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Literature and Religion: A Critical Confluence
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10603 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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2 / 1986 |
5,121 Words |
| Author
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George A. Panichas
George A. Panichas is Professor of English at the University
of Maryland and he is the editor of the journal, Modern Age.
His most recent book is The Courage of Judgment. |
The contention of some scholars and teachers that the relations between literature and religion have deep critical and educational values has not been exactly popular. In fact, there has been hostility to this view. I remember, not without pain, that when in the early sixties I was scheduled to conduct a seminar dealing with literature and religion, some senior colleagues looked askance at the offering. Some condescendingly pleaded a methodological bias. Others treated my undertaking as an excrescence resulting from the influence of "comparative literature," for which I should in time be forgiven. Still others responded belligerently: one colleague scornfully remarked that I was trying "to play God." Meeting me in the corridor, he would bow solemnly but disdainfully. Even after the passage of years, during which I have also examined in my teaching and writings the relations between literature and history, literature and philosophy, literature and politics, this colleague has never failed to remind me that, for him, my early interest in literature and religion signified a cardinal academic sin for which I was never to be forgiven.
If an interest in other interdisciplinary relations was regarded as legitimate, though possibly curious, an interest in the relations between literature and religion clearly indicated an absolute infraction of consequence. That is to say, it was viewed as something that disclosed a metaphysical, in short, a spiritual and a religious predisposition that, in a strictly intellectual sense, was completely unacceptable. One could talk about literature and history, and yet be an anarchist--that was acceptable. One could talk about literature and philosophy, and yet be a nihilist--that was also acceptable. And one could talk about literature and politics, and yet be a Marxist--that was even more acceptable. But for one to talk about literature and religion and also be one who subscribed to our Judeo-Christian patrimony--well, that was unacceptable and even contemptible.
Innuendo, distrust, derision, caricature have, it seems, informed reactions to any consideration of the relations between literature and religion. There are many famous instances of the language of scorn reserved for these relations, but none more infamous than that employed by Michael Gold in his review of various novels by Thornton Wilder that appeared in The New Republic, October 22, 1930, under the heading, "Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ," Gold's assessment is a case study of the critical demolition of works that have religious moorings. It belongs to the record of criticism; and however unsophisticated, shrill, and vulgar it now reads, given its socio-historical moment and antecedents--the Great
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