Modernism and Christianity by Erik Tonning (review)

Author Erik Tonning has emerged as a major figure in modernist studies in Europe’s nordic region. From 2011 through 2014, he directed a research center, Modernism and Christianity, at the University of Bergen, which is usually ranked as second only to Oslo among research institutions in Norway. In stating the program of the work here reviewed—and implicating the center of that name—Tonning declares an intention to establish “‘Modernism and Christianity’ as a field of studies” (24). Such a project risks falling into predictable generalities, but happily, throughout Tonning’s exposition, there is movement beyond the obvious. There is in fact much astute discernment and critique as the author explores and explains how Christian discourse is absorbed into and informs modernist literature.

This is a relatively brief work of four chapters, but comprehensive in its scope. In chapter 1 (“Rethinking ‘Modernism and Christianity’”), Tonning addresses previous scholarship concerned with the notion that modernist writing was often generated within—as well as in reaction to—a Christian context. Tonning revisits Roger Griffin’s Modernism and Fascism (2007) to argue that, even more basically, mainstream modernism of the twentieth-century largely develops as a discourse of dissent, a response to a technology, capital, and urban-based modernity pervasive at the close of the nineteenth century. Prior to and more so following the Great War, these varied transformations involving technology, money, and the city tended to be seen as decadence, not progress. As a consequence, the doctrinal and other enclosures of Christianity could be apprehended either as refuge or as zones of moral and affective confinement. Not surprisingly, Tonning regards Friedrich Nietzsche’s contrarian writings as a foundational stratum, a major preparatory step in the emergence of an exuberant modernism out of mere structure- and formality-filled modernity. Tying his book’s schema to Nietzsche’s program, the author argues that “it considerably sharpens our critical sense of the specificity and imaginative activism of Nietzsche’s genealogy of Christian morality and metaphysics if his approach is measured against a fuller account of the very theological themes he is trying to subvert” (21). A basis is established for uncovering Christianity’s remnants and impacts—especially the impulses evident in literary texts—across seemingly unconnected discursive terrains at the onset of Modernism and later.

Thus the second chapter deals with a seemingly disparate pair of writers, James Joyce and David Jones. The former an insistent apostate and the latter a pious convert from Anglicanism to the Roman Church, the two find “a common and prominent enemy in Catholic anti-modernism” (28). This reactionary movement is explained as an effort initiated by the Vatican, at the start of the twentieth century, to combat both disparagements of traditional dogma and enthusiasm for secular representation that appeared leveraged to promote a sense of contact with whatever is meant by the term “divine.” Tonning in this way establishes grounds for asserting that “Joyce needs Catholicism not just as a Grand Enemy, but also as a vital quarry for images that can infuse some measure of ‘epiphanic’ transcendence into his artistic fascination with the ordinary” (33–34). For David Jones, an affirmation of Modernism begins with a process of rebellion but instead emerges via a synthesis inspired, to a large extent, by the writings of Jacques Maritain. A revisionist Catholic philosopher writing in the wake of the anti-modernist movement, Maritain provided Jones with a pathway for justifying the unique missions of artists desiring to coordinate their perceptions of decay in the contemporary world, on the one hand, with redemptive programs of broad cultural benefit, on the other.

The succeeding chapter is the most ambitious and most convincing. It is concerned with a trio of Modernist megaliths: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W. H. Auden. Tonning coordinates his assessment of the post-World War I historical context with each figure’s concerns and strategies. Particularly viable here is the author’s handling of his primary task: calibrating the diverse engagements revealed by his three writers with Christian doctrine and belief. In the...