The Humble Sublime: Secularity and the Politics of Belief 9780755624072, 9781780767444

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In Memoriam Hans Frei 1922–88 my teacher, mentor, and friend and with thanks to my students at Haverford College and Harvard University, 1976–2012

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 The Supper at Emmaus, 1601, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Credit: © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY 1.2 The Supper at Emmaus, 1606, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY

1.3 The Holy Family, also known as The Household of the Carpenter, 1640, Rembrandt van Rijn. Credit: Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

2.1 The Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God, twelfth century. Credit: © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow / Art Resource, NY

FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Laura Thiemann Scales

Behold Christ lying in the lap of his young mother. What can be sweeter than the Babe, what more lovely than the mother! […] I would not have you contemplate the deity of Christ, the majesty of Christ, but rather his flesh. Look upon Baby Jesus. Divinity may terrify us. Inexpressible majesty will crush us […] Are you frightened? Then come to him, lying in the lap of the fairest and sweetest maid. You will see how great is the divine goodness, which seeks above all else that you should not despair. Trust him! Trust him! Here is the child in whom there is salvation. To me there is no greater consolation given to us than this, that God became human, a child, a baby, playing in the lap of his most gracious mother. Who is there whom this sight would not comfort? Now is overcome the power of sin, death, hell, conscience, and guilt, if you come to this gurgling Baby and believe that he is come, not to judge you but to save.1

A dear family friend read these words from Martin Luther’s The Magnificat at my father’s memorial service at Harvard University earlier this year. The passage was intensely meaningful to my father, Ronald Thiemann. It represents a key assertion of Lutheran theology—that of salvation by grace and through faith alone— that guided him throughout his life. It is an important marker of our family tradition: we have read this sermon together as a family every Christmas Eve for almost forty years, gathered around the Advent wreath for a moment of quiet contemplation in the midst of a bustling holiday. And it is a point of origin for my father’s intellectual life, and thus for The Humble Sublime. Although this book represents the wide scope of his literary and cultural interests, it is nevertheless deeply informed by his Lutheranism, and he writes, more so than in his other books, self-consciously as a Lutheran theologian.

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The youngest of three children, my father was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His mother, Marie Graeser, emigrated at the age of two from Germany to Missouri, where her family became tenant farmers. His father, Frank Thiemann, was raised on a farm and became a traveling salesman. Marie was a practicing Lutheran; Frank, a practicing Roman Catholic. Their respectful Catholic–Lutheran “mixed marriage”—unusual for that time—provided an early model of ecumenism and informed my father’s interest in religion in the public sphere. Several years ago, preaching at the baptism of his first grandchild, Kate, my father told the story of sitting in church as a young boy with both his parents on Reformation Sunday, which in the Missouri Synod of his youth was celebrated in grand style. He watched the procession of the red-clad clergy, feeling awe and pride at the spectacle of the ceremony. But as the service went on, he also felt pain and shame to realize that this “victory” celebration came at the expense of his Roman Catholic father, a gentle man who showed no resentment but who must have felt alienated by the experience. Although my father loved grand expressions of transcendence— he took us to the cathedral towns of France, Germany, and Italy and reveled in organ and choral music that echoed through the ancient stone edifices—it was the everyday sublime that nourished his faith. That boyhood Reformation Sunday was an early reminder that aesthetics and ethics are always intertwined: that the experience of the sublime must bring with it a pull toward, not away from, human connection. That gurgling, human, real baby that Luther describes was certainly my father’s foundational experience of the humble sublime. My father first conceived of this book more than a decade ago, at a moment when he was contemplating his own role as a public academic and a “connected critic”: one who both participates in and critiques one’s community. The Humble Sublime represents the culmination of his longstanding investment in the study of religion in the public sphere. In addition to his writing and teaching, he spent the last 20 years of his career working to put his ethical commitments into practice. At Harvard Divinity School, where he was Dean for 13 years, one of his key accomplishments was establishing the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life. In 2006 he visited Iran as the guest of the Iranian National Academy of Sciences, giving lectures on “ethics and public decision making” which focused on how pluralism can contribute to resolving ethical debates over issues like



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stem cell research. In 2010 he was appointed by the Lutheran World Federation and the Vatican to be the North American representative to the Lutheran Roman Catholic International Commission on Christian Unity, which works toward the goal of full communion between Catholics and Lutherans. Most recently, he co-founded, with Bruce McEver, The Foundation for Religious Literacy, which as its mission “works to educate leaders in business, medicine, finance, education, and journalism about world religions, religion in public life, and religion in the workplace.” I am myself a scholar of literature, and it was a source of satisfaction for both my father and me that the subjects of our respective intellectual projects drew closer together in the last few years. Reading the manuscript of The Humble Sublime brings the pleasure of recognizing both his public and private voice, and of remembering the many ways he merged faith, aesthetics, and ethics in his life. His emphasis on the sacredness and ethical call of literary representation itself brings his work into conversation with both theologians and literary critics. I believe the book has important implications for understanding both the “turn to religion” and the “turn to ethics” in literary studies, which have provoked debates in the past decade among critics like Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, James Phelan, Adam Zachary Newton, Simon Critchley, Derek Attridge, and others. I know that I will feel an enduring sense of personal loss that I will not hear my father participate directly in those literary debates, and that we do not have more years in which to share our own work with one another. My father finished this book after having been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in the summer of 2012. The manuscript was accepted for publication by I.B.Tauris on December 5, 2012, the day of his funeral: a bittersweet milestone for our family. In the few months before his health failed, he wrote the last chapter and the introduction, working assiduously under what he termed, in a bit of black humor, the “deadline of mortality.” The process of finishing his last book was surely emotionally painful for him in some respects, but it also brought him joy and renewed his energy. In the midst of the brutality and the banality of chemotherapy treatments, in the midst of grief at the cruel march of his disease, he maintained a true sense of the sacred in the everyday and sought the transcendent in the midst of suffering. In those last weeks and months, he often read, wrote, listened to his beloved Bach, and met with friends and

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colleagues in the living room, surrounded by a pair of Greek Orthodox icons—“mediators of the visible and the invisible” and signs of the incarnation—and a haunting portrait of Anna Akhmatova, which, wearing a knowing expression, seemed to bear unshrinking, sacred witness to suffering. Although my father died before he could write a full acknowledgments section, he left a brief list of those readers who gave him support over the years of this book’s composition. I know he was deeply grateful for the friendship and intellectual camaraderie offered by these and many others: Jeffrey Stout, Kathryn Tanner, the Yale-Princeton Theological Discussion Group, Mark Jordan, Mark Edwards, Matthew Boulton, Matthew Potts, Anne Monius, Mara Willard, Sutopa Dasgupta, Kimberley Patton, Paul Jones, and Charles Matthewes. He also wished to thank the following institutions for the generous support they provided: the ATS/Lilly Endowment, the Hauser Center at Harvard University, and the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University, which provided research grants; Harvard Divinity School for providing sabbatical leave; and the Virginia Center for the Study of Religion. The book’s dedication, to his mentor Hans Frei and to the generations of students he taught, speaks to his belief that teaching was his true vocation. On behalf of my family I would like to extend particular thanks to my father’s Harvard Divinity School colleagues and friends, Kimberley Patton, who treated the manuscript as if it were her own, and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, who offered unfailing friendship and support; his former HDS doctoral students, now scholars in their own right, Mara Willard and Paul Jones, who undertook the task of writing the conclusion my father was unable to complete; his doctoral student in theology, Michelle Sanchez, who has provided superb editorial and research support for the manuscript over the past two years; his Princeton colleague and friend, Jeffrey Stout, who provided much-needed intellectual support and facilitated the placement of the book; and his editor, Alex Wright, at I.B.Tauris, himself a trained theologian, who deeply believed in the book’s vision from first reading, and who ushered it through the door of publication with great kindness and care. Every book my father wrote included a note of love and gratitude for his family. It now falls to me to thank my sister Sarah Connolly, our husbands Bill Connolly and Daniel Scales, and our children, Kate, Will, Anna, and Nathan, who provided him with so much joy



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through his last days. The best and most important thanks goes to my mother, Beth Thiemann, without whom this book would not exist. Through 44 years of marriage, she was the beloved center of my father’s life. April 29, 2013

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Ronald F. Thiemann, Benjamin Bussey Professor of Theology and former Dean of Harvard Divinity School, died on Thursday, November 29, 2012, at the age of 66. In 1986, President Derek Bok appointed him to the Divinity School as Dean and John Lord O’Brian Professor of Divinity. He led the Divinity School as Dean until 1999. After his deanship he continued on at the Divinity School as Professor of Theology and of Religion and Society, and, in 2006, he was appointed to the Bussey Professorship, a chair endowed from the bequest of Benjamin Bussey in 1842. He remained in that position until his death. A noted scholar, theologian, teacher, and administrator, Thiemann was a leading voice in the debates about the role of the theologian as a public intellectual, the value of “connected criticism” within political and religious communities, and the significance of religion for public life. Born on October 4, 1946, a native of St. Louis, Missouri, Thiemann attended Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he received the B.A. degree magna cum laude (1968) and then studied at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis for a Master of Divinity (1972). He pursued graduate studies at Yale University from 1972 until 1976, earning an M.A. (1973), an M.Phil. (1974) and a Ph.D. (1976). He studied with, among others, George Lindbeck and Hans Frei, who advised his dissertation on the topic, “A Conflict of Perspectives: The Debate between Karl Barth and Werner Elert.” In researching this dissertation, Thiemann spent a year at Eberhard Karls Universität of Tübingen, Germany (1974–5). The dissertation anticipated the direction of his future academic work. The debate in the 1930s between Werner Elert, a Lutheran theologian at the University of Erlangen, and Karl Barth, a Reformed theologian at the University of Basel in Switzerland, was more than a debate about two different theologies or about the nature of natural theology. It entailed the political implications of their theoretical theological affirmations, insofar as it took place during the period of National Socialism in Germany. Barth, a member of the Confessing Church, supported the

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Barmen Declaration in its critique of the Nazi government; Werner Elert, by contrast, criticized the Barmen Declaration. After graduation from Yale in 1976, Thiemann began a tenyear teaching career at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He chaired the religion department from 1978 through 1984, then served as acting provost for the College (1985) and acting president (1986). His teaching was honored in 1982 when he received the Christian and Mary Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching. While at Haverford, Thiemann published Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame, 1985). In the book, Thiemann contributed to theology in two ways. First, he attempted to rethink the concept of revelation in a way that took into account the North American pragmatic tradition’s critique of foundationalism and its emphasis on practice. He took into account diverse resources, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s understanding of meaning and his Haverford colleague Richard Bernstein’s merging of American and European philosophical traditions. Second, Thiemann framed revelation within a narrative theology that underscored the importance of narratives for identity. Further seeking to advance this direction, Thiemann chaired a group on narrative theology at the American Academy of Religion for several years. His appropriation of the pragmatic critique of foundationalism and his emphasis on the importance of narrative and practice for communal identity proved to be hallmarks of his theological writings throughout his academic career. They were also constitutive of his understanding of the public role of theology and religion. Thiemann proposed a distinctive theological vision for the direction of Harvard Divinity School, which he elaborated on the occasion of the School’s 175th anniversary celebration: “The challenges for us in the coming decades,” Thiemann argued, will include preparing ministers, theologians, scholars, teachers, and religious and social service leaders to reflect theologically on the reality of a religiously plural world; advancing women’s studies in religions; revitalizing interdisciplinary and inter-professional conversation; building a truly diverse faculty and student body; and taking the fervent intentions expressed at the founding of the School that its program of study be genuinely nonsectarian and open to all forms of critical inquiry, and truly making those purposes our own.



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Thiemann’s 13 years of leadership were dedicated to advancing this vision. During this time he was successful in diversifying the faculty to include more senior women, persons of color, and those identified with traditions other than Christianity. As part of his work toward these objectives, Thiemann reestablished Religion and Society as a field of study at the School, and in 1992 he founded the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life. The center’s activities focused on three areas: the role of civil society in the renewal of public life, environmental ethics, and international relations. Several distinguished scholars and public intellectuals were among its first fellows. At the same time, he organized an interfaculty seminar with members drawn from the Law, Kennedy, and Divinity Schools, as well as from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Its papers and discussions addressed the problem of welfare reform and were later published in 2001 as Who Will Provide? The Changing Role of Religion in American Social Welfare with Mary Jo Bane, Brent Coffin, and Ronald Thiemann as co-editors. While Dean, Thiemann published a collection of essays, Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (1991), further advancing his case for the importance of narrative for theology and identity, the importance of communal worship and practice, the relation between theological and religious studies, and the role of the church in public life. Five years later, he published a more constructive theological statement, Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy (1996). In this work, Thiemann began with a historical analysis of the present constitutional framework and moved to a sharp criticism of both classical liberalism and sectarian communitarianism. Both, he argued, ultimately reduce religion to the private sphere, rendering it inaccessible to public discussion. Classical liberalism does so through its sharp separation of church and state, its emphasis upon neutrality, and its preclusion of religious arguments from public debate. The advocacy of withdrawal from public debate within communitarianism was seen to lead to a similar result. Consequently, Thiemann suggested that we embrace revisionist versions of liberalism and communitarianism, and argued for an understanding of religious faith that underscores both its communal and its public aspects. Faith understood in such a manner makes it possible for religious communities to engage in public discussions about shared values and their significance for political life. Members of religious communities would thereby bring their

