The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era by Colin Jager (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 475 The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature is the best starting point for knowing or reviewing how English authors have positioned themselves in relation to the Bible. But a starting point should not be an ending point. Anyone using the Blackwellbook should go directly from it to David Jeffrey's appendix on individual authors' use of the Bible-not only because it covers American authors as well English, but additionally because it includes many good sources omitted by contributors to the Blackwellvolume. Then one should consult David Norton's two-volume set titled A History of the Bible as Literature, a book referenced only once in The Blackwell Companion that actually contains a wealth of information that supplements the Blackwellvolume. I have praised the Blackwellbook for what it includes. My own research uncovered additional tidbits that should have been included. The minimal number of biblical allusions in Shakespeare'sworks is 1,200,and a broader conception of what ranks as a biblical allusion easily yields twice that number. Blake's Bibleis the most thumbed-through from use of his English books, and his most famous verdict on the Bibleis that it is "the great code of art" (a formula does not appear in the chapter on Blake). The King James Biblewas one of two books that Coleridge kept next to his bed during the last decade of his life. James Joyce copied the entire book of revelation into his notebook from the King James Version (not the Catholic Douay version). I note finally my sadness in reviewing a book that I wish to be on every CCL member's shelfbut that isbeyond the financial means ofvirtually any private scholar. Leland Ryken Wheaton College The Book ofGod: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era. ByColin Jager. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. ISBN 0-812-3979-2. Pp. ix + 274. $59.95. The years since 9/11 have witnessed seemingly endless reconsiderations of "secularization" emanating from sources as diverse as Charles Taylor (A Secular Age) to Terry Eagleton (Reason, Faith and Revolution). With The Book ofGod, Colin Jager jumps into this conversation with a masterful analysis of the "argument from design' and its relationship to natural theology, teleology, secularization, intentionality , and Romantic literature. He first suggests a revision of secularization theory and then finally-and, perhaps, most radically-a subtle transformation of our understanding of the concept of intentionality. For the more general reader, The Book of God has three chapters of interest: one on literature, modernity, and evil (which involves an intriguing discussion about the "transformation of evil from a metaphysical to a moral category" (37); another on the nature of religion 476 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE (a question which invariably arises in conversations about secularization as it is necessary to consider what the putative opposite of the secular is); and a fabulous concluding chapter that wonders whether one can be committed to the "intentionality " of texts without simultaneously committing oneself, even if unknowingly, to the "divine intentionality" of the world (224). However, the book is more than just a reconsideration of natural theology, as Jager'sbasic argument revises (and finally rejects) a central premise of secularization theory and an equally important belief of much Romantic literary history: namely, that Romanticism is instrumental in the secularization of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe and that Romantic poets were primarily trying to overcome or abandon Christianity. Instead, Jager argues that the centrality of the argument from design suggests that Romanticism neither marks the beginning nor the intensification of the "secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking" as M. H. Abrams so forcefully argued in Natural Supernaturalism. Jager's critical revision is to insist that "secularization"- understood as "loss of [religious] belief" (1) or "decline in authority of religious institutions" (26)-does not possess much "explanatory power" for understanding the Romantic age (x). That he does this while engaging the design (and anti-design) arguments running from David Hume to Anne Barbauld, from William Paley to Immanuel Kant, from JaneAusten to William Wordsworth, all while also engaging the critical establishment of the mid-twentieth century which brought these figures to prominence and codified their apparent loss of...