each a unit in itself, yet at the same time part of a larger whole, a proto-novel of the picaresque kind. Narratologically speaking, its ordering principle, that which makes a series of episodes into a book of lasting popularity, is not quite obvious. In early modern narratives of this kind, episodes are conventionally tied together ‘under the general denominator of a continuity of setting or on the basis of a continuity in the protagonists,’ which constitutes ‘a dramatic ground-pattern’ (Fludernik, 1996, p. 78). Of course, the episodes in Ein kurtzweilig Lesen have a general denominator, the continuous and eponymous protagonist, Dil Ulenspiegel. And likewise of course, the book follows his life from birth to death, from beginning to end. Yet what happens between the beginning and the end of Ein kurtzweilig Lesen bears remarkable resemblance to the content and pattern of Christianity’s master biography, the Gospels. The trajectory of the story is obviously modeled upon the account of the life of Christ.





Among the most striking parallels are the following. The protagonist’s parents are of lowly extraction yet connected to nobility. His appearance on earth is surrounded by unusual circumstances – Ulenspiegel is baptized three times (KL, 1990, pp. 9–11). Rather than pursuing his father’s trade and settling down, he lives the unsteady life of an itinerant preacher, player, and artist, under much suspicion from the authorities and religious professionals of his world. Ulenspiegel’s father, whose part in the narrative is marginal, dies in the second chapter (KL, 1990, p. 13). His mother has a slightly more important function. She is mentioned at conspicuous turning points: at the hero’s portentous birth and during his exceptional childhood – obviously – and then, after more than two hundred pages of absence, she returns to witness and grieve for her son’s death (1990, pp. 256–7). The prodigious child worries his parents by early signs of his vocation – which is not one of wisdom (Luke 2:41–51) but one of crude joking (KL, 1990, pp. 12–13). At the beginning of his unholy ministry, Ulenspiegel is tempted, not by Satan (Matt. 4:1–11) but by a depraved squire-turned-robber. However, he rejects this invitation to make easy riches (KL, 1990, pp. 30–2). The woes pronounced upon Chorazin and Beth-saida (Matt. 11:21) find their parallel in Ulenspiegel’s condemnation of the city of Halberstadt, where he is unable to find an audience that is generous enough for his demands (KL, 1990, p. 56). Of course, while the owl’s mirror does reflect the plot and protagonist of the Gospels, there are also overwhelming differences. The most obvious is between the protagonists’ manners of death. Jesus Christ dies, suspended on a cross, in despair: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Matt. 27:46). The counter-hero Ulenspiegel, while not quite bursting into song about ‘the bright side of life,’ utters a few very graphic jokes at the expense of an old beguine, performs one last prank, which involves a priest sticking both hands deep into a pot of feces, and then dies peacefully in his sleep (KL, 1990, pp. 262–4). Yet especially this last difference is more an assertion than a refutation of the story’s counter-evangel character. Showing things ‘through a glass, darkly’ the enigmatic Ulenspiegel is both a (yes, frivolous) toying with the narrative convention and an assertion of foundational theologoumena. Much in the way of a novelistic or dramatic adaptation – think Dorothy Sayers or Walter Wangerin; think also Norman Mailer – it is a reinterpretation of the master story by quite surprising means. It transports theological tenets; it is, in the terms of Christian theology, a work of didakhe¯. In a Christian understanding, didakhe¯ (apostolic) instruction, is that kind of text that generates for itself a reading community and which



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shapes those who believe themselves to be shaping/creating it. It gathers humans; it seeks for itself its community and accepts it (Bonhoeffer, 2005, p. 243). Within its theological message, all of Ulenspiegel’s crude and cruel jokes are important and relevant. In fact, the English editor Wyllyam Copland cannot resist adding a theologizing quip to his version of the text: ‘Me thinke it is better [t]o passe the tyme with suche a mery Jeste and laughe there at and doo no synne: than for to wepe and do synne’ (MJ sig. A1v). Remarkably, the German edition, with ostentatious innocence, recommends itself exclusively for entertainment. The book, we read in the preface, is best accompanied by baked pears and new wine, to pass the time ‘while the mice play under our seats.’ This entertaining reading, the preface declares emphatically, must not and will not prevent readers from attending divine service. Yet of course we need not heed these ruminations of the anonymous author. They are too overt in their denial of any prodesse beyond delectare to be credible. Quite contrarily, through the entertainment it provides it speaks about the human condition; in the laughter it provokes it forces reader to scrutinize themselves, to contemplate their image in the ‘glass, darkly.’ In fact, may we hear an echo of Matthew 9:17 in that recommendation of new wine?

Strigidian reflections: the Ulen-Spiegel To explore the full implications of this inverted gospel, we have to spend some time outlining what laughter means and does – again, from both a materialist and a Christian perspective. Dil Ulenspiegel is one of that handful of memorable characters that our collective memory locates at the onset of the early modern. Opposed to the thoroughly tragic nature of others, such as Hamlet or Doctor Faustus, Ulenspiegel is a creature of laughter. The carnival, a feast that did not appear before the thirteenth century, is causally connected to the Christian liturgical year, to the cycle of Lent and Easter (Moser, 1990, p. 94). Its laughter and misrule were never intended to mock the sacred. If parody occurred, it was outsiders, heretics, unbelievers, that got the raspberry (Moser, 1990, p. 96). To Moser, the carnival had a didactic/catechetical/theological function. It staged the dualism of the ‘kingdom of the world’ and the ‘kingdom of God’ outlined in the thought of St Augustine. The ‘kingdom of the world’ is that of Cain, Nimrod, Babel, Rome/Babylon, and hell; the ‘kingdom of God’ is that of Abel, Noah, Abraham, Jerusalem, and heaven. The ‘kingdom of this world’ is one of lust and greed (cupido); the ‘kingdom of God’ is that





of love (caritas). In the carnival celebrations, people were confronted with the choice they were to make, continually, day to day, between these two kingdoms – and with the consequences of their choice (Moser, 1990, pp. 100–7). They were shown these alternatives from the empowered position of divine laughter: ‘He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision’ (Ps. 2:4).6 The Bible’s position on laughter and playing the fool is famously ambiguous. Several Old Testament authors are severely critical of folly, of which, as the disillusioning Ecclesiastes proclaims, even a little can spoil ‘wisdom and honour’ (10:1). Folly is perceived as a moral deficiency: ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God’ (Ps. 14:1); ‘fools despise wisdom and instruction’ (Prov. 1:7). And the irony becomes, if anything, even sharper in the New Testament when Christ uses the term ‘fools and blind’ for the religious professionals of his time (Matt. 23:17). Yet on the other hand the Bible contains enough stories in which those favored or commissioned by God behave in ways that appear, to say the least, unwise. Isaiah walks ‘naked and barefoot three years’ (Isa. 20.3); Jeremiah preaches with ‘bonds and yokes’ upon his neck ( Jer. 27.2); Ezekiel is ordered by God to perform a 430-day sit-in and to feed exclusively on coarse bread baked ‘with dung that cometh out of man’ – even though this order is later mitigated to using ‘cow’s dung for man’s dung’ (Ezek. 4:4–15). The New Testament counterpart is St Paul’s eulogy of the ‘foolishness’ of the Cross and the ‘foolishness’ of God (1 Cor. 1:18–25). The unconventional behavior of the prophets, the scandalous reasoning of the Apostle, foolish though they appear, are not godless folly. Theirs is holy folly: holy in that sense of the word that indicates transcendence, the quality of being ‘inviolate from ordinary use, and appropriated or set apart for religious use or observance’ (OED); holy, therefore, in the sense of the Hebrew qa¯do¯š. ‘Holy folly, in its grotesqueness, makes explicit the otherness breaking into ordinary reality, but also the impossibility of containing this otherness in categories of ordinary reality’ (Berger, 1969, p. 188). Where all human reason and structure is reduced to shambles, there is room for thinking about God. While the Christian carnival demonstrates the un-Christian, the godless, in all its manifestations and invites viewers to amend their ways (Moser, 1990, p. 100), the Ulenspiegel book and its totalizing critique of society offers no alternative. As it invites its readers to laugh at the world, it does not debunk the society in which it is set for the sake of a utopia. It is destructive in its grim wittiness, and as it appears it does not indicate any viable option of ‘godly’ behavior. Yet like the carnival, it is Christian in origin, and like those of the carnival the purposes of



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Ein kurtzweilig Lesen are also entirely Christian. While the carnival demonstrates the opposition between the ‘kingdom of the world’ and the ‘kingdom of God,’ Ein kurtzweilig Lesen proposes a profound theologoumenon, namely the contrasting of the tangible realities of what humans perceive of their world (which is not much) with God, a Levinasian Altogether Other and beyond that – a shattering realization and precisely what makes this text fascinating. Ein kurtzweilig Lesen presents itself as a ‘popular’ text of the early modern that contains an advanced theology on a line towards Luther and beyond. The explanation that the book reflects or refracts the social/societal change that stood at the beginning of the modern age cannot suffice. We must therefore assume that what presents itself as cruelly destructive is a deep concern, not for replacing the shattered status quo with a utopia, but for heightening humans’ ability to perceive themselves and God, for providing the Pauline esoptron, the mirror of 1 Cor. 13:12. This concern is, in its last consequence, identical with love, St Paul’s Christian agape¯, which ‘never faileth’ (1 Cor. 13:8). This love is a correlate of faith; it is non-indifferent. As Žižek describes it, it is ‘a violent passion to introduce a Difference, a gap in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object at the expense of others.’ Christian love is nothing easy; it ‘is violence’ (2003, p. 33). Ulenspiegel elevates the transcendent God at the expense of humankind and humankind’s sense of self-value. This agape¯ has little to do with practical philanthropy, even with Christian charity; quite the contrary, it is powerful; it can be frightening; it may be mistaken for hatred and devilry (Bonhoeffer, 2005, p. 209). It is what the Lucan Jesus speaks of when He says that His purpose is ‘to send fire upon the earth’ (Luke 12:49). T.S. Eliot captures it as such in the overwhelming imagery of fire and violent, hurtful, ‘intolerable’ love that he proffers in his ‘Little Gidding.’ In the name of this stunning love, Ein kurtzweilig Lesen mocks conventional charity. The episodes in Ulenspiegel’s life that parody biblical healing miracles are almost painful to read. Take, for instance, the most complex and longest of Ulenspiegel’s jests (KL, 1990, pp. 205–9), the story of the twelve blind beggars, to whom the jester pretends to give twenty florins, so that each of the twelve assumes that another one has them. They go to an inn to get food and lodging for their money, and as they cannot pay, the landlord abuses and mistreats them until Ulenspiegel returns, candidly, and settles the matter (KL, 1990, pp. 205–9).7 Ulenspiegel negates society, human mores, certainly human conventions, yet also human ethics – ethics that divines of his own time would no less have liked to see negated than his conventionally materialist





interpreters today. Ulenspiegel, the lower-class protagonist, leaves no one untouched or unchallenged, not even, or especially not, the dispossessed and helpless. His onslaught on society goes far beyond the revolutionary dialectic that contrasts the (evil) empowered and the (good) oppressed, that appraises, with Terry Eagleton, the ‘dregs and refuse of society’ as those who carry new hope, ‘who do not need to abandon themselves to be remade, since they are lost to themselves already’ (2003a, p. 277). Ulenspiegel certainly does not extol the proletariat as the standard-bearers of a new dawn of utopian justice. He drenches them in the same caustic and aggressive laughter as anyone else. When Ulenspiegel proposes to do the impossible and fly off the town hall in Magdeburg (KL, 1990, pp. 42–3), he exposes the readiness of people to believe anything that is proposed to them, to tempt their Lord, as it were, to fall down and worship idols (compare, Matt. 4:9), more precisely, to worship themselves: to Martin Luther, the most accomplished form of idolatry (Rieske-Braun, 2002, p. 41). Englished by Copland, his speech to the duped Magdeburgers is this: ‘I thought there had bene no more fooles but my self: but I se wel yt her is a hole town ful’ (MJ, 1971, sig. B3v). The holy fool Ulenspiegel brutally exposes the folly of the fools of Magdeburg. The human who believes in the unchangeable value of his or her words, ways, and gravitas is a fool. Ulenspiegel is a Pauline ‘fool for Christ’s sake’ in a godless and foolish ‘kingdom of the world.’ He exposes the hubris of the professors at the University of Prague (KL, 1990, pp. 82–5), who believe they have the right to answer questions such as, How many barrels of water are there in the sea? How many days have passed since the times of Adam? How wide is Heaven? Ulenspiegel exposes the hubris of the physician who ‘in no wyse might here nor se no foles’ (MJ, 1971, sig. B4r) – Ulenspiegel treats him to a restless and humiliating night of stench, feces, flatulence, and bowel movements (KL, 1990, pp. 44–8). For the bishop of Bremen he stages a miracle: merely by the power of his mind, he promises the prelate, he will make a potter’s wife smash her ware in the market square. Of course, he has bribed her in advance. The bishop, who thinks such a thing quite out of the question places a wager with the jester and is awe-struck when he beholds what appears to be miraculous: the woman does what Ulenspiegel has predicted (KL, 1990, pp. 247–50). The more obstinate people are in their self-centeredness, the cruder are the measures that the jester takes. His attacks are geared towards the age, gender, social status, education, and power of his victims: a sardonic suum cuique. In that respect, the text really appears to be estates satire (Arendt, 1978).



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The Prague professors are exposed by seemingly subtle scholastic reasoning. The bishop of Bremen is given a mock miracle. Far less shrewdly, a landlady who spreads rumors about Ulenspiegel (without even having met him) gets her bare behind placed in the glowing cinders of her own hearth by the outraged jester (KL, 1990, p. 242). Ulenspiegel’s standard prank is an attack on semantics: the deliberate misunderstanding – taking literally – of words obviously meant to be understood figuratively. When a shoemaker unknowingly employs him and tells him to cut leather for shoes, ‘all sizes, like the swineherd drives them through the village,’ he finds, to his great dismay, that his new employee has cut out nothing but silhouettes of livestock (KL, 1990, pp. 126–8). In Woodbridge’s analysis, this jest appears a form of the subaltern’s standing up against his superiors; it is ‘the kind of resistance Howlglas may be practicing, saying, in a way that costs his employer money by ruining materials, “If you’re smart enough to be my boss and make more money than I do, you should be smart enough to make instructions crystal clear, or you’ll suffer the consequences”’ (2001, pp. 140–1).8 Using speech act theory, Priscilla Hayden-Roy opposes Ulenspiegel’s ‘language of transgression’ to that of ‘conventional language’ and demonstrates how the hierarchy of master and servant is undermined by Ulenspiegel’s intentional misunderstandings (1991, p. 15). Yet it doesn’t seem too difficult to look for a far more profound significance in these jokes, one that the infuriated shoemaker himself provides. In Copland’s Englished version: ‘[Y]e do after mi saying and not after my meaning’ (1971, sig. G1v). It is almost a gloss on St Paul’s revolutionary statement that in the relationship between God and humankind ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’ (2 Cor. 3.6). Albrecht Classen is right when he identifies this feature of Ulenspiegelian comedy as the one most important feature of the text. He reads the ‘owl’s mirror’ as the instrument that demonstrates to humans their inability to perceive the nature of things and words (1998, p. 261). Yet as such the mirror is not an end in itself but part of a greater project, epistemological transgressions are loaded with Christian theology. Žižek reminds us that there is one unsurpassable example of how ‘obeying orders all too literally’ can result in the total annihilation of these orders: ‘[W]hen Christ claims that he is here merely to fulfil the ( Jewish) Law, he thereby bears witness to how his act effectively cancels the Law’ (2000, p. 148). It shows, not only the limits of human understanding but indeed the limitedness of the world. It destroys the assumed safety of the linguistic universe in which things are understood to mean what they mean.





And when Ulenspiegel exposes human flaws and limitedness, humanness itself, that is, he points at human dignity as well. If humans are, in the paradoxical Christian worldview, wretched and flawed, they are also privileged by their awareness of those deficiencies and the limitations they imply. They see their shortcomings, ‘in a glass, darkly,’ but they understand that perception to be an enrichment. They know their deficiencies, yet they also know that, paradoxically, there is infinity in the finiteness that is humans and their world. This is a definite advantage of the Ulenspiegelian position – and of the position of the Christian materialist reader – over those who, in the name of materialism and scientism, implicitly or overtly deconstruct human uniqueness and the far-reaching consequences it has for human self-understanding. Such a position can be dangerous, if only for the argumentative prowess of those who hold it. It renders innocuous their humanist stance. On this point there is agreement between Christianity and critics of such divergent backgrounds as, for instance, Tzvetan Todorov (‘[I]t is not possible, without inconsistency, to defend human rights with one hand and deconstruct the idea of humanity with the other’ (1987, p. 190)) and George Steiner (‘I do not see how a secular, statistically based theory of meaning and of value can, over time, withstand either the deconstructionist challenge or its own fragmentation into liberal eclecticism’ (1986, p. 23)).

Conclusion: ‘The truth shall make you free’ The jest-book protagonist Ulenspiegel demolishes all epistemological, social, gender-related and even theological certainties that his society cherishes. In this, the seemingly destructive yet altogether Christian Ulenspiegel may be Christian in the most empowering and constructive manner, constructive, that is, of the freedom of the Christian ( John 8:32). It was no lesser a theologian than Luther, the theoretician of Christian freedom, who described the center of Christian existence, the belief in a liberating relationship between savior and saved, in terms of comedy. And it is not from high comedy that he takes his imagery: ‘So isn’t this a merry household, where the rich, righteous, and noble bridegroom, Christ, has wedded the poor, rejected, condemned harlot and has freed her of all evil and adorned her with all goods?’ (Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen; Luther, 1982, 1:246). This understanding of freedom as a result of recognizing the nature of human endeavor in relation to humans’ material surroundings is at the same time what sharply separates the conventionally materialist



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interpretations of the Ulenspiegel story from one that proceeds along the lines here proposed. The Christian freedom is not necessarily that of social revolution; and the protagonist of Ein kurtzweilig Lesen, accordingly, is not the revolutionary into whom one strand of reception and criticism is shaping him. This is, incidentally, a misunderstanding that occurs frequently when materialism encounters Christianity in a friendly way or in one that, by all evidence, is intended to be friendly. Terry Eagleton appraisingly dubs Christ a ‘political criminal’ (2001, p. 122), and, as we have seen, identifies the underprivileged subproletariat, the ‘dregs’ of society, as the true Christians, in fact as sacramental scapegoats and therefore as Christ-like figures: ‘They are the flotsam and jetsam of history who do not need to abandon themselves to be remade, since they are lost to themselves already. And it is with them that Yahweh identifies. […] The true sacrificial figure, the one which like the burnt offering will pass from profane to powerful, loss of life to fullness of it, is the propertyless and oppressed’ (2003b, p. 277). As an interpreter of Christianity, Eagleton is obviously an heir to that Enlightenment monophysitism that is capable of honoring only certain – politically relevant – traits of Christ (and peripheral details of Christianity). In a way, he may even be seen as repeating, perhaps with not-so-different intentions, what Nietzsche proffered as a seething critique of Christianity: ‘Christianity is the rebellion of all that creeps on the ground against what is lofty’ ([1895] 1966, p. 1206). Ein kurtzweilig Lesen contains a sounder theology than both Nietzsche and Eagleton. It avoids the mistake of instrumentalizing Christianity, either as a vehicle for one’s philosophy or as a sham enemy. It does not preach rebellion against any one polity or form of society. If it debunks social order, it debunks everything, the peasant along with the squire and the clerk along with the burgher. It does not propose, as many critics have suggested, a change of the corporate state, of the corrupt Church, of the feudal administration of his world. As the carnival, when understood correctly, is a liturgical practice of the pre-Reformation Church, the book is not depicting but rather ‘doing’ religious practices or, better, beliefs. It shatters the epistemology of the world – more precisely, that of a logocentric Church and academia and that of a rising bourgeois capitalist society – in the name of the kingdom of God. Thus, Ein kurtzweilig Lesen claims no less than what Christianity itself claims, and what a Christian materialist wants to claim, namely that ‘material reality is non-all’ (Žižek, 2009, p. 95), and that there is an interplay between material reality and that which complements it to make ‘all there is.’ This interplay is as important for critical reading and





understanding as the material reality itself is. It makes critical reading into an engagement, as Stanley Hauerwas says pointedly, to ‘study Milton because Milton thought God matters’ (2007, p. 77). We cannot prove that God matters. Yet we must allow for the possibility and act accordingly. That will heighten our critical awareness and scholarly abilities. Reading Dil Ulenspiegel with the instrumentarium of Christianity and cultural materialism provides new insights into the functioning of materialist Christianity, and it speaks of Christianity in a way that it is not commonly spoken of. Primarily, though, it lets a familiar text appear in an unexpected light. It is an anachronism – and in fact Johannes Grüninger, Ulenspiegel’s first printer, remained indifferent to the actual Reformation (Steinberg, 1961, p. 48) – but it may be in order to conclude these considerations with Paul Tillich’s classic definition of the ‘Protestant principle’: ‘It is the guardian against the attempts of the finite and conditioned to usurp the place of the unconditional in thinking and acting. It is the prophetic judgment against religious pride, ecclesiastical arrogance, and secular self-sufficiency and their destructive consequences’ (1957, p. 163). Tillich, Till, Dil, Ulenspiegel, the Eulen-Spiegel, the strigidian mirror of human vanity (in the sense that the disillusioned and disillusioning Ecclesiastes uses the word) is a call to humility, a call to acknowledge human creatureliness and materiality as well as human uniqueness.