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religious commitments into public discussions as engaged and committed “connected critics” (Michael Walzer’s term, appropriated by Thiemann), as public intellectuals, and as “prisoners of conscience.” In the taxing months before his death, Thiemann completed the manuscript of The Humble Sublime: Secularity and the Politics of Belief. This book, which had occupied him for the last decade, focuses on persons living in “dark times” (a phrase of Hannah Arendt): “prisoners of conscience,” who, despite high costs to themselves, continued in the face of hostile political environments to express their deepest convictions through their art—poetry, prose, and writing. Thiemann sees their intellectual trajectories and acts of protest to give testimony and witness to the integrity of visions, lived out in the collective, non-ratifying sphere. The book begins with Martin Luther’s theology of the sacraments, but focuses on the life and work of five figures from the time period before, during, and just after World War II, all of whom responded to the failed aspirations of their societies in some way in their work: the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, the American poet Langston Hughes, the British novelist, social critic, and journalist George Orwell, the French existential writer Albert Camus, and the anti-Nazi German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The book’s themes intersect in many deep vectors, among them aesthetics, race, class, economics, intimate human relationships, ideological beliefs, the will of the state, and the mind of the modern martyr, whether religious or secular in her or his commitments. These same themes animated Thiemann’s teaching and energized his intensive doctoral student advising in his two and a half decades at Harvard. Throughout Ronald Thiemann’s career, he received many honors. In 1998, he received both an honorary doctor of divinity degree from Trinity Lutheran Seminary, Columbus, Ohio, and an honorary doctor of laws and letters from Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Thiemann lectured widely, in both the United States and worldwide, in such places as Germany, Greece, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. In 2006 he represented the U.S. National Academies of Science on a lecture tour of universities and research centers in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Since 2006, Thiemann directed the Business across Religious Traditions initiative, an executive education program for business leaders, to help deepen their understanding of the opportunities and challenges of global capitalism in a variety of cultural and geopolitical



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contexts. With H. Bruce McEver, MBA ’69 and MTS ’11, he recently co-founded The Foundation for Religious Literacy and addressed the first meeting of that group in New York City on October 4, 2012, his 66th birthday. An ordained Lutheran minister, Thiemann served on several task forces and committees of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and, as a theologian, he participated regularly and frequently in conversations and dialogues with scholars and professionals from various fields, disciplines, and religious traditions. In 2010 he was appointed as the North American representative to the Lutheran Roman Catholic International Commission on Christian Unity by the Lutheran World Federation and the Vatican. A resident of Concord, Massachusetts, Thiemann is survived by a close and loving family: his wife, Beth A. Thiemann; his two daughters, Sarah Thiemann Connolly and Laura Thiemann Scales; sons-in-law William J. Connolly and Daniel Scales; and grandchildren Kate, William, Anna, and Nathan. Many of his colleagues remember him not only for his achievements, but also for the deft and intellectual manner in which he led faculty meetings and hosted dinners and discussions at Jewett House. His love for baseball and football, his acute, incandescent sense of humor, as well as his enjoyment in sharing dinners and conversations with students and faculty will continue to endear him to all of us. Adapted from the Faculty Memorial Minute for Ronald F. Thiemann Entered into the Record of Harvard University, January 28, 2013 Francis Schüssler Fiorenza (Charles Chauncey Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Theological Studies, Harvard Divinity School) David Lamberth (Professor of Philosophy and Theology, Harvard Divinity School) Kimberley C. Patton (Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion, Harvard Divinity School) Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School)

INTRODUCTION Ronald F. Thiemann

The publication in 2007 of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age reinvigorated a debate that many believed deserved to die an unlamented death. A growing academic and popular consensus has emerged that concludes that secularization theory carries little or no analytical power in a world in which a resurgence of religion’s spiritual, political, and economic power can hardly be overlooked.1 Insofar as secularization theory predicted the ultimate demise of public religion in a post-industrial world it appears to have been overthrown by a preponderance of the empirical evidence. Taylor is, of course, no defender of oversimplified secularization theories. He has no interest, for example, in defending what he calls “subtraction theories” which argue that the modern world has simply left behind a range of naïve religious beliefs and practices which we moderns have now outgrown. Nor is he interested in supporting positions that argue for the inevitable privatization of religion or its disappearance from public life. But Taylor still thinks that certain aspects of secularization theory deserve to be restated and defended: The change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others […] One way to put the question that I want to answer here is this: why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?2

In his wide-ranging and complex tome, Taylor argues that the secular age has produced a new type of self—a buffered self—shaped within a new social world: the immanent frame. The new self is one that is cut off from transcendent sources of meaning and fullness. He therefore writes about

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The Humble Sublime the world we have lost, one in which spiritual forces impinged on porous agents, in which the social was grounded in the sacred and secular time in higher times […] and this human drama unfolded within a cosmos. All this has been dismantled and replaced by something quite different in the transformation we often roughly call disenchantment.3

In support of his thesis concerning the buffered self and the immanent frame, Taylor offers a historical narrative in which he identifies the thirteenth- to sixteenth-century movements of reform within Western Christendom as the key culprits in shifting the social and cultural landscape toward the secular age. The sources of secularity, Taylor argues, lie in a series of medieval innovations: the reforms instituted by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the rise of the mendicant preaching orders in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the new forms of lay piety engendered by those orders, the view of God’s revelation developed by the nominalist philosophers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the Protestant reformations of the sixteenth century which introduced non-sacramental and ascetic forms of Christian practice. Taylor’s historical claims provide the foil for the thesis of this book. I believe that Taylor offers a deep misreading of these movements of reform. His attempt to characterize them as nonsacramental and disenchanted blinds him and those who follow his narrative to a number of powerful resources for religious life and practice that these reforms continue to make available to those of us seeking to live responsible, ethical lives in a post-secular age. The theologies and pieties shaped by these movements, far from being non-sacramental, offer deeply incarnational ways of living and believing in a world in which ancient hierarchies are collapsing and new forms of democratic life are beginning to emerge. Taylor operates with a form of metaphysical dualism, one that requires terms like sacred/secular, spiritual/mundane to refer to opposing ontological entities. In order to enter the divine presence, it is necessary, in Taylor’s scheme, to leave behind the secular and mundane so that one might ascend to the sacred and spiritual realm. Thus Taylor sees radically incarnational theologies as virtually effacing the “other side,” the sacred that stands over against and above the mundane. Thus he sees dangers even in such thoroughly orthodox positions as Thomas Aquinas’ view on the “synthesis” of nature and grace which, Taylor argues,



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leads inevitably—though unintentionally—to the “autonimization of nature.” The reformers of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries do quite thoroughly reject these forms of metaphysical dualism by stressing the deeply incarnational character of Christian piety. By entering into human form, God identifies fully with the human reality of Jesus’ flesh. As Luther writes, “When you can say, ‘Here is God, then you must also say, Christ, the man, is also here.’”4 God’s presence is always, according to the reformers, hidden “in, with, and under” mundane and human realities like the flesh of Christ and the words, water, bread, and wine of sacramental ritual. Indeed, in the sacraments of the church, God’s reality in Christ is both represented by the human elements and re-presented in the sacramental ritual, thus mediating the presence of God within the community gathered around those sacramental elements. As Taylor recognizes, this incarnational theology also has significant consequences for ethics. If the practice of evangelical piety is available to all lay Christians and not only to those who have received holy orders, then another aspect of the sacred/secular dualism has been broken down. Lay Christians can now aspire to the same spiritual and ethical practices as those exemplified by the mendicant orders, especially the care of the poor, even to the point of embracing evangelical poverty in solidarity with the poor. Moreover, the goal of ethical action changes dramatically in these movements of reform. With the theological logic of sola fide forwarded by the reformers, the conceptual relation of works to faith shifts. Since works no longer justify, the motivation for works becomes unhinged from securing salvation. Acts of mercy are now to be directed solely toward the neighbor in need without reference to the consequences of such works for one’s own ultimate salvation. The Christian has been saved by grace, through faith, for the sake of Christ, and thus works of love are to be directed simply to the needs of those who suffer. One’s spiritual salvation has been gained by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, so ethics can now be an incarnational practice in service to the neighbor in need. Works of love thus produce an ethic of responsibility where Christians direct their ethical activity always toward the neighbor in need—both inside and outside the church, both believers and non-believers. Taylor’s deep misunderstandings of these forms of incarnational theology and ethics not only lead to a seriously inaccurate reading

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of the historical record but also reinscribe a series of dichotomies— sacred/secular, believer/non-believer, spiritual/mundane—that distort our readings of our own contemporary situation. While the reformers did not simply obliterate all distinctions between the ultimate and penultimate realms, they did seek, at least in the area of ethics, to remove the invidious distinctions between the two that would place the so-called unbelieving secular person in a morally inferior position to believers and followers of a sacred path. Luther not only taught that God’s presence is always hidden in, with, and under the mundane but he also asserted that God is revealed always sub contrario, under God’s opposite. Just as our salvation has been earned by the execution of a political prisoner in first-century Palestine, so also God’s presence in our own times might be found where we are least likely to expect it, in those realms we too easily dismiss as the secular, mundane, and unbelieving. In the first chapter of The Humble Sublime, I give a thorough account of the theology and ethics of the thirteenth- to sixteenthcentury movements of reform which culminate in Luther’s theology of the cross. I discern in these theologies a key dimension that becomes important for the argument of the book as a whole: the humble sublime. As Erich Auerbach has so elegantly shown, the humble sublime is a writing practice deeply inscribed within the Western traditions of realism. Auerbach argues that early Christianity rejected the classic rhetorical tradition which reserved sublime rhetorical tropes for appropriately sublime topics and mundane rhetoric for less elevated subjects. Because in Christ’s incarnation the most humble elements—flesh, suffering, and death—are the vehicles of the most sublime divine actions—salvation, victory, and new life— so in Christian rhetoric the humble form can be used for the highest topics and the most elevated forms can be used for the most mundane subject matters. In early Christian literature, It is always an ordinary individual who is picked out from his ordinary real-life situation, from his family, social class, or profession […] and called upon to bear witness: the holy sublimity of the event is rooted in everyday life, and even amid the trials and torments afflicted on the saint, a kind of realism prevails […] It is this realism […] [which] can be grasped […] as a blending of two realms, the sublime and the lowly, expressed in the semantic development of the word humilis.5



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Thus the contemporary genre of realism bears the marks of this early Christian writing practice of the humble sublime, even when the writers themselves make no claim to participation in Christian beliefs and practices. One can see the influence of the humble sublime particularly in authors’ preferences for everyday characters and ordinary situations as a primary concern of the modern realist novel. Auerbach recognizes that already with Dante the deeply incarnational character of realist literature begins to give way to the primacy of the immanent in-and-for itself; but even in its most “secular” forms, modern realism continues to bear the marks of its Christian beginnings in its preference for hiding forms of the mysterious, uncanny, unexpected, and sublime “in, with, and under” the mundane. In his brilliant analysis of Virginia Woolf ’s “The Brown Stocking,” Auerbach shows that even the most apparently secular stories bear the traces of the Christian practice of the humble sublime in their employment of important writing techniques to depict the strange depths of ordinary objects, the curious inseparability of the ordinary and the sublime, and background beneath the surface of the everyday. In the remainder of the book I show how the writing practice of the humble sublime continues to shape the writing and ethical practice of four realist artists of the highest rank: Anna Akhmatova, Langston Hughes, George Orwell, and Albert Camus. In chapter 5, I add to this group the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer so as to bring together again the literary and the theological at the end of the book. In the case of each writer, I not only show how elements of the humble sublime shape their realist writing styles, but also how their writing functions to develop social and cultural critiques of the oppressive power of the tyrannical regimes under which they live and work. This provides an opportunity to extend my analysis from the literary to the ethical and political. All four writers offer vivid descriptions of the lives of those who live under such tyranny and thereby create remarkable aesthetic/ethical critiques of these regimes of power. In so doing they likewise engage that centuries-long tradition of artistic realism traceable both to the earliest forms of Christian writing as well as to the sacramental reflection of late medieval and early modern Christian theologians. Like their medieval forebears, they show that an ethic of political responsibility reveals elements of solidarity between the critic and the criticized, between the oppressed and the oppressor, thereby overcoming simple ethical dichotomies. These writers additionally all struggle with the apparent absence of

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God in situations of profound suffering and yet seek ways to engender hope by cultivating the deepest dimensions of human experience in order to motivate sustained resistance to evil. Their narrative art thus exemplifies a sensibility whereby the spiritual is hidden in, with, and under the earthly, ordinary, and everyday. For these literary artists, the most “heroic” spiritual acts of courage, faith, and resistance are to be found in the “mundane” actions of ordinary people. Each author also provides elements of an ethic of responsibility relevant to the lives of today’s readers. Anna Akhmatova is a crucial figure in this study not only because her poetry manifests the characteristics of both the humble sublime and sacramental realism but because her theorizing of realism shows remarkable parallels to the discussions of sixteenth-century Eucharistic theology. Akhmatova’s criticisms of the dominant poetic school of Russian Symbolism are deeply resonant with Luther’s critical engagement with Ulrich Zwingli over the meaning of sacramental signs. Whereas the Symbolists posit a transcendent and mystical referent for the poetic sign, Akhmatova asserts that the referent is tied inescapably to the sign itself. Instead of being transparent to the mystical referent, the sign for Akhmatova holds the referent within itself. Thus sign and signifier are given together and the signified lies not “beyond” the word but “in, with, and under” the word. For Luther and Akhmatova alike, the signified—poetic or religious—is ineluctably tied to the very ordinariness of the sign itself. Neither poetry nor theology is an esoteric enterprise; both are efforts to discern the incarnate within the ordinary discourse of everyday speech. It is precisely this attention to the presence of the divine within all that is ordinary and mundane that gave Akhmatova the ability to so identify with the women who suffered under the Stalin terror and to give witness to their situation of unspeakable suffering. As Joseph Brodsky said of her, she “could identify with people more thoroughly than those who were pushing at the time their literary or other programs” because “she simply recognized grief.”6 All the writers under consideration here are masters of realist literary art. When George Orwell describes so vividly yet simply the plight of a young poor woman in a mining town—“she knew well enough what was happening to her, understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain pipe”7—



