The Emergent Postsecular in Contemporary Irish Literature

The displacement of religion has been a predominant theme of recent analyses of Irish society. General theories of secularization in the West have often been applied to the case of Ireland in particular as an outlier among European nations, one late in yielding to the triumph of scientific knowledge.¹ It has been convenient for some experts to perceive recent Irish society in binary terms, with religion and modernity as mutually exclusive domains.² Since the late 1980s, this view maintains, Ireland has seen the increasing prevalence of a secular cosmopolitan Irish majority that rejects traditional religion as intellectually and morally “untenable.”³ Ireland’s relatively recent and rapid secularization has been hastened and intensified by the revelations of clerical abuse since the 1990s.

Still, scholarly analyses of Irish culture to date have neglected “postsecularism” as an apt descriptive category. This term, coined by German social theorist Jürgen Habermas, refers to a renewed religious turn of thought in the West in the new millennium. The postsecular signifies an “awareness of what is missing” when secular reason and science supplant the customary roles of religion, prompting recognition of the absence of common bonds that hold society together.⁴ Habermas’s vision of the postsecular identifies the need for emergent cultural formations that can mediate between “the triumphalist, scientistic view of secularization and the pessimistic evaluation of secularization as cultural decline.”⁵

Conspicuous examples of a postsecularity consistent with Habermas’s vision have appeared in Irish literature of the past twenty years in response to contemporary issues and concerns. Postsecular Irish literature proffers an imaginative challenge to the problem of postmodern cynicism as well as a portent for the revitalization of elements of moral and spiritual welfare in contemporary culture. The work of some of the most popular and critically acclaimed figures of recent Irish literature has manifested a new concern with spirituality, one not strictly Catholic but resonant with elements from the Catholic tradition. The postsecular—traced here through the ideas and forms of Seamus Heaney, Conor McPherson, and Colum McCann—has emerged as a new category of Irish literature, marking not a simple “return of religion” but engendering instead a new reflective discourse accompanied by a distinctive strategy that works across expected generic boundaries.

A substantial body of literary criticism on the poetry of Seamus Heaney has been concerned with his complex relationship to what Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien have called the “hegemonic ideology” of Irish Catholicism.⁶ With the poetic response to rigid forms of Catholicism as its frame of reference, however, this body of criticism neglects what may have been in the last two decades of his life an even greater force than ideological Catholicism in stimulating Heaney’s apprehension: the hegemony of the postmodern in intellectual culture.⁷ In seeking to understand his career’s late turn toward “the marvelous,” critics have tended to overlook that by the 1990s, Heaney was responding to the prevailing spirit of cynicism and negation that he perceived in literary and academic circles. His 1995 Nobel lecture sought to “credit” poetry, for example, as a necessary response to the problematic yet predominant intellectual predisposition of our time: our inclination, he said, is “not only not to credit human nature with much constructive potential but not to credit anything too positive in the work of art.”⁸ Heaney had been forming images in his poetry—reinforced by statements he made in interviews—that voiced a counter to this negative vision, indeed enunciating an understanding of his own postsecular context before the term had even emerged. As he noted in an interview from the early 1990s,

Typically if you’re a kind of late twentieth century educated ‘yuppie,’ if you’re moving from a kind of ignorance to a kind of ‘supposed to know about the world,’ you try to secularize yourself, unless you’re really stupid, and typically you lose your faith. And then at a certain stage, the word ‘mystery,’ the word ‘spirit’—you say, ‘there’s something there; that has a meaning. And there’s a big empty space in me where...