From an Existential Vacuum to a Tragic Optimism: The Search for Meaning and Presence of God in Modern Literature by Barbara A. Heavilin (review)

Since the Greek and Roman roots of modern literature, one grand theme has emerged: humanity’s relationship with the divine. Wars and rumors of wars, love adorned and lovers scorned, God’s voice and the silent void—all seem cast under the grand umbrella. Sometimes a source of comfort, sometimes the subject of inchoate wrath, the relationship between God and human beings has always avoided categorical neatness and exegetical simplicity. Consequently, in the modern era, critical theories and the journals devoted to the topic have sprung up in profligate numbers. Religion and Literature, Religion in Life, Christianity and Literature, and Christian Scholars’ Review are just four of the better known. Despite such attention in the latter half of the twentieth century, does that mean there is no more to say about the subject?

On the contrary, the issues are just becoming clearly defined, and to that end, Barbara Heavilin’s fine book, From a Tragic Optimism to an Existential Vacuum: The Search for Meaning and Presence of God in Modern Literature, makes a remarkable contribution. Effectively staged in three sections, Heavilin selects, as her connecting thread among various modern literary works, the philosophy of Viktor Frankl. His concept of the existential vacuum captures the impact of the overwhelming weight of naturalistic modernism in the twentieth century. As she writes in a discussion of Yeats’s “The Second Coming”: “With the death of Christianity, the absence of God, and the loss of morality, there is no language, no meaning; no appeal for mercy, justice, morality—just emptiness, blankness, pitilessness.” That is the void. And the relativistic flattening of modernism places the authors under study there in the emptiness, searching for an alternative or a way out.

But Heavilin’s study is not one more lament over an age without ultimate values. In part, this is so because her guide Viktor Frankl would not have it so. In both Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy (1984) and in Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning (1997), Frankl rebaptizes Saint Augustine in modernism’s murky waters, making him useful for our times. As Heavilin explains it, the sense of meaninglessness that is the existential vacuum is first disturbed by a syncretic trio of creativity, love, and moral choice. Such actions or states of being resemble transcendent norms of meaningful life. So it is, therefore, that behind meaning there must lie being. This, then, forms Heavilin’s critical approach: examining the nature and qualities of modernism in an author’s work, and then searching for patterns of transcendent meaning, either stated or suggested, within that work.

I have suggested that Frankl remained under the theological imprimatur of Saint Augustine. A further word must be said about that. Frankl shares Augustine’s concept, as set forth in City of God, that ultimate meaning locates in ultimate Being, which may be named Good or God. Furthermore, for Augustine, it was Unchangeable Good. The world of humanity, however, is constantly subject to change. Augustine, we remember, was fighting a twofold battle: one with the Pelagian heresy of two dominant powers, one good and the other evil; and the second for the freedom of human choice. Evil, he was certain, exists, but it was in no way a match for God. So, Augustine introduced his theory of deprivation—the more evil one becomes, the less being, meaning, and goodness one has. Frankl recognized this deprivation. But so too, it seems, did such authors as are examined in this study. They are not puny little creatures weeping before a much diminished light. They are often heroic in their struggle, even when apparently going down to defeat. The greatest battle they wage is to wrestle meaning out of the ultimate confrontation with death. And while choices may be freely made, they seldom are easily made...