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he provides a deeper connection to the condition of the poor than any mere invocation of the “proletariat” could hope to conjure. When Langston Hughes shows us the cruelty and folly of white culture by depicting the beauty and dignity of African Americans like Cora, Luther, Oceola Jones, and Sargeant, he uses realist narrative to turn the spotlight on the interaction between his black protagonists and “the ways of white folks.” And when Albert Camus takes the reader along with Rieux and Tarrou outside the walls of Oran for a night swim in the Mediterranean he shows us what cannot easily be said, “a happiness that forgot nothing, not even murder.”8 By powerfully depicting the ways in which ordinary people exemplify extraordinary virtues, these authors engage in the practice of the realism of the humble sublime. Hughes, Orwell, and Camus remain to the end humanists with deep ethical commitments. None would claim to be a Christian, but within their deeply authentic humanist conviction lies a commitment to depict the moral life primarily through the plights of everyday persons facing situations of extraordinary challenge in which their basic humanity is displayed to a reading public. Realist art seeks to depict its characters, settings, and actions with sufficient vividness that they are rendered as uniquely real and available to the reader’s imagination. Such texts evoke from the reader an identification with the characters’ basic humanity and thus seek to reshape the reader’s deepest convictions in a situation of moral address. Moral and political persuasion takes place within the context of this rich, nuanced, and ambiguous but still recognizable narrative world. The reader is invited to dwell within the real-butimagined world of the text in the hope that the reader’s own beliefs and behavior might be transformed through this encounter with “the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves” (George Eliot).9 In this situation of address, realist literature renders the empathetic reader vulnerable to the claims and challenges of those characters as they both engage and disrupt the reader’s subjectivity. In so doing, such realist texts seek to call the reader to an ethic of responsibility in and for the neighbor, an ethic in which the reader herself is put at risk by the claim of neighbor in both text and world. Such an ethic engages oppressive conditions with witness, critique, resistance, rebellion, and transformative action—ethical behavior depicted with great power by Akhmatova, Orwell, Hughes, and Camus. Realism of the sort exemplified by these four authors is a deeply democratic practice. By focusing attention on ordinary people coping

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with recognizable but exceptional challenges, these authors evoke a situation of mutual vulnerability between characters and readers. At the same time, the rhetoric of realism is often comic, irreverent, and skeptical, thus resisting the melodramatic seriousness of works that sentimentalize suffering. Still, these artists insist that the individual lives of ordinary people are the locus of genuine historic forces and that social change takes place only through our empathetic understanding of the situation of everyday people. Such artistry is resolutely anti-totalitarian because it luxuriates in particularity, ambiguity, contradiction, and uncertainty. At the same time these authors are convinced that the wisdom of uncertainty yields not inaction but action tempered by humility; not apathy, but conviction graced by compassion. The ethics and politics that emerge from the aesthetic of sacramental realism are pragmatic and temperate, but still resolute and bold. For these realist authors, ethics and politics are guided by convictions that emerge from their hard-earned embrace of their own moral and spiritual centers. And in offering to their readers their realist literary art, shaped by the centuries-long writing practice of the humble sublime, they invite us to join them in a process of discernment, risk, critique, and action.

1

SACRAMENTAL REALISM THE HUMBLE SUBLIME

The country church is small and dark, despite its whitewashed walls. A sickly light filters through the grimy little panes of its narrow windows. Small, dark, mysterious, a bit like a cave. An ambiguous perfume – its familiar side: damp; its strange side: incense – hits the nostrils. The mystical, far-away splendour of the incense penetrates the ordinary smell of must and mould. Already I am inhaling the perfume of the Orient. I want to inhale it despite myself, to identify it. Unalloyed it would be overpowering, but here its mystical appeal is tainted with something mundane.1

Henri Lefebvre, the Marxist philosopher and social theorist, wrote this remarkable paragraph in an essay that is part of his trilogy Critique of Everyday Life.2 Although he is sharply critical of religion’s role in controlling and manipulating the everyday life of human beings, still in this passage he evokes a powerful sense of a sublime that is present “in, with, and under” the mundane. Note in particular the way he links the experience of the mystical and mysterious to the ordinary and everyday. Without the mundane the perfume of the Orient would overwhelm; but since the mystical is here “tainted” with the quotidian it becomes both bearable and alluring. Indeed, it is the very hiddenness of the sublime that constitutes its mysterious power. Without the mundane the sublime would overwhelm; without the sublime the mundane would lose its mystery. The power of Lefebvre’s writing depends in part on the realist prose with which he begins this paragraph. The first two sentences bring the reader immediately inside this country church. A series of phrases—“small and dark […] whitewashed walls […] grimy little panes […] narrow windows”—casts a vivid image into the reader’s imagination, one that is reiterated by the writer’s own report: “small, dark, mysterious, a bit like a cave.” The dark cave-like interior casts up the scents of dankness and decay so the reader is surprised by the sudden appearance of “an ambiguous perfume.” The perfume’s

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The Humble Sublime

ambiguity is constituted by the odd conjunction of incense and damp, splendor and mold, strange and familiar. It is precisely that olfactory complexity that hints of the “mystical and far-away […] perfume of the Orient.” The mundane is the carrier of the sublime’s scent, the bearer of its trace. In employing realist prose in this fashion, Lefebvre is engaging in a writing practice that has a long history within Western literary culture. Erich Auerbach has traced the development of “representations of reality” in Western literature from the Bible and Homer to Gustave Flaubert and Virginia Woolf,3 showing in particular the influence of Christianity on modes of reading and writing in the West. In his essay Sermo Humilis4 Auerbach shows how Augustine adapted classical rhetorical forms in service to the proclamation of the Christian gospel. Augustine was fully aware of Cicero’s threefold classification of academic rhetoric: the sublime, the intermediate, and the lowly. While for Cicero the three forms are hierarchically ordered, Augustine rejects the hierarchy in all matters spiritual. From the Christian point of view all questions concerning human welfare—even those considered base or lowly—are of equal concern to a preacher addressing the needs of a congregation. [Even] the most paltry affairs […] remain sublime. A cup of cold water is assuredly a small and worthless thing; but does this mean that the Lord said something small and worthless when he promised that whosoever should give a cup of cold water to the least of his servants would in no wise lose his reward (cf. Matt. 10:41)? And should a preacher who refers to this incident in church suppose that because it is trivial he should employ not the intermediate nor the lofty, but the lowly form of discourse? Has it not transpired that while we were speaking of this to the people (and not ineptly because God was with us), there burst from that cold water something akin to a flame, which, through hopes of heavenly reward, fixed the cold hearts of men to works of mercy?5

For Augustine, lowly things may be spoken of in lofty style and sublime matters may be addressed through the simplicity of low style. [I]n the Christian context humble everyday things, money matters or a cup of cold water, lose their baseness and become compatible with lofty style; and conversely […] the highest mysteries of the faith may be set forth in simple words of the lowly style which everyone can understand.



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This was a radical departure from the rhetorical, indeed from the entire [classical] literary tradition […] The themes of Christian literature [Augustine] held, are all sublime; whatever lowly thing it may touch upon is elevated by its contact with Christianity.6

Auerbach argues that the Christian embrace of the low style, sermo humilis, transformed the meaning of that classical category. While in classical rhetoric humilis signified the base, worthless, trivial, even degraded, in Christian usage sermo humilis becomes the most important rhetorical form because it corresponds to the humble nature of Jesus’ own life, ministry, suffering, and death. [H]umilis became the most important adjective characterizing the Incarnation; in all Christian literature written in Latin it came to express the atmosphere and level of Christ’s suffering and death […] It was precisely its wide range of meaning – humble, socially inferior, unlearned, esthetically crude and even repellent – that gave it the dominant position which makes it so valuable as an indicator of trends.7

According to the biblical witness, Christ’s incarnation is an act of humilis, humility, for “he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). But that very act of humbling is itself sublime, for “God also highly exalted him, and gave him the name that is above every name” (Philippians 2:9). The act of humiliation is at one and the same time also an act of exaltation; the humble becomes sublime and the sublime humble. Thus Christ’s incarnation becomes the model for subsequent Christian discourse; the sermo humilis now becomes the humble sublime. The Incarnation as such was a voluntary humiliation illustrated by a life on earth in the lowest social class, among the materially and culturally poor, and by the whole character of Christ’s acts and teachings. It was crowned by the cruelty and humiliation of the Passion […] The humility of the Incarnation derives its full force from the contrast with Christ’s divine nature; man and God, lowly and sublime, humilis et sublimis, both the height and the depth are immeasurable and inconceivable.8

This Christian rhetorical style becomes normative as well for Christian piety, for Christians in their social, cultural, and ethical lives are now expected to enact the humilitas found in the life of



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magic, mystery, and mayhem. Spirits and demons lurked at every turn and lay people used charms, potions, and incantations to keep the spirits at bay. In addition, they engaged in festive celebrations and magical rituals (think Mardi Gras or Carnival) that put people in touch with the uncanny, the extraordinary, and the chaotic. These ludic celebrations allowed the venting of energies that might otherwise undermine public order, but they were also characterized by drunkenness, sexual license, and occasional violence. Movements of reform within Latin Christianity beginning in the fourteenth century sought to bring such behavior under control by applying ethical standards previously limited to monks and religious to ordinary folk or lay Christians. These reforms favored ascetic forms of spiritual life and strongly discouraged the festive, playful, and anarchic aspects of medieval piety.41 There is much in Taylor’s analysis that is rich and accurate, and he surely captures well some of the shifts that take place between the medieval and modern periods, especially the rise of the disciplinary social and political forces that ultimately shape the modern world. He does, however, overstate the ways in which reform movements become ascetic and iconoclastic in their aesthetic. When Taylor characterizes the reform aesthetic as non-sacramental and excarnational (rather than incarnational) he seriously misreads one important stream of reform spirituality; what I have called its sacramental realism.42 Indeed, I argue that the maintenance of a sacramental sensibility is fundamentally important to the notions of realism that began to emerge in literature, art, and theology during the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period. It is a profound mistake to characterize the movements of reform that emerge in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as non-sacramental and excarnational. To acknowledge the rich sacramentality of this era is to challenge the very notion of secularity with which Taylor operates. Medieval Reform and Lay Spirituality Auerbach and Taylor are surely correct in suggesting that a fundamental shift in Western culture begins with the aesthetic, political, and spiritual changes that take place in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but to call these changes “secularizing” is inaccurate and

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misleading. Auerbach’s assertion that aspects of ancient figural realism remain in the best of modern realist literature is a hint that the story of modernity’s rise is considerably more complex than secularization theorists have generally recognized. The tenth and eleventh centuries were a period of crisis within the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. Clashes between clergy and princes, and between the papacy and the emperor, occurred on matters of the investiture of bishops, of the buying and selling of church offices (simony), and of clerical concubinage and sexual misconduct. The triumph of the Gregorian reforms (Pope Gregory VII, 1073–85) resulted in a more centralized papacy, a sharper division between clerical and lay authority, and a sustained assault on the very structure of feudal society and the family relationships upon which it was built.43 As lay prerogatives dissipated, clerical power—and especially the authority of the papacy—grew in equal measure. The elimination of lay investiture, the establishment and policing of clerical celibacy, and the creation of the College of Cardinals secured papal control over all the key offices of the church and institutionalized the Gregorian reforms. Despite these important advances in church authority the following centuries remained a time of turmoil and ferment in both church and empire.44 The twelfth century saw the rapid growth of towns and cities across the empire. As urban populations grew, a new working class of artisans, lawyers, and merchants emerged, one that created more fluid social organizations which would soon replace the kinship groups that undergirded the feudal system.45 Precisely as lay ecclesial power waned, lay spiritual movements gained increased vigor. Gregory had invoked the model of the “primitive church” as the basis for his reforms, and had further encouraged celibate clergy to live together in community and to follow the lifestyle example of the early apostles. The idea that the Christian life involved a renunciation of worldly goods and secular power became the basis for a new movement: the vita apostolica.46 This movement urged a life based on the suffering, spirituality, and penance of the early apostles, one of voluntary poverty and service to the neighbor. It found especially eager adherents among town-dwelling laity and non-cloistered clergy and fostered new forms of radical lay piety of worldly renunciation and evangelical fervor. The renewed spiritual life of urban lay Christians presented unprecedented challenges to the church’s pastoral care.47 Initially a



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group of unofficial itinerant preachers arose to meet the needs of urban lay spirituality, preachers who stressed a new consciousness of what it meant to be a Christian, of what were Christian beliefs and the Christian way of life. Ordinary individuals were again to be important and would help to spread the word of God, as in apostolic times […] [A] way was being pointed towards the acceptance of the possibility of the laity also being able to lead a spiritual life of secular action. The vita apostolica was to be open to all.48

Ultimately, however, a more organized approach to the needs of the laity emerged, and in the thirteenth century the mendicant orders—the Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, Carmelites, and Servites—were established and officially recognized by the church at the Second Council of Lyon (1274).49 During the same period, groups of women founded communities, Beguinages, that required adherents to renounce personal wealth and to cultivate a humble and frugal lifestyle. Some of these communities of Beguines supported themselves by begging but many received gifts and endowments from wealthy patrons. Ultimately, the Beguinages allied themselves with the Dominicans, who, though they had rejected cloistered living for their male members, demanded seclusion and enclosure of their female orders.50 Hugh Lawrence has helpfully summarized the message and impact of the mendicant friars. The impact of the friars upon the history of Western Christianity must be measured against the problems of the thirteenth-century church […] They were a revolutionary answer to a potentially revolutionary situation. For the spiritual and intellectual turbulence of the twelfth century, which had accompanied the growth of towns […] had also awakened the religious aspirations of a more articulate laity, which the traditional monastic theology and the existing apparatus of the Church seemed unable to satisfy. It was the achievement of the friars, through their teaching and example, to satisfy this quest for personal sanctification and direct it into orthodox channels […] At the heart of the message the friars brought was a belief that the Christian life was not a monopoly of a professional elite, but was accessible to all; that the interior life of the spirit, even the contemplative life, could be pursued in the

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The Humble Sublime secular world through the sanctification of common tasks and the faithful performance of ordinary duties.51

