Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age by Roger Lundin (review)

738 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE uncomfortably and inconsistently lapsed Christians. To Miller's eye, they resemble Hawthorne's description of Melville as an artist who could "neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief" (247). Yet within Stevens' poem, "Sunday Morning:' Miller also finds confirmation that such writers have struck a cautious but "not necessarily gloomy" balance between a Sunday no longer protected within the walls of orthodoxy and a Sunday drained of all spiritual value. Glossing the dramatic final lines of Stevens's poem-"At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make / ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings"-Miller applies the poet's comment that through poetry "the most casual things take on transcendence:' "Are the 'casual flocks of pigeons' a 'casual thing' that takes on transcendence?" Miller asks himself (223). The answer, it seems certain, is yes. In this affirmation of literature's power, Miller suggests that the troubled writing he has surveyed can also knit together the fractured Christian and pagan worlds into a Sunday still potent with meaning. Samuel Graber Valparaiso University Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age. By Roger Lundin. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8028-3077-7. Pp. x + 292. $26.00. Believing Again is not a work of specialized scholarship but rather a work of personal exploration by a literary critic who reports a journey from the "land of unbelief" to an ecumenical Christian faith. The chapters are interconnected essays, some of them previously published, on aspects of the decline of faith and the rise of unbelief, effects wrought by scientific discoveries that have served to contradict the idea of a benevolent cosmos. Attention is given mainly to evidence derived from literature, philosophy, and theology of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, and much of Roger Lundin's discussion will resonate with readers who have wrestled with the issues that are surveyed. One of Lundin's examples, citing a 1962 film, provides a useful introduction to the arid landscape of secularism-indeed, a variant of the "darkling plain" of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" -that emerges when belief is withdrawn. The film is Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light in which a priest of the Church of Sweden undergoes both psychological and theological crises while his parishioners have simply lost interest (123). Lundin might well have mentioned how this film ends, with the priest-in-crisis, now physically ill, intoning the opening words of the Swedish hiigmasse ("Holy,holy, holy, Lord God Almighty; all the earth is full of His glory") as darkness falls over the essentially empty church, located in the wintry countryside at Frostnas, symbolic of the lack of any spiritual warmth. In America, as BOOK REVIEWS 739 in Europe, the intellectual currents of the post-Enlightenment period have tended over time to erode the foundations of belief and to undermine the authenticity of spiritual experience. But Lundin now sees evidence of a changed intellectual atmosphere. However, if belief has returned in the last decades of the twentieth century and first years of the twenty-first century, it is not presented as something uncomplicated. Rather, skepticism itself has frequently become evident as a necessary component of belief. Thus Czeslaw Milosz struggled to write poetry that is honestly religious in spite of the uncertainties that he felt; his was faith searching and struggling for understanding. Pope John Paul II once queried Milosz's lack of certainty, his taking "one step forward and one step back:' To this the poet responded: "Can one write poetry in any other way today?" (121-22). Such a view calls to mind a traditional enemy of faith which, in Soren Kierkegaards treatment, is despair, the "sickness unto death." The search for poetic authenticity can be, as for Milosz, a dialectical process, a defense against unbelief that nevertheless absorbs unbelief into the process of poetic creation. Perhaps inevitably, in his chapter titled "Interpretation;' Lundin turns to Dostoevsky, whose confession in a letter of 1854 announced that "if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth" (154...