Tensions in Religion and Literature III: Self

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.

Tensions in Religion and Literature II: Empathy

In my last post, I promised to try to answer a long-neglected question: what are the tension points between religion and literature? In this post, I’ll begin by discussing a tension point that I’ll call “the problem of empathy.”

Reading or writing a work of literature is, fundamentally, an exercise in empathy. One of my English professors first suggested this idea to me when she opened my freshmen survey of literature class by saying grandiosely, “If you don’t learn anything else in this class, or for that matter in your liberal arts education as a whole, I hope you learn the art of empathy.” At the time, my professor’s words puzzled me, but as I’ve thought more about them over the years, I think I’ve worked out what they meant. And, I’ve decided, my professor was spot on. As I’ve studied literature, I’ve learned that reading a text well requires walking around in the shoes of the author for a while. I have to live in the world the author lived in, think the thoughts the author thought, and believe the beliefs the author believed. Only after I’ve “been” the author for a while, after I’ve truly empathized with him or her, can I offer a true and persuasive reading of the text. The same principle applies for writing literature. In order to create persuasive fictional characters or make insightful poetic claims, an author has to get inside the mind of humanity and attentively look out of its eyes. The best authors are those who do this best, those who have mastered the art of empathy.

Here’s the rub: while reading and writing literature requires empathy, religion requires just the opposite. This may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out. It’s not that religious people are cold, unfeeling ogres; in fact, I would be the first to argue that religious belief has made for some of the most warmhearted and caring people our planet has seen. However, while religion encourages empathy in some things–like in caring for the sick, the elderly, and the poor–it restricts empathy, whether implicitly or explicitly, in other things. Within Christianity, a taboo list might include witchcraft, alternative sexual practices, and acts of violence. Such things are not to be empathized with, and doing so is succumbing to temptation.

The restrictions imposed on literature by religion routinely create quandaries for religious writers and readers of literature. C. S. Lewis, for one, in the preface to The Screwtape Letters–a book which takes the form of a series of letters written from the perspective of a senior demon to a junior demon–says he won’t write anything else from a demon’s perspective because doing so gives him, as he puts it memorably, “spiritual cramp”:

I was often asked or advised to add to the original Letters, but for many years I felt not the least inclination to do it. Though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment….Though it was easy to twist one’s mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The work into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness, and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before I was done. It would have smothered my readers if I had prolonged it.

While Lewis’ literary sensibilities enabled and encouraged him to compose an astonishingly empathetic work from a demon’s point of view, his religious sensibilities made him think better of it. Even though most Christians would argue that The Screwtape Letters is a very tame and well-intentioned trek into the demonic, Lewis felt the urge to rein himself in.

The problem of empathy gets even stickier when we deal with other works. Consider Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a novel written from the perspective of a man sexually obsessed with a 12-year-old girl. Is this the sort of text the religious person should be reading? How about J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, in which the teenage narrator repeatedly swears blue streaks so blue they’re almost purple? Or what about Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues, in which various women, one of whom is a lesbian prostitute, talk candidly about their vaginas? For Catholics at the University of Notre Dame, the question of whether to perform The Vagina Monologues on campus has spurred many heated debates over the last several years. Is The Vagina Monologues the sort of play the religious person should watch? What about the woman who plays–that is, who empathetically pretends to be–the lesbian prostitute? Is this a fitting role for a religious person?

I don’t have definitive answers to any of these questions, though maybe I should say that I have chosen to read Lolita and The Catcher in the Rye and go to a showing of The Vagina Monologues. At least for these works, empathizing with great literature was more important to me than adhering to religious teaching. I decided these classics were classics for a reason and that their positive messages outweighed their negative ones. What I want to point out, though, is that I’m not sure my decision was the “religious” one. That is, I think many in the religious community would disagree with my choice. In the end, then, the gap between what I and many religious people think is right in the realm of literary empathy suggests, if nothing else, a need for more dialogue about the problem of empathy. Empathy is a tricky business, and I think students of literature and religion alike could benefit from thinking and talking about it more than they do.

Tensions in Religion and Literature I

My father is a scientist who studies the relationship of science and religion, so, growing up, I heard probably more than your average Jane about the tensions between the scientific and religious worldviews. However, while my upbringing was perhaps unique, I don’t think I’m the only one who has heard a lot about the intersection of science and religion. Given the prominent voices in the media today of, on the one hand, America’s religious right and, on the other, vocal atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, we–that is, Americans and to a lesser degree Europeans–are constantly bombarded with the question of how to reconcile science and religion. Indeed, I think it’s safe to say that ever since the scientific revolution, the interface of science and religion has been the primary battleground in the great war between the church and the academy, between faith and reason.

And understandably so. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from hearing my father talk about his work, it’s that reconciling science and religion is a tricky business deserving of extreme care and attention. However, while I think discussing the science and religion interface is important, I can’t help but wonder if, in our attention to the religion and science front, we’re neglecting other fronts in the war between the academy and the church–fronts that were discussed more often in the days before the scientific revolution and that today, in a postmodern age when some argue that how we talk about truth is at least as important as truth itself, require our attention again. I’m thinking about the front between religion and the humanities, and in particular between religion and literature.

Most people assume that religion and literature make good bedfellows. When I tell friends or relatives that I study religion and literature, the usual response is, “Oh, they go together well!” Certainly, on some level, religion and literature do go together well. Afterall, biblical studies is really literary criticism, systematic theology is really philosophy, and church history is really, as its title suggests, history.

However, my experience in the literary world has taught me that the relationship of religion and literature isn’t so simple. Over and over, I’ve observed that in Christian colleges and universities, it is the English departments and not the science departments that are, as one of my English professors put it once, “the liberal holdouts.” Far from easily swallowing their institutions’ theological lines as some might expect, then, English professors actually seem to be the most eager to challenge theological teaching.

Indeed, after graduating from an Seventh-day Adventist undergraduate institution and watching my SDA friends go their separate ways, I’ve noticed that, at least within the SDA church, it is the humanities majors who stop attending church, not the science majors.* To be sure, many of my scientist friends do have questions about their faith. However, maybe because they see that the church is interested in talking about their questions, they seem to keep attending church faithfully. My humanities friends, though–perhaps seeing that the church doesn’t address their questions and then concluding that it is uninterested in, unaware of, or unable to answer them–seem to give up on church altogether.

Which leads to the million dollar question: what are the questions that humanities majors are asking that the church isn’t? Or, to phrase it differently, what are the tensions between religion and the humanities? For the next few posts, I plan to describe what I think are some of the big conflicts between religion and the humanities–and, in particular, between religion and literature. My goal is not so much to reconcile religion and literature or to encourage the church and my humanities colleagues to reunite; like science and religion, literature and religion are not easily reconciled and sometimes I’m not even sure thay should be reconciled. Instead, I hope merely to bring to light in an articulate way some of the tensions between religion and literature that have long been overlooked.

*I think it would be fascinating to compare the retention rates of humanities students in other Christian faiths. My hunch is that Catholic or high church Protestant humanities majors would be more likely to stick with their churches than their low church Protestant counterparts because Catholicism and high church Protestant faiths have historically engaged more in pre-scientific revolution issues like the tension between religion and literature than have low church Protestant faiths.