Compare Lawrence’s account with the following comments by Taylor: Then the action of the mendicant preachers, which had more than one kind of impact on the hierarchical church, not all by any means stabilizing. But one effect was certainly to open up new and very effective channels of communication with the base, through the preaching of itinerant friars, often better educated than the parish clergy (and often in a condition of rivalry with these poor secular priests). Through them the message of the new, more exigent practice was very effectively spread throughout the length and breadth of Latin Christendom. If we see this attempt by an elite to make over the base as a kind of distant preparation for a world in which something like the Bolshevik party can emerge, then we can see the friars as a form of late-medieval agit-prop.52

Why Taylor, who is usually eminently fair even to positions with which he disagrees, should caricature and trivialize the mission and spirituality of the friars in this fashion is difficult to fathom. On its face the movement engendered by lay piety and organized through the mendicant friars seems unlikely as a source of disenchantment and desacralization, and yet Taylor points precisely to the growth of lay spirituality as a major shift on the road to secular modernity. “Though it couldn’t be clear at the time, we with hindsight can recognize this as a major turning point in the history of Western civilization, an important step towards that primacy of the individual which defines our culture.”53 Oddly, Taylor connects the growth in lay piety to the Thomistic “synthesis” between nature and grace. To be sure Thomas was a Dominican friar, and the influence of his Aristotelian-shaped theology on the medieval universities and on all subsequent Catholic theology is unquestioned. But Taylor writes, Take the new Aristotelian–Christian synthesis which takes its most influential form in Thomas. This brought about what one could call an autonomization of nature […] Autonomization of nature was the first timid step towards the negation of all super-nature. Of course, people at the time wouldn’t have put it in these terms; they had to have some acceptable reason relating to God. But what was really pulling them was a growing interest in nature-for-itself.54



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Somehow Taylor sees the extension of the vita apostolica to the educated lay masses as a source of the primacy of the modern individual; and, moreover, he sees Thomistic theology, especially his natural theology, as a source of the modern conception of autonomous nature. Taylor also implicates the rise of realist art in the emergence of a modern view of nature as autonomous. “So the autonomy of nature had genuine and powerful spiritual sources. But so did the new ‘realism’ in painting and sculpture.”55 While he doesn’t develop this point in great detail, it is clear that Taylor understands the late medieval and Renaissance fascination with perspective, the details of the human form, and the portrayal of ordinary scenes as contributing to the disembedding of nature from its divine, spiritual source. That the portrayal of the Virgin and Child shows real observation of contemporary models, that there is variety and individual portraiture in religious painting, that what is represented is no longer just some universal, normative feature of the person or being concerned, as in the awesome Christ Pantocrator on the cupola of Byzantine churches, but the traits of live individuals begin to appear; all this is frequently taken as the emergence of an extra-religious motive, alongside the religious purpose […] This interest in the variety and detailed features of real contemporary people did not arise alongside and extrinsic to the religious point of the painting; it was intrinsic to the new spiritual stance to the world.56

Compare this account of the rise of naturalism as ingredient to the new lay piety to the account given by Richard Viladesau in his The Beauty of the Cross. Giotto’s art, like much art already in the thirteenth century, attempted to induce a sense of pathos. What Giotto added was the naturalism of his representation. Still, his crucifixes, however naturalistic, retain a sense of quiet dignity […] The new naturalism in painting added a further dimension to the practice of meditation on Christ’s suffering […] This was already an important element in early Franciscan spirituality […] [Believers] should imaginatively act out their presence at the events of the passion: they should sit beside Jesus, comfort him, take his place in carrying the cross and so on […] Visual realism would obviously be an aid in the practice of the imaginative meditation encouraged particularly by the Franciscans and Dominicans.57

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While these forms of spirituality could lead to more gruesome depictions of the crucifixion and unhealthy forms of spiritual imitation, they also generated the spiritual world of the pieta and the stabat mater.58 Whatever one’s theological judgment about these spiritual and artistic practices, it is difficult to see them as forerunners of modern notions of autonomy. If anything, the relation between the viewer and the art, and thus between the believer and Christ, is deepened and intensified through this spiritual practice. This form of realism, far from encouraging notions of autonomy—of nature, human bodies, or viewing subjects—fostered forms of relational spiritual imagination. The great art historian G. Gombrich characterizes this relation as the “imaginative identification” between the viewer and the subject of the painting. Realist art creates the demand for what I have called the dramatic evocation, the return to the desire not to be told only what happened according to the Scriptures, but also how it happened, what the events must have looked like to an eyewitness. I agree with those who connect this decisive change with the new role of the popular preacher in the thirteenth century. It was the friars who took the Gospel story to the people and spared no effort to make the faithful relive and re-enact it in their minds.59

To be fair to Taylor, he understands that these developments remain deeply embedded in Christian practice and theology, but he remains convinced that the influence of the mendicant friars unleashes notions of the human and of nature that anticipate modern notions of autonomy. But his account of the disembedding of these notions from their spiritual home remains, in my judgment, unpersuasive. Taylor seems so eager to generalize about the rise of the modern world that he neglects the spiritual diversity that arises in the late Middle Ages and endures into the modern era. Taylor’s most balanced account of the medieval developments is found at the end of his second chapter “The Rise of the Disciplinary Society.” There, Taylor writes about the influence of the mendicant friars upon the realist art of Giotto and his successors and the impact of their encouragement of lay spirituality upon later groups like the Brethren of the Common Life,



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which aim precisely to integrate the life of prayer more closely into everyday life. The Reformation itself is strongly marked by this goal, which emerges in what I have called the affirmation of ordinary life. A Christian worships God in his everyday existence, in work and family life. None of this is to be considered profane. Now I believe there is a connection between this aspiration, and some of the profound shifts in representation, which one can see in Western painting in these centuries […] In the centuries which follow Renaissance Italian and later Netherlands painting moves out of the orbit of the icon […] and portrays [Christ, Mary, and the saints] […] as very much present in our time, as people whom we might meet in our own world […] It bespeaks a rather strong Incarnational spirituality, an attempt to see/imagine Jesus and Mary as having really been among us, hallowing the ordinary contexts of life, in which we also live.60

Still, Taylor thinks that these new forms of spirituality and representation make themselves vulnerable to secularization because they no longer depict the independence of the divine life from our own ordinary experience. For Taylor, the sacred and divine must be truly transcendent, genuinely other, in order to remain genuinely divine. While he admires such incarnational instincts, he also thinks that an incarnational world can too easily become a world without God, an immanent frame characterized by autonomous nature and buffered selves. In this painting, transcendence and immanence are together. But it is in the nature of things that as the interest in immanence grows, frequently for its own sake, a tension should arise […] The world as so represented comes more and more to be the world as lived, in which spirits, forces and higher times are less and less directly encountered.61

Like Auerbach, Taylor recognizes that these shifts in piety and theology relate to the deeply incarnational character of Christian life and theology. But unlike Auerbach, Taylor finds little of the mysterious, uncanny, or mystical in these new forms of devotion and theological reflection, especially as they persist into the modern era. He seems to think that these new approaches have little or no defense against subsequent efforts to turn “graced nature” into “mere nature” or lay devotion to the cross into human autonomy. Both Auerbach and Taylor identify spiritual and artistic movements of the

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thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as crucial to the development of approaches both term “secular,” but while Auerbach continues to see the best of modern literature as still “fraught with background” and filled with invitations to see a deeper and more mysterious reality, Taylor sees a modern world in which even religious devotion has become disembedded from the spiritual world of which it had previously been a part. The Reformation as Reform is central to the story I want to tell – that of the abolition of the enchanted cosmos, and the eventual creation of a humanist alternative to faith […] All branches of Reform push toward disenchantment, Protestants in a more radical fashion. This enormously facilitates the collapse of the two spheres into each other, because a great deal of what marked off the “spiritual sphere” was that its members dealt with the sacred, present in concentrated form in certain times, places, persons and actions, in feasts and churches, clergy and sacraments […] [These movements of reform held up] an ideal of living nonsacramentally.62

This passage makes clear that transcendence for Taylor requires a separate spiritual sphere, one clearly demarcated from the worldly context within which most Christians—both lay and clerical— live their lives. Taylor’s idea of incarnation requires a paradoxical juxtaposition between sacred and mundane, between spiritual and worldly, between transcendence and immanence. This analysis resists a strong notion of the divine as the mystery of the mundane, the hidden truth of the everyday, or the depth dimension of the ordinary. But it is precisely this conception of divinity as hidden “in, with, and under” the ordinary that defines the very meaning of sacraments for these movements of reform. Luther’s Reform and Sacramental Realism Taylor’s reading of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century movements of reform is important because he is most concerned to show how the Protestant reformers, especially Luther and Calvin, undermine the entire sacramental system of medieval Catholicism and prepare the way for the “buffered self ” and the “immanent frame.”63 The charges of being “non-sacramental” and “excarnational” apply primarily to



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these sixteenth-century figures and only indirectly to their earlier forebears. But, as I hope to show in this section, a close look at the theology of Martin Luther gives little or no credence to Taylor’s antisacramental accusations. Luther was, of course, an Augustinian friar; so there is little doubt that the theology and spirituality of the friars played a crucial role in his own theological development.64 Luther’s devotion to the Scriptures and his pastoral conviction that the Bible should be used to cultivate a Christ-centered spirituality in believers can be traced to the practices he encountered as a member of the Augustinian community. His criticisms of the abuses of the late medieval church resonate deeply with the reforms urged by the mendicant preachers in the fourteenth century. And his sacramental theology and spirituality clearly stand in the line of Franciscan conceptions of Christian devotion to the humanity of Christ. “Anywhere you confront me with God,” Luther wrote, “there you must confront me with his humanity.”65 Here you must take your stand and say, Where Christ is according to his divinity, there he is a natural divine person and is present in a natural and personal way, as his conception in his mother’s womb shows […] And when you can say, Here is God, then you must also say, Christ, the man, is also here. If, however, you were to show me a place where the divine nature is, and the human nature is not, the person would be divided, because then I could say in truth, Here is God who is not man and never has become man. That is not my God.66

For Luther there is no presence of God that is not also the presence of the human Jesus. The miracle of the incarnation demands that we reject the division between natural and supernatural in all matters Christological. Thus Christ’s bodily presence in the Eucharist is neither a supernatural event nor a natural symbolic remembrance, but the “real presence” of the still-incarnate though resurrected Christ “in, with, and under” the ordinary elements of bread and wine. For Luther one need not transcend the natural in order to find the supernatural; rather the divine itself is hidden within the mystery of the incarnate Christ. Christ’s presence is mediated through “sacramental realism.” Luther is an advocate of the humble sublime, the humilis et sublimis. Luther’s view of the Eucharist flows directly from his Christology, and his Christology is one of radical incarnation. Luther understands

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that God’s presence is always mediated through particulars—in the incarnation Jesus’ flesh and blood, in the Eucharist the ordinary elements of bread and wine. In addition, Luther believes that we experience God’s saving presence in the Eucharist always and only by faith in God’s promises. God is present everywhere in the world, Luther argues, but in the sacraments he is present for us (pro nobis). While God is present in a stone or a leaf, that presence is not the gracious saving presence of the one who has promised to be with us and for us in Jesus Christ. What makes God’s presence sacramental and saving is our faith that God’s promises are trustworthy. Jesus’ words in the Gospels, “Do this in remembrance of me,” serve as both command and promise. “Do this as I have commanded and I will always be graciously present for you in Christ’s body and blood, the bread and wine of the communion rite.” Luther’s sacramental understanding of “real presence” draws upon a long tradition of theological conceptions of God’s hiddenness. Like Gregory of Nyssa in The Life of Moses, Luther claims that we can only know God sub contrario, under God’s opposite, for to see God face to face is to be overwhelmed by God’s holiness. God graciously allows us to see “God’s backside” (posteriori dei), the “visible and manifest things of God, seen through suffering and the cross.”67 In the Eucharist, Luther argues, we experience the genuine presence of Christ in the eating of the ordinary elements of bread and wine. Though Christ has ascended to the right hand of the Father he is nonetheless present, really present as he has promised to be, in these simple earthly elements. Luther vigorously rejects any notion that bread and wine are merely “signs” that symbolize or memorialize the risen and ascended Christ. Who in the world ever read in the Scriptures that ‘body’ means ‘sign of the body’ or ‘is’ means ‘represent?’ […] For even if we put on all the glasses in the world, we would find none of the evangelists writing, ‘Take, eat; this is a sign of my body,’ or ‘This represents my body.’ But what we clearly find without the aid of any glasses, so that even young children can read it, is, ‘Take eat; this is my body.’68

Thus, for Luther, Christ’s presence is mediated through simple earthly things like water, words, wine, and bread. The ascended and thus “absent” Christ is present again (re-presented) through promise, word, and earthly elements in the sacraments. The notion of “sacramental



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realism,” that Christ’s mediated presence is “hidden” under the ordinary and everyday, is of fundamental significance to the theology and art that emerge from the movements of reform, including those earlier Catholic reforms of the thirteenth and fourteenth century. Thus Charles Taylor is surely wrong when he characterizes these movements as “disenchanted” and “non-sacramental.” Quite the contrary. While the reformist aesthetic eschews any direct depiction of the divine presence, it is deeply sacramental in the way in which it points to the divine always and only “in, with, and under” dimensions of ordinary experience. Luther’s Christology and his Eucharistic theology function therefore to “sacralize” the everyday. For Luther, Christ’s humanity, and not just his divinity, truly saves humankind from sin and destruction. In formulating this theology in which flesh and blood, bread and wine, words and water truly save, Luther believes he has provided a theology that has the pastoral power to reassure, console, and comfort those who long for salvation. For the only God whom we can truly love and trust is a God clothed in the familiar, ordinary, and everyday. Behold Christ lying in the lap of his young mother. What can be sweeter than the Babe, what more lovely than the mother! Watch him springing in the lap of the maiden. Laugh with him. Look upon this Lord of Peace and your spirit will be at peace. I would not have you contemplate the deity of Christ, the majesty of Christ, but rather his flesh. Look upon Baby Jesus. Divinity may terrify us. Inexpressible majesty will crush us. That is why Christ took on our humanity that he should console and confirm. See how God invites you in many ways. He places before you a baby with whom you may take refuge. You cannot fear him for nothing is more appealing than a baby. Are you frightened? Then come to him, lying in the lap of the fairest and sweetest maid. You will see how great is the divine goodness, which seeks above all else that you should not despair. Trust him! Trust him! Here is the child in whom there is salvation. To me there is no greater consolation given to us than this, that God became human, a child, a baby, playing in the lap of his most gracious mother. Who is there whom this sight would not comfort? Now is overcome the power of sin, death, hell, conscience, and guilt, if you come to this gurgling Baby and believe that he is come, not to judge you but to save.69