Notes This chapter is dedicated to Greta Olson. 1. Grieninger’s 1515 Ein kurtzweilig Lesen was re-edited in 1966 by Wolfgang Lindow. A facsimile of the 1532 edition was made by Werner Wunderlich in 1990 (references in the text are to this work, hereinafter KL). SchulzGrobert (1999) provides an exhaustive study of the intellectual and literary background of Grüninger’s printing. Copland’s text – one copy of which was owned by Edmund Spenser (Brie, 1903, p. 7) – was reprinted in facsimile in 1971 (hereinafter MJ ). The best versions in contemporary English are those prepared by Paul Oppenheimer (2001). Kenneth Mackenzie’s Victorian edition, aiming both at philological accuracy and popular interest, is hopelessly outdated. To make it quite clear that the object of this study is the 1515 protagonist and not one of the many adaptations, I use the form Ulenspiegel throughout. 2. See Easthope (1991); also Dollimore and Sinfield (1985). Burns and Burns (1973) give an impression of materialist/political analysis of literature before the rise of Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism. 3. In a materialist way, but much less sweepingly, Schulz-Grobert (1999, pp. 24–34) sketches a ‘new historicist’ reading of the relationship between



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4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

Grüninger’s Ulenspiegel volume and the material conditions of early modern book production. On the tentative exploration of faith as a legitimate source of knowledge that has been taking place in some more recent Renaissance scholarship see Jackson and Marotti (2004). The approaches sketched there, however, may hardly be called specifically Christian. See McGrath (1980) for an introduction to and discussion of Schrödinger’s cat paradox. ‘There is no suggestion of provisional geniality in [this] divine laughter,’ wrote Reinhold Niebuhr. ‘Derisiveness is pure judgment’ (1969, p. 139). Röcke provides a discussion of the treatment of the motif by Johannes Pauli and Hans Sachs. Wolf and Wolf’s Till Eulenspiegel reinterprets this episode as a conspiratorial gathering of revolutionary peasants who pretend to be blind. Eulenspiegel, needless to say, is their ally in class struggle (1973, pp. 76–8). Luce Irigaray would speak of a form of ‘mimicry,’ the ‘mak[ing] “visible,” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible’ (1985, p. 76) – in Ulenspiegel’s case, the patriarchal structures of the inchoative capitalism of the early modern.




Take and Eat: Eve, Mary, and Feminist Christianity Martha Kalnin Diede

In current critical discussions, much ink covers women’s bodies, and much of this discussion centers on the ways in which women’s bodies are constructed by the phallocentric language that writers use to describe them. Indeed, the literary history of women’s bodies in language has problematized pregnancy, lactation, menstruation, and sexual desirability. Critical discussion includes Bynum’s study of medieval women and food in Holy Feast, Holy Fast (1987), Bell’s examination of Italian saints in Holy Anorexia (1985), extended discussions of female mystics, and discussions of individual works, such as Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Yet few theorists have addressed the connection between women and food as a widespread literary phenomenon (Magid, 2008; Heller and Moran, 2003). The persistent comparison of women to Eve or to Mary – and women’s position between the two examples – is now commonly recognized in feminist thinking (Williams and Echols, 1994). Although Eve’s sin was appetite and Mary’s virtue was (sexual) abstinence, most considerations of women and their bodies relate in some way to the sexual: early feminists argue for female capability to do much more than produce children (see the introduction to Freedman, 2007), and second and third wave feminists argue for separate study of women’s bodies and experiences.1 While important lines of inquiry, these kinds of scholarship point to reproductive function as a touchstone, and such an approach deserves reconsideration. Instead of focusing on the sexual nature of Mary’s virtue and its seemingly easy contrast to Eve’s reckless eating, critics might reconsider the relationship between women, appetite, and food. Thinking of food as a location of female power and pleasure, the recognition of which has long been denied to women, scholars might offer new insights into the struggle that women historically have had (and many women still do have) with food and sustenance. 106



8

Theoretical considerations of food and appetite suggest revised understandings of the implications of Eve’s original sin, the Last Supper, and Communion. God’s commands in Genesis encouraged Adam and Eve to eat from every tree except one. Eve, then Adam, disobeyed this one command, choosing to eat the fruit of that forbidden tree. This story explicitly links eating with sin. The persistent associations between Eve and Adam’s disobedience, appetite, and food have developed into associations between disobedience and any appetite, for example knowledge, power, money, or fame. Because of the frequent connection between appetite, disobedience, and sexuality, for women, eating is often connected with sexual promiscuity. The results of eating – fatness – or of not eating – thinness – are also loaded with cultural associations related to sexuality and/or sexual desirability. In addition to women’s sexuality, their primary or secondary sexual characteristics, or their mouths with unruly tongues and voices, the food that enters the mouth and its functions merit attention. In its essence, Communion is a meal. So, Christ’s insistence that his followers repeat this meal requires that people sit down to eat with one another and that eating is an important activity. In addition, although small, the portions of the symbolic meal are explicitly linked with satisfaction. No one at Christ’s table leaves hungry or thirsty. Even more remarkable in the context of this discussion is the insistence upon eating itself as a way to remember salvation, instead of a way to remember temptation and fall. This fact itself radically redefines the act of eating as salvific rather than sinful. If eating is neither sinful nor sin-producing, then appetite is neither sinful nor sinproducing. For women, this shift is particularly important as it forces re-examination of the link between women, eating, and sin. Critics and Christians need further to examine the activity of preparing, serving, and eating food, historically the province of women, as a site of female power. In fact, the ways in which women teach other women how to cook, how to serve, and how to eat may indeed imply a recognition of the threat that women’s relationships to food pose to ‘established order.’ Thus, by determining that women’s relationship to food is primarily one of sexual appetite rather than gustatory appetite, critics have ignored the potential for self-determination and power that the kitchen represents. For indeed, women prepare and serve. But they also eat. Moreover, Christians, all of whom eat and drink the sacrament of Communion, symbolically repeat and literally remember Christ’s offering of his body and blood for salvation of sin. Scholars overlook the fact that Communion is an invitation to eat and to drink that also redeems Eve’s original disobedient eating. For women, the act



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of preparing, then eating – physically sustaining and salvific – becomes an act of presence: a way of being heard aloud rather than remaining silent, a way of becoming a subject rather than an object, and, in Communion, a way of being served rather than serving. Because of the lengthy, complex relationship between women and food, any examination of this relationship benefits from a brief re-telling of the story: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden – Eve’s eating, Adam’s fall, and the accompanying curses; the corresponding story of redemption – the Virgin Birth, the Last Supper, crucifixion, and resurrection. Essentially, the narrative begins when God creates light, dark, earth, water, plants, animals, and finally Adam. But Adam is unhappy alone. So God causes Adam to sleep, removes a rib, and makes Eve. Adam finds Eve to be a suitable companion, and they live happily in the Garden of Eden. Although God invites Adam and Eve to eat all of the fruits of the garden except one, Satan tempts Eve with precisely that fruit. Eve, falling to temptation, eats the fruit, and then offers it to Adam. Adam eats. Sin enters the world; God evicts Adam and Eve from the garden. God curses Adam with hard work and Eve with pain in childbirth, a curse that makes sense only if Eve and Adam are sexually active. Humans must now be redeemed. But, because both Adam and Eve participated in the fall, both Adam and Eve participate in the coming redemption. Millennia later, Christ will be the second Adam, and Mary, a virgin, a second Eve, will give Him birth. Nowhere in this story is Eve’s sin related to sex.2 While the curse that she suffers certainly results from sexual activity, sex and sexual desirability are not Eve’s curses. Indeed, they are not Adam’s curses either. The root of sin in the world is not eating itself or sex, but disobedience, explicitly linked to eating a forbidden food. The story of redemption begins with God’s procreation. An angel approaches Mary, a virgin, and tells her that she will become pregnant without sex. She will give birth to Jesus, who will save the world from sin and reverse the curse that Eve and Adam brought into the world. Mary agrees, and Christ is born. Thirty-three years later, Jesus and his disciples gather to eat. At the Last Supper, Jesus offers his disciples broken bread, commanding, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ He then offers them a cup of wine, announcing ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you’ (Luke 22:19–20; New International Version). Significantly, Jesus interprets his coming crucifixion and resurrection as an act of eating and drinking and commands eating. At this table, eating becomes a mnemonic for two gustatory events: Adam and Eve’s ingestion of the



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fruit of the forbidden tree that brought sin into the world, and Christ’s offering of himself as food for the disciples which brings redemption into the world. Christians, however, have ignored the fact that the clear parallels between commands regarding the acts of ingestion – one bringing sin, the other bringing salvation – do not, in fact, point to sexual status as a particular measure of any state of soul. Under the influence of Jerome and Augustine,3 medieval theologians reinterpreted Eve’s sin as appetite, specifically sexual appetite, in contrast to Mary’s sexual abstinence. This despite the fact that sex does not appear at all in the narrative surrounding Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, nor in the insistence of the Last Supper on ingestion as a symbol of salvation. Still, by clearly deriving Mary’s holiness from her virginal state,4 such thinking made easy the transfer of Eve’s sinful disobedience from food to sex. Mary is holy because she is a virgin; Eve is cursed because she is not. The accretion of beliefs around Mary – that she and Joseph never consummated their marriage because he believed she was too holy, for example – suggests that maintaining Mary’s virginal state as a model for women placed women in society in a very difficult position. This thinking, however, consistently ignores the fact that sin entered the world as a result of disobedient ingestion on the part of both Eve and Adam. Mary’s pure state is unattainable for any other woman. As Warner (1983) points out, Mary is ‘alone of all her sex,’ for she is the only woman to give birth to a sinless infant. Assigning women the blame for birthing both sin and sinful people makes every woman a new Eve. Men’s sexual desire for women produces not only sin itself, but also more sinners. Woman becomes the object of desire, first as the difficult mate for the adult male, then as the nursing mother for the infant male. In both situations woman bears the responsibility for sin: first for generating sexual desire that she may or may not satisfy; then for having given birth to a sinful man who inhabits a difficult world. In essence, woman can satisfy neither the adult male’s desire for sex nor the male infant’s desire for sustenance. The conclusion, then, is that somehow she purposefully withholds more than temporary satisfaction. And, because she is Eve – the incarnation of the archetypal woman – who brought sin and more people into the world, she is responsible. Thus sin, the force of evil in the world, becomes displaced from men and relocated in the female body alone. So, to deny the female body is also to deny sin. To deny the appetites of the female body is to deny sinful appetite. Furthermore, to control the female body is to control sin and to achieve a state of holiness that prepares one for heaven. And this persistent equation of





temptation with the desires of and for the female body has led to the rejection of Eve’s sinful appetite for Mary’s holy abstinence. One of the strangest effects of the antagonistic relationship between appetite and abstinence is the equation of the mouth with the vagina. Although both represent corporeal points of entry, the equation of mouth with vagina remaps the human body. Although both men and women have mouths, only women have vaginas. Thus the male mouth can be mapped as a different location from that of the female mouth. Significantly, the male mouth is often not depicted as a place of eating, but rather as a place from which proceeds wisdom, understanding, and statements of power. The insistence of the Roman Catholic Church on male priests reifies this association. The very name of St John Chrysostom is an excellent example: literally, his name means John, the one with the Golden Tongue. The male mouth is the mouth of God who brought the world into being with his word. But men do not have the power to speak beings into existence. That power resides in the pen/is. The female mouth, however, is mapped as an entrance, or as the opening to a place of darkness into which the fruit that produced sin entered. But the female mouth is also like the womb which births temptation. If one pushes the connection between the mouth and the sexual organs to its end, one arrives at a disturbing conclusion. The male mouth and penis both proceed from the male body. These parts contain and produce power – the penis produces life itself. The female mouth and vagina are only entrances to the female body. These parts tempt men and produce sin. The food that women ingest sustains their sinfulness and produces the suspicious menstrual flow, and in giving birth to children, the womb ultimately produces fallen people, whose end is death. While this equation treats sexual activity as highly suspect, it fails to acknowledge the accompanying suspicion of food as that which sustains the body – both male and female – in its sinful state. The equation of the female womb and mouth with sin and death ignores the strange body – estranged body – that it creates by placing two different parts in essentially the same position. It reduces the central human relationship to a contest between sexes. In addition to being the human location of sinful desire, the fount of sin itself, which brings death into the world, Eve also functions as the purveyor of food, specifically the fruit flesh. She brought the forbidden fruit for Adam to eat. Her daughters, then, prepare food for Adam’s sons to eat. But in this role they are ironically suspicious in that they re-enact Eve’s offering of the forbidden fruit to Adam even as they serve life-sustaining elements.



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In contrast to Eve, Mary is rarely depicted with food.5 Instead, she is always shown with the Christ child, and at most a bare breast, implying that she has nursed him. Occasionally, theologians and artists show her milk sustaining and preserving others too (Warner, 1983, pp. 195–205). The food that she offers to the Christ child is presented as deriving from her holy, virginal body. Mary is most strongly associated with food at Christ’s first miracle, for it is she who approaches him to resolve the issue of having run out of wine during the celebratory wedding dinner. In this instance, Mary is clearly associated with the production of food. How else would she be aware that the host of the event had run out of wine? This episode completes Mary’s association with traditional female labors – she has given miraculous birth, and she can ask her son to produce miraculous wine. Still the sustenance that Mary produces is not suspicious (perhaps poisonous or sinful), but miraculous, and performed through mediation with Christ himself. Mary thus gains association with holy birth and with holy drink. However, these links leave out flesh. She, unlike Eve, is not associated with flesh. She is not an object of sexual desire. She herself is not the object of the male gaze: she points beyond herself to her son, Christ. To gaze on her is to contemplate salvation, to beg for her intervention. Not only is Mary’s association with food made miraculous, but Mary’s voice – heard in heaven pleading for sinners – is the antidote for temptation. Christ will listen to his mother, and those who cannot get help from God, can get help from her to move God’s benevolence on their behalf. Her holy voice in prayer to her son leads to the redemption of sinners doomed by Eve, Eve’s eating, and the temptation that Eve voiced to Adam. Given that Mary is the model of undisputed holiness for women and given the powerful connection between her and abstinence, one should be unsurprised by the association of holy women not only with fasting, which has a long association with holiness in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also with silence, except in prayer. For the mouth silent to other humans is closed, and temptation, therefore, cannot proceed from it. As Christianity spread, women and men could not escape Eve’s presence. As Mary and Eve became the polar opposite models for women, two diverging views of women emerged in popular imagination. Women might be like Wealtheow, wife of Hrothgar: she brings peace between Beowulf and Hrothgar’s men by serving them wine and by bringing family allegiances along with her when she marries. Although Beowulf is certainly an early text, the sco¯p clearly links women with food. Good women serve food. Bad women – like Grendel’s mother – eat flesh. This





connection continues into the Middle Ages. Women following after Eve might be like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath – sexually aggressive with split front teeth that suggest open legs. The association of her teeth with her sexual availability reinforces the connection between women, food, and sex. Indeed, Dame Alyce clearly enjoys sex: she announces early in the pilgrimage that she has had five husbands and will welcome a sixth, primarily because, she tells her fellow pilgrims, St Paul has determined that it is better to marry than to burn. In addition, Dame Alyce violates the prescription that women be silent. Dame Alyce, who lectures her current husband Jankyn on how to behave, is like Eve. She is sinful; she is not virginal, but sexually active, not silent, but vocal, and the illustration of her in the Ellesmere MS clearly indicates that she enjoys food. She is fat. A distinct contrast to Dame Alyce, medieval holy women, particularly those in the mystic tradition, often rejected food and sex. These women sought the best position available to them – Bride of Christ. Their desire for salvation and eternal union with the divine beloved produced a tradition. This tradition prized virginity as the most holy state for both men and women, rejecting sex and, in some cases, the body, altogether.6 Men could lead holy lives as monks; women could lead holy lives as nuns. But in the cloister or abbey, a third tradition developed, one followed particularly by women, and food played a significant role in it. In the mystic tradition, women desired holy union with Christ, as they hoped to become his spouse. Seeking such union, many women punished their bodies in attempts better to understand Christ’s sufferings for the salvation of humankind.7 They fasted, claiming that the only food they needed was the Eucharist, and the only drink necessary for living was wine from the chalice. When these women took in the consecrated wine and wafer, they experienced mystical union with Christ himself; some experienced such ecstasy that they fainted.8 The belief in transubstantiation, by which means these women ate Christ’s flesh and drank his blood, can be interpreted in another way as well. These women sought to be Christ’s bride, and given the persistent association of food with sex, they then, in Communion, performed a kind of mystical sexual act, and for such women, the association of food with sex is reinforced. The beliefs and consequent actions of these women indicate the tensions between Eve and Mary as the two models for female behavior and the difficulty they represent for women who desire holiness but recognize that they can be neither Eve nor Mary.



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Although the Protestant Reformation reduced the emphasis on the position of Mary in relation to the Trinity, and although it focused on the importance of individual relationships to God for both men and women, the Reformation and its Roman Catholic counterpart – the Counter-Reformation – did little to change the models offered to women. Women remained daughters of Eve, and Mary epitomized female holiness. Women still faced accusations of tempting men to sin, and the connection between appetite and abstinence remained constant. In the sixteenth century, Anne Boleyn is perhaps the most famous example. Because Henry became enamored of Anne while married to Catherine of Aragon, Anne became the human forbidden fruit, the symbol of the fall itself. Strikingly, the contrast between the two women revolves around both food and fruit (children). Catherine, a notably holy woman, prayed and fasted (Weir, 1991, p. 255).9 Her eating habits reinforced her holy reputation. But Henry asked for an annulment based on the assertion that she had been married to his deceased older brother, Arthur. Anne Boleyn, in contrast, had a reputation for enjoying music, dance, and wine (Weir, 1991, p. 153); she fasted only as a means to recover from the sweating sickness (Warnicke, 1989, p. 80). The fact that Henry’s giving in to temptation meant divorce from Catherine and separation from the Roman Catholic Church undergirded Anne’s position as both Eve and the fruit that represents sin. Once she failed to produce a son for Henry VIII, she faced charges of sexual license and committing adultery with several men, including her brother. Indeed, she was rumored to have attracted Henry’s attention through witchcraft (Warnicke, 1989, p. 231; Weir, 1991, p. 304). The tenor of these accusations positions Boleyn as a daughter of Eve, who instead of promoting holiness and salvation by giving birth to a son, produced only disorder and a daughter. In addition, the Roman Catholics who desperately wanted England to acknowledge the authority of the Pope once again, furthered the image of Boleyn as a whore,10 equating her with the whore of Babylon in her wooing of a man once awarded the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ away from the Church. Shakespeare and other Early Modern writers treat women who fast in order to prove that they are ‘chaste and loyal wives’ as models, despite the fact that these women ‘undertake fasting, fully intending to die.’ In contrast, men who fast appear as ‘abnormal and unnatural’ (Gutierrez, 1992, p.79).11 So, the relationships between characters and food as presented on stage became part of and reflected widespread positions on eating. These attitudes, also visible in Erasmus





and Elyot, continue the tense relationship between women and food. To prove their chastity and loyalty, women must die by voluntarily giving up food. References to women and eating during the early modern era suggest continued anxiety over how and what women eat (Lee, 2005, p. 65), and the way in which the use of their mouths might encourage sin. Concomitant with the insistence on women as tempting men to sin, was the insistence on appropriate speech by women. Popular literature on women as shrews and on shrew-taming emphasized the necessity of appropriate speech for women, enjoining them to a life of silence in public and quiet conversation at home. In Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville Diderot imagines an encounter in the South Seas with an indigenous family which revolves around contrasting attitudes toward women, food, and sex. In the episode, the Tahitian male offers the European traveler food prepared by his wife. At the end of the meal, the man then offers the traveler his choice of companion for the night: he may choose the man’s wife or any one of the three daughters. The youngest daughter begs the traveler to choose and to impregnate her so that she will have the same status in the family as her two sisters who have already given birth (Diderot, 2007, pp. 213–16). Western equations of women, food, and sex underlie any reading of this text. Women prepare and serve the food. Then, they are served to the traveler as a means to satisfy his sexual appetite. But, while the woman prepares, serves, and is served, she does not eat. Her eating is not important. Indeed, the desire that drives the youngest daughter is the desire for a child. And, while he complains that his religion should prevent him from having sexual relations outside the boundaries of marriage, her father’s arguments that this natural state is so much better, so much purer, win the day. In this struggle between Christian beliefs and the idea of the noble savage, the youngest daughter – one of the savages – demonstrates her purity by following the dictates of nature. But she is still the food that will satisfy the sexual appetite of the male. So she is unlike the Christian women whom the traveler has left behind who have opted for Marian chastity. Instead, she is a new kind of Mary: natural, pure, and servile. But this woman is also Eve. Her natural state – perhaps Edenic – is one that tempts the Christianized man to extramarital sex, an activity that has clearly been labeled sin. This pattern repeats the pattern of Eve with Adam. Eve offers Adam food. He eats. He then realizes his nakedness and feels shame. Still, only two positions exist for women to fill: they can be either Diderot’s nobly savage women who feed men, then beg



