Religion and literature tend to disagree about how one should treat the self. This was a point I first discovered during my senior year in high school when I was trying to decide what college to attend and what to major in. Part of me wanted to study English in a prestigious secular university. I had liked my English classes in high school and, being relatively good at them, had enjoyed my teachers’ praises. So, I concluded, studying English at a big name university would allow me to continue learning about what I liked, and it would incite further admiration from my friends, family, and teachers. However, another part of me felt compelled–or in the religious lingo, “called”–to study theology at a small parochial college. At the time, sacrificing my ambitions and becoming a pastor seemed nobler and more selfless than becoming a writer or an English teacher. I’ve since realized that my understanding of the appropriate role of the self was too simplistic–religion isn’t all about self-sacrifice, and literature isn’t all about self-promotion. However, my difficulty with choosing a major and a college does point to a significant difference in how religion and literature view the self–a difference that has troubled not only me but others working on the fault line between religion and literature.
Religion does tend to call for a loss of self. Christians, for example, are supposed to imitate Christ’s self-sacrifice and follow his command, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matt 16:24). Furthermore, Christians are not supposed to exalt themselves because, as Christ says, “the last shall be first, and the first last” (Matt 20:16). Admittedly, Christ also says, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matt 22:39), suggesting a need for self-love, but Christians usually emphasize loving others more than loving self.
I know less about other world religions than I do about Christianity, but I suspect a similar emphasis on self-denial obtains for them as well. Buddhists, I know, teach the concept of anatta or anatman which means “no-self” or an “absence of a separate self,” and they believe that all suffering arises from one’s clinging to an individual and immutable self. Similarly, Muslims teach the concept of islam, meaning submission, and they believe that one should give up the will–or the self–to God.
While religion tends to require self-denial, writing great works of literature or great critiques of those works often calls for self-assertion and even self-promotion. Fundamentally, to write is to seek an audience and preferably an audience who likes what one writes and praises one for it. Whether a writer strives to appear on the New York Times bestseller list and be praised by prominent reviewers or merely hopes to get views and favorable comments for a personal blog (say, this one), in the end she always writes in order to get attention. Granted, on some level pastors and theologians want attention too–we all do–but the push for recognition seems to be stronger in literature than it is in religion.
The need for literary recognition and the compulsion to piously deny oneself frequently run up against each other in religious writing. I could list scores of writers who wrestled with this tension, but I’ll just name two with whom I’ve come to identify most. First, John Milton. Strangely, Milton is both one of the most important English religious poets and one of the most egotistical English poets–a combination that often produces peculiar contradictions and contortions in his poetry. In “Lycidas,” for instance, Milton seems to have conflicting feelings about fame. He calls it, enigmatically, “That last infirmity of Noble mind,” suggesting that it is at once an undesirable sickness and an admirable sign of nobleness.
Gerard Manley Hopkins too frequently wrestled with the problem of the self. Both a poet and a priest, he famously burned all of his poems when he took his religious vows because he believed writing poetry wasn’t appropriate for his profession. Even when he decided, seven years later, that writing poems would be suitable for a priest after all, he continued to struggle with the problem of the self in his poetry. In “As kingfishers catch fire,” for example, he says that mortal things should assert both their own presences and, in a sort of self-denial, Christ’s presence. The mortal thing, he writes, “speaks and spells” itself and cries “What I do is me: for that I came.” But, Hopkins continues, man also “Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is– / Christ.” In the end, then, Hopkins argues not that mortal things should speak of Christ instead of themselves, but that they should speak of Christ and themselves. They should not so much resolve the tension between self-assertion and self-denial as try to accomplish both at once.
I can’t say that Milton or Hopkins–or any other religious writer–ever determines exactly how one should conceive of the self. And if they haven’t figured it out, I certainly can’t say that I have. However, I do think that the tension in the lives and poetry of religious writers like Milton and Hopkins raises a number of potentially profitable questions: Can composing literature ever be a selfless act–say, when one writes instruction or exhortation? And, if it can, how does the writer distinguish selfish motivations for writing from selfless ones? Can pious self-sacrifice ever be a form of self-promotion? Whose recognition, if any, should the religious writer seek–God’s or man’s? Is self-promotion even necessarily bad? In the end, I imagine some of these questions exceed even the interdisciplinary boundaries of religion and literature and become philosophical questions about altruism or psychological questions about self-actualization. Still, I think that literary and religious scholars could begin to engage these questions more rigorously than they do now and that doing so could significantly enrich their understandings of literary and religious texts.
Thank you