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Luther’s incarnational and sacramental theology also yields an ethic of vocation to the neighbor in need. In Luther’s understanding of vocation one sees a continuation of the spirituality of the everyday urged by the mendicant friars. That Christians dedicate their lives in service to the neighbor is the key idea in Luther’s conception of vocation. Because salvation is solely God’s accomplishment—by grace, through faith, for the sake of Christ—our works do not and cannot earn us any merit before the Almighty. Yet works remain a necessary part of the Christian’s life. Works of love are designed not to seek favor with God but rather to serve the neighbor in need. Having been set free by the saving grace of God, all baptized Christians have a responsibility to use their freedom in the service of the neighbor. As works do not make a man a believer, so also they do not make him righteous. But as faith makes a man a believer and righteous, so faith does good works […] Therefore he should be guided in all his works by this thought and contemplate this one thing alone, that he may serve and benefit others in all that he does, considering nothing except the need and the advantage of his neighbor […] Here faith is truly active in love.70

All baptized Christians—popes, bishops, priests, princes, burghers, and farmers—have an equal responsibility lovingly to serve the neighbor in need. But each is called to serve within his or her own specific situation in life. Luther uses various terms to describe those situations—order (Ordnung), office (Amt), station (Stand)—but it is within such situations that we are to discern our call or vocation (Beruf). All persons occupy various stations in life; one might simultaneously be an employee, a spouse, a parent, a citizen, a friend. But no matter what one’s situation, we are all always in relation to the neighbor in need, and in each situation it is our responsibility to serve that neighbor in love. To use a rough example: If you are a craftsman you will find the Bible placed in your workshop, in your hands, in your heart; it teaches and preaches how you ought to treat your neighbor. Only look at your tools, your needle, your thimble, your beer barrel, your articles of trade, your scales, your measures, and you will find this saying written on them. You will not be able to look anywhere where it does not strike your eyes. None of the things with which you deal daily are too trifling to tell you this incessantly, if you are but willing to hear it; and there is no lack of



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such preaching, for you have as many preachers as there are transactions, commodities, tools, and other implements in your house and estate; and they shout this to your face, “My dear, use me toward your neighbor, as you would want him to act toward you with that which is his.”71

Faith gives to the believer new sight, a new way of looking at the world, a fresh way of seeing everyday objects and ordinary persons in the light of Christ. What was once simply a workbench now becomes a means of serving the neighbor in need. What was once simply a dirty diaper now becomes an invitation to perform acts of service to one’s child and spouse. Luther could wax particularly eloquent when reminding husbands of their domestic responsibilities. When our natural reason […] takes a look at married life, she turns up her nose and says, “Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores, and on top of that care for my wife, provide for her, labor at my trade, take care of this and take care of that, do this and do that, endure this and endure that, and whatever else of bitterness and drudgery married life involves? What, should I make such a prisoner of myself ? O you poor, wretched fellow, have you taken a wife? Fie, fie upon such wretchedness and bitterness! It is better to remain free and lead a peaceful, carefree life; I will become a priest or a nun and compel my children to do likewise.” What then does Christian faith say to this? It opens its eyes, looks upon all these insignificant, distasteful and despised duties in the Spirit, and is aware that they are all adorned with divine approval as with the costliest gold and jewels. It says, “O God, because I am certain that thou has created me as a man and hast from my body begotten this child, I also know for a certainty that it meets with thy perfect pleasure. I confess to thee that I am not worthy to rock the little babe or wash its diapers, or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of being certain that I am serving thy creature and thy most precious will? O how gladly will I do so, though the duties should be even more insignificant and despised.”72

Luther recognizes that ethics always operates within the confines of everyday, ordinary life, and that our life situations and our particular contexts can change dramatically. But the constant, Luther argues, is

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the necessity to discern the commandment (Befehl) of God within each situation and thereby to discern our calling or vocation (Beruf). Luther understands that it is often difficult to discern what God would have us do in any particular situation, but it is our inescapable responsibility to do just that. Indeed, Luther argues, God hides from us under “masks” so that his will cannot be known simply by following a set of rules or principles. All our work in the field, in the garden, in the city, in the home, in struggle, in government – to what does it all amount before God except child’s play, by means of which God is pleased to give his gifts in the field, at home, and everywhere? These are the masks of our Lord God, behind which he wants to be hidden and to do all things […] God bestows all that is good on us, but you must stretch out your hands and lay hold of the horns of the bull, i.e. you must work and lend yourself as a means and a mask to God.73

Through his teaching on vocation, Luther undermines an entire set of distinctions that are commonplace in analyses of the rise of secularization: sacred and secular, spiritual and temporal, exceptional and ordinary, powerful and weak, honorable and despised. Luther’s “theology of the cross” teaches the revelatio Dei sub contrario specie, i.e. the revelation of God under the appearance of its opposite. God only makes God’s “backside” (posteriora Dei) available to us, so we must always look beyond the surface in order to discern where the will of God lies.74 In Christ, by faith, the Christian sees the world with new eyes as a place where the hidden God dwells within the everyday, ordinary, and commonplace, and especially within those places where the neighbor in need suffers. The ethical responsibility of all the baptized is to discern the will of God in each situation where one encounters the neighbor, knowing that works of love are done not for one’s own benefit but only for the benefit of the one in need. Divine Absence and Real Presence: Sacramental Signs and Representation When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. They said to each



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other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road?” Luke 24:30-32

In conclusion, it is important to return again to the notion of “sacramental realism.” Disputes within Christianity about the Eucharist are, in large part, disagreements about how to understand the continuing presence of the resurrected and ascended—and thus “absent”—Christ within worshipping Christian communities. If the ascended Christ now dwells “at the right hand of the Father” and is no longer physically present to the community, in what manner does he fulfill his promise to the church to “be with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20)? And what is the particular mode of Christ’s presence within the context of the ritual act and the elements of the Eucharistic rite? The Christian notion of “sacraments” is in part an answer to these questions. St. Augustine articulated an understanding of sacraments that remains authoritative to this very day. “The word comes to the element,” Augustine writes, “and so there is a sacrament, that is, a sort of visible word.”75 Augustine further employs the term “signs” or signa to designate the particular function of these visible words. Visible words, or sacraments, are signs because their meaning resides not simply in the words themselves but also in the “reality” or res to which they point. “The things our Lord did […] are simultaneously works and words, works because they happened, words because they are signs.”76 Visible words are, therefore, also verbal actions in that, as signs, they point to the divine reality, and, as actions, they perform that reality within the worshipping community. Thus in the rite of baptism the element, water, is joined with the words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” to create the ritual act of incorporation of the baptized into the Christian community. Ordinary water takes on a sacramental function by being joined to the triune name of God, thereby pointing beyond itself to God’s saving grace, a grace that it both signals and performs in the rite of baptism. When ordinary words are joined with ordinary water in the baptismal rite, a sacrament is created, a rite that signals the grace by which the baptized is incorporated into the community and at the same time performs, i.e. makes present, the very grace that it signals. Baptism speaks the grace of God visibly, and enacts the grace of God verbally. Thus sacraments are “visible words” that do what they say.77

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Sacraments as signs (signa) point to a reality (res) that lies beyond the signs themselves. Thus sacraments represent the divine reality, the very presence of God in Christ. The word represent has at least two meanings within the logic of sacraments. Sacraments “stand for” the divine reality even as they make that reality “present again.” Thus representation means both the linguistic and visible depiction of God’s gracious reality and the ritual performance, the making present again, of that gracious presence. Baptism, to use our current example, both speaks the Gospel of God’s grace and performs that grace in the act of initiation into the Christian community. Sacraments thus represent the divine reality even as they re-present that reality in the ritual act. These complicated issues become even more complex when we turn to the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharistic rite of eating and drinking. Remember the story of Christ’s appearance to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, quoted at the beginning of this section. “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight” (Luke 24:3031). The sacrament of the Eucharist presupposes the absence of the very Christ that the rite seeks to represent in its visible words. The resurrected and ascended Christ now dwells at the “right hand of the Father”; so how does the Eucharist represent the ascended Christ? It is here that the metaphysical dualism that Taylor seems to presuppose is called into question by much of the Christian tradition. While early forms of Platonism and neo-Platonism might have fostered such a dualism within Christianity, Christology, and Eucharistic theology, especially from the thirteenth century on, have by and large eschewed dualistic understandings of the relation between the spiritual and the material. Within this tradition, sacramental meanings and facts are conceived as one. The res is not spiritual and the sign material; rather both are incarnate, so that the spiritual and material are given together. In the Eucharist, Christ’s body and blood—in, with, and under the bread and wine78—are at once signa and res, signs and reality. Thus the visible words of the Eucharistic rite do not point beyond themselves to an invisible spiritual reality; rather, they quite literally re-present God’s incarnate reality in Christ by making present again—here and now—the very reality of which they speak.79 In the Eucharistic rite, the resurrected and ascended Christ is once again present, re-presented in visible



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words, thereby fulfilling his promise to be “with you always, even to the end of the age.” For Luther and others in this tradition, God’s incarnational presence in the sacraments is not “invisible” but “hidden.” Just as Christ’s divinity is present though hidden in his humanity, so also the divine reality in the sacraments is present but hidden under the elements of water, bread, and wine. These ordinary elements are, indeed, “set apart” from their natural settings in order to be included in the sacramental rite. But this “setting apart” does not make them sacred, spiritual, or miraculous elements. They remain what they were created to be—water for washing, bread for eating, wine for drinking. And the washing, eating, and drinking of the sacramental rites are continuous with those ordinary acts of our everyday lives. But now when these elements are combined with the words of gospel by which Christ promises to be with and for his people, these visible words become the means of grace by which Christ’s saving presence is mediated to the gathered community. The water now washes away sin and drowns the old self; the bread is now the bread of life and the wine the cup of salvation—not because they have been changed in substance but because God has promised to use such ordinary things for our benefit and salvation. Because God’s gracious presence is hidden within the ordinary and everyday,80 sacramental realism must acknowledge and embrace a “crisis of representation.” God’s hiddenness in creation means that we cannot “read” divine intentions off of natural events or historical occurrences. If we seek to know and understand God by seeking God’s identity under the masks of creation, then we will only encounter an inscrutable deus absconditus. If God does indeed act “under God’s opposite,” then it will be difficult if not impossible to discern the divine will within the chaotic march of history. Sacramental realism does not easily lend itself to theodicies in the face of evil. At the same time, sacramental realism does not turn its face from suffering, recognizing as it does that, as Luther said, the only theologian deserving of the name is the one “who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross […] He who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering.”81 If God can bring life out of death, if God can turn an instrument of political execution into a means of salvation, if God can turn disciples’ sorrow into joy by becoming known “in the breaking of the bread,” then the believer can look into the face of evil

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and still see the redeeming grace of a merciful God. Through faith, believers’ eyes are opened to see what is hidden in the ordinary events of everyday life, even when that life is shot through with suffering, death, and destruction. The ability not to look aside from suffering but to see within it a hidden grace, a secret mercy, or an arcane truth—this is the wisdom of sacramental realism. And so we return again to the Gospel of Luke which tells the story of the resurrected Christ joining two disciples as they walked the road from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus. The text tells us that Jesus’ two followers engaged him in animated conversation about the events of the previous three days but “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” Jesus feigns ignorance about this “prophet mighty in word and deed before God,” leading the disciples to ask: “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place in these days?” As they relate the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection, the stranger interrupts them with rebuking words: “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” And even though Jesus proceeds to interpret “the things about himself in all the scripture,” the two men still fail to recognize him. When the stranger is about to continue his journey beyond Emmaus, the disciples implore him to stay with them since evening is drawing near. Jesus does stay with them and joins them for supper. Then, according to the text, “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight.” This text has fascinated theologians, biblical scholars, and everyday Christians for millennia. Why did the disciples fail to recognize Jesus, even when he expounded the Scriptures to them? Why did Jesus act as if he knew nothing about the events of his own life, death, and resurrection? Why does the text juxtapose the shared meal with the words he spoke at his last supper with the disciples? And, most puzzling at all, why does he disappear from their sight the moment they recognize him? I will have more to say about this text later, but for now I want to focus on the way this story inspired two of the greatest works of art of the early seventeenth century. The great realist painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio produced two depictions of the Supper at Emmaus described in the Gospel of Luke. The first, completed in 1601, is a masterpiece of realist depiction (see Figure 1.1 in Plate Section).82