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for sex, or they can be Christianized Europeans who feed men, then virginally refuse sex except in marriage. In the nineteenth century, women continued to find themselves positioned between these polarities, although the Church exerted less and less influence. Not explicitly Christian, but still asserting JudeoChristian morality, the Victorian image of the Angel of the Hearth certainly bought into these two stereotypes. Indeed, women’s difficulties with food became so pronounced that doctors gave one eating pattern a new name, ‘anorexia nervosa.’ Such abstinence from food was likely related to the need for control (Polinska, 2000, p. 575). But such exaggerated undereating also tapped into a persistent subtext that insisted that desirable, chaste women had to be thin (Michie, 1987, p. 22). For those women who grew round with childbearing – a visible sign of sexual activity – could not be seen publicly. Again, women found themselves inexplicitly positioned between two eating patterns, one associated with Eve-like temptation, the other with Marian virginity. Despite the continued decline of Church influence on society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, women still find themselves between contested ideals of appetite and abstinence. Christians, and members of other religious traditions that promote modesty, continue to struggle with the body, particularly with what constitutes its appropriate use and display. These questions and conflicts almost always relate to display of the female body and are often vaunted in the context of images presented by a variety of media. Overall, photographers and filmmakers design images of women, as Mulvey (2007) has ably argued, to satisfy the male gaze. The emphasis is on reifying a particular image – one that bears a striking resemblance to the physique of a medieval ascetic mystic who mysteriously survives on morsels of the Host and on the sip of wine from the chalice, or to the chaste, loyal wife who dies by fasting. Accompanying the rejection of a feminine body that this emaciation represents is also a rejection of ‘fat’ as ‘bad,’ a moral term that suggests sin. Despite the fact that Western popular culture is arguably post-Christian, this kind of thinking clearly has roots in a Christian tradition that positions appetite as evil. The only way for women to achieve the kind of body that the media establish as the ideal, or even as ‘healthy,’ is to deny appetite itself. Indeed, giving in to appetite has been pathologized as ‘bingeing’ or ‘overeating.’ In a striking reversal of the dichotomy that puts the Virgin Mary on a pedestal and relegates Eve to a pit, it is Eve, with her sexual appetite, who is now applauded as the model for the ‘new woman.’ The problem is that simply reversing the model does not open any avenue by which women





can escape from these two polarities. Woman faces the strange mapping of her body in which the vagina is equated with the mouth. The penis becomes a substitute for food, and woman’s desire for sex should help her to control her gustatory appetite. The increasing emphasis on achieving health still offers only appetite and abstinence as choices. To reach the accepted state of physical and mental health, the woman must abstain from food, now coded as ‘unhealthy eating choices,’ and fulfill her appetite for sex. The pervasive nature of this binary model warrants re-examination, for as models for female behavior, Eve and Mary represent unobtainable poles. No living woman will ever claim to be the mother of all persons; nor will any living woman claim to be pregnant without sexual intercourse. Christ will always be male. So, given these parameters, what model is available to women? What place is available for them? The answer is at the Communion table. For it is at this table that Christ himself took the position designated for women. He serves the disciples his flesh and offers them his blood to drink. Significantly, before this meal he had already equated himself with fully satisfied appetite, and he did so in the context of a conversation with a female outcast. In the well known story of the Woman at the Well, Jesus, who is alone, offers a Samaritan woman ‘living water.’ He claims that this water will so satisfy her thirst that she will never thirst again. Importantly, her response indicates the pervasive association between women and physical appetite. She calls her friends to meet Jesus because he has promised her water that – she hopes – will keep her from constantly working to satisfy her household. This brief moment evokes other references to Christ as food: the Bread of Life, the Vine. In each case, Christ offers himself as the substitute for the food that Eve and all her daughters prepare and provide. At the Last Supper and symbolically at Communion, Christ presents himself as the substance of an entire meal. First, he humbles himself to wash the disciples’ feet. Then they sit at the table to eat a meal that, very likely, women, their social inferiors, prepared and served. Although the context of the Passover meal had always been that of remembering God’s intervention in a specific situation, Christ enlarges the symbolism. Having already positioned himself as a servant, he declares that the blood that he will shed and his broken body, represented in the wine and bread, will bring a different kind of intervention: rather than sustenance for physical flight from physical threat, this meal promises eternal salvation. Christ’s command that the disciples eat this meal with



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its eternal symbolism/significance suggests that this instruction TO EAT redeems Eve’s earlier, eternally significant violation of the instruction NOT TO EAT. Considered as a redemptive act for Eve and Adam’s ingestion of the forbidden fruit, the ritualized lifting of a food and eating taboo not only makes sense as reversal, but also as emancipation of Eve’s body from the symbolic cannibalism to which the female body has been subject. Additionally, the triple insistence of Jesus on his position as servant – he washes feet, serves wine, serves bread – repositions women, transforming them into those who are served, rather than those who serve. No one has ever been able successfully to deny women a place at this table. The very act of taking Communion, an act which necessitates ingestion by the mouth, re-positions the female mouth and redeems it from its symbolic position as the port of sin. Instead of constant association with Eve’s mouth and that first taste of the forbidden fruit – the opening from which her voice issued, tempting Adam likewise to eat the forbidden fruit and thereby creating an entrance into the world for sin and death – the female communicant’s mouth becomes an entrance for salvation, the force that purifies and gives eternal life. Rather than directing the body to sin, the mouth becomes the salvific member of the body, and the vagina becomes the entrance of fully mapped human beings into the world, those who can, as recipients of felix culpa, experience salvation. Because salvation for both men and women comes from the ingestion of the same substance at the same point in the body, both can claim salvation of language that proceeds from the salvific opening. Because Communion provides the mnemonic for salvation, appetite for this meal, in contrast to fleshly appetites for forbidden fruits, is divine. For the appetite for salvation can only, according to Augustine, be excited by a profound sense of spiritual lack. And only Christ himself can prompt the sinner to such an appetite. Moreover, sin/flesh or sinful flesh cannot satisfy the appetite for salvation. Attempts to find satiety in sin and flesh only deepen hunger. Sated by salvation, which the conclusion of the Eucharistic meal represents, appetite is itself redeemed. Instead of leading to greater attempts for satisfaction that no one can achieve, using substances that lead only to greater hunger, this appetite continually returns not only to the source of the appetite itself, but also to its eternal satisfaction. In this paradigm, appetite need not be managed or controlled. Nor is abstinence the standard for holy behavior. Instead, appetizing fruit is appropriate fruit, and the command is not to abstain, but to take and eat.




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1. Among the first to suggest that women moderate their experiences through male language and ideas was Simone de Beauvoir. Other writers who argue for the difference of women’s experiences across the human spectrum are Carol Gilligan, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Carolyn Heilbrun, and Gloria Anzalduá. Susan Bordo’s work on female body image is also important (Bordo, 2004), as is Horner and Keane’s (2000). Of course this list is only partial as many scholars have explored this territory with grace and sophistication, and their work is widely available. 2. Milton’s retelling of this story in Paradise Lost is an exception to this statement. 3. Blaumires (1992, p. 3) explains, ‘Even Augustine […] thought woman more than man represented an orientation of the mind towards the material rather than the spiritual. In a cruder form of such thinking, woman becomes bodily sensation.’ Blaumires continues to explain the working out of such misogynist thinking: theologian-philosophers conceived of women as ‘being[s] who constantly risked sinning almost by [their] very existence, if that existence caused a man to have lustful thoughts.’ Moreover, ‘not only did women excite men to sinful thoughts; women were actually held to be more lustful creatures by nature. From here it was a short step to the equation, woman equals lust’ (ibid., pp. 4, 5). 4. Medieval philosophers posited that women could attain only three levels of perfection, ‘with faithful wifehood at the bottom, and chaste widowhood and virginity higher up the scale. […] though the greatest admiration was inevitably reserved for virgins’ (Blaumires, 1992, p. 13). 5. One notable exception is the Virgin with Child by Gerard David and the seemingly popular reproductions of this image in which Mary is shown with Jesus before a table on which are foods for both to eat. The position of the foods suggests that Mary is introducing her child to solid food, an image that reifies Christ’s humanity (Tomasik and Vitullo, 2007, p. xx). 6. Although the early Church deemed the rejection of the body total a heresy (Gnosticism), the ascetic tradition, in which mortifications of the flesh were acceptable and encouraged, flourished. 7. Although part of the mystic tradition, anchorites function in an entirely different way. As holy women, they were not sexually available. But these women might live locked in a cell, cared for by passers-by or by those who brought gifts of food. From this position, which restricted food intake and eliminated sexual activity, people expected the anchorite to dispense wisdom and to speak truth. For more on this tradition and its relationship to food, see Bynum (1987). 8. Bynum (1987) explores this aspect of medieval life in great detail. Additional specifics regarding female devotion to the Eucharist appear in Bynum (1991). 9. Significantly, Catherine saw herself following the example of the medieval holy wife, ‘openly declaring herself to be a “Patient Grizelda” ’ (Weir, 1991, p. 167), a reference that not only connotes patience, but also thinness and deprivation. 10. Anne’s increasing power at Henry’s court resulted in several public accusations of whoredom. The Abbot of Whitby was the first in 1532 (Weir, 1991,



Notes

p. 230). Although Anne tried later to publicize her devotional life, her efforts were not enough to reverse the public perception of her as a witch and whore. 11. Significantly Hartle draws attention to the development of the ‘Great Eater’ subgenre, an outgrowth of the Interregnum. While this genre celebrates particular gourmands, it also draws attention to the conflict between Puritan values that eschewed conspicuous consumption and social practices that valued feasting. Certainly for all, holiness again became associated with fasting, while feasting suggested – for men – ‘eccentric’ theology. Women heard the association between eating and sin reinforced even in sermons, such as the Sermon against Gluttony and Drunkennesse (Hartle, 2007, pp. 42–3).




9 Philip Sampson

How can they [the gods] meet us face to face till we have faces? C.S. Lewis, Till we have faces (Lewis, 1956, p. 294)

Prologue This chapter sets its sights on an analysis of animate ‘Otherness’ as it has developed in critical theory from the Frankfurt School to the late twentieth century.1 I argue that European philosophy’s minimal contribution to animal welfare discourse draws our attention to specific weaknesses in its conceptualization of human existence, despite its well known radical critique of humanism. I explore these issues by drawing upon Christian understandings of communality and dominion.

Theology, philosophy, and animal welfare A surprising finding of late twentieth-century research on animal welfare is that reform ‘grew out of the (minority) Christian tradition that man should take care of God’s creation’; ‘an essential role was played by Puritans, Dissenters, Quakers and Evangelicals […]’; the ‘Old Testament was the authority most frequently cited [rather than classical authors or philosophers]’, and the contribution from philosophy, especially European philosophy, has been minimal (Thomas, 1984, pp. 180, 153–4; Preece, 2005, pp. 10–11; Sampson, 2000, ch. 3; Fudge, 2006, pp. 102–3). This finding is contrary to the widespread belief that the humane treatment of animals is the fruit of the humanism initiated by the Renaissance, exemplified in the European Enlightenment, and fulfilled in Darwin’s reinsertion of humans into the community of animal life 120



Humans, Animals, and Others

on earth. Many authors argue that this evolutionary communality of all beings should foster an interest in the welfare of our animal cousins. But Preece and Chamberlain are surely right in observing that, historically, it has not done so: ‘Almost all the publications and pamphlets put out by the early SPCAs and Humane Societies [in the later nineteenth century …] have a very strong evangelical Christian bent. […] Ironically, it was those who repudiated Darwin’s elevation of the status of animals who, in practice, did most to protect the interests of animals’ (Preece and Chamberlain, 1993, pp. 38, 37, 40). Atterton and Calarco conclude that twentieth-century continental philosophy has ‘only rarely given serious attention to the animal question’ despite its critique of humanism (2004, p. xv). In this they are partly mistaken. As Wolfe (2003a and 1998) notes, European philosophers have not lacked seriousness, but their writing has nevertheless made minimal contributions to contemporary animal rights discourses. Similarly, Webb recognizes the contemporary affirmation of Otherness in European philosophy, yet ‘animal others are usually treated as mere appendages of the human project’ (1998, p. 69; my emphasis). The remainder of this chapter attempts to address Singer’s (2004, p. xii) question of what the ‘failure’ to contribute to the animal welfare debate says about the ‘much-vaunted critical stance’ of European critical theory. In particular, it examines the origins of this curious neglect, with particular reference to the concept of animal Otherness. I argue that the marked contrast between the historical contributions made by Protestant theology and European philosophy is not accidental, but reflects fundamentally different understandings of human and animal existence in the world.

Christianity and Otherness The OED tells us that ‘other’ means ‘separate in identity, distinct in kind.’ During the pre-modern Christian period, a long tradition developed in Western Europe which focused on two ‘distinctions in kind’: that between created human beings and their Creator, and the distinction within creation between human and animal existence. We might think of these as a ‘vertical’ sequence of distinctions: God – human – animal. This entailed two dimensions of discourse:2 1 The first concerned the transcendence of God over humans (and creation generally). The two poles of this discourse (transcendence and immanence) threatened to collapse into absolute separation on the



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one hand or Pantheistic unity on the other. The former renders God absolutely Other, the inscription over the entrance to the Via Negativa; we may know what God is not, but we can make no ‘positive’ statement about what God’s nature includes. By contrast, pantheistic unity loses transcendence altogether in the Same. The doctrinally orthodox resolution mediated absolute transcendence in the doctrine of the incarnate Word.3 2 The second dimension of discourse concerned the place of humans within, and in some sense over, creation. This also had two poles: the communality of all creation, and the dominion of humans (especially over animals). These two poles also threatened to collapse, occasionally into a mystical unity of all creation, but more usually into the tyranny of absolute separation. The latter is commonly found in the (supposed) Christian doctrine that animals were made for man’s use, to do with as he wishes. The place of humans found its doctrinally orthodox resolution in their creation in the image of the living God. The consequent doctrine of dominion regards animals as ‘relatively’ other within the family community of creatures, and entails ethical duties of care, mercy, and restoration (Primatt [1776] 1992; Linzey, 1994). These two dimensions of discourse were woven together in the type of the shepherd, exemplifying sovereignty and care, glory and love, power and gentleness.4 Humanness is thus doubly pinned in the doctrines of God and of creation, and forms a single fabric. This discourse was not simply a metaphysical debate; it was not abstract in the modern sense, but was rich in ethical dimensions. Thus humans owe a duty of worship to God, and of stewardship to the beasts. This double pinning generated the distinctive Protestant understanding of human and animal existence, and inspired the animal theology which motivated the historical animal welfare discourse noted above. The threefold rubric of ‘God – man – animal’ placed humanity in a double relation of otherness: to the transcendent God, and to the beast. Neither of these is simply absolute. Moreover, the first relation, through creation and providence, maintained for the second a dominion within creaturely communality. Humans and other mammals are equally creatures, all created from the dust of the earth on the same day, and all standing in the same relationship to the creator. There is no total separation, no neo-Platonic hierarchy as with the Greek ‘chain of being.’ Even the much maligned Aquinas is clear on this, denying the total Otherness of Creator to creation, and asserting a community of all creatures: ‘The Word also has a kind of essential kinship not only with the



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rational nature, but also universally with the whole of creation, since the Word contains the essence of all things created by God’ (Aquinas [1264] 1975, IV.42[2]). The kinship of the Word here underwrites the communality of creatureliness. An orthodox understanding entailed that transcendence in the relation between God and humans militated against tyranny in the relationship between humans and beasts. I will argue below that the collapse in this orthodoxy, and the consequent absolutizing of transcendence, excluded such creational communality and opened an abyss between human and animal existence.

Renaissance dualism The threefold distinction of this complex debate (God – human – animal) proved vulnerable, and rips in the fabric of Christian anthropology widened, especially under the influence of classical Greek dualism. Some have argued that Renaissance ‘humanism’ marked a transitional unraveling: by replacing the transcendence of God with that of man, it ‘set man, not God, at the centre of the world’ (McCorquodale, 1994, p. 12). As this suggests, the displacement of God from the center did not coincide with the abolition of transcendence itself; rather, man took God’s place, a palimpsest of transcendence within the world. Just as divine transcendence had set God apart from the created order, so worldly transcendence set man apart from nature; but with the important difference that man’s transcendence, unlike its divine original, generated an absolute gulf, and made of animals the absolute ‘Other.’ Fudge notes that the Greek dualism inherited by the Renaissance identified this gulf with the ‘possession or lack of reason.’ This dualism ‘reiterates the centrality’ of the individual human self, making animals ‘the absolute other,’ lacking any community with humans (Fudge, 2006, p. 100). The absolutizing of Otherness and the loss of creaturely communality destroyed the human duty of dominion care. As Preece and Chamberlain remark, ‘If [in the Renaissance] man was to be made the centre of nature and of the universe there was little time to waste on inferior beings’ (1993, p. 26). Unsurprisingly, Renaissance humanism contributed little to animal welfare discourse. For Burckhardt (1860, pp. 98, 185ff., 198), Renaissance humanism marked the very arrival of modern man. Whether this is or is not so, this debate marks three important features for the understanding of human and animal existence within modern humanism.5 Firstly, it is anthropocentric. Humans are at the center of nature, sovereign over it, and separated





from it by an absolute gulf. Secondly, reason is the crown of humanity, distinguishing us from the ‘irrational’ animals. Thirdly, the consequent collapse of communality destroys Aquinas’s kinship of the Word; the duty of care is lost. Indeed, the Greek notion of a ‘chain of being,’ from lowest to highest, makes it a natural duty for the higher to exploit the lower (Fudge, 2006, p. 101). Atterton and Calarco (2004, p. xvi) link the mistreatment of animals with ‘a humanism that has always sought to elevate the human at the expense of animals’ (see also Webb, 1998, pp. 69–70). This putatively Renaissance account of worldly transcendence, with its absolute human sovereignty, contains a hidden instability. Man, transcendent over nature, is painfully dependent on that very same nature, vulnerable to forces he cannot control. Overcome by nature, he might lose his vaunted reason, the supposedly transcendent part of him, and what remains is bestial.6 The absolute gulf between transcendent man and animal-Other is vulnerable to collapse into Sameness. This putatively Renaissance perception of Man provided a language for modernity’s self-understanding well into the twentieth century. Thus Horkheimer and Adorno wrote of the Enlightenment that: ‘Man’s likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the Lordly gaze, in the command’ (Horkheimer and Adorno [1947] 2002, p. 6). But reflection upon this conception of humanness generated a more technical, metaphysical discourse. Having lost the dual unities of incarnate Word and image of God, Western philosophy sought within the world for another concentration point for thought (Dooyeweerd, 1969). A new problematic assumed increasing prominence: the relationship of humans (as absolutely transcendent Subjects) to animal-Others. It is to this that we must now turn.

Philosophical transformations At first sight, Renaissance man’s ‘sovereignty over existence’ suggests a parallel transcendence of the subject of experience over sensory experience of the world, for the subject cannot make an object of itself in the same way that it can of the world. Further reflection generates a world that is itself at one remove from the objects of thought that represent it. The ‘Other’ comes to be an object of the transcendent Self, rather than the world. But there is a formal symmetry here; it can equally be argued that the ‘ “lived experiences of consciousness” […] concern […] objects transcendent and exterior to it’ (Marion, 2002b, p. 72). Transcendence oscillates unstably between Subject and Object, and the Other becomes the ontological co-respondent of the Self.



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This formal symmetry has only become apparent retrospectively, for the development of Western philosophy had yoked the Self-Other relation to a positive, interior understanding of what the subject is, of what its identity includes: namely the rationality that qualifies the animal as human. This inclusive identity of rational man was symmetry-breaking, and gave a priority to the subject worthy of Renaissance human sovereignty over Nature. The subject’s transcendence was thereby pinned by the human possession of reason. Heidegger summarizes ‘what Western thought has thought of man since the beginning [that is, ancient Greece]’: ‘Man is the rational animal. Through reason, man raises himself above the animal, but so that he must constantly look down upon the animal, subject it, master it’ (1968, p. 58). The animal became the paradigmatic Other. In the Cartesian tradition, reason underwrites the absolute transcendence of human ‘souls’ over the Otherness of animal ‘mechanisms.’ The Cartesian indifference to the screams of vivisected dogs as the sound of ‘breaking machinery’ is well known. The unchallenged supremacy of humanist Cartesianism following the French Revolution saw an unopposed rise in vivisections in Paris (Rosenfield, 1968, p. 54; Ryder, 1983, pp. 122–4, 139; Hastings, 1936). For Kant ([1784a] 1996), authentic human existence lay in the free exercise of reason. Revealingly, Kant compares those who lack the courage to live authentically (including ‘the whole fair sex’) with domestic animals: the rational life distinguishes men from the beasts. This inclusive conception of human identity establishes the ‘absolute inner worth’ of the human over the animal (Kant [1797] 1991, p. 186). ‘Absolute’ because even ‘the supreme power’ cannot forbid ‘progress in Enlightenment.’ Irrational beasts are instrumental ends, and humans owe no direct duties to them. Thus vivisection, while cruel, is acceptable because ‘animals are regarded as man’s instruments’ (Kant [1784b] 2001, pp. 212–13, 434). Early twentieth-century advocates of animal welfare lamented the indifference of philosophy. Henry Salt recognized the impact of the ‘humanitarian movement’ with its Christian roots, noting that vegetarianism is growing ‘even in the religious organizations, conservative as these are.’ But the ‘ethical societies,’ which hosted modern ‘philosophical’ debate, were silent (Salt, 1914, pp. 39–41). In fact, they were worse than silent, for vivisections and intensive animal husbandry were growing apace under the indulgent eye of Enlightenment progress. Both owed their systematic, early industrial cruelties to the mature Self’s free exercise of reason. Bauman (1991) has noted that rational man generates his Other as that which is to be regulated and controlled through regimens of power and oppression.




