Modernism and Christianity by Erik Tonning (review)

Because modernism has been thought to mark a radical break from religion, particularly western Christianity, modernist studies have only begun to respond to the renewed critical interest in religious history and theology. Erik Tonning’s Modernism and Christianity provides the best case for drawing together these two ostensibly opposed terms while also generously pointing the way forward for new avenues of study. As a general introduction and overview to the relationship between modernism and Christianity, Tonning’s book is a remarkable success, one that will be of great value for both graduate students and junior scholars as they engage in the burgeoning interest in this hybrid area of study.

While Tonning’s point of departure is the standard narrative of modernism as crisis, he rightly notes that such an account would necessarily entail “some confrontation” with Christianity (2). To provide background for his work, Tonning draws on appropriate studies of modernism such as Roger Griffin’s Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, as well as on the most important study of modernism and religion in the past decade, Pericles Lewis’s Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel.¹ Tonning selects a few central modernists for his study—James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound—as well as incorporating a “minor” modernist in the British poet and painter David Jones. Tonning then traces their literary treatments of religion through the century into the writings of W. H. Auden and Samuel Beckett. In doing so, his work not only recasts the meaning of the often pejorative term “dogma” for these writers but also revises the standard “crisis of faith” narrative about modernism in favor of a more historically accurate reading of a broader “crisis of authority” (100-101). The neglect of any women in this picture, however, is puzzling. Tonning treats Virginia Woolf at some length, but the religiously curious poetry of H.D. or the idiosyncratic Catholic elements of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood would have provided complex variations for his study.²

His third, and most effective, chapter, “Old Dogmas for a New Crisis? Hell, Usury and Incarnation in T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden,” remarkably moves from Eliot’s “dogmatic rearmament” (69)—a term used to describe his views against what he saw as anemic, bourgeois liberalism—to Pound’s “private orthodoxy” (81)—built from a pagan-inspired and deplorably anti-Semitic reevaluation of Christianity’s European and Greco-Roman roots—to Auden’s emergent sense that a liberal democracy must be informed by the Absolute and modeled on the ecclesia. His studies of these writers stand out for their historical and biographical precision. Rather than generalize their beliefs, Tonning pinpoints particular positions at specific historical moments, such as Pound’s “1930s rapprochement” with the Roman Catholic Church, partly inspired by his attraction to Fascist Italy (82). He skillfully combines this historical analysis with new readings of the poetry that emerge from that history.

Unfortunately for Joyce scholars, Tonning’s chapter on Joyce, “Catholic Modernisms: James Joyce and David Jones,” lacks this level of sophistication largely because it relies on a dated and one-sided view of Joyce as a materialist, atheist, and secular writer, a reading based on Geert Lernout’s 2010 book, Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion.³ Tonning fails to connect the stridently secularizing picture drawn by Lernout with more balanced appraisals such as Roy Gottfried’s Joyce’s Misbelief,⁴ Mary Lowe-Evans’s Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company,⁵ or Lewis’s chapter on Joyce from Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. While Tonning accurately sketches the relationship between modernism and Catholicism through appropriate sources like the 1907 anti-modernist encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis⁶ and does well to combine Joyce with Jones, he treats Joyce’s views of religion as unchanging and fails to apply the historical precision his treatment of Eliot, Pound, and Auden employs. Like most standard secular accounts of Joyce, Tonning opens with the 29...