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The light illumines the painting over the viewer’s left shoulder and shows the resurrected Jesus as a young beardless man blessing the food arrayed upon the table. The small loaf of bread, the roasted chicken, and the plate of fruit precariously poised at the table’s edge are, one critic has commented, “startlingly real.”83 Jesus is presented in period-appropriate dress reminiscent of early Christian painting, but the disciples and the innkeeper are clothed in seventeenth-century costume, thereby connecting the world of the viewer with that of the first-century disciples.84 Jesus is bathed in light but unlike the disciples seems to cast no shadow upon the rear wall, an indication, perhaps, of his resurrected state. Caravaggio captures the scene at the moment of recognition, and the disciples’ gestures of surprise virtually leap from the canvas into the space of the viewer.85 Those who know the story well, realize, however, that a moment after this scene, the resurrected Christ will disappear from their sight. The artist’s second painting of the Supper at Emmaus was completed in 1606, just five years after the first version, but at a very different point in Caravaggio’s life. Shortly before he began this painting, the artist had murdered Ranuccio Tomassoni and had fled into exile in Naples. The painting itself presents a much darker and more brooding account of the supper (see Figure 1.2 in Plate Section). The light again comes from the viewer’s left, but the scene itself is more shadow than light, with browns, tans, and grays the predominant colors. Jesus is now bearded and no longer young, his furrowed brow conveying a sense of weariness.86 In place of the young innkeeper of the first painting Caravaggio substitutes an elderly serving couple, their expressions intent but somber.87 The light illumines one side of Jesus’ face; the other is cloaked in darkness, but it also captures his gesture of blessing over the food, which now includes a roasted lamb, suggesting a connection to the earlier Passover meal Jesus had shared with his disciples on the night before his crucifixion.88 The scene again captures the moment of recognition, but the disciples’ movements are much less dramatic, and their faces are both expressive and obscured.89 In this painting the disciples, like Jesus, are dressed in first-century apparel, while the elderly servers wear the costumes of seventeenth-century innkeepers. These two remarkable paintings capture many elements of the sacramental theologies that I have been describing in this chapter. The extraordinary realism of the paintings, and especially in their depictions of the risen Christ as a genuine physical presence, suggests

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the doctrine of “real presence” (Christ is truly and bodily present in the bread and wine) urged by both Roman Catholic and Lutheran interpretations of the Eucharist.90 Caravaggio’s intentional mixture of first- and seventeenth-century dress affirms the connection in time between the original story and the viewers’ own world of experience, the continuing presence of the one crucified, resurrected, and ascended. And the two paintings together suggest the range of emotions characteristic of Eucharistic practice: delight in the presence of the crucified but risen Christ, and yet the melancholic anticipation that the present one would momentarily “disappear from their sight.” Caravaggio’s artistic style marks a high point in the development of realism, a trend that would continue in both Italian and Dutch painting of the seventeenth century and would influence the rise of the realist novel in both France and England.91 G. Gombrich describes the realist element in Leonardo’s Last Supper in words strikingly similar to descriptions of realist literature: Even […] minor detail must be understood as a visual aid, enhancing the immediacy of the beholder’s experience as he is made to witness the momentous occasion of the Institution of the Eucharist. Unhappily, we have no better word for this feeling than the omnibus term ‘illusion,’ […] The word we would need would have to correspond with the term ‘fiction’ in literature. Fiction can be vivid and convincing in evoking an imaginary event.92

Gombrich also describes Giotto as “the narrative genius who knew how to transform the pictograph into a living presence, and the participants into beings with an inner life of inexhaustible intensity.”93 Perhaps no one has captured that “living presence” with greater power than Caravaggio. He looked relentlessly at the world before he committed to paint. He watched the way that blood surged beneath human skin, and painted figures that flushed and paled like real people. He watched the little old ladies that everyone else ignored, with their wrinkles, goiters, and dirty bonnets, and saw how much more quickly they understood the way of the world than the glittering nobles who pushed them aside. He honored them in his paintings just as they were, living sibyls who pass unnoticed. He painted young women with plain, strong features and lubricious boys



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decked out as Cupid, Bacchus or John the Baptist, and he painted Jesus, over and over, at a moment when Christianity itself was racked with doubt.94

By now I hope to have shown that the movements of reform that emerge within Catholic Christianity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and culminate in the sixteenth-century reformations are not, as Charles Taylor and others have claimed, “excarnational” and “secular.” Rather they are deeply Christological, incarnational, and sacramental. If we continue to think in simple binaries like divine/ human, sacred/secular, transcendent/immanent, we will miss the important theological innovations of the leaders of these movements of reform.95 The incarnational logic of Christianity resists a simple separation of divine and human, spirit and flesh, sacred and secular by focusing on the deep interpenetration of those apparent opposites. Charles Taylor’s failure to understand that the “divine” is not necessarily “transcendent” but may lie deeply “hidden” behind and within the ordinary blinds him to the “sacramental” elements within the piety, practices, and productions of the late medieval and early modern movements of reform. By depicting the world of ordinary experience through the eyes of Christian faith, late medieval reforming theologians sought to provide a cruciform lens through which to see and act within the world. For these reformers God’s presence lies hidden “in, with, and under” the ordinary and everyday. God is not “beyond” our everyday lives but rather hidden deeply “within” them. Those who believe that in Christ God has brought life out of death, hope out of sorrow, and love out of cruelty are now called to see the world, the everyday and ordinary, with new eyes, the eyes of faith—and to live lives of hope and love directed to the neighbor in need. To be sure, this view undermines many of the safe distinctions that we have come to rely upon— particularly the distinction between the sacred and the secular; but it seeks to replace those dichotomous categories with integral notions like incarnation and sacrament. In so doing this view seeks to relocate the sacred not beyond but within our everyday experience.96 So we end this chapter with another beautiful work of art. This is a painting by Rembrandt, completed in 1640 (see Figure 1.3 in Plate Section). It holds an important but controversial role among historians of Dutch art, precisely around the question of whether there is a “spiritual” meaning in the painting. The controversy extends

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even to the name of the painting which is designated as either The Holy Family or The Household of the Carpenter.97 Is the depiction sacred? Secular? Sacramental? This painting powerfully illustrates the issues that Auerbach set before us at the outset of this chapter. The vivid forms of realism that emerge in modernity make it possible for texts and paintings to be read as merely naturalistic with no relation to the spiritual worlds out of which both literary and artistic realism emerged. Yet at the same time, in the best of modern realist art there remains a background, a mystery, a depth that points to something hidden “in, with, and under” the depiction itself. In her important book, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World, Regina Mara Schwartz makes the point that cultural forms persist stubbornly, especially religious ones, and the persistence of the mystery of the Eucharist in early modernity was no exception […] My contention is that instead of God leaving the world without a trace, the very sacramental character of religion lent itself copiously to developing the so-called secular forms of culture and that these are often thinly disguised sacramental cultural expressions.98

In the remainder of this book, I will offer interpretations of four twentieth-century literary artists whose works manifest just such “sacramental traces.” I will use the term “sacramental realism”99 to characterize the aesthetic, ethical, and political impact of their realist art in poetry, novels, essays, and short stories. Sometimes the sacramental traces are just barely visible; at other times the sacramental undertones hover everywhere in and around the poem or story. Like all great realist work, these artistic creations manifest the characteristic signs of realism: plain style, realist descriptions of everyday places, mysterious depths of ordinary objects, the curious inseparability of the mundane and sublime, and use of simplicity to suggest background, depth, and mystery beneath the surface of the everyday. In every case these writers give us glimpses of the “humble sublime” and offer us models for living responsible ethical and political lives. And so to their work we now turn.

2

SACRAMENTAL POETRY AS MEMORY AND WITNESS ANNA AKHMATOVA

Akhmatova, whose verse always gravitated to the vernacular, to the idiom of folk song, could identify with the people more thoroughly than those who were pushing at the time their literary or other programs: she simply recognized grief. Joseph Brodsky Love is essentially an attitude maintained by the infinite toward the finite. The reversal constitutes either faith or poetry. Joseph Brodsky

Russia’s Sacramental Culture The ancient Primacy Chronicle tells the story of Prince Vladimir of Kiev, who sent emissaries throughout the neighboring kingdoms to discover which religion might be most suited for the Russian people.1 The faiths of the Bulgars, Germans, Jews, and Greeks were all rejected as unsuitable to the Russian character. But the reports from the visitors to Hagia Sophia in the great city of Constantinople painted a picture of such beauty that Vladimir found it irresistible. [They] led us to the buildings where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty.2

One year later (988) Vladimir was baptized and declared Orthodoxy the official religion of Kievan Rus. As Christianity spread throughout the Kievan kingdom the Russian people adopted and embraced

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with passion and enthusiasm the art, liturgy, and architecture of the Orthodox tradition. From its beginnings Russian Orthodoxy has been a religion of beauty, worship, and images. Orthodoxy took root in a culture in which the practices of folk religion, “a brooding pagan naturalism,”3 were deeply and broadly held by the peasant population. Instead of opposing these practices as contrary to the Christian faith, Russian Orthodoxy absorbed and consecrated them into Christian practice. Especially important among these ancient views was the belief in the sanctity and power of the earth. The earth which nourishes, the earth, whose inexhaustible energy spends itself and is mysteriously renewed year by year, the earth which sustains man, and in which at the end he comes to rest – how could this not be, for an agrarian folk, “the moist Earth our mother?”4

While some scholars characterize early Russian religion as “dvoverie” or dualistic in belief, it seems more accurate to say that Russian Orthodoxy grew out of the soil of earlier naturalisms which then provided continuing sustenance for the development of Christian practices in Russia. Russian faith found its primary expression in images and only secondarily in language. The Russian language became codified in written form only in the nineteenth century following the extraordinary influence of Alexander Pushkin in creating a standardized literary language. From the tenth to the seventeenth century Russia isolated itself from the rest of Europe; consequently the country experienced neither the Renaissance nor the Protestant Reformation. European influences began to shape the Russian experience only in the seventeenth century through Peter the Great’s forced—and often violent—creation of the city of St. Petersburg, a city designed by Peter to be Russia’s outpost to the West. Consequently many of the factors that contributed to the modernization and secularization of Western Christianity never touched an isolated Russian Orthodox Church centered around the patriarchate of Moscow. Russia simultaneously adopted and transformed the spiritual practices of Byzantine Orthodoxy. While icon painting had been developed for some centuries prior to Russia’s adoption of Orthodoxy in the tenth century, Russian icon painters—and especially the master Andrei Rublev—raised the artistic values of icon painting to a new



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level. His painting of the Savior, completed in the 1420s, established a new ideal for depictions of Christ, Mary, and the saints. The face of Rublev’s Savior was elongated as if to flow with the grain of the wood on which it was painted. The austere and hitherto sacrosanct Byzantine model was softened by abstraction suggestive of the image of the preceding pagan protector of hearth and home: the domovoi […] Rublev’s Christ is recognizably human.5

Indeed, James Billington suggests that Russian painters are responsible for “humanizing” icon painting and bringing the images of Mary and the infant Jesus to prominence, thus emphasizing Mary’s motherhood more than her virginity.6 The icon is, of course, a form of painting quite different from the representational art that one associates with Western painting beginning in the fourteenth century.7 Icon painters employ “inverse” or “inverted” perspective which, in contrast to Western perspectival painting, locates the lines of convergence not in a vanishing point behind the painting but in a focal point behind the viewer and in front of the painting. The effect of this inversion is to extend the view of the image into the field of the viewer, rather than vice versa. Thus the image extends into the viewer’s space and so encompasses and even embraces the viewer, thereby relativizing “my own” point of view. In addition, the eyes of the icon are always symbolically enlarged so that the person depicted gazes directly into the eyes of the viewer and draws the viewer into the space of the painting itself. Orthodox believers always pray with their eyes open, precisely in recognition of the icon’s own gaze. The subjects of icon paintings are not understood to be “representations” of the person depicted; rather, they are understood as the visible presence of the invisible subject now living in glory, as shown in the holiest icon of Russian Orthodoxy: the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God (see Figure 2.1 in Plate Section).8 Indeed, it is the role of the icon as the mediator of the visible and the invisible, the hidden and revealed, that constitutes the icon’s greatest spiritual and theological significance. The inescapable materiality of the icon—its wooden surface and its brilliant-colored paints—serves not as a barrier between the material and the spiritual, but as a window between the two.

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The Humble Sublime I gaze into this icon and I say in myself: this is She Herself, not Her image, but She Herself who, with your help, iconpainter, I am contemplating. As through a window, I see the Mother of God, the Mother of God herself ! And it is She Herself that I am now praying to face to face and not to an image. A window is only a window, and the board of an icon is merely wood, paint, and finish. But through the window I behold the Mother of God, a vision of the Most Pure.9

The icon thus serves as “a witness, or better still, a consequence of the unity of the divine and human, of heaven and earth, that has been accomplished in Jesus Christ. All icons are in essence icons of the incarnation.”10 Orthodoxy thus rejects the very binaries that Western theology has struggled to unite: natural vs. supernatural, profane vs. sacred, earthly vs. heavenly. Orthodox theology begins with the mystery of the incarnation and thinks through the entirety of the Christian faith from that incarnational and sacramental perspective. Perhaps most importantly for our purposes, Orthodoxy rejects the separation in language between signa and res, between figura and veritas.11 In the early tradition […] the relationship between the sign in the symbol […] and that which it signifies […] is neither a merely semantic one […] nor causal […] nor representative […] We call this relationship an epiphany, “A is B” means that the whole of A expresses, communicates, reveals, manifests the “reality” of B […] without, however, losing its own ontological reality, without being dissolved into another “res.”12

In the orthodox tradition, sacramentality encompasses creation,13 the incarnation, the icon, the liturgy, and the Eucharist. Language itself becomes sacramental, precisely in the ways specified by Auerbach’s figural realism, because “language functions iconologically when it aims at both the disclosure and the concealment of the truth signified.”14 Given the deep sacramentality of Russian culture it should come as no surprise that Russian literature is saturated with sacramental elements.15 Indeed, some of the fundamental disputes in early twentieth-century Russian poetry about the nature of poetic language can best be understood as conflicts over the function of poetic signs in relation to the reality they signify, the relation of signa to res. The poetry of Anna Akhmatova, as I will show in the remainder of this