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The Master and the Slave Ostensibly, the inclusive conception of man as rational established the absolute sovereignty of the subject over the irrational animal-Other. However, Young-Eisendrath and Wehr (1989, p. 134) point out that this conception was incipiently unstable. In the Cartesian Enlightenment tradition, both Nature and Woman are regarded as Other, and the sovereign Self is founded through the methodical doubting of all Otherness: ‘In order to believe in his separate existence, a man empties the reality of (M)Other through doubts and suspicions.’ Paradoxically, an attempt to establish an absolute, sovereign Self makes it dependent upon the Other and promotes the priority of the Other. Both the woman and the animal became the repressed Other within the modern subject. This paradoxical dependence of the sovereign Self upon the Other was systematically explored in German idealism. Its insights, especially Alexandre Kojève’s ([1947] 1969) meditation on Hegel’s ‘Master-Slave dialectic,’ proved crucial to twentieth-century European philosophy. To recognize an inclusive identity is to be aware of a boundary, and hence to delineate what is beyond. A positive statement of what humanness includes (‘man is a rational animal’) gives rise to its negation (‘the irrational beast which man is not’). This would not be so destabilizing if the positive statement were secure. But it is not. As noted above, if transcendence is absolutized, the transcendent becomes un-sayable, and only what it is not can be articulated: the Via Negativa. The same impossibility arose with the inclusive conception of man the rational animal. Absolute human transcendence over nature makes the inclusive statement of the human un-sayable. How can reason, interior to the absolutely transcendent Subject, become part of nature, the object of reflection? Hegel made this impossibility his starting point; freed from the interior of the Subject, reason ‘penetrates all reality’ (Lévinas, 1990a, p. 236). His ‘Master-Slave dialectic’ came to epitomize the instabilities which arise in the relationship between Self and Other. Hegel’s famed analysis of one self-consciousness encountering another implies that identity is posited in an opposition leading to the enslavement of the one by the other. However, the positing of the self through opposition to the other is itself unstable. True, the Master’s power and human



Animal bodies became a site for the operations of such pitiless power. The communality of creation fostered by the Christian doctrine of dominion was fragmented into a hierarchy of instrumentality and control (Magel, 1989, pp. 32f.; Eisnitz, 2007; Scully, 2002).

dignity is recognized and thereby enhanced by the Slave-Other. But the Slave lacks the wherewithal to give such recognition worth. The Master thereby becomes dependent for his power and human dignity upon the Slave-Other who is unable to valorize such recognition. Moreover, the Master unexpectedly finds himself dependent upon the services of the Slave; his existence becomes doubly derivative (Hegel [1807] 1977, IV: pp. 178–96).

The twentieth-century discourse of the Other Hegel disclosed the dependence of inclusive identity upon the other, and moved humanness away from isolated centers of reason towards the social transforming of the world (Kojève [1947] 1969, pp. 18f.). The stage is thereby set for a shift to an exclusive conception of human identity which does not rely upon the subject’s possession of reason. Heidegger (1968, pp. 16, 3, 61f.) recognized that humanness could not be inclusively conceived and followed Hegel by moving reason into the world; ‘reason’ became ‘thinking,’ no longer abstract but historically tied to human manipulation and mastery. Thus he notes that apes have ‘organs that can grasp,’ but they do not have ‘hands’ for ‘only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft.’ In this respect the hand is ‘different by an abyss of essence’ from the ape’s organ that can grasp.7 Reason’s move into the world destroyed the inclusive centre of human identity. Human solidarity could only be recovered by absolutizing the human-animal gulf into an ‘abyss of essence.’ Moreover, Heidegger’s novel reinvention of a chain of being does nothing to heal the broken communality of creation. ‘Things’ are ‘without world,’ ‘animals’ are ‘poor in world,’ while humans are ‘world-forming’ (1995, pp. 213, 267ff.) This poverty in world, this privation by which we name animals, is no mere quantitative matter, nor even an absence of reason which might permit an underlying community of interest. It is an ‘abyss of essence’ between humans and animals such that ‘the essence of the human being consists in his being more than merely human’ in the sense of merely a rational animal, whereby we fulfil our calling to be the shepherd of being (Heidegger, 1998, p. 260). Not only does the communality of all creation remain lost, but its loss is a condition for human shepherding, for humanness itself. The contrast with the biblical shepherd seeking what is lost is stark. These contours of the Other were inherited by the Frankfurt School. For the first time it was clearly recognized that the Enlightenment project





up to that point signified both the exposure and the extension of domination, including the enslavement of the rational Self. At the center of the difficulty is the absolute transcendence of the self over a nature upon which it is dependent: ‘Enlightenment is more than enlightenment, it is nature made audible in its estrangement. In mind’s self-recognition as nature divided from itself, nature […] is calling to itself […] as something blind and mutilated. In the mastery of nature, without which mind does not exist, enslavement to nature persists’ (Horkheimer and Adorno [1947] 2002, p. 31). Worse, ‘reason,’ the inclusive core of humanism, conceals a heterogeneity of interests behind its apparent clarity: ‘The difficulties within this [instrumental] concept of reason, arising from the fact that its subjects, the bearers of one and the same reason, are in real opposition to each other, are concealed in the western enlightenment behind the apparent clarity of its judgements’ (ibid., p. 65). This concealed opposition within humanness undermines its inclusive identity; to find its unity humanness is forced back onto external opposition to animal-Others. This recognition of the Enlightenment underbelly took place against the ‘triumphant calamity’ in Europe from the 1930s, and the question of how the land of Kant and Aufklärung could have given birth to the Third Reich. ‘Enlightenment […] has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters [or ‘establishing their sovereignty’]. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947 [2002], p. 1). Despite this, the Frankfurt School affirmed its belief that ‘freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking’ even as it set about exposing the role of instrumental reason in the ‘self-destruction of enlightenment’ in Europe (ibid., ‘Preface’). The central dogma of the Enlightenment, the rejection of the transcendent God, proved nonnegotiable. But the way forward was not obvious. Given the enslaving consequences of a transcendent Self, philosophers favoring dualism seemed uncongenial to the task of reconstruction. The Frankfurt School turned instead to the inter-subjective, to communicative exchange, and to the communal inclusion of the Other (Habermas, 1998). Where there was previously a gulf separating Self and Other, these theorists attempted to avoid the absolutizing of transcendence by emphasizing mediation, the bridges of language, history, and context. The subject then has no ‘ontological priority before the world’ (Adorno, 1990, p. 213). Indeed, Habermas continues to refer to himself as steering a course between ‘the Scylla of a leveling, transcendence-less empiricism and



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the Charybdis of a high-flying idealism that glorifies transcendence’ (Habermas, 2002, p. 91). In his early work Habermas drew upon the inter-subjective role of interpretation in Freudian psychoanalysis, but later turned to language itself for the necessary mediating function. Engaging with Rawls, he identifies with the move away from placing the transcendence of Self over Other center-stage. Rawls, he says, ‘proposed an inter-subjective version of Kant’s principle of autonomy’ (Habermas, 1998, pp. 49–50). But, whereas Rawls relies on shared background beliefs to provide an ‘overlapping consensus,’ Habermas regards communicative action, with its implicit ‘telos of mutual understanding,’ as more fundamental, providing a distinctive form of social action working towards consensus (Borradori, 2003 p. 38). In this way the gulf of Otherness can be communicatively bridged, and the communality of the human recovered. ‘The “inclusion of the other” means […] that the boundaries of the community are open for all, also and most especially for those who are strangers to one another and want to remain strangers’ (Habermas, 1998, p. xxxvi). However, there was a cost. The communality of all creation before its creator was reduced to human community. It was taken for granted that an evolutionary abyss of superiority separated humans from animals. Indeed, it was just this species gulf which defined human as human. Clark (1997, p. 168) argues that Nazism demonstrated the risk of blurring the human/animal boundary with its sentimentalizing of animals and bestializing of humans; this is a lesson that post-war critical theory could hardly miss, reinforcing their maintenance of that boundary. The absolute animal-Other persists and cannot be a subject. Moreover, the Other is again constituted by the subject, losing its integrity as creature. Only the human remains (Whitebook, 1979).

Later developments: the constitutive Other Meanwhile a parallel discourse was emerging in France. For Sartre, the ‘transcendence of the ego’ remained a central problematic (Sartre [1937] 1960). Human existence is unique in knowing what it is not, thereby nihilating the Other, and establishing an abyss of transcendence between the two. But, once again, this abyss proves unstable, for ‘I need the Other in order to realize fully all the structures of my being.’ In some sense, the Other externally constitutes the Self (Sartre, 1969, p. 222). De Beauvoir made innovative use of this dual aspect of the Other in her seminal work on feminism. Following Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic,





she argued that ‘we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed – [man] sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.’ Man ‘is the Subject, he is the Absolute – [woman] is the Other.’ The absolute subject becomes dependent upon the inessential Other. For the first time, she presented a systematic, concrete analysis of the way that the Self is constituted not only by what it includes (its positive identities), but by what it excludes (the Other). To this end an Other, embodying these exclusions, is necessary. This makes Otherness ‘a fundamental category of human thought’ (de Beauvoir, 1989, pp. xxii–xxiii). Where early critical theory emphasized theoretically that the subject and object ‘constitute one-another as much as […] they depart from each other’ (Adorno, 1990, p. 174), and gave priority to communication and inter-subjectivity over transcendence of the Self, the French appropriation of Hegel subverted the very structure of transcendence itself by making the Other constitutive of the Self. The Other had moved from the wings to center-stage. This has perilous implications for the transcendent Self which may, in Foucault’s colorful phrase, be ‘erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault, 1970, p. 387). The constitutive Other has since become commonplace in the critique of oppression.8 For example, an insecure ‘macho’ masculinity might seek to bolster its identity by a fear and exclusion of the feminine. A critique would uncover the abuses of power whereby the common humanity of man and woman is obscured and the woman-Other oppressed, thus revealing their underlying humanity. This project fails if, instead of an underlying community, there is an underlying transcendence of Self over Other, an abyss, a fundamental and irrevocable division within humanity. It becomes essential, then, to identify what is human and to show its unity. But the boundaries of our communal humanity cannot be marked inclusively, for this is what is under critique. Rather, the boundary and nature of humanness must be constituted exclusively: ‘human’ is that which excludes the animal-Other. The ‘abyss of essence’ is transferred from within the human community to the gulf between human and animal. Humans transcend animal existence, and this transcendence defines our relationship with the animal world. As with Habermas’s communicative action, the constitutive Other requires a human community at the expense of the communality of all creation. The animal-Other constitutes the human in so far as the human transcends it, and the transcendent can owe no duty to that which it transcends. Moreover, a heightened perception of human heterogeneity makes transcendence over animal-Otherness ever more urgent.



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An example of such a mechanism is provided by Fudge’s discussion of early modern attitudes to animals in the context of the destabilizing of traditional identities. She sees the cruelties of animal sports as reinforcing the status of the viewer as human by comparison with the antics (screams, involuntary urination due to terror, and so on) of the suffering animal. The ‘stability of the category [of “human”] would seem to be the main result of the sport.’ In history, humans have defined ‘themselves as human in the face of the animal’; contemporarily, we might think of the popularity of dog-fighting or hunting as a sport among marginalized groups. ‘Paradoxically, humans need animals in order to be human’ (Fudge, 2000, pp. 1, 4, 13). The animal has become the constitutive Other of humanity. In its sovereign insecurity, humanity requires the animal-Other in order to sustain its precarious identity. In making itself transcendent over creation, humanity has undermined its dominion, and made itself dependent upon the oppression of the animal-Other. To posit ethical duties towards animals, is to pull away the props beneath humanity itself. This repressed dependence of humanness upon the animal has implications, for as Freud has taught us, the repressed returns. It has long been argued that cruelty to animals makes humans bestial. Animal otherness infiltrates the human and destabilizes its communal unity. In recent decades empirical investigation has linked such cruelty to violence against women and children (Ryder, 1983, p. 13; Lockwood and Ascione, 1997). Wolfe, quoting Cavell, suggests that animal otherness ‘points to an existence, even a consciousness […] which we imagine as a terrifying, even alien lack’ and problematizes the human. ‘We begin to feel, or ought to [feel], terrified that taken-for-granted human qualities rest upon “very shaky foundations – a thin net over an abyss” ’ (2003b, p. 4). The very Otherness of animals problematizes the humanness made dependent upon it.

The religious turn We have traced the vicissitudes of Otherness in continental philosophy, as exemplified in the human-animal relationship. However, it is worth recalling the resistance within critical theory to draining transcendence of ‘the wellspring of religious intuition’ (Harrison and Heyward, 1989, p. 166). From the beginning there has been a continued yearning for the unrepresentable, the ‘wholly Other’ (Mendieta, 2002). Indeed, Habermas has insisted upon the ‘inspiring and even indispensable’ content of religious language and intuitions of the Bible (1992, pp. 15, 51; 2002, p. 162). In light of this, it is noteworthy that recent sensitivity





to animal creation within continental philosophy has featured in religiously informed discourses. Adams observes that an inclusive conception of human transcendence which ‘raises us out of nature’ (for example, reason or language) is reminiscent of the ‘divine agency’ of its original (2006, pp. 84–5, 191f.) Rather than oppressively squeezing the animal Other for every drop of constitutive blood, the inadequacy of its created finiteness to such a task leads us back to the constitutive infinite Other of theology. Zuidervaart (2007, pp. 119f.), following Dooyeveerd, reinstates the animal as subject. Noting that the possibility that ‘the object can also be a subject’ has been precluded, he asserts an animal subjectivity that exceeds mere ‘objecthood,’ and upon which ‘human “subjects” depend.’ Here, animals are conceived, not as the constitutive Other of humanness, but as subjects in their own right. For Jean-Luc Marion (2002b, p. 9f.), exclusive conceptions of the self allocate evils we do not wish to own to the beastliness of the animal-Other. Recognizing the innocence of animals returns responsibility and freedom to humans. But it is Emmanuel Lévinas whose contribution is most resonant.

Lévinas and the Bible For Lévinas, a student of both European philosophy and the Talmud, the Other is not principally either an object of the transcendent self (traditional ontology) or constitutive of the self (later critical theory). For Lévinas, it is the excess of otherness of the Other, not reason, that disrupts the symmetry of the Self-Other relationship: ‘The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name the face’ (1969, p. 50). For Lévinas ‘the face’ witnesses a responsibility to the Other which takes precedence over my own freedom and autonomy (Bernstein, 2002, p. 180f.) As in early modern Christian anthropology, human community once again becomes an ethical issue, not a metaphysical one. In ‘face-to-face’ encounter with the Other, the subject is constituted in ethical responsibility. This plainly draws on the biblical ‘panim’ (LXX ‘prosopon’), the face-to-face encounter with God. The face of the Other makes demands on the subject prior to any discourse of truth or freedom. This demand has the quality of a revelation, of transcendence, of ‘gentleness’ rather than the violence of nihilation (Lévinas, 1969, p. 150). Insofar as the subject is always already constituted in ethical responsibility towards the Other, subjectivity is subjected-ness to the Other. For Sartre (subjective) existence precedes essence; for Lévinas ethics precedes (subjective)



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existence. Responsibility for the Other precedes subjectivity, grounds its meaning, and takes priority over metaphysics. I noted at the beginning of this chapter that modernity had collapsed the ethical dimension of earlier Christian debate into metaphysics. Lévinas, under Talmudic influence, reverses this, and draws our attention to the continuing centrality of questions of transcendence, communality, and duty. But where does this leave the question of the human relationship with the (animal) creation as Other? Lévinas (1990b) has commented on the mutuality of regard between some animals (such as dogs) and humans. He concurs with Fudge that humans define themselves as human in the face of the animal-Other, but for Lévinas this is, at least in part, already ethically qualified.9 Lévinas returns us to the ethical quality of the look of mutual surprise between animals and humans which, in the modern world, ‘has been extinguished’ (Berger, 1980, pp. 3, 26). Experimental animal laboratories use opaque cages to prevent the animal ‘apparatus’ from becoming ‘real’ and ‘disturbing’ experimenters by looking at them (Birke, 2007, p. 331). Many find it hard to ‘look that animal in the face’ which is kept to eat (Salt, 1914, p. 36; Sampson 2008). The ethical regard between human and animal has not been much discussed in recent Christian theology, but was noted by the Puritan George Walker in 1641 (p. 210) in his discussion of pre-lapsarian Eden. He describes the ‘delight’ of the mutuality of regard when the beasts appeared before Adam. For Walker, of course, there is an ethical duty upon humans towards animals arising from their created communality and from human dominion.

‘Till we have faces’ Critical theory inherited a highly abstracted, metaphysical Other, the object of transcendent subjectivity, and traced its vicissitudes under the pressure of its own inadequacy. A minority voice has drawn on insights from the Bible and the Talmud to recover a more ethical discourse. This richer understanding has re-appropriated a sense of transcendence beyond creation, and of ethics as undergirding human communality. Human self-identity thereby becomes more robust, less dependent upon an animal-Other to constitute it through exclusion; and a mutuality of regard establishes an ethical duty in our relationships with animals. The halachic principle tza’ar ba’alei chayim (the suffering of living creatures) prohibits cruelty and enjoins the pious to remember suffering in communality with all living creatures. A midrash (Tehillim 37.1)





proposes that Noah and his sons were saved on account of their ‘alms’ to the animals on the Ark, depriving themselves of sleep in order to care for them. Jewish mysticism traditionally emphasized the underlying kinship of humans with animals (Schochet, 1984, ch.12). The underlying biblical sources envisaged a communality of all living creatures in gentleness and care which goes far beyond the animal as constitutive Other for the human, or even Lévinas’s ethical concessions. Isaiah envisages the end of animal-Otherness in the modern sense, and the restoration of the earth ‘full of the knowledge of the LORD’ in communality and dominion: The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Is. 11: 6–9; New International Version)

Notes 1. Within ‘critical theory’ I include the broader tradition of European philosophy from the later twentieth century. See, for example, Wexler (1991). 2. By ‘animals’ I generally do not include birds and fish. I also pass over the place of angelic beings (see Schreiner, 1991, ch.2). These distinctions should not be confused with the neo-Platonic hierarchy of the chain of being (Schreiner, 1991, p. 22). Of necessity, there are many aspects of theological reflection on these issues which this chapter cannot encompass. 3. I take the Protestant Reformations to include the most articulate expression of Christian orthodoxy of the early modern period. 4. One has only to think of Psalm 23, or the good shepherds of the Bible, among them Abel, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, and Jesus. 5. For a discussion of Burckhardt’s thesis, see Starn (1998). 6. The allusion is to Othello Act II. 3. 7. Heidegger is here developing an insight of Hegel ([1821] 2002, p. 53) 8. See, for example, Patterson (1982, pp. 97ff.); Said (1979, pp. 47f.) 9. We might compare this with Heidegger (1968, p. 61) who glosses the Western philosophical tradition of ‘man the rational animal’ with ‘man is the animal that confronts face-to-face. A mere animal […] never confronts anything to its face.’



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Theologizing Horror: Spirituality and the Gothic Andrew Ng

Many contemporary critical theories seem biased towards anti-humanist, anti-religious trajectories, and this has somehow resulted in the undermining of attempts to elicit the spiritual dimensions in literature in favor of more tangible, material ones (race, sexuality, gender, class, and so on). Hermeneutics, once an enterprise that was vibrant and widely accepted (up into the 1980s) has, in the climate of poststructuralist theories and postmodern suspicion of metanarratives, lost its fervor within academia. It is important, in my view, to recognize that the Christian philosophy provides a valid tool for studying literature. Literature, as humankind’s textual mirror par excellence, can illuminate, under the lens of faith, profound facets of our identities that surpass merely the physical and material. In the way that the unconscious and the traumatic can become unveiled when subscribing literary texts to a psychoanalytical reading, the spiritual dimensions of fiction can be located when a religious perspective is deliberately deployed to investigate it. In this sense, the biblical notion of spiritual ‘truths expressed’ in ‘spiritual words’ in 1 Corinthians 2:13 takes on a weightier relevance in the area of literary studies. The following verse goes on to say that ‘The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned’ (Cor. 2:14; New International Version). To a point, someone who criticizes a religiousbased reading of literature fails to appreciate that this is one way of practicing interpretation. Like the ‘man without Spirit,’ he cannot recognize the validity of such an enterprise, and directly rejects the insights yielded by such an approach as ‘foolishness.’ The purpose of this chapter is to pursue the possibility of appreciating horror narratives theologically.1 What I hope to do is to offer an 135



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‘intersecting’ reading of Gothic and Christianity, but with the latter carefully inflected with a deconstructive bent. To undertake this enterprise, the chapter is divided into two principle movements. The first outlines some shared assumptions between the Gothic and Christian philosophies, especially with regard to the spiritual. Despite contemporary criticism’s emphasis on the largely material dimensions of horror (especially gender and sexuality), it is my contention that horror tales profoundly address spiritual concerns that often underpin the material, and that the subject’s encounter with horror has the potential to reconnect her with the spiritual and subsequently to bring about transcendence (or dissolution). In this respect, horror narratives seem to reinforce a point from 1 Corinthians 2:14 about the folly of prioritizing the flesh at the risk of dismissing or misrecognizing the necessity of the spiritual in our lives. The affinity between horror and theology established in the first part of the chapter will be consolidated in the second part when selected horror narratives are considered. The longest section of this chapter, part two, rekindles somewhat the practice of hermeneutics, with some help from psychoanalysis and Derrida’s deconstructive approach to theology.2 Drawing on Derrida’s interrelated concepts of the gift of death, hospitality, and radical friendship, this chapter, through an examination of selected narratives, argues that horror can be a meaningful, if difficult and misunderstood, Christian experience that instigates the self’s detachment from symbolic reality (really a fantasy) to (re)integrate it back into the void of Reality that is God. Horror, in these narratives, effectively unmoors the self from existential complacency and neutrality, and instead invigorates the self to rediscover faith either in God or in a coming community. Like the experience of the dark night of the soul identified by St John of the Cross, horror has the capacity to compel the self to confront its own dissolution, but it is also the means by which the Other (God or the hospitable community) can finally be embraced. It is an otherness that is not premised on any binary logic but on the collapsing of oppositions into each other. However, this does not suggest a Hegelian synthesis as well, for such a collapsing does not blur or dispel the distinctive identities of the various component members. Rather it keeps them intact and in harmonious tension with each other. Meditating on William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1972) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1988) will further consolidate my argument. Admittedly, these texts seem disparate in their choice (they are after all, personal favorites) but I want to demonstrate that in both popular horror writings and those from the Gothic canon, there is an intense, albeit



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sometimes embedded, spiritual and/or theological concern with which these narratives deal. Moreover, as narratives written in the West, it could safely be assumed that the writers are familiar with the Christian tradition, and that this tradition would in part either consciously or unconsciously inform their works. As such, contextualizing these narratives within a Christian perspective can illuminate the spiritual dimensions of the novels, and possibly lend them a theological inflection as well, as I will attempt to do.

