Seeing into the Life of Things. Essays on Literature and Religious Experience (review)

Seeing into the Life of Things. Essays on Literature and Religious Experience. Edited by John L. Mahoney. New York: Fordham University Press, 1998. xx + 364 pp. $35 hbk.

This is the first volume of a new series on religion and literature to be published by the Fordham University Press under the general direction of John L. Mahoney. The book is meaty; there are eighteen essays, plus a preface. The aim is worthy--in the context of current interest in cultural studies to make the case that "religion, or perhaps religious experience" merits attention, in addition to issues of race, nationality, and gender (xiii). There are two organizing principles in the collection; an initial section on theory includes five essays and a second section on "practical approaches" is comprised of thirteen contributions. Most of the essays are devoted to American or English authors, with three essays about broader issues of culture.

The essay by Dennis Taylor, introducing theoretical matters, sets the tone and reveals the limits of what follows in the book. He makes the case for "the enterprise of seeking a religious critical discourse" (22) in the light of the "competing cultural voices" in contemporary conversations about literature, noting that there is often an overlap between the religious, the spiritual and the ethical. One of the most compelling issues Taylor raises is the theme of the public and social versus the private and hermetic in writers such as Edward Said, with Said, obviously, coming down on the side of the public and social (23).

The very title of the this volume with its emphasis on "religious experience" comes at this issue of the public versus the private obliquely. (The jacket uses as subtitle, "Essays on Religion and Literature," but the title page has the subtitle cited above.) Are we talking here of western interiority, of the individual's sense of the sacred or transcendent? (In an essay on Stevie Smith near the end of the book, John Mahoney speaks of the religious dimension of her poetry, "if by 'religious' one means a sense of something transcendent, of an ultimate reality beyond the worldly" [323].) Or are we talking of religious experience in a broader cultural sense, or of the cultural basis for religion? These distinctions are never clarified.

A few essays approach these issues, again obliquely. Philip Rule makes the case for the gendered imagination in his essay on Keats. Charles J. Rzepka and Jane P. Rzepka compare the sermon in liberal Protestant churches with the ideological discourse of contemporary criticism, noting that the sermon has become increasingly secularized while "moral" judgments are imbedded in ideological literary criticism (e.g., writing on Austen, 101). And Judith Welt analyzes with acuity the techniques of the American film in an essay devoted to popular culture and the portrayal of the sacred, "Acts of God: Film, Religion, and 'FX'." She examines the evolution of the movie from the "sacramentalization of the mundane" to the post-modern use of "the sacred as the trace of the other" (352).

The majority of the essays, of excellent quality, use the discourse of orthodox Christian theology or Biblical narrative as a means of extrapolating individual spiritual quests or they re-examine the interpretive history of certain authors, how they have been read, to arrive at new religious insights. A few draw on other traditions, such as Buddhism. Although authors such as Charlotte Smith figure in this panoply, the majority are canonic in that their texts or biography have long raised the issues of belief, doubt, or quest, all in respect to the sacred or transcendent. The method in these essays is predominantly to establish first a frame of reference (theological or otherwise) and then to analyze paradigmatic texts in relationship to this frame. Thus we meet again Milton, Emerson and Thoreau, Hopkins, Flannery O'Connor, and Stevens.

In reflecting on this volume, so admirable...