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chapter, is itself “iconic.” Akhmatova’s poetry combines elements of the material and spiritual, the mundane and sublime, and like the icon it both reveals and conceals the subject matter it depicts. Standing at the boundary between the visible and invisible, her poetry serves as a “witness” without parallel in the history of twentieth-century Russian literature. Sacramental Words and Everyday Life Anna Akhmatova, one of the greatest poets of twentieth-century Russia, was born in 1889 in a small town on the Black Sea near Odessa and died on March 5, 1966 in a nursing home near Moscow.16 The date of her death was, ironically, the anniversary of the death of Stalin, a day she customarily celebrated as a personal holiday. Her life spanned years of tumult in Russia as she witnessed the demise of the Tsarist regimes, the rise of Communist Party rule, the terror of the Stalinist purges, the two world wars, and the onset of the Cold War between the nuclear superpowers. Recognized through her early poetry as a premier young literary artist, she nonetheless endured cycles of vilification and banishment as Communist Party leaders first condemned her poetry and then forbade her to publish for many years. Despite these harsh measures, she managed to write and share her poetry throughout her life and served as the voice and conscience of the nation during the horrors of the purges and the wars. In her early years Akhmatova was a founding member of the Acmeists, a group of poets who opposed the mystical otherworldliness of the Symbolists, the dominant poetic force in early twentieth-century Russia. Along with fellow Acmeists, including her husband Nikolai Gumilev and their friend Osip Mandelstam, Akhmatova focused her poetry on matters of the everyday, finding truth, beauty, and even the divine presence in aspects of the mundane and ordinary.17 The Acmeists were sharply critical of Symbolists like Aleksandr Blok, Andrey Bely, Valery Bryusov, and Vyacheslav Ivanov,18 accusing them of sacrificing the everyday language of the Russian people in exchange for theurgic, metaphysical, and philosophical discourse. Among the Symbolists, wrote Mandelstam, Perception is demoralized. There is nothing real or genuine. A horrifying contradanse of ‘correspondences’, all nodding, endlessly winking at one

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The Humble Sublime another. Not a single plain word, only hints, half-finished suggestions. A rose nods at a girl, the girl nods back at the rose. Nobody wants to be himself.19

Symbolism was part of a widespread explosion of creative cultural energy that took place in the decades immediately prior to the Bolshevik revolution. This period, often called the Silver Age,20 witnessed a flourishing of the arts in literature, music, dance, painting, and philosophy. Artists like Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, Marc Chagall, Fyodor Chaliapin, Sergei Prokofiev, and Igor Stravinsky burst upon the St. Petersburg scene21 and soon became international celebrities. In addition to the emergence of Symbolist and Acmeist poets this period saw a renewal of philosophy and theology in figures like Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Soloviev, Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, and Nikolai Fedorov. V. Veidle, a poet and essayist, said of this brief era, [The Silver Age] did resurrect St. Petersburg; it resurrected the old Russian icon; it restored sensuality to the word and melody to verse; relived again everything that Russia had once lived by and opened for it anew […] These years have seen the long-awaited awakening of the creative powers of the Orthodox church, an unprecedented flowering of Russian historical self-awareness, a […] quickening of philosophy, science, literature, music, painting, theatre. The vital concerns of these years, what these years have given, will not die in the realm of spirit; yet, for Russia today, all this has, as it were, never happened. This might have been tentatively a threshold of flowering, but has actually become a portent of the end.22

That this cultural moment came to such a quick and decisive conclusion in the first years of the Russian revolution created a significant element of nostalgic musing in the minds of many observers of early twentieth-century Russia about what “might have been.”23 Russian émigrés in particular sought to keep alive the memories of a time that passed away far too quickly. Of all the literary figures associated with the Silver Age and its aftermath, Anna Akhmatova remains undoubtedly the most important. Unlike many of her compatriots she proudly refused to leave her home for the safety of Western Europe, Great Britain, or the United States following the revolution. Her decision to remain in



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her homeland would cost her dearly; but it also allowed her to achieve the status of a cultural icon once the Stalin years had passed. Her fate, she believed, belonged to that of her countrymen and women, and so she remained to face with them a most terrible time of suffering. I am not one of those who left the land to the mercy of its enemies. Their flattery leaves me cold, My songs are not for them to praise. But I pity the exile’s lot. Like a felon, like a man half-dead, Dark is your path, wanderer; Wormwood infects your foreign bread. But, here, in the murk of conflagration where scarcely a friend is left to know, we, the survivors, do not flinch from anything, not from a single blow. Surely the reckoning will be made after the passing of this cloud. We are the people without tears, straighter than you … more proud …24

The critique Akhmatova and her fellow Acmeists made of Symbolist poetry is important not only for debates within literary and semantic theory but also for our understanding of her remarkable ability to identify with a broad range of her fellow Russians, especially her countrywomen. “In Russian Symbolist theory metaphysics, mysticism, even a form of religious Messianism, are directly involved in the formulation of the nature and goals of art.”25 Like many of the late Romantics, Symbolists understood art as a distinctive mode of cognition or means of knowing.26 Influenced by Russian Silver Age philosophers, especially Soloviev, Symbolists saw their poetry as a form of revelation, a means of “non-rational or mystical cognition”27 of the divine. The act of poetic creation opens access to spiritual or psychic realms that are unavailable to scientific or other rational forms of discernment. The poet, Symbolists argued, is a creative theurgic agent whose imaginative act presses toward the very limits of language in order to disclose a non-linguistic reality unavailable to ordinary inquiry. Poetic language does not so much reflect or represent reality

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as transform and transcend it. The realia of ordinary language point beyond themselves to a realiora which can only be expressed, not represented.28 The function of poetic language is to disclose “the other-worldly ‘music’ immanent in all phenomena.”29 For Valery Bryusov, one of the first important theorists of Symbolism, the primary goal of poetry is as it were to hypnotize the reader, to evoke in him a particular mood through a series of juxtaposed images […] Living art always ‘plumbs the depths’, always comes close to mysteries, for mystery is in its soul, its life-giving origin; it is always philosophical, mystical, religious if you will.30

The poet’s creative soul saturates a poem with powerful imagery and thereby opens up a range of aesthetic and spiritual experience otherwise unavailable to the reader. The poetic words hold but a tertiary place in the hierarchy of meaning: the words are designed to create images and the images are designed to point beyond themselves to the divine mysteries. For Bryusov “representations of empirical realia are of value only when their function is to express something other than themselves.”31 Poetic writing and reading were, for the Symbolists, an elite affair. Not all readers are capable of grasping the “revelation” inherent in Symbolic poetry. Only those readers who share in the imaginative ecstasy of the poet’s creative soul can access the non-rational divine world of the poem.32 Thus the poet must seek and train disciples, those who can follow after in order to keep the poetic flames alive. To A Young Poet—Valery Bryusov ( July 15, 1896) Pale youth with burning gaze, I give you three commandments now: Follow the first: don’t live by the present, The future is a poet’s only place. Second, remember: feel for no one, Love yourself without bounds. Safeguard the third: worship art, Art alone, without thought or goal. Pale youth with embarrassed gaze! If you follow my three commandments,



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I’ll die in peace, a defeated warrior, Knowing I leave a poet behind.33

Two of Bryusov’s successors, Aleksandr Blok and Andrey Bely, would further refine Symbolist poetic theory. Blok specifically assigns a “theurgic” role to the poet; the creative artist mediates the mysteries of “the world soul,” “the eternal feminine” to those few who are capable of hearing the music of the divine spheres. In the fathomless depths of the spirit, where man ceases to be man, in those depths inaccessible to state and society which are the product of civilization, there travel waves of sound like the waves of ether which embrace the universe; rhythmic vibrations pass there which are like processes forming mountains, winds, sea currents, the vegetable and animal worlds.34

Bely takes these sentiments even further, adopting theological language to suggest that the creative artist must finally assume an incarnational role and so become a divine hypostasis. The word must become flesh. The word become flesh is both a symbol of creativity, and the true nature of things […] The artist must become his own form: his natural ‘I’ must blend with his work; his life must become artistic. He is himself ‘word become flesh’. Existing art forms lead to the tragedy of the artist: victory over this tragedy is equivalent to the transformation of art into a religion of life.35

Given this hyperbolic view of poetry and the poet, it is perhaps not surprising that Symbolism began to sink under the weight of its own excesses. Aleksandr Blok and Innokenty Annensky, both self-identified Symbolists, developed sharp internal critiques of the uncontrolled hubris of late Symbolist theory, pointing to its denigration of the poetic word in favor of philosophical concepts and aestheticized images as well as its near-blasphemous exaltation of the poet to demiurgic status. Annensky is especially critical of the view that poetic speech can leave the realm of the phenomenal in order to dwell in some pure noumenal state. The symbolic force of the poetic word, Annensky argued, depends on its continuing return to the phenomenal representation from which the symbol takes its flight. Poetic symbols do, indeed, point beyond themselves, but they

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can do so effectively only if they remain connected to the phenomenal realm, the “everyday word” (“budnichnoe slovo”),36 from which all poetry arises. It is, of course, this concern for the everyday word that identifies the primary focus of the writers who formed the Poet’s Guild and established the journal Apollon. Under the leadership of Nikolai Gumilev this small group of young poets—Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Zenkevich, Vladamir Narbut, and Sergei Gorodetsky—established a movement that Gumilev dubbed “Acmeism,” a name chosen at a gathering in February, 1912.37 They were united primarily by their opposition to the excesses of Symbolism and a desire to establish their own independent identities as the poets of Russia’s future. They soon made the journal Apollon the official organ of Acmeism and began an aggressive publication effort of both poetry and criticism. While Gumilev was the most important theorist of the movement, Akhmatova and Mandelstam were clearly the guiding poetic artists, and their work established the poetic practices that drove the movement.38 All of the Acmeists’ self-promotion might well have come to naught had not some established literary figures recognized their work. In his important early article “Symbolism’s Successors” (1916), the distinguished philologist and literary historian Viktor Zhirmunsky treated the new movement as the rightful inheritor of Symbolism’s place in Russian literary culture.39 He points to an article by Mikhail Kuzmin, “On Beautiful Clarity,”40 as having provided the impetus for younger poets to introduce “a new sensibility, a new aesthetic” for Russian poetry. “Let your tale tell its story,” Kuzmin wrote, “let your dramas be dramatic, preserve lyricism for your poetry, love the word like Flaubert, be thrifty in your means and meager in your words, be precise and genuine and you will find the secret of a wonderful thing – beautiful clarity.” Among these new poets, wrote Zhirmunsky, There was a desire to speak about the clear and simple objects of external life and about ordinary, uncomplicated human affairs without feeling the sacred need to prophesy ultimate truths. Before the poet now lay the external world – varied, distracting, and bright, and almost forgotten in the years of individualistic lyrical self-absorption.41

Unlike some critics who saw (and continue to see) Acmeism as a rejection of Symbolism’s theological interests, Zhirmunsky recognizes



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that they continue an interest in religion precisely as it is mediated through the ordinary and everyday. “In rejecting mysticism, i.e. the direct experience of the divine, the acmeists have by no means denied God: they have accepted religion as an object of personal faith and religious feeling as ‘material’ for artistic depiction.”42 Zhirmunsky then turns to the poetry of the young (she was then 27) female sensation, Anna Akhmatova. By this time Akhmatova had published two volumes of poetry (Evening, 1912 and Rosary, 1914) to great public acclaim, but this was the first sustained critical analysis of her work outside the Acmeist circle. Zhirmunsky begins with remarks about her distinctive use of language. She moves poetic diction close to conversational speech. Her poetry introduces the impression not of a song, but of a refined and witty discussion, an intimate conversation […] She speaks so simply; her words seem like crystallized snatches of lively conversation in prose.43

With uncanny theological insight, Zhirmunsky continues to display the religious dimensions of Akhmatova’s poetry, a religious sensibility far removed from the exuberant mysticism of Symbolism. In Akhmatova’s poetry religiosity is no less genuine, yet its nature is not one of mystical insight, but of firm and simple faith which becomes the basis of life. And this firm, calm, positive faith enters life itself, acquiring living, historical, everyday forms, and it manifests itself in the conditions of daily existence and in the customary rituals, acts, and objects of religious devotion.44

To illustrate this aspect of her work he chooses the following poem: There is a worn carpet under the icon; The cool room is dark, And thick and dark green ivy Curls around the large window, The roses are sweetly aromatic; Hardly burning, the icon lamp chirrs, The room’s furniture is brightly painted By the loving hand of a craftsman.45

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He concludes with the following reflections on the moods and emotions of Akhmatova’s poetry. Akhmatova speaks of a simple earthly happiness and of simple, intimate, and personal grief. Love, separation, unfulfilled romance, infidelity, the radiant and happy faith in one’s beloved, the feeling of grief, abandonment, loneliness, despair, that which is close to everyone and which everyone experiences and understands, although not so deeply and personally. To what is simple and everyday she gives an intimate and personal character; therefore the tender and human love for her deeply human poetry is so understandable […] Clearly, Akhmatova’s muse is not the muse of symbolism […] If the symbolists’ muse saw in the image of a woman’s reflection the Eternal Feminine, Akhmatova’s poetry speaks about what is enduringly female.46

This essay, published on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution, may still be the most beautiful and insightful piece ever written about Akhmatova’s poetry. Zhirmunsky suggests that in her poetry “everything is incarnated” and her work reflects an “artistic realism” not only of exterior life “but also of spiritual life” because it is based “on a firm and unshakable religious feeling, on the positive religion which has entered history and everyday life.”47 In the remainder of this chapter I seek to build on Zhirmunsky’s insights, arguing that Akhmatova’s poetry is a supreme example of “sacramental realism,” one that shapes a moral life of “sacramental character.” Hers is a poetry that is deeply spiritual, engaging the divine as it is found “in, with, and under” ordinary, everyday life. Akhmatova’s Poetry of Witness48 Readers of Akhmatova’s poetry face a number of interpretive challenges. Akhmatova was the first female Russian poet to garner a significant popular readership49 and since she wrote out of her own experience and used the first person singular throughout her poems, the reader is tempted to see her poetry as autobiographical.50 Indeed, one of the best of Akhmatova’s English biographies, Amanda Haight’s Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage, builds the biographical account by correlating the poems with events in Akhmatova’s life,