Shared terrains: horror and ambiguity in the Gothic and the Bible What is known as Gothic literature began, among other things, as a reaction against the Enlightenment’s exaltation of rationality over imagination. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), purportedly the first Gothic novel, was an exercise of defiance against, and a parody of, the by then conventional wisdom of reason. This narrative laid the foundation for many stock-in-trade features of the Gothic, including diabolical men and mad women, haunted castles, ambiguous heroes/villains, and monstrous hybrids. The first part of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of the Gothic novel, with writers such as Ann Radcliffe, Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis, Mary Shelley, and Charles R. Maturin consolidating what is known today as the Gothic canon. Their narratives, with their representations of excess, terror, transgression, and the grotesque, have left an indelible mark in the history of English literature. The power of the Gothic somewhat dissipated after 1820 (the year Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, the last of the great Gothic novels, was published) because of its formulaic characteristics, which resulted in mass production of what became known as ‘penny-dreadfuls’ (sensational writings in the Gothic vein sold for a penny a novel). However, with the advent of the fin-de-siècle at the close of the 1800s and the publications of The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Dracula (1897), the Gothic recaptured the macabre imagination in the late Victorian era. In America, the Gothic had different emphases: the monstrosity of religion, especially in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s narratives, a concern which has fallen more or less out of favor with contemporary criticism; and the unspeakable nature of psychological rupture and aberrant desires, expressed in the narratives of Edgar Allen Poe, which have become a significant feature in Gothic narratives and studies today. Poe’s stories effectively relocate horror to within the individual. It is the self that is fundamentally the site of horror, or some other self – like the serial killer – whose presence mirrors ours



Theologizing Horror: Spirituality and the Gothic 137


and who therefore dwells undetected amongst us, but who is in truth a creature of terror. From this brief introduction to the Gothic, what can be gleaned as a shared terrain with the Bible is the insistence of both discourses on the existence of human dimensions beyond the visible and admissible, the material and the rational.3 The Gothic and the Bible maintain that there is also a supernatural and creative complex both exterior and interior to the self, and that the rift between the two is what often damages the self. Both discourses show (although in the Gothic, it is not always emphasized) that when the self fails to acknowledge, or rejects, the spiritual, it can become susceptible to fragmentation due to an inability to understand the experience; the experience is instead relegated to the perplexing and harrowing. This is akin to the man in 1 Corinthians 2:14 who deems the spiritual as foolishness because he fails to discern its power, and instead, encounters it as horror. But like Saul’s experience of being blinded (Acts 9) by the Other while on his way to Damascus, this horror can also potentially bridge the spirit within and the Spirit without, and thereby reinstate wholeness once more. Horror, rather than being opposed to a spiritual experience, is deeply spiritual in itself, akin to the numinous ‘Something,’ or mysterium tremendum, which Rudolf Otto discusses in his classic work, The Idea of the Holy. For Otto, an encounter with this profound mystery shatters the self’s myth of coherence and forces it to confront alterity as an irreducible other. As Richard White posits, ‘for such an experience [the tremendum] to take place, the tension with the other as other must be maintained; which means that the other cannot be apprehended or reduced to the categories of the subject; but neither can the subject simply efface or abandon herself to that which lies outside’ (1997, p. 132). The self becomes displaced and endangered in an encounter with horror, but it is through such a process that the self can also transcend its own material and ideological limitations to experience that which is ultimately spiritual. It is often that this transcendence fails to develop because the subject desperately tries to recuperate her sense of displacement by rationalizing (away) her experience, or abandoning herself to dissolution. The idea of the ‘spiritual,’ as will become evident below, is the collective mobilization of Derrida’s various concepts underpinning my reading of the horror narratives. Tentatively, the spiritual suggests an active state of being in the pursuit of the Other, a term that simultaneously connotes God and fellow men and women. To be spiritual is first to become conscious of one’s capacity for the violent reduction of otherness to categories of the self so as to eliminate its alterity and mystery.



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In order to overcome this, the self must embrace alterity (Derrida’s hospitality) by taking the radical stance of relinquishing itself (Derrida’s notion of the gift of death) to admit the latter, however threatening and dangerous this gesture may be. Only when this is activated can the self transcend the limitations of its material identity and arrive at the spiritual. In horror narratives, the other (or Derrida’s arrivant) often appears in guises abject and fearful but, as my reading of selected texts will demonstrate, the spiritual is often only finally apprehended when the self forms what Derrida terms a ‘radical friendship’ with such otherness, even at the possible risk of the self’s termination (1997, p. 232). In order to reach God, the highest form of spiritual attainment, it is sometimes necessary that a more basic, if no less harrowing act of reaching toward otherness be first attempted so as to hollow the self out of all familiar identifications in order to prepare it for a transcendental encounter. The two novels discussed in this chapter exemplify the idea of the spiritual expressed above, and the spiritual dimension of such narratives instigates a rethinking of horror, or evil, as already always opposed to holiness. It invites us to consider horror as possibly the complement of holiness, or at least a conduit to it. Not only does such a consideration complicate the way in which we think about horror, but it also contributes to what has always been an important aspect of Gothic narratives: ambiguity. According to Fred Botting, although ‘The terrors and horrors of transgression in Gothic writing become a powerful means to reassert the values of society, virtue and propriety: transgression, by crossing the social and aesthetical limits, serves to reinforce or underline their value and necessity, restoring or defining limits,’ at the same time, the Gothic is also ‘an examination of the limits produced in the eighteenth century to distinguish good from evil, reason from passion, virtue from vice and self from other’ (1996, pp. 7, 8). In other words, while Gothic literature allegedly reifies the status quo, it implicitly questions its limits. Horror, then, is not so much about transgressing norms and propriety as it is about exposing their fissures and fault-lines. It questions the very logic that underpins the binary thinking of the Enlightenment and reveals, in the process, the monstrous dimension such a logic carries in its demonization and marginalization of alterity and otherness. Ironically, evil is actually the denial of horror because it insinuates the refusal to meet otherness in its own terms, but seeks instead to reify the self at the violent expense of the other. When this happens, any inclination towards the spiritual is blocked, and the self, unable to attain transcendence, implodes into a state of existential numbness.




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Rather than asking how one reads theology into a horror narrative, it is perhaps more relevant to consider how horror can open a story up to theological concerns. This way, the focus shifts from how Christian a text is (or is not), to what a text can tell us about humans as spiritual entities, as appreciated from a Christian perspective. Horror narratives, many of which gesture toward the supernatural and deal with religious transgression and life beyond death, are particularly useful for theological reflections. Especially important is the way in which a traumatic experience awakens the subject’s dormant, or refused, spirituality, and the implication such an awakening entails. Consider William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, for example. Although criticized for its relegation of women as sexually suspect and victims who must be rescued by men, thus perpetrating the age-old gender/sexual binary (Clover, 1992), this narrative is nevertheless a powerful story about how horror can sometimes rekindle a waning spirituality. Father Karras, the priest trained in Enlightenment worldviews, must encounter the devil in order to realize that the spiritual realm defies reason and quantification, and that God, like the devil, exists as the sublime Other. Only when this is acknowledged can Karras resume his faith and save the possessed girl, Regan. Carol Clover argues that Karras’s ‘spiritual reawakening is cast in the language and imagery of opening up, of letting things in’ (1992, p. 90), that is, in language that is sexually suggestive. In this sense, Karras’s victory is ultimately also his defeat because, in becoming Regan’s substitute (he allows the demon to possess him in exchange for Regan’s freedom, after which he defenestrates himself), he embraces symbolical penetration (he has ‘opened up,’ and let something ‘in,’ as if raped), and thus takes on a feminized position. Such a feminist interpretation is insightful, but I want to proffer another way to understand the notions of ‘opening up’ and ‘letting things in.’ In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Real is an ‘internal self-impediment’ (Žižek, 2001a, p. 49) that prevents the subject from satisfying his desires; the Real disrupts the pleasure principle by creating a fissure that prevents the subject from achieving his desires, thus forcing pleasure always to seek out other forms of satisfaction. The Real is an ‘internal “excess” which impedes from within the “smooth running” of the psychic apparatus, as its immanent antagonism’ and must be differentiated from ‘reality’ which ‘by definition, appears as external limit’ (ibid.; emphasis in original). As such, desire can never be satisfied because the substitute that ‘reality’ poses is fundamentally ‘limited’ and cannot activate



Horror and/as theology

closure. The Real resides as a kernel that refuses symbolization within the subject’s psyche, motivating his fantasy of self-coherence and stable identity through the structuring properties of reality. As long as the subject believes that his fantastic self is real, the Real can be kept at bay; but circumstances can sometimes result in the (re)surfacing of the Real, which necessarily opens up a void within the subject. If profound enough, this void of the Real can potentially transform or destroy the subject. Although psychoanalysis tends to regard the Real as linked to the (m)other that has become lost through Oedipal action, this theory can also be gainfully deployed to understand the fissure experienced as a spiritual crisis that disentangles the subject from his fantasy to realign him with God. Read in this light, the demon in The Exorcist, at once powerful and inexplicable, is the opening up of the void which compels Karras to confront the Real which he has tried to relegate to the limited realities of science and reason. In this void, Karras reaches the threshold, or the limits, of reality, and instead re-embraces an Other through the gift of death. As Karras lies dying, his eyes are ‘filled with peace; and with something else: something mysteriously like joy at the end of heart’s longing’ (Blatty, 1972, p. 311). This joy can be construed as the complete looping of Karras’s pleasure in which his desire finally reaches its destiny in God. If the ‘opening up’ within Karras is the confrontation with the void of the Real, what he must ‘let in’ to complete the loop of desire is death. Death becomes both his and Regan’s salvation. Indeed, this recalls a passage from Isaiah: ‘After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied […] because he poured out his life unto death’ (Isa. 53:11–12). It is a prophecy about Christ, but it explains the necessity of horror (or suffering) as a conduit that reconnects soul to life, and the attainment of desire (‘satisfied’). Contrary to Clover’s view, death is not castration or defeat, but what Derrida would understand as a gift. According to Derrida, what defines a gift is that it must be received; but the gift of death requires a radical reception because it entails ‘an acceding to responsibility [that] comes from a gift received from the other, from the one who, in absolute transcendence, sees me without my seeing, holds me in his hands while remaining inaccessible’ (Derrida, 2002, p. 40). In other words, the acceptance of the gift of death necessitates the subject’s self-evacuation. To accept this gift, one must, in a Christian sense, deny oneself. Derrida’s concept of the gift is closely related to his formulation of hospitality, which, he argues, must be founded on an impossibility. It is an impossibility because it must be given without condition; it must





be ‘unpredictable and gratuitous.’ Hospitality is not the acting out of ‘some sort of morality or rules or prescriptions, or oughts or obligations’ (Kearney, 2005, p. 300), but the embrace of the other as other without expecting the other to comply with any ideological boundaries. Of course, such a premise is impossible, but as Derrida would have it, it is precisely because it is impossible that we must do it, that we must make it possible so that hospitality in its transcendent, purest manifestation can be realized. Hospitality then is the acceptance of a gift that is impossible, but which must nevertheless be accepted to transcend the self/other binary. Father Karras’s substitution of himself for Regan, rather than being interpreted as symbolic castration, should be appreciated as his acceptance of such a gift. In death, Karras stops relegating God (and the devil) to explicable phenomenon (the reduction of otherness to the self-same), and instead finally embraces God as Other. This is, arguably, akin to what Derrida means by Adieu – an ‘apposition,’ or ‘movement without movement’ – which is both a gravitation towards God (à Dieu), and away from the God (Adieu) constructed by human understanding (Derrida, 1999, pp. 50–1). This acceptance and transcendence, I argue, is that ‘something mysteriously like joy’ which Karras’s dying eyes capture, alongside peace. Karras, in fatally sacrificing himself, meets God on God’s own terms at last, not on the terms of any ‘canonical, dogmatic, and onto-theological [and I would add, scientific, quasi-mathematical, or rational] interpretations of this notion called “God”’ (De Vries, 2002, p. 298). It is hard to miss the spiritual dimension in The Exorcist, whose very title itself signals that the focal point of the narrative is not the possessed child but the priest. But the spiritual should not, however, be defined only in terms of its relationship to God or supernaturalism. Spirituality, as the Gospel of Luke relates, is about the ‘kingdom of God’ being in us (17:21). Romans further qualifies this kingdom as pertaining to matters of ‘righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and approved by men’ (Luke 14:17). The kingdom of God then, is not merely some future event (although this is one aspect of it), but an event here-andnow, experienced and expressed through righteous living and peace with others. It is, as Derrida would see it, a state of having experienced the return of the Messiah without His actually having returned, or ‘messianicity without messianism.’ Such a state ushers the ‘coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without the horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration’ (2002, p. 56; emphasis in the original). This concept is unmistakably linked to hospitality: the state of absolute grace that is achieved only if otherness is embraced without the desire



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to reduce it to categories of the self. When such a state is established, only then can ‘the other as the advent of justice’ become possible, because it is no longer justice established on some ideological or axiological expectations of the other (which would then reduce it to categories of the self), or some ‘prophetic prefiguration’ (the other embraced only at some futuristic time after Christ’s return) but justice premised on unqualified embrace of alterity. It is a justice that no longer marks out sameness and difference, but collapses both categories into a radical union. As such, the kingdom of God must be recognized as a present event, whose attainment can only be premised on radical, or what Derrida calls ‘good,’ friendship: on the breaking down of the self/other distinction. In his Politics of Friendship, Derrida writes that: ‘Good friendship’ supposes disproportion. It demands a certain rupture in reciprocity or equality, as well as the interruption of all fusion or confusion between you and me. By the same token it signifies a divorce with love, albeit self-love […] ‘Good friendship’ is born of disproportion: when you esteem or respect (achtet) the other more than yourself. Nietzsche points out that this does not mean that one loves more than oneself – and there is a second division, within lovence, between friendship and love. ‘Good friendship’ certainly supposes a certain air, a certain tinge (Anstrich) of intimacy, but one ‘without actual and genuine intimacy’. It commands that we abstain ‘wisely’, ‘prudently’ (weislich), from all confusion, all permutation between the singularities of you and me. (1997, p. 62; emphasis in the original) Derrida’s point is that ‘good friendship’ relinquishes the need to identify the other within the terms of the self (‘intimacy without intimacy’). The otherness of the other must be treated with respect, even as the other must respect your otherness so as to remove ‘all fusion or confusion between you and me.’ When Derrida discusses the rupture of equality, he is not insinuating that self and other cannot be equal, for elsewhere, he argues that ‘There is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity, or alterity, but there is no democracy without the “community of friends” (koína ta philo¯n), without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal’ (1997, p. 22). By rupture in equality, Derrida is talking about the attempt to reduce singularities into homogeneity – to equalize all into a single entity, and thus deny alterity. Appropriating this concept to the kingdom of God, it is therefore the





peace and joy ‘equally’ available to everyone without anyone having to sacrifice his or her singularity to gain it. The community of friends, as in most of Derrida’s paradox, is about being equal without becoming equalized. After all, Psalms tells us that we are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ (139:14), which implies that we are each created unique (alterity) and yet in God’s image (equal). Indeed, this biblical exhortation, encouraging us to cherish and celebrate singularity while living in peace and joy with others, curiously echoes Derrida’s ‘community of friends.’ This concept of a community of friends, to bring the theory back to this chapter’s broader argument, encapsulates an aspect of spirituality that I outlined earlier. Morrison’s Beloved also emphasizes the importance of radical friendship, which is both catalyzed by horror and is the means by which this horror can be overcome. Sethe attempts to kill her children in order to rescue them from slavery (she manages to kill only her youngest, Beloved), and as a result, she is ostracized by her own community. Even individuals like Ella and Paul D, Sethe’s lover, both having experienced the trauma of slavery, cannot bring themselves to sympathize with Sethe for her actions (Paul D even equates her to an animal at one point; Morrison, 1988, p. 165). Within a secluded house, with only her daughter, Denver, for company, Sethe becomes gradually engulfed by the ghost of Beloved, until Denver, in a desperate bid to save her mother, finally leaves their home to seek the community’s help. Susan Corey reads this episode as an important turning point in the novel: Alerted by Denver, who has finally risked moving out into the community, the women of the town march to Sethe’s home to face the naked, huge Beloved and drive her out. Their presence is a sign that Sethe could become reconnected to her community, which alone has the power to subdue this demonic force, this ghost of the past. (1997, p. 241) What must be emphasized here is that this communal exorcism is not of a single ghost, but of many. Everyone in the community has experienced some traumatic history, including Ella, whose past also carries of hint of infanticide, and their tacit banishment of Sethe can be understood as their refusal to acknowledge, and thereby confront, their own horrors. In coming together to free Sethe, what they are finally doing is facing a collective, if traumatic (recall Lacan’s Real), memory, and achieving communal healing. The horror that is Sethe, and the horror



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that she bears, may mark her alterity from the rest of the community, but it is also this horror that compels the others to recognize their own singularity in suffering – that everyone, in their own private way, has irrevocably been wounded by history. Yet, this singularity can also be shared, recalling Derrida’s intimacy without intimacy. On her own, each woman cannot heal, but as a community of true friends, they can transcend their trauma without having to relinquish their unique experiences. This is perhaps what Mary Carden sees as Beloved’s dual endings, one that exemplifies ‘The history conveyed in the dynamics of romance – coming together, talking a talking cure, establishing a happily-ever-after family – carries the potential for repair and rejuvenation,’ and another that, through ‘the unknown story of Beloved […] reinscribes all that is written out of an intelligible romance, all that haunts models of history based in closure and control’ (1999, p. 423). Carden’s point is that although the narrative seems to conclude ‘happily,’ the horror conveyed remains as an irrepressible, excessive trace that haunts the telling of Sethe’s story, as well as the stories of all the women in the community. This point recalls the ambiguity embedded in horror (and biblical) narratives through textual transgressions, and at the same time echoes Derrida’s injunction to embrace otherness, however traumatic and terrifying (an impossibility) as a possible means for transcendence and salvation.

Conclusion: and the Word is made flesh Beloved is a novel that begins with an epigraph from the Bible. It is a novel about the urgency of remembering the ‘sixty million and more’ (Morrison, 1988, ‘Dedication’) who suffered and perished during the middle passage. It is, ultimately, a novel about words made flesh – the ‘enfleshing’ of bodies through text. Although Beloved is fiction, it is also a ‘rememory’ (Morrison, 1988, p. 36) of that which has otherwise slipped out of official records. Yet, as much as words can obfuscate, words can also redeem. Through words, Morrison succeeds in real-izing forgotten lives and ‘establish[ing] a communal narrative’ (Rushdy, 1992, p. 591). Through words in the form of a (horror) narrative, Morrison reasserts the humanity of Sethe, Denver, Ella, Paul D, and finally, Beloved herself (Rushdy, 1992, p. 588). However, it is not humanity alone that is avowed, but spirituality as well – at least in the way in which I have defined the term. John’s Gospel tells us that ‘God is spirit’ (4:24), but this comes after it informs us that ‘the Word was God’ (1:1) and that ‘the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’ (1:14).





Despite poststructuralism’s suspicion of language and its deconstructivist agenda (one to which I subscribe to a point), it is also undeniable that it is through language that God chooses to reveal Himself. The spiritual and the material may be distinguishable, as Kevin Mills avers, but they are not separable (1995, p. 131). More importantly, as Mills further argues, and as my reading of Beloved suggests: The very language that we have to employ in order to speak or write of spirituality, and in which our spiritual experience is often constituted, returns us to the social relations, conventions and conditions which inhere in that language. We come to terms with spirituality not by denying our physical, material and phenomenal existence, but by reading the material signs in which the meaning of our existence is embodied. This is the significance of incarnation. (1995, p. 131) Denver must share Sethe’s story (and directly, hers as well) to help return her mother to social relations. The refusal to speak permits the specter of death and trauma to haunt a community, but in finally speaking out, communal life is incarnated, and the kingdom of God can be upon them at last. The notions of ‘true friendship’ and radical hospitality, as the narratives discussed in this chapter demonstrate, often require an epiphany that is painful and sublime. To achieve them, the impossible must be embraced, and that is precisely the point of Derrida and Christ’s visions. In this sense, deconstruction and Christianity, as this chapter has attempted to convey, may have more in common than is usually perceived. While the former may be suspicious of any grand narrative, and the latter stakes an entire belief system and history upon it, both ultimately tell us that there are dimensions beyond the tangible and the material whose reality must be acknowledged even as they remain suspect and require constant reinterpretation.

Notes 1. Despite many Anglo-American Gothic/horror narratives’ explicit reference to Christianity and its symbols, very few studies have actually attempted to elucidate the significance of religion in such texts, or to interpret the theological dimension of horror. Even Victor Sage’s study (1988), which is an expressively religious reading of the Gothic, is actually more concerned with the antiCatholic vein that characterizes traditional Gothic narratives, many which are written by professing Protestants.



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2. Although Derrida’s work does not explicitly embrace religion, many of his views on God and religion remain strongly premised on the Judeo-Christian tradition. A professed atheist, Derrida’s consideration of religion, or what is more familiarly known as ‘negative theology,’ is as much a challenge to the tenets of this tradition as it is a re-interpretation of them, thus compelling a rethinking of Christianity and Judaism that is at once radical and necessary, and which this essay, in some ways, attempts to do. 3. Gothic literature gained ascendance about the same time Christianity became increasingly subordinated to reason. Throughout the 1700s, the battle for God and religion took on a decidedly scientific tone; the existence of God by divine revelation was rejected, and was instead substituted with a ‘range of rational defenses, such as the argument from design, quasi-mathematical proofs, and the “‘historical” evidence of revelation’ (Sambrook, 1986, p. 36). It is against such trajectories that the Gothic retaliates. It is possible that the Gothic was, in a way, attempting (and has always attempted) to ‘rescue’ Christianity from becoming altogether detached from its spiritual and supernatural qualities.




The Secular Dream of a Christian Utopia: American Studies and Political Theology Is¸ıl Özcan

The academic effort to establish an integrated approach to the study of American national culture begins in the 1920s and takes formal shape with the institutional organization of American Studies after the Second World War. Within American Studies, scholarship on American Puritans has an important place, with Puritanism appearing either in discussions of religion as a cultural theme or of theology as a technology of selffashioning and nation-making. For some scholars, the Puritan past is the basis of America’s exceptional status. For others, such belief is mere ideological affirmation for specific historical conjectures. This study will attempt to re-assess the prevalence of the Puritan legacy in some major texts of American Studies, and to trace the responses to the secular variations/extensions of the Puritan idea of exceptionalism in the relentless effort to define America. First, we look at the Cold War consensus-oriented approach to Puritanism as ‘usable past’ for a coherent national identity in Perry Miller (Susman, 1985, p. 7). Perry Miller, one of the founders of American Studies, re-conceptualizes America’s Puritan heritage as the implicit basis of a collective entity, the unified and unique American mind. He challenges the stereotypical Enlightenment categorization of religion as passionate superstition, ignorance, and idiocy and attempts to show that American republicanism and democracy can be seen as following directly from Puritan social and intellectual formations. Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, Emerson, and William James can all be placed within an American continuum as aspects of the American Mind. For Miller, although Puritanism has its sources in European developments, its American transformation has produced a completely original synthesis. In the preface to Errand into the Wilderness (1956), Miller explains the source of his interest in the Puritan past: during his voluntary military 148



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service in the Second World War in Congo, he experiences ‘a sudden epiphany of the pressing necessity for expounding my America to the twentieth century’ (p. ix). The fact that Miller defines America with the exceptional ‘history’ of the Puritans, leads Donald Pease to count Miller among historians who, in the post-war period, tried to confirm America’s uniqueness through historical facts. For Pease, ‘examining the past became for scholars who were steeped in exceptionalist convictions a personal quest whereby they would understand the meaning of their “American” identity by uncovering the special significance of the nation’s institutions’ (2007, p. 110). Despite such criticism, Miller’s work on Puritan thought remains seminal. In his 1939 classic, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, Miller explains how Puritan theories on conversion and the Covenant of Grace aim at creating a perfect Christian nation of re-born Christians. For Miller, central to Puritan theology is conversion, which realigns human faculties that were misaligned in Adam’s fall (Miller, 1939, p. 280). In regeneration, God does not put new faculties in the soul but the grace that God had implanted in all men begins to guide reason. Grace endows reason with ‘an apprehension of true images’ so that the will, which must be guided by reason to rule the heart correctly, can have ‘a correct judgment’ of spiritual truths (p. 281). Miller explains that the doctrine of the Covenant of Grace, proposed by the so-called ‘federal’ theologians, was invented by Americans in order to defend such a synthesis of piety and reason. The Puritans asserted that a covenant was, like a business contract, a mutual, voluntary agreement between two parties, signed and sworn to, and binding upon both. Federal theology appropriated this concept for the relationship between God and man. After the failure of the first covenant, Covenant of Works, God started a new covenant, the Covenant of Grace, with Abraham. From Abraham to the settlers of New England, there was one and the same bond between God and man. But this time the condition was not a deed (works) but faith (grace). Under the Covenant, the justification of the elect did not lead directly to the sanctification of correct actions, the saint still had to struggle to be perfect, and God did not punish him for his failure as long as in his continual efforts he was pledged to God with all his faculties. For Perry Miller, the Puritans increasingly saw everything in terms of collective contracts. John Winthrop argued that the foundation of Puritan government was the free consent of the people, willingly binding themselves to laws enacted by magistrates for the sake of the common welfare. Government was best based on some kind of social covenant (Miller, 1939, p. 409). For the Puritans, there was a powerful



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resemblance between political incorporation and salvation, between civil duties and Christian duties. The Puritan state was seen by Puritans as the incarnation of their collective will, re-connecting man to man, empowered by the will to re-connect man to God. Insofar as a state was based on a free ‘compact,’ and the principles of reason and ‘equity,’ it was based on God. Puritan civil government, mediated through human reason and will, was nothing less than the ‘second incarnation of the Messiah’ (p. 419). As in personal salvation, here God creates the state, not directly, but through human freedom; man freely institutes what God desires. As a product of men’s volition, the Puritan state is wholly contractual and rational, yet it is directed and ruled by God. The New England Puritans thought very highly of themselves. The eyes of the world were upon their city set on a hill and watching with excitement the great experiment of free, rational, prosperous, orderly godliness. Although the colony ‘made good everything Winthrop demanded,’ the children of the first immigrants discovered that the lesson of the ‘city upon a hill’ was rejected as England began to tolerate heresies for the sake of social stability (Miller, 1956, p. 13). For Miller, they acted as if they were not the doers of their errand but errand-boys who expected recognition and appreciation from a master. ‘If the due form of government were not everywhere to be saluted, what would New England have upon its hands? [...] How provide an identity for something conceived under misapprehension?’ (p. 12). Upon their disappointment of their so-called failed errand, the second generation internalized the failure by condemning themselves in a traditional genre of lament: the jeremiad. This literature of self-condemnation was transformed when it channelled the outrage of the Puritans’ disappointment over their abandonment by England towards themselves. Their documentation of corruption helped them redefine their errand: one they did for themselves rather than for England. Perry Miller can be seen as father to the Myth and Symbol approach in American Studies in the sense that he argued for a non-European uniqueness in American circumstances and American mentality. In the texts of the Myth and Symbol school of American Studies, we see the persistence of the figural symbols the Puritans established, albeit in a very secularized form. The New Israelites in the New Canaan or the Chosen Nation, Christian Nation, and the Millennial Nation reappear as the conquest and cultivation of the virgin land, Manifest Destiny, the myth of the garden or the pastoral idyll, the American Dream, the frontier thesis, and the American Adam in new Eden – all of which can be seen as the symbols for America that the Puritan eschatology gave



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rise to (Bercovitch, 1975, p. 108). The Puritan typology, which is the ultimate means in the creation of the belief of American exceptionalism, can be seen to have set the standard for many subsequent myths of the American national character. The Puritan typology can also be said to correspond/establish what Donald Pease calls the ‘cultural typology’ of the myth-making essence of American exceptionalism (2007, p. 110). Each metaphor in such typological ventures serves to establish and defend a particular aspect of the uniqueness of America, whether sacred or secular. The texts of the Myth and Symbol school re-wrote American history as a set of myths, symbols, images, and representations that were persistent throughout the nation’s history. R.W.B. Lewis’s American Adam, Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land are the school’s prime examples. For Pease, ‘these scholars articulated transhistorical themes (assimilation, political liberation, cultural rebirth, and social mobility) to the national myths through which they were idealized (the melting pot, the endless frontier, American Adam, Virgin Land)’ (2007, p. 110). In this way, they created a ‘cultural typology’ that would justify the uniqueness of American national identity. R.W.B. Lewis’s ground-breaking book The American Adam (1955) analyzes the myth of American Adam as the first American-born myth of the nation. The myth, Lewis writes, flourishes between 1820 and 1860 in New England and the key words that arise out of this myth – innocence, novelty, experience, sin, evil, hope, the past, memory, and tradition – explain the cultural formation and intellectual history of America between 1820 and 1960 (Lewis, 1955, p. 2). In discussions on the formation of the American character, some, like Walt Whitman, urge the preservation of Adamic innocence while others, like Henry James, exhort the termination of the state of innocence towards maturity. The fact that the myth borrows the image of Adam before the Fall and endows the American individual with prelapsarian innocence, reflects the Puritan theological conception of the regenerate self as manifest in Perry Miller’s discussion. For Lewis, this prelapsarian image of American Adam serves many purposes. For instance, ‘Adam’ refers to ‘the authentic American as figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities’ (p. 1). Being innocent, the Adamic American intends no evil and holds the promise of the future. Moreover, the prelapsarian Adam standing at the beginning of history matches America’s claims for a new history and fuels America’s efforts to break with her past. Hence, Adam symbolizes the newness that nineteenth-century America seeks, repeating the project of the seventeenth-century Puritans.





According to Lewis, in Leaves of Grass, or the ‘Yankee Genesis,’ Whitman voices the beginning of social life in America and he gives ‘the fullest portrayal of the new world’s representative man as a new, American Adam’ (p. 28). Whitman celebrates the liberated, solitary, and forward-thrusting character of Adam based on his state of innocence. The ‘primitive Adamic condition’ of the American takes him ‘to the beginning of time,’ fulfilling the demand for a new beginning (p. 42). Whitman’s Adam emerges after discarding and forgetting the past. For Whitman, there was ‘no past or “worse” to progress from; he moved forward because it was the only direction (he makes us think) in which he could move; because there was nothing behind him – or if there were, he had not yet noticed it’ (Lewis, 1955, p. 44). Therefore, novelty, or being at the beginning of history defines Whitman’s Adamic American. The American Adam, as Whitman portrays him, is the selfmade man. He is the newly created man who is also the creator of his society, his history. Whitman gives ‘a new account of the creation of the world – the creation, that is, of a new world; an account this time with a happy ending for Adam its hero, or better yet, with no ending at all; and with this important emendation that now the creature has taken on the role of creator’ (pp. 45–6). A descendant of the regenerate Puritan, the self-made image of American Adam justifies, authenticates, the beginning of American history in the New World. Another Myth and Symbol text that recounts the Edenic image of America is Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964). For Marx, the pastoral, which is a literary genre that tells the story of a shepherd who begins a new life in the green landscape, is transformed into a celebrated image of the New World. The collective imagination that shapes the American Pastoral Ideal in the nineteenth century defines America as an exceptional place of peace and perfection, in the image of the wilderness as the Puritans conceived it. Marx considers this myth to be a re-working of a classical pastoral poem by Virgil. In Virgil’s poem, there are two shepherds, one representing the preserved pastoral ideal (he is allowed to remain in his land), and the other representing the interrupted pastoral ideal (he is sent on exile: he is alienated and depraved). In Sleepy Hollow, Hawthorne relates an anecdote from his Concord days where the sudden shriek of a train interrupts not only his own peaceful state of mind amid nature but also nature’s harmonious sounds. Hawthorne thus formulates a symbol of the busy, violent, noisy civilization with the train whistle desecrating the paradise of nature, the Edenic garden of America. Despite remaining in his rural environment, Hawthorne suffers from the alienation and



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deprivation of the shepherd in exile: the train interrupts his pastoral dream. According to Marx, the concept of the alien reality that comes with the machine in Sleepy Hollow is borrowed from Virgil’s pastoral ideal and is transformed into the American exaltation of the pastoral ideal in the face of modern machinery. It is possible to read American Pastoralism as something akin to the vision of an Edenic America established by the Puritan migration to New Canaan. The ‘New Americanist’ Donald Pease argues that in most of the texts of the Myth and Symbol school, the sense of America’s exceptional place and mission in history is ‘reappropriated’ in the mode of a ‘fundamental recasting’ to define the unique mission of the United States among all other nations due to its perfect immunity from the European ‘evils’ of Marxism and socialism (2007, p. 108). By the time of the Cold War, American Studies became ‘indispensable to the state’ with the ‘nationalist and, ultimately, imperialist discourse’ it produced (pp. 108–9). In this sense, Pease defines American exceptionalism as an academic discourse that serves as ‘a political doctrine, and a regulatory ideal’ that defines and maintains the uniqueness of the US national identity designed for the requirements of the Cold War climate (p. 109). Sacvan Bercovitch is another scholar who contributes to the ideological critique of American myths and symbols. Bercovitch is the dialectician who both elaborated further and challenged the originality and unity of the so-called American Mind, showing how Perry Miller and the field of American Studies were complicit in the mythification of America, a mythification that was a mystification, or the ideological distortion of a ‘consensus’ approach to American culture and history. For Bercovitch, ‘the transparently ideological’ symbol, or idea, of America is clearly manifest in the ‘system of beliefs that the early colonists imposed on the so-called New World’ and ‘the procession of declarations through which the republic was consecrated as New Israel, Nature’s Nation in the Land of Futurity’ (1986, p. 419). It was not consensus, as Cold War ideology suggested, but dissensus and its place within the consensus that defined American exceptionalism. However, New Americanists took him to task for fostering a more refined, dialectical exceptionalist ideology (Pease, 1994, pp. 1–37). To begin with, we might note how Bercovitch disagrees with Miller on certain matters. For Bercovitch, rather than voicing the second generation’s confusion over the real meaning of their errand, the jeremiad was the first immigrants’ attestation to their faith in the errand. In John Winthrop’s case, for example, the jeremiad affirmed the errand with ‘unshakable optimism’ and promised ‘ultimate success, affirming to





the world, and despite the world, the inviolability of the colonial cause’ (Bercovitch, 1975, pp. 6–7). The jeremiad at once ‘sanctif[ied] an errand of entrepreneurs whose aim is religious, [and], legaliz[ed] an errand of saints whose aim is entrepreneurial’ (Bercovitch, 1978, p. 22). The Puritans asserted that the prophet Jeremiah not only addressed the Old Testament Israelites but addressed also the ‘spiritual Israelites, the entire community of the elect, past, present, and to come’ (p. 32). The jeremiad was also a celebration of God’s corrective punishments which confirmed their promise. Winthrop defined the prospects of the venture, and made a ‘prophecy of doom’ if they were to break the terms of the covenant with God which they were thereby entering. In this way, the jeremiad fostered ‘a climate of anxiety that helped release the restless “progressivist” energies required for the success of the venture’; ‘it made anxiety its end as well as means. Crisis was the social norm it sought to inculcate. The very concept of errand, after all, implied a state of unfulfillment’ (p. 23). According to Bercovitch, perhaps the most important achievement of the jeremiad is its power in consensus formation by obviating conflicts. The state of anxiety the jeremiad created served to impose control on dissenters and on society in general. Such control had many dimensions from moral to religious, from economic to social and intellectual. The jeremiad is an affirmation of the ideals through a condemnation of the deviations. For Bercovitch, it is this dialectic of consensus and dissensus that defines what he calls ‘the process of Americanization.’ In this sense, for Bercovitch, the jeremiad, by recognizing and neutralizing dissensus, establishes ideological consensus through infusing America with symbolic meaning whose figurality and typology of mission takes a completely different function and defines social change and spiritual ideal simultaneously. ‘The symbol of America is the triumphant issue of early New England rhetoric and a long-ripened ritual of socialization,’ which situates civic identity within the prophetic vision of history, within the sacralization of the profane (1978, p. 176). By amounting to a ritual of progress, an affirmation of mission and destiny, this rhetoric fashioned the myth of America in literary and historical terms. In their histories, sermons, and diaries, the Puritans direct themselves toward the establishment of ‘the American city of God’ (Bercovitch, 1978, p. 9). As Bercovitch states in his 1993 work The Rites of Assent, the ideological function of the errand constituted American ‘imperialism before the fact’ (1993, p. 32). Furthermore, the ‘state of unfulfillment’ the errand emphasized contributed in significant ways to the American Revolution, to Jacksonian democracy, and to other myths



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that have defined America. In a way, Puritanism made out of the concept of errand a myth of America based on continual progress: a progress that had the ‘glory of the millennium,’ a free enterprise that had ‘the halo of grace’ (p. 43). Reference to the Israel exodus was the justification of the Puritan jeremiad. By the eighteenth century, the progress of the nation was itself a justification of the Puritan claims: the errand created the revolution of progress and the ‘fulfillment of God’s plan’ (1978, p. 123). As the Great Seal of the United States declared, ‘God prospered this undertaking; it shall be the new order of the ages.’ What the New England Puritans conferred on Enlightenment America was the jeremiad that ‘mystified secular change as divine progress, and that redefined the errand as a rite of passage into the sacred meaning of the American Revolution’ (p. 133). Bercovitch’s 1975 work, The Puritan Origins of the American Self offers another insight into the ideological basis of Puritan typology. Bercovitch explains how typology gave the theologian Cotton Mather, in his massive 1702 work on the ecclesiastical history of seventeenth-century New England, Magnalia Christi Americana, the opportunity to link John Winthrop to the biblical leader Nehemiah who led the Israelites back from Babylon to the so-called promised land, Judea, and not only ensured security and carried out civil and religious reforms, but helped reconstruct Jerusalem, reviving the Jewish sense of destiny (Bercovitch, 1975, p. 1). In calling the first governor of New England Nehemias Americanus, Cotton Mather mixes the genres of secular biography and sacred hagiography and thereby turns American history into ‘suprahistorical sacred allegory,’ and the statesman becomes a heroic saint with a divine national mission in the wilderness. Here, the Puritans invert the method of exegesis by ‘enlist[ing] hermeneutics in support of what amounted to a private typology of current affairs’ (p. 113). For Bercovitch, they did this through ‘symbolic interpretation’ of every aspect of their venture. Bercovitch suggests that ‘the image of America’ resides ‘in the symbolic imagination’ and the ideological ‘premises of secular hermeneutics’ which extended the use of typology to post-scriptural, historical persons and events (p. 132). In this system of interpretation, Christ was the central ‘antitype’ overshadowing sacred history, backwards and forwards, so that every Christian, or proto-Christian, in secular history could be represented as a type, figure, or imitation of Christ, either repeating, or foreshadowing him. The denier of Christ, or God, was also a type encompassed by sacred history: Cain, Judas, and so on. Since Christ as antitype ‘encompassed’ all of history, there was no reality outside of sacred history. Thus, John Winthrop was citizen and saint,





state and Church, American and Christ-like, the hero of both providential history and redemptive allegory; the American Israel was ruled by someone of the stature of Moses, David, or Solomon. For Americans, nationality was not a secular designation; it was, rather, a divine promise of the complete future transformation of the ‘wilderness,’ seen as the realm of Satan. Being (an individual) American meant taking part in a (federal, corporate) sacred ‘errand’ into the (non-Christian) wilderness. In a way, true America was the millennial America to come. In his ‘Afterword’ to the 1986 Ideology and Classic American Literature he edited with Myra Jehlen, Bercovitch offers his most explicit critique of the consensus-oriented ideological basis of myths and historical narratives of America. In his discussion of American culture, the source of union, or consensus, appears to be grounded in its co-optation of the energies of radicalism. Bercovitch elaborates on the alliance of ideology and utopian vision that enables the dominant culture to absorb and redefine dissent so that it can ‘control discontent and harness anarchy itself to the social enterprise’ (1986, p. 433). For Bercovitch and the contributors in the volume, the real consensus of America relies on an ideology that can ‘transmute radicalism of all forms, from religious protest to revolutionary war, into forms of cultural consensus’ (p. 436). In this dialectic of the jeremiad ideology, ‘the very act of identifying malfunction becomes an appeal for cohesion’ (p. 433). For that purpose, ideology stresses the gap between what was envisioned and what is achieved. For example ‘to denounce Christian immorality through the precepts of Christ is to define morality itself as Christian’ (p. 433). For Bercovitch, if America is a ‘rhetorical battleground,’ then, it is the rhetoric of dissent that turns the conflict between the secular and the spiritual into ‘a mode of symbolic reconciliation’ (pp. 418, 434). As an example of the continuation of the notion of American exceptionalism and its power to justify new policy, Pease refers to George W. Bush’s remarks about the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 which defined the event as a ‘fundamental transformation of history that took place in history’ (2007, p. 112). By saying that everything has changed after the attacks, Bush added a new mytheme to the mythology of exceptionalism. Bush associated the U.S. monopoly on the legal use of global violence with the intervention in human time of a higher law (what he called his ‘higher father’). In doing so, he endowed the doctrine of American exceptionalism with a metaphysical and arguably theological supplement, claiming that the preemptive violence through which the



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United States would defend the globe against the threat of Islamic terrorism was metaphysically superior to that of other nation-states. The apocalyptic and Christian millenialist register of Bush’s invocation of this higher law has not merely reestablished the nation’s claim to historical uniqueness; it has positioned the United States outside the world of nations as the divinely ordained exception. The future organization of the field of American studies will depend on how scholars respond to this latest turn in the discourse of American exceptionalism. William T. Spanos, a New Americanist, might be seen as a scholar who has been shaping new directions within the field in the context of the response Pease solicits. In The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (1995), Spanos uses the Heideggarian notion of ‘errancy,’ an essentially theological concept, in order to de-exceptionalize America. According to Spanos, Melville was aware of America’s claims to exceptionalism and was decentering America’s theological-secular self-absolutization in Moby-Dick. In this analysis, Spanos redeploys the place of the sacred, the religious, of theology as the other of the empire, and questions the reassurances of the secular, modern American project. In other words, he strategically deploys theology as the force of criticism, of theory. In The Errant Art of Moby-Dick, Spanos argues that Moby-Dick is a selfdecentering text whose ‘heretical’ and counterhegemonic voice ‘proleptically’ criticizes America’s imperial designs and ‘dis-closes,’ or re-opens, the issue of the evolution of American hegemonic discourses in history (Spanos, 1995, p. 12). The ‘disruptive irregularities’ of the text expose the complicity between America’s privileged discourses of the 1850s – Puritan exegesis, Emersonian transcendentalism, natural science, the discourse of the republic – and its practices – Ahabian totalitarian quest as the highest point of the self-reliant individual (pp. 59–113). However, although Melville does not offer a ‘visionary or prophetic’ American essence, Spanos demonstrates the process of Moby-Dick’s appropriation by American Studies to define an American ‘Imaginary’ true to the changing ideological purposes of literary canon formation and the novel’s transformation into ‘a monument to America’s exceptionalist destiny’ (p. 251). For Spanos, the discourse of the American cultural ‘Imaginary’ shows continuity throughout the history of American selfrepresentation, and its historical itinerary begins with the Puritan ‘errand in the wilderness,’ informs the post-Revolutionary jeremiad, shapes the expansionist discourse of Manifest Destiny, resurfaces with the Cold War’s





discourse about the Third World, and destroys itself in the Vietnam War (p. 256). Spanos explains the destructive essence of the novel with Heidegger’s notion of errancy. Errancy, for Heidegger, ‘is the essential counteressence to the primordial essence of truth [… it] is the open site for and ground of error […] Error extends from the most ordinary wasting of time, making a mistake, and miscalculating, to going astray and venturing too far in one’s essential attitudes and decisions’ (cited in Spanos, 1995, p. 86). Spanos calls Ishmael’s narrative an antinarrative that has no center, and that exposes ‘the specular philosophy of presence’ as well as ‘the totalizing – and totalitarian – ideological agenda of the “unerring” art privileged by [Melville’s] contemporaries’ (p. 46). Spanos identifies three phases in the history of the reception of Melville’s Moby-Dick, all of which repress Melville’s indicting interrogation of ‘the ontological principle of presence’ that marginalizes ‘the disruptive Other’ (pp. 59–60). Early Melville criticism is informed by a visible and irresistible center of authority that excludes, represses, and marginalizes differences, and which dismissed Moby-Dick as an ‘exorbitant,’ almost blasphemous text that deviates from the Puritan/capitalist order of Ahabian quests (p. 12). Later Melville criticism demonstrates an invisible and irresistible authority that includes the differences by commanding assent, pacifying the elements that seem to deviate from the orbit of the authority’s imperial will to power. In the 1920s, critics revived a Melville who was, for them, a spiritual genius neglected and alienated within an oppressive material culture. Embodied in Ahab’s pursuit of the whale was the Emersonian self-reliant individual who, we might say, tried to domesticate threats that resisted the sociopolitical order, or who was a representative of America that transformed potential threats to its hegemony (that is, for example, the new consciousness of the working-classes and the immigrants) into an Other to be assimilated and mastered. These critics ‘did not cut off the head of the Puritan theos, […] they gave it another – benign – name, one deceptively consonant with the discourse of the American Revolution’ (p. 19). After the Second World War, Moby-Dick defined American liberal democracy through Ishmael’s (America’s) self-reliant effort to free himself (the world) from Ahab’s totalitarianism (communism). For Spanos, Ahab’s reduction of being into ‘the single image of Moby Dick’ in order to render its ineffableness ‘practically assailable’ represents how Western philosophy, including Emersonian transcendentalism, ‘has as its representational end the recuperation of Identity from difference, Eternity from time, Stillness from motion’ (p. 124). In naming



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the whale, Ahab may ‘confront and manipulate’ the whale’s ‘dislocating, and intangible being’ (p. 125). This, for Spanos, is a re-enactment of the Puritans’ act of naming and claiming power over being through Emersonian self-reliance. If Puritan theology and typology reduced the threats of the New World to the image of the (satanic) savage and hence justified violence against it, Ahab saw in the evil image of Moby Dick the incarnation of the totality of things, known and unknown, that torment human beings. In his understanding of Ahab’s vision of the whale as the ‘assailable’ representation of ungraspable, non-rectifiable nothing/being, Ishmael exposes the ontological ground not only of Ahab’s but also of America’s imperial will to power and the violence that enacts it. The imperial assumption holds that being – whose existence the ‘Empire’ can tolerate – is visible, nameable, hence what can be appropriated to the knowledge that renders being comprehensible. Ishmael, on the other hand, admits his ontological uncertainty and talks about a ‘rather vague, nameless horror concerning [Moby Dick], […] so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me’ (quoted in Spanos, 1995, p. 269). Ishmael’s hesitancy in defining the whale shows that he does not try to reduce, or accommodate the different, the Other, to an identity imposed by logos. In this way, his narrative places itself on the margin: Ishmael is not obsessed with understanding and naming ‘the dislocating conflicts of temporal being’ (p. 51). Through Ishmael’s attitude toward being, Melville refuses to put the whale/being ‘into an inclusive, unified imperial space’ (p. 52). Ishmael’s subversive discourse ‘disempowers the hegemonic discursive practices of the dominant culture’ (p. 270). For Spanos, the opening of the novel, which implies a recounted beginning, is another instance of Melville’s decentering of ontology. The sentence that opens the novel, ‘Call me Ishmael’ shows that the narrator does not assume the proper self of the transcendent author. Hinting that the name of the narrator is like a mask or a sign, Melville demystifies the notion of the author as a ‘self-present “subject” of the logos’ and erases the identity of the traditional narrator (p. 75). For Spanos, this is a deliberate attempt to make the distinction between Ishmael and Melville a ‘fluid’ one (p. 81). In addition, this erasure questions the ‘traditional relationship, Adamic in origin, appropriated anew by the American Puritans, between Naming and Identity’ (p. 77). The problematized certainty of the authorial identity blocks the reliance on a preordained and preconceived end. Spanos asserts that the forward recollection of Ishmael’s Kierkegaardian repetition is a parody of





Puritan eschatology which, for Spanos, enabled the perpetual renewal of (the imperial) American errand in the wilderness. Ishmael’s narrative subverts the prophesy/fulfillment structure of providential narrative history. The details, occasions in Ishmael’s narrative, do not foreshadow the promised end of a hidden and large design. In his refusal to read signs and events symbolically, Ishmael resists seeking unknown causes behind appearances and does not seek to regulate the manifestations of being, whether dreadful, ambiguous, or different (p. 91). Ishmael’s response to Father Mapple’s sermon on the biblical story of Jonah and the whale constitutes an example of such ‘counterimpulse,’ as Ishmael calls it. When he questions the logistics of the whale-Jonah encounter, he suggests the absurdity of all routes. Perhaps as an anticipation of the modern ‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’ as Spanos suggests, Melville/Ishmael demonstrates the historical truth of biblical exegesis ‘to be a masquerade’ (p. 109). For Ishmael, the Old Testament story of Jonah and the whale does not weave different events into a meaningful pattern that explains their own circumstances. Ishmael is not seeking coherence, he is a wandering orphan, freed from totalizing narratives, and content with his dislocation in time and the world; he is at home nowhere. Furthermore, in this parody of traditional exegesis, Melville juxtaposes the sermon’s will-to-unerrancy, its complicity with truth/power discourses, with the novelistic text’s errant movement. For Spanos, Father Mapple’s sermon imposes meaning by way of the prophecy/fulfillment structure of the Puritan biblical exegesis where a maze of symbols all hint at the epiphanic end, thanks to a ‘single-minded and unerring purpose’ (p. 95). The content of this purpose, for Spanos, exemplifies the hidden agenda of the American jeremiad. Rather than aiming at the conversion of sinners and prophesying the doom of sinners, or, as Sacvan Bercovitch argues, repeating the consensus-achieving rhetoric Puritans used to direct the New Israelites towards their promised destiny and salvation, Spanos suggests that Father Mapple’s sermon discloses that the jeremiad aims at a ‘sociopolitical’ consensus and suppresses deviancies that ‘err from the right [unerring] way’ (p. 103). Yet, this jeremiad is not addressed to a public who are routinely appealed to for their endorsement of the national consensus: Father Mapple addresses errant seamen, who are marginalized in society as a subculture, and who drift at sea without direction despite ‘the ‘unerring’ directedness of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale’ (p. 64). For Spanos, the sermon discloses how the imperial American jeremiad tries to normalize deviancies in society, such as ‘the multiracial and ethnic American working class’ (p. 100). This normalization is achieved through the panoptic



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perspective that compels the subversive elements to conform to a design. Panoptics defines a sociopolitical rhetoric and spatialization which impose a practice of surveillance. It is a gaze, the gaze of God’s omnipresent eye that represses or marginalizes the disruptive Other. Spanos discusses Father Mapple’s sermon, or the American jeremiad in general, showing it to be in complicity with the coercive mode of panoptics. To conclude, we might note two views on the radical character that theology can have within critical theory. The first view considers Spanos’s latest remarks on the jeremiad in American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam (2008). He argues that the jeremiad, the frontier, and Vietnam are ‘indissolubly related’ (p. 196). Further, there is a profound continuity between the Puritan errand and the American Peace after 9/11. The jeremiad, as an American-Puritan strategy of crisis-production, has prevailed throughout American history, albeit in a ‘religiosecular’ form (Spanos, 2008, p. 198). Thus, only a ‘religiosecular’ deconstruction can undo the discourse of empire. The US is still a ‘religiosecular’ hegemon, relatively immune to purely secular, modern Enlightenment critique. The second view belongs to Mark Taylor, the postmodernist a/theologian. In the same way as Spanos, Taylor argues that a severely deconstructed theology can, in its turn, become a deconstructive a/theological force in the world. In Erring, A Postmodern A/theology (1984), Taylor undertakes the deconstructive criticism of religion and theology. For Taylor, the errant character of deconstruction bestows it with religious significance for liminal thinkers suspended between foundationalist belief and postmodernist unbelief (pp. 5–6). ‘Neither properly theological nor nontheological, theistic nor atheistic, religious nor secular, believing nor nonbelieving,’ a/theology is the formation of a border in the mode of a ‘permeable membrane’ where ‘fixed boundaries disintegrate’ and create a new opening for ‘the religious imagination’ on a boundless border which is ‘betwixt’n’between’ oppositions (pp. 11–12). On the one hand, it appears that even the most historicizing and relativizing American Studies readings remain focused on (obsessed with?) religio-secular American exceptionalism. On the other hand, it increasingly seems to be the case that theology as the erstwhile irrational ‘other’ to philosophy (as its repressed counterpart) is making a comeback as the deconstructive interrogation of modern thought. In American Studies theory, the pluralizing impulse moves the field in the direction of post-colonial, post-national comparativist historicization while the deconstructive impulse questions the most basic categorizations, such as ‘American’ and ‘theology.’




Heaven Came Down: Deconstruction, Christianity, and George Herbert’s ‘The Collar’ Michael Mattek

In ‘The Collar,’ a poem by seventeenth-century Anglican minister George Herbert, a priest expresses his frustration with his role as God’s servant and threatens to abandon his duties, for he feels his hard work has not brought forth much fruit. The poem proceeds as an internal dialogue between his frustrated Will and his calmer Reason as he tries to decide whether to flee or to stay (Roberts, 1993, p. 199). At the climax of the poem, the speaker thinks he hears the voice of God and responds in faith to this ‘caller.’ In addition to being a dramatic moment in the poem that demonstrates Herbert’s skills as a wordsmith and poet, the ending of ‘The Collar’ raises questions regarding the relationship between language and thought, questions that also lie at the core of deconstruction. In order to explore further the relationship between language and thought, I offer an analysis of ‘The Collar’ using a number of reading strategies encouraged by deconstruction. In some ways, though, this is beginning at the end, since these methods are simply the practical applications of the underlying notions contained in deconstructionist theory. However, by beginning with an analysis of the poem, I hope to prepare the way for the second part of the chapter wherein I will present a few of my own thoughts on the overall usefulness and compatibility of deconstruction to orthodox Christian readings of literature.

Reading strategies encouraged by deconstruction1 Throughout his writings and interviews, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) refused to define deconstruction as a methodology. Nevertheless, as its concepts were applied to works of literature by Derrida and others, certain patterns of interpretive activity emerged (Culler, 1982, pp. 213–16; 162



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Norris, 1987, pp. 18–20). However, before we proceed to see how some of those strategies can be used to interrogate ‘The Collar,’ it may be helpful for the reader to keep in mind several general characteristics of deconstruction. The first is that deconstruction endlessly delays meaning in a text. Any conclusion about what a work means is continually questioned. Just when we think we know what the meaning of a text is, the deconstructionist shows that such a meaning does not hold up under additional scrutiny, because the language in the text (the words themselves) undermines that meaning. Another general characteristic is that deconstruction denies the existence of an all-encompassing structure in the text. As Norris explains, ‘Deconstruction is avowedly “post-structuralist” in its refusal to accept the idea of structure as in any sense given or objectively “there” in a text’ (1982, p. 3). This notion is in sharp contrast to New Criticism’s assumption that everything in a work of literature is there for a reason and nothing should be present that does not contribute to the development of the structure of the work, such as plot, characterization, or theme. Finally, deconstruction is a form of empiricism: thought and understanding begin with an encounter with an object, symbol, or word, which is then processed through the senses. Thought, then, is limited by what is encountered through the senses. This is in contrast to English Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, and orthodox Christianity, all of which celebrate knowledge gained through intuition. In addition, strict empiricism also seems to conflict with the Christian belief in divine revelation as a source of human understanding. These general principles can be productively applied to Herbert’s poem, ‘The Collar,’ which is printed below. The Collar

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I struck the board, and cried, No more. I will abroad. What? shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free; free as the road, Loose as the wind, as large as store. Shall I be still in suit? Have I no harvest but a thorn To let me blood, and not restore What I have lost with cordial fruit? Sure there was wine



Deconstruction, Christianity, and George Herbert’s ‘The Collar’

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Before my sighs did dry it: there was corn Before my tears did drown it. Is the year only lost to me? Have I no bays to crown it? No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted? All wasted? Not so my heart: but there is fruit, And thou hast hands. Recover all thy sigh-blown age On double pleasures; leave thy cold dispute Of what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage, Thy rope of sands, Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee Good cable, to enforce and draw, And be thy law, While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. Away; take heed, I will abroad. Call in thy death’s head there: tie up thy fears. He that forbears To suit and serve his need, Deserves his load. But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild At every word, Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child: And I replied, My Lord.

The first deconstructionist strategy for reading this poem is the identification of binaries, paired and oppositional sets, which at first appear to provide structure to the text (Derrida, 2004, p. 106). This practice links deconstruction back to Saussurean linguistics, where language is defined as ‘a system of differences, in which signification resides not in the terms themselves, but in the differential relations between them’ (Johnson, 1999, p. 34). Language as such becomes a huge collection of binaries through which meaning is constructed: good/bad, up/down, female/male. Whether giving a structuralist or a deconstructionist interpretation, one begins by isolating words in the text and then pairing those words with their opposites, which may be explicitly stated or



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merely implied. In addition, there is a hierarchical relationship between the two words that form this binary, with the first term deemed the more powerful – the privileged term in the pairing – and the second, the marginalized and weaker term, usually cast in a negative light (Derrida, 1981, p. 39). Some binaries found in the first stanza of ‘The Collar’ (in which the disgruntled voice of the rebellious ‘Will’ of the priest is speaking) are abroad/home, free/bound, large/small, harvest/plant, and fruit/thorn. Applying Saussure’s theory of word meaning, we see that in a deconstructive reading of these words, each of the privileged terms is defined by its difference from the marginal term in the binary. By then grouping the first terms – the dominant privileged ones – we have abroad, free, large, harvest, fruit, which imply that by fleeing his duties, the priest will experience greater joy, self-fulfillment, and productivity. Next, applying Derrida’s extension of Saussure’s theory, we become aware that each privileged term contains a trace of the marginal term. One cannot go abroad without having a home; one cannot be free without having been bound; large has no essence in itself but merely in relation to something small; one cannot harvest without first having planted; and fruit – that tasty morsel – may never mature without the protection of the thorn. Suddenly, the marginal term has taken on added significance, or as Culler describes the situation, ‘The question for the critic is whether the second term, treated as a negative […] does not prove to be the condition of possibility of the first’ (1982, p. 213). With the importance of the second term elevated, the binary is overturned and the second term becomes the privileged one. This is only possible, though, because an alternative logic has replaced the logic that previously gave the first term dominance. Culler explains: ‘Along with the logic that asserts the preeminence of the first term, is there a contrary logic, covertly at work but emerging at some crucial moment or figure in the text, which identifies the second term as the enabling condition of the first?’ (1982, p. 213). The second term was originally placed there by an underlying logic; to reverse the terms in the binary also requires upsetting the logic that placed the terms in their initial positions. We first identified the binaries that give ‘The Collar’ structure and then applied this structure to the first stanza. If this were a structuralist reading, perhaps that is all we would need, for we would already have found the signs (words) in relationship to each other that create meaning in the poem. However, by showing that the terms in the binaries can be reversed – that which was marginal now becoming privileged – we are calling into question the system of structure that once stabilized





the meaning of the poem. The meaning is becoming unstable; the center is not holding; the poem is beginning to deconstruct. A benefit of using ‘The Collar’ for our investigation is that Herbert himself performs this reversal of the binaries in the second stanza of the poem, almost as if he is playing the part of a deconstructionist critic. The voice in the second stanza is that of Reason, of a priest who accepts his responsibilities, finds freedom and contentment in his duties, and presents the wayward speaker of the first stanza as trapped by his thoughts. The ‘fruit’ is to be found in performing his duties, rather than on the road as the voice in the first stanza declares. The priest’s ‘hands’ can ‘recover’ not only a harvest, but a bumper crop, gathering ‘double pleasures’ of the spiritual kind, rather than merely worldly ones. This second voice accuses the first of having created a psychological ‘cage’ for himself through his ‘petty thoughts.’ These thoughts, though ‘ropes of sands,’ have become strong as ‘good cable’ causing him to feel trapped and frustrated, all because he closes his eyes – he did ‘wink and wouldst not see’ – to the double pleasures of the priesthood. In other words, the second voice accuses the first of working himself into a tizzy over petty, misguided thoughts. The voice in the second stanza has effectively reversed the binaries used by the voice in the first stanza. Fleeing will not result in freedom and contentment. Instead, flight will create a very small world in which the wayward priest will be a prisoner caged by his own ‘petty thoughts.’ By fleeing, he will miss the pleasures of a spiritual harvest, gathered by those who are faithful to their calling. The argument put forth in the second stanza is then rejected by the first voice, which reappears in the third stanza. The binary of responsibility/irresponsibility is used in the second stanza to argue that fleeing would be a form of spiritual waywardness; however, the speaker in the third stanza inverts this, arguing that the person who does not take responsibility for his own needs is wayward: ‘He that forbears / To suit and serve his need, / Deserves his load.’ The binary of responsibility/irresponsibility is thus destabilized, for the definition of what is responsible depends upon the different perspectives of the two speakers. In the final stanza the Will becomes even more emotional, raving in his battle with Reason, ‘more fierce and wild at every word,’ and the reader anticipates that the inconclusiveness of language played out in the first three stanzas will finally be resolved. In a dramatic finish to the poem, the speaker exclaims, ‘Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child: / And I replied, My Lord.’



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Up to this point in the poem, through all of his raving, the speaker has assumed that he is a slave or degraded servant of the Lord and regards his service and suffering as intolerable and fruitless. But with the call ‘Child,’ in a flash he recognizes his error, perceives clearly his relationship to the Lord, and accepts wholeheartedly his Christian destiny. Roberts here juxtaposes language and epistemology in his analysis of the poem. A linguistic event occurs: a voice is sent from heaven to call the speaker ‘Child.’ Upon receiving this call, the speaker ‘perceives clearly his relationship to the Lord.’ However, Roberts fails to comment on what seems to be an extremely important phrase: ‘me thoughts.’ Why? One explanation may be that in orthodox Christianity, human language is not the ultimate factor in what humans are capable of knowing; thus, human understanding is not limited by flaws inherent in language itself. If this notion is applied to ‘The Collar’ God then becomes an active force who is capable of removing any false notions that the speaker may have constructed through language or missed because of the inadequacies of language. We might restate the situation by saying that in orthodox Christianity, human knowledge transcends the hermeneutic circle created by language. As Barbara Hernstein Smith (1994, p. 141) notes in ‘Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account’ traditional theories allow for ‘the possible rupture of the hermeneutic circle by what is posited as autonomous, observer-independent reality.’ In other words, Reality (Truth, God) exists independently of the observer who seeks it and is not affected by the limitations of language or by the perspective of the observer.2 In ‘The Collar’ God is the ‘autonomous, observer-independent reality’ who breaks through the speaker’s psychological struggles and enlightens him with pure knowledge. At its essence, this knowledge is constant, unchanging, and absolute. Derrida, though, criticizes the belief in a stable center of knowledge independent of the observer as being naive, and labels the structure of thought that is built around a stable center ‘logocentricism.’ Logocentrism is, Derrida asserts, ‘the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire’ for what he calls ‘the transcendental signified’ (1976, p. 49), and the function of the transcendental signified in terms of interpreting a literary text is to stabilize, and therefore limit, the relationship between language and what that language represents. In contrast to



John R. Roberts (1993, p. 200) provides a traditional interpretation of the poem’s ending:


Roberts’s orthodox interpretation, where there is closure to the meaning of the poem, a deconstructionist reading would extend the ambiguity of its meaning indefinitely. ‘The Collar’ actually lends itself well to this approach because of those two words, ‘me thoughts.’ Roberts asserts that the speaker ‘perceives clearly his relationship to the Lord’ upon hearing the call ‘Child.’ From a poststructuralist perspective, however, how can the speaker clearly perceive that which lies outside the hermeneutic circle of language, in this case, God? The sensory stimulus is a word, ‘Child’, which is itself a part of the system of signs known as the English language, and language – at least from this poststructuralist perspective – imperfectly expresses in the form of words what we construct as knowledge by means of those very words. The reason why the speaker thinks he hears one calling ‘Child’ is that he cannot know for certain that he hears one calling ‘Child.’ This confusion is not surprising; since there is not a one-to-one correspondence between words and ideas, one can never be absolutely certain of the message. More than that, though, the ideas themselves are constructed by the language of the user. With poststructuralism, there is simply no way to escape the hermeneutic circle of language, within which, if God does exist, the speaker can only know of God through the system of language, which is imprecise, and so the speaker can never really know God. From this same perspective, even if we frame the situation as God crashing through the hermeneutic circle instead of the speaker breaking out of it, the problem would still not be resolved, since any contact between God and humans must be processed by the sensory nodes in human beings. We are trapped within a physical body. This finite material processing an imprecise series of signs and impulses ultimately prohibits humans from knowing absolutely that they know God. They may think that they know God, but from a strictly logical, rational perspective, they can never be certain of it, for there appears to be no way to escape the limitations imposed upon human understanding by the hermeneutic circle of language or human sensory perceptions. We have thus far been using a strategy developed by deconstructionists whereby the reader focuses on the binaries – and their resulting hierarchies – that first give structure to ‘The Collar’ but then destabilize it, thereby constantly deferring meaning in the poem. A second reading strategy encouraged by deconstruction ‘leads the critic to look for points of condensation, where a single term brings together different lines of argument or sets of values’ (Culler, 1982, p. 213). The critic looks for an aporia – a moment in the text whereby an irresolvable



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contradiction is concentrated within a single word, one that ‘may signify precisely opposite meanings’ (Jacobs, 1991, pp. 180–1; Derrida, 1993, p. 16). There are several such words of contradictory meaning in ‘The Collar,’ with the primary one being the title itself. The word ‘collar’ can refer to the object a priest wears around his neck as a sign of his vocation (a respected emblem in society), but it can also refer to an object of constraint or discipline worn by an animal or slave. Still other signifieds include the choler (anger) felt by the speaker’s frustrated Will in stanzas one and three (Di Cesare, 1978, p. 55). Then again, in Herbert’s time the words collar and caller would likely have been pronounced in the same way, and therefore the title can refer to the call from heaven that the priest thinks he hears at the end of the poem.3 According to Derrida (1976, pp. 70–1), since the meaning of a word is built up over time, each of the contradictory meanings includes elements, traces, of the other meanings. As Jacobs explains, ‘no one meaning is or ever can be fully present; the possibilities flicker in and out of view’ (1991, p. 181). In our poem, the priest, whose collar reflects his call to the priesthood as well as his privileged place in society, is constrained by his collar from following the call of his frustrated Will to flee his duties. He feels as though he is a beast of burden for the Lord, but even this metaphor is deconstructed in Matthew 11:29–30, where Christ instructs his followers to ‘Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me […] and ye shall find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light’ (cited in Di Cesare, 1978, p. 55). In addition to the word ‘collar’ the word ‘child’ also produces an irresolvable contradiction in the poem. When the voice from above cries out ‘Child’ it may be that the priest is being strongly scolded for his recalcitrance; the voice of willful resistance that was present in the first and third stanzas is reprimanded in the closing lines. Like a slave overpowered by the force of his master, the priest cowers in submission. Then again, the voice may simply be that of a compassionate God, who says ‘child’ to calm the anger and fears of the priest. The call ‘child’ could likewise be an invitation from a father to his son to take his inherited position beside him – similar to the actions of the father in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32). Still another interpretation, but certainly not the last in a long line of possibilities, is a theological reading as presented by Roberts (1993, p. 202) whereby the priest is ‘called upon to carry out the will of the divine Caller […] like the Suffering Servant in Isaiah and like Christ himself.’ All of these





interpretations are valid – as well as contradictory – with each possibility flickering and fading even as we try to solidify any one of them. At this point, the poststructuralist critic would likely argue that the meaning of the poem deconstructs: any one interpretation is destabilized by the other interpretations, which exist simultaneously and are equally valid. Because of this instability, the text itself calls into question the logical framework that the reader uses when seeking meaning in the poem. Can deconstruction be beneficial to Christian readers? If the impreciseness of language distorts communication and the human senses distort meaning even further, does this not then cause Christians to doubt what they believe? In other words, if language cannot convey Truth without distortion, then how can Christians have confidence in their doctrine? One response might be that religious belief requires a leap of faith. As declared in Romans 1:17, faith is the cornerstone of Christian belief: ‘The just shall live by faith.’ Rather than destroying Christianity, poststructuralist theories might occasionally help Christians gain a deeper understanding of their own doctrines. If we say that we know the nature of God, then are we not tempted to rely upon our own understanding, rather than on faith? One benefit derived from deconstruction is that it can remind Christians of the imperfections, impreciseness, and ambiguity inherent in language. The extensive use of metaphor by such Metaphysical poets as George Herbert is an acknowledgement of this slipperiness of meaning within language – that words do not directly correspond to concepts, much less to God. However, from a Christian perspective, metaphors nudge the reader closer to essence, to Truth. Therein lies a significant difference between a Christian reading and a deconstructionist one: deconstruction ends with the practitioner abandoning the pursuit of stable and absolute Truth, since it is unapproachable through language and rational thought, and encourages the reader simply to enjoy the never-ending process of concepts breaking apart and reassembling in new ways. In contrast, Christians believe not only that God is an absolute presence apart from human construction in language and thought, but also that God is knowable through faith. Why does the speaker in the last stanza of ‘The Collar’ say he thought he heard one calling ‘Child’? It is because humans and their modes of communication are imperfect. Despite this, the speaker does answer ‘My Lord.’ His response represents an act of faith in the existence and approachability of a benevolent, unchanging, and all-knowing God. For Christians, this leap of faith is ultimately what the poem is all about.



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A benefit of deconstruction to Christians is that it does call attention to the limitations of language when one attempts to communicate one’s ideas to others.4 If God’s awesomeness is beyond human comprehension, then it is beyond human language to describe, yet human language is the only means we have to do so. This situation is labeled the ‘double bind of theology’ by Luke Ferretter (2003, pp. 15–16): ‘On the one hand, [theology] must use the worldly material of language to speak of God, since this is all that is available. On the other hand, and with precisely this language, it must also point out its incapacity to name God, who is wholly other than the world to which it applies.’ We thus have a conundrum: if language is inadequate to describe God, yet we wish to express God’s incomprehensibility, what do we do? One method that works around the inadequacies of language is ‘negative theology’ (Via Negativa). When employing negative theology to describe the attributes of God, one mentally prefaces descriptions with a disclaimer on the order of ‘but that is not quite it either.’ Even as we strive to be precise in our understanding of God, we are constantly tearing down the terms by which we describe Him, for we are continually aware of the impreciseness of those very terms. This constant tearing down is the same process that Derrida follows in deconstruction, or to phrase it another way, deconstruction is simply another form of negative theology.5 Even though the process of negative theology and the process of deconstruction are similar, their endpoints are vastly different. As discussed earlier, the endpoint for deconstruction is no endpoint at all: the game just goes on forever; meaning is constantly and forever deferred. In contrast, Christians put their faith in the existence of a stable center – God – with whom humans can have a personal relationship through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. To the Christian practitioner of negative theology, what awaits is not frustration with the inability of language to describe God fully, but rather an overwhelming appreciation that there is always more to God than one had previously thought, experienced, or expressed. Note, however, that a Christian’s use of negative theology begins with the presupposition that God exists, and if we seek Him through faith and a sincere heart, we shall be rewarded by finding Him ( Jeremiah 29.13). Although we cannot fully describe Him through language, we can use language to approach a more accurate understanding of Him – which is the primary objective in the study and development of systematic theology.



A general response to deconstruction from a Christian perspective


While negative theology, and to a certain extent deconstruction, can facilitate a Christian’s walk in gaining a deeper understanding of God, neither is capable of describing the positive aspects of the Christian experience. Here, I refer to the comfort that Christians feel from having a personal relationship with God through faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior. This relationship provides the solace and spiritual assurance that neither deconstruction nor negative theology is able to provide (see Rom. 5.1, John 14.27, Phil. 4.7). It is ironic, but Christians can read Derrida as a way to confirm their own beliefs. Rather than defending themselves against charges of logocentrism, Christians should simply acknowledge and celebrate that God – the center and maker of the universe – is at the center of their system of belief. Examples of this transcendent God revealing Himself as the stable center around which humans are to live their lives include His revealing Himself as YHWH – the unchangeable and great ‘I AM’ (Exodus 3:14) to Moses in the Old Testament. This attribute of God’s stability continues in the New Testament, for example, when Christ as God Incarnate is described by John as the ‘Alpha and the Omega,’ the Beginning and the End, the same yesterday, today, and always (Revelation 1:8, 21:6, 22:13). The one requirement placed upon humans is simply to believe that God is, and that He is a rewarder of those who faithfully and diligently seek Him (Hebrews 11.6). Just as Christianity requires faith, so does deconstruction. As Ferretter (2003, p. 1) points out, ‘there is no system of thought that does not at some point involve an act of faith.’ With deconstruction, faith is placed in the notion that centers of interpretation are only provisional – that terms and entities are forever defined by other authorizing sources, which then must be defined by still other authorizing sources, without end. In contrast, Christians place their faith in an all-powerful everlasting God whose authoritative source is Himself. If we apply this belief to Derrida’s discussion of the structure of structure, God would be both the center within the system of signifiers, and also the authorizing source outside the system of signifiers at the same time. The only way that would be possible is if an entity could be in both places at the same time – an impossibility for humans; a simple task for an omnipresent triune God (see John 1:14). Deconstruction, having its origins as an empiricist philosophy, is limited in its discussions to that which is knowable through the senses; thus, it is of little to no use when discussing knowledge humans gain without using sensory perception or language. Norris (1982, pp. 4–5) summarizes Saussure’s conceptualization of language as a system of



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signs, the result being that ‘there is simply no access to knowledge except by way of language and other, related orders of representation.’ But there is a way: God’s immanence. God is not limited to bringing Himself to us from the outside in; God can act upon our senses from the inside out. God precedes human senses, creates human senses, takes precedence over human senses, and has authority over human senses. This is a crucial concept when we return to the speaker in Herbert’s poem. Why limit Herbert to hearing God from without – the transcendent God – when he could also hear God who works from within? Roberts (1993, p. 200) points out this possibility when he asserts that ‘the resolution, the calling and naming that occurs, is not from without but is a new interior understanding of the speaker’s relationship to God.’ God’s immanence means that communication from God to humans (special revelation) and human understanding of God is not limited to that which is processed through the senses (see especially Luke 17.20–1). An example of knowledge existing prior to language, and even working at a level that is not translatable into language, is described by Paul: ‘for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered’ (Rom. 8.26, KJV). If prayer is not dependent upon words, then meaning exists prior to language, thus undermining the core belief in deconstruction that human understanding is determined by the hermeneutic circle of language. Ultimately, deconstruction simply does not, it cannot, account for the whole of the Christian experience. Analyzing George Herbert’s ‘The Collar’ demonstrates such reading strategies encouraged by deconstruction as the instability of hierarchical binaries and the instability of meaning resulting from words that contain mutually exclusive connotations. These reading strategies can be effectively utilized by anyone conducting close readings of texts, including Christians. Deconstruction also reminds Christians of the impreciseness of language and, by extension, the impreciseness of knowledge gained through language. Following the traditions of Saussurean linguistics and structuralism, deconstruction limits human knowledge to what is constructed within the hermeneutic circle of language and sense perception. However, Christians, while accepting the admittedly imprecise knowledge gained through language and rational analysis, also celebrate knowledge gained by such non-rational and non-linguistic means as intuition, divine revelation, and non-verbal prayer. As a result, Christian belief is a much broader and richer means of understanding than deconstruction offers. The end for deconstruction is in simply enjoying free





play – the watching of a game that never ends, where meaning is forever put out of reach, always deferred. In contrast, Christians practice the logocentrism so criticized by Derrida: the center of our structure of understanding is an all-powerful, never-changing God whose essence far exceeds any attempts that are made to describe Him, yet whose presence we know through the joys of a Christ-centered life.6

Notes I wish to give special thanks to Claudia M. Champagne, my friend and colleague from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, for her valuable assistance and suggestions. 1. I have adopted this phrasing from Culler (1982, p. 216), since it captures the notion that while deconstruction is not a prescribed methodology, it does encourage certain reading strategies when used as a means for literary interpretation. 2. James K.A. Smith, in Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church, takes a more conciliatory approach to deconstruction. Of special interest to him is ‘the role of community in the interpretation of Scripture’ and also the way one’s involvement in a church community influences the way one sees and interprets an event (Smith, 2006, pp. 23, 43–51). 3. For additional elaboration on the title, see Roberts (1993, p. 197). 4. Joel Westerholm (2007, p. 113) reminds Christians of the need for humility when presenting their own understandings of God: ‘Should we believe that we have God in such a cognitive box, we immediately incline to a kind of authoritarianism that simply is not appropriate to our actual knowledge.’ 5. Even though Derrida denies that deconstruction is a form of negative theology, Ferretter (2003, pp. 19–30, 184) demonstrates that in practice it is. See also Derrida (1992). 6. George Steiner sees God’s presence as the basis for human communication: ‘Any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence’ (cited in Vanhoozer, 1997, p. 137). Whereas Steiner links faith in God with belief in the ability of language to convey meaning, Leland Ryken (1991, p. 294) sees a link between the ‘prevailing skepticism’ found in contemporary critical theory with the ‘skepticism about the ability of language and literature to communicate precise meaning,’ deconstruction being the extreme example.



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Adorno, Theodor 124, 128, 130 agency 61–2, 65, 67, 132 animals 120–34, 144 anti-foundationalism 75 Aquinas, Thomas 17, 122–4 Arnold, Matthew 34, 42, 54 Augustine 20, 26–32, 46, 72, 76–7, 97, 109, 117, 118n author 23–6, 28, 30–2, 46–7, 49, 51, 159 authority 24–6, 30–2, 48, 49, 54, 158, 173 Badiou, Alain 59–62, 63, 65–7, 69n Barthes, Roland 23–4, 29 Beloved 106, 136, 144–6 Bercovitch, Sacvan 153–6, 160 Blanchot, Maurice 19, 21 Bloom, Harold 13–15 body 16, 27, 39, 46–8, 51–2, 117, 168 of Christ 27–8, 55, 94, 107–8, 116 female 109–12, 115–16, 117, 118n Bonaventure 17–18, 20–1 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 47–8, 50, 56, 94–5 Bynum, Caroline Walker 106, 118n carnival 97–8, 103 Cartesian subject, see Decartes, René Cervantes, Miguel de, see Don Quixote charity, also caritas 2, 25, 30, 47–8, 50, 98, 99 Chesterton, G.K. 26, 29, 31–2 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 34, 36, 39–43 coming-out narratives 71–9, 81, 83, 85n communality 27, 46–8, 55, 120–4, 126–31, 133–4, 144–6 Communion, see Eucharist

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Index

Foucault, Michel 59, 61, 63–5, 67–8, 70, 130 Fudge, Erica 120, 123, 124, 131, 133 Geertz, Clifford 91 gift 2, 17 of death 136, 139, 141–2 Gothic, the 136–9 Greenblatt, Stephen 63–5, 67–8, 93 Habermas, Jürgen 128–31 Hall, Donald 77–8 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 36, 41, 57, 64, 90, 126–7, 129–30, 134n, 136 Heidegger, Martin 17, 125, 127, 134n, 158 Herbert, George 16, 19, 30 The Collar 162–74 Hill, Geoffrey 14–15 Horkheimer, Max 124, 128 horror narratives 135–41, 144–6 hospitality 141–2, 146 Hugh of St Victor 17 human/humanness 13, 27, 30, 32, 34, 39, 41, 44, 46, 64–5, 70, 80, 91, 93–5, 97–9, 101–2, 104, 108, 110, 112, 117, 118n, 120–34, 135, 138, 140, 142, 149–50, 163, 167–8, 170–3, 174n humility 27, 104, 174n Husserl, Edmund 16–20 identity 59, 61, 66–7, 78, 121, 125–8, 130–1, 133, 139, 141, 150, 154, 158–9 identity politics 66, 78 national identity 148–9, 151, 153 Jeffrey, David Lyle 26, 29, 30 Jena Romantics 15, 37–8, 41 jeremiad 150, 153–7, 160–1 Johnson, Samuel 12, 14 Kant, Immanuel 21, 125, 128–9 Keble, John 15, 34, 42–4 knowledge of good and evil 48–9, 55

Lacan, Jacques 57, 60, 140, 144 Lacoste, Jean-Yves 11, 20–1 Lévinas, Emmanuel 27, 99, 126, 132–4 Lewis, C.S. 25–6, 29–32, 46 Till we have faces 120 love 19, 20, 25–6, 30–2, 46–7, 52, 76–7, 98–9, 122, 143 Luther, Martin 94–5, 99–100, 102 Marion, Jean-Luc 11, 17, 20–1, 132 Marxism 57–8, 64, 68, 92, 153 Mary 106, 108–16, 118n materialism 57, 62, 65–8, 90–1, 93–5, 102–4 Melville, Herman, see Moby Dick Milbank, John 2–3, 47, 49–50 Miller, Perry 148–51, 153 Moby Dick 157–8 Montrose, Louis 63–4, 66–7 Morrison, Toni, see Beloved narrative argumentation 72–6 New Americanists 153 New Criticism 28, 30–1, 163 New Historicism 59, 63–6, 68, 104n Nietzsche, Friedrich 70, 90, 93–4, 103, 143 ontology 78, 124, 128, 132, 158–9 otherness 23, 27, 30, 50, 57, 58–9, 82, 98–9, 120–34, 136, 138–43, 145, 158–9, 161 Otto, Rudolf 138 Paul, St 35, 46, 54–5, 60, 65–7, 95, 98–101, 112, 173 Pease, Donald 149, 151, 153, 156–7 Phelan, James 74–5, 84n phenomenology 11, 18 poetry 11–16, 19, 21, 39–44 post-secularism 57, 81–3 poststructuralism 27, 30–1, 59, 61, 64, 84n, 135, 146, 168, 170 power 24, 27, 39, 44, 59–61, 63–7, 76, 91–2, 94, 100, 106–7, 110, 122, 125–7, 130, 158–9 psychoanalysis 44, 62, 74, 129, 135, 136, 140–1 Puritanism 119n, 120, 133, 148–61



Index 195

Index

queer theory 70–1, 77–82 radical friendship 139, 144 Real, the 60, 140–1, 144 reality 18–20, 26–7, 31, 50–1, 62, 91–4, 98, 99, 103–4, 126, 136, 146 reason 18, 49, 74, 84n, 98, 123–8, 132, 137, 139–41, 147n, 149–50, 162–3, 166 reduction 16–21, 92, 138, 142 Reformation 37, 75, 84n, 92, 103–4, 113, 134n Renaissance 63–4, 91, 105n, 120, 123–5 revolution 59, 65, 92, 103, 105n American Revolution 154–5, 156, 158 French Revolution 125 satire 92, 95, 100 Savin-Williams, Ritch 73–4, 77–8, 84n Schiller, Friedrich 44 Schlegel, Friedrich 37–8, 44 secularization narratives, critiques of 81–3 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 78, 80, 82 selflessness 25–6, 28–31 set theory 62

Spanos, William V. 157–61 Steiner, George 23–7, 31–2, 102, 174n subject 16, 20, 26, 44, 60–2, 65, 108, 124–30, 132, 136, 138, 140–1, 143, 159 intersubjectivity 49, 128–30 subject formation, narratives of 71–81 subjectivity 29–30, 32, 60–1, 64–6, 68, 69n, 133 subversion 63 Swift, Jonathan 47, 50, 53 Taylor, Mark C. 161 terror 131, 137–9 terrorism 156–7 Till Eulenspiegel, see Dil Ulenspiegel transcendence/transcendent 158–9, 163, 167, 172–3 violence 54–5, 99, 131–2, 156, 159 non-violence 47 Wolfe, Cary 131 Wordsworth, William 16, 18–19, 36, 40–3, 45n Žižek, Slavoj 57–62, 65–8, 90, 93, 99, 101



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