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thereby risking a collapse between the “poetic personae” and the poet herself. Akhmatova employed multiple personae in her poems, a technique that was essential to the Acmeist critique of Symbolist poetry as self-expressive. The goal of Acmeist poetry was not to create an encounter between the poet’s soul and that of the reader; rather it was to facilitate an encounter between the reader and the words and images of the poem. While Akhmatova clearly wrote out of her own experience, the text is in no way a “report” of that experience. Indeed, the Acmeists were quite explicit about the need to engage in intentional “poetic self-invention.”51 Gumilev uses the term “mask” to emphasize the distance between the poet herself and her poetic selfinvention. The masks are essential if one is to capture the complexity, fragmentation, and diversity of the human personality. The Symbolist assumption that the self is a single consistent identity waiting to be shared with the reader, is, Gumilev asserted, a pure fantasy. The human personality is capable of infinite fragmentation. Our words are the expression of only a part of ourselves, one of our faces. We can tell of our love to a beloved woman, to a friend, in court, in a drunken gathering, to the flowers, or to God. It is clear that each time we will tell a different story, since we change in accordance with our situations.52

Akhmatova not only employed various poetic personae in her poems, she also engaged in self-conscious manipulation of these masks in order to undermine the reader’s expectations and create an element of the unexpected and surprising.53 This tendency toward ironic self-representation led some of her early critics to accuse her of inconsistency and contradiction. In 1923 the formalist critic Boris Eykhenbaum accused her of failing to depict a self-consistent heroine in her early works. Akhmatova’s heroine, combining in herself a whole series of events, scenes, and feelings, is ‘oxymoron’ incarnate. The lyrical plot at the centre of which she stands is developed through antitheses and paradoxes, evades psychological formulae, is ‘made strange’ by the absence of connection between her spiritual states.54

Not content with pointing to the paradoxes within her personae, Eykhenbaum proceeded to offer a gender slur that would haunt Akhmatova throughout her life. “Here already we can see the

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beginning of the paradoxical, or more correctly, contradictory, double image of the heroine – half ‘harlot’ burning with passion, half mendicant nun able to pray to God for forgiveness.”55 And so we are confronted by a second interpretive conundrum: namely, how to understand the religious themes developed in Akhmatova’s poetry. The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to that matter, but it is important to offer an overview of this issue at the outset. The religious dimensions of Akhmatova’s poetry have often been deeply, even disastrously, misunderstood. Those who approach her work with a dichotomy between the material and the spiritual fail to see the incarnational character of her language. Since many of her early poems dealt primarily with the theme of erotic love, most often unrequited love, critics have found her generous use of religious themes and images in these same poems jarring and even contradictory—thus the “half harlot […] half mendicant nun” comment. Even an admirer like her fellow poet Marina Tsvetaeva would call her both “sorceress” and “virgin” in a single body. Other critics would call her peculiar combination of passion and piety “superstitious paganism.” The whole general style of her love is linked to the fact that Anna Akhmatova is a moral nun, with a cross on her breast. She is mindful of hell and believes in divine retribution. Her love is her hair shirt. Her passion is severe, and she is disturbed by her love, but, perhaps reassured by the fact that her love is unhappy, and that God is, therefore, not angry, not mocked by the sinfulness of his servant. Akhmatova is a nun, but in the world, in society, in the glittering whirlwind of the capital.56

Many of these criticisms are linked to the growing materialism and anti-religious sentiment of Marxist literary critics, who found the combination of erotic desire and religious faith an impossible, even absurd, contradiction. Thus Leon Trotsky offers a sardonic dismissal of Akhmatova’s domesticated bourgeois God, a riposte that combines religious and gender slurs in equal measure. One reads with bewilderment the majority of our collections of poems, especially the women’s – where verily you can’t get in as far as the doorstep without encountering God. The lyrical circle of Akhmatova […] is very small. It embraces the poetess herself, an unknown male person in a



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bowler hat or spurs, and without fail, God – without any distinguishing marks. The last is a very convenient and portable third person, fully housetrained, a friend of the family, who from time to time fulfills the function of a doctor specializing in women’s complaints. How this personage, who is no longer in his first youth, and who is burdened with the personal and not infrequently very troublesome errands of Akhmatova […] still manages in his spare time to control the fate of the universe is quite simply more than the mind can grasp.57

Perhaps such sharp criticism should be expected from hardened Marxist atheists but unfortunately this same criticism can be found in the work of some of the most serious contemporary scholars of the religious themes in Akhmatova’s poetry, including the distinguished Australian literary critic Wendy Rosslyn. She writes of the “heroine” in Akhmatova’s early poetry books: The heroine’s attitudes can hardly be called Christian. To be sure, we do in one poem find the heroine at a church service, but there is no evidence of a working relationship with the Christian God, and a consideration of her relationship with her lovers reveals why this should be so: relatedness induces a certain claustrophobia which compels her to pursue freedom and escape her lover. Several poems in Evening draw attention to the heroine’s sexuality. She commits adultery, flaunts her charms; her smile betrays frenzy, and her heart and soul intoxicate her lovers as if she were a bacchante. If, therefore, one side of the heroine’s nature has aspirations to the religious life, it must equally be said that she has something of the harlot about her.58

That even a distinguished scholar, one clearly attuned to religious themes, can make such outlandish (or so I hope to show) claims illustrates how difficult it is for readers to grasp the incarnational and sacramental dimension of Akhmatova’s poetry. If one approaches these poems from the vantage point of “sacramental realism” and if, further, one brings an appreciation of the place of “divine eros” in Russian Orthodox theology and culture,59 then the apparent paradoxes between passion and piety, between human and divine love, begin to resolve themselves into a deeply incarnational vision of human life—fallible, broken, yet beloved of God. The theme of unrequited love dominates Akhmatova’s early work. Many of the poems collected in the volume entitled Evening, written

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during her husband’s two-year-long absence in Africa, reflect her own sorrow and loneliness brought on by their separation, and anticipate their final break-up and ultimate divorce. He loved three things in life: Evensong, white peacocks And old maps of America. He hated it when children cried, He hated tea with raspberry jam And women’s hysterics, … And I was his wife.60

But more importantly she uses her own experiences to convey sentiments that are accessible to people who understand the pain of everyday loss and ordinary distress. I wrung my hands under my dark veil. “Why are you pale today, what makes you reckless?” – Because I have made my loved one drunk with an astringent sadness. I’ll never forget. He went out, reeling, his mouth twisted, desolate. I ran downstairs, not touching the banisters, and followed him as far as the gate. Panting I cried: ‘I meant it all in jest. Don’t leave me or I’ll die.’ He smiled at me – oh, so calmly, terribly – and said, ‘Why don’t you get out of the rain?’61

Or another brief poem that begins, How helplessly my breast grew cold yet my steps were light I put on to my right hand my left-hand glove.62

Note how these poems reflect elements of everyday speech and conversation. Ordinary gestures like running down the stairs or putting a glove on the wrong hand capture a sense of desperation or confused embarrassment through the use of simple words that



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convey great emotional power. Surely Nikolai Nedovrovo was correct when he wrote of this first volume of Akhmatova’s poems: These torments and complaints […] is this not weakness of spirit, simple sentimentality? Of course not: Akhmatova’s very voice, firm, even selfconfident, her very calmness in confessing pain and weakness, the very abundance of anguish, poetically refined, – all this bears witness, not to tears over life’s trivialities, but to a lyrical soul […] clearly masterful rather than downtrodden.63

Akhmatova’s critics are, of course, correct when they point out her sometimes surprising combination of sexual desire and religious piety within the same poem.64 For example: And when we cursed each other In passion, fired until white hot, Neither of us grasped as yet That the earth is too small for two people, And that furious memory tortures. Torment of the strong – fiery sickness! – And in the bottomless night the heart teaches The question: Oh, where is my friend who went away? But when, through waves of incense, The choir thunders, exulting and threatening, Those same inescapable eyes, Strict and firm, look into my soul.65

In another example, she combines ordinary time with the liturgical calendar: High in the sky, there was a small grey cloud, Like a squirrel skin spread out. He said to me, ‘I am not sorry that your body Will melt in March, fragile Snow-maiden!’ My hands were getting cold in my fluffy muff. I was afraid, I was somehow confused. Oh, how to bring you back, swift weeks Of his unsubstantial and fleeting love!

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The Humble Sublime I want neither bitterness nor revenge, Let me die with the last white snowstorm. I foresaw his coming on the eve of Epiphany. In January I was his love.66

Or yet again she uses biblical tropes to capture her own sense of disappointment: At the rising of the sun I sing of love, On my knees in the kitchen garden I weed out the goose-foot. I tear it out and throw it away – May it forgive me. I see: a little barefoot girl Is crying by the fence. I take fright at the ringing wails Of the voice of woe, Ever stronger grows the warm smell Of the dead goose-foot. A stone instead of bread Will be my bitter prize. Above me, only the sky; With me, though, your voice.

Or finally these snippets in which the heroine struggles with her own doubts: I do not ask for wisdom or for strength. Oh, only let me warm myself by the fire! I’m cold … Winged or wingless, The happy god will not visit me.67 The Muse, my sister, looked into my face, Her gaze was clear and bright, And she took away my golden ring, The first spring present.



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Tomorrow the mirrors will laugh, and tell me, “Your gaze is not clear, not bright …” I shall quietly reply, “She took away God’s gift.”

These verses, which reflect the genuine struggles familiar to all people of faith, generate Wendy Rosslyn’s judgment: She is by no means a believing Christian meeting with her God. Yet inasmuch as guilt and anxiety reveal to her a dimension of a world which lies beyond the ordinary and the everyday, she may be said to have some religious experience. Whether that experience renders life meaningful and existence worthwhile is highly questionable.68

Rosslyn believes that religious experience always lies “beyond the ordinary and the everyday” and thus fails to grasp the deeply sacramental and incarnational sentiments of Akhmatova’s poetry. In addition, Rosslyn deeply misunderstands the nature of Christian faith. If one believes not by sight but by faith, and if the God in whom the Christian believes is both hidden as well as present, then there is no faith without doubt, no discipleship without struggle. Akhmatova displays faith’s striving with unusual clarity and honesty, thereby creating a bond with all those who seek to be faithful—and sometimes fail—on the difficult journey of discipleship. Throughout one’s life, time addresses us in a variety of languages: in those of innocence, love, faith, experience, history, fatigue, cynicism, guilt, decay, etc. Of those, the language of love is clearly the lingua franca […] Love is essentially an attitude maintained by the infinite toward the finite. The reversal constitutes either faith or poetry […] What art and sexuality have in common is that both are sublimations of one’s creative energy, and that denies them hierarchy. The nearly idiosyncratic persistence of the early Akhmatova love poems suggests not so much the recurrence of passion as the frequency of prayer.69

The women in Akhmatova’s early poems are ordinary people, often steeped in the culture of Orthodox belief and practice, real persons through whom Akhmatova’s own inner life, as well as the struggles of her countrywomen, are depicted. As her poetry matured, the themes of love, while still grounded in the personal and everyday, began to

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reflect larger aspects of Russian life and culture during the shattering and revolutionary years of the early twentieth century. Her second collection of poems, titled Rosary and published in 1914, continues the themes of the earlier collection; but the women depicted here, while still abandoned, now find new sources of strength and hope in memory and in faith. To become a girl of the sea shore again, Put shoes on my bare feet, Wind my braid in a crown round my head, Sing with emotion in my voice.70

Or again, There are many of us homeless Our strength lies in that For us, the ignorant and blind, God’s house is bright. And for those who are bent down, Altars burn, And up unto God’s throne Our voices rise.71

It would be a mistake to characterize even these early efforts as the depiction of helpless women who turn to religion as a mere palliative. Rather, the women depicted in Rosary are not unlike the African American women of the same era who, as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham so powerfully portrayed in Righteous Discontent, engaged in “everyday forms of resistance to oppression and demoralization,”72 drawing upon and yet transforming biblical and liturgical resources. These women are not saints but fallible human beings who do wrong, suffer loss, and look to God for solace and strength. With the outbreak of the war in 1914, Akhmatova’s poetry captured the grief of a nation whose young were being slaughtered in increasing numbers on the battlefields of Europe. Drawing again upon her own emotional response, she would provide the words for a nation in mourning as she employs the metaphor of a late spring frost to depict the tragedy of youth cut down in its prime.



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On the fresh turf the transparent shroud Lies and thaws, unnoticed. The cruel, cold spring is murdering The swollen buds. This untimely death is so terrible I cannot look at God’s world. I feel King David’s grief, his regal bequest, Passed down for a thousand years.73

This poem is an exceptional example of the sacramental realism that characterizes all of Akhmatova’s poetry. The primary image of the poem, the dying buds of a tree “murdered” by a late spring freeze, is vividly sketched by words both simple and moving. But the further meaning of the poem, its res if you will, is its reference to the deaths of young men on the European battlefields, a referent implied but not explicitly stated. But that reference possesses its semantic and emotional power only as it remains linked to its signa, the image of ice-covered buds murdered by the cold. Thus the sign points not away from itself but through itself to a deeper reality hidden within the sign itself. Then, as a further deepening of the historical meaning of this loss, Akhmatova connects the grief of the Russian people to King David’s mourning for his son Absalom, a “regal bequest” of sorrow “passed down for a thousand years.” With remarkable simplicity, she manages to capture the historic magnitude of the senseless deaths of young men in war, and she does so “sacramentally” by connecting each successive referent to the original sign or image, the frozen buds.74 While religious images are often in the background in Akhmatova’s early poetry, they emerge with much greater clarity in her third volume of poems, titled White Flock and published on the eve of the revolution in 1917. Themes of suffering, death, judgment, and forgiveness suffuse these poems, as do explicit references to God, churches, and prayer. This was my prayer: “Slake The deep thirst of poetry!” But the earthbound cannot leave the earth And there was no setting free. Like the smoke of a sacrifice that cannot Fly up to the throne of power and glory,

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The Humble Sublime But only float at its foot, Kissing the grass beseechingly— So, I, Lord, am prostrate: Will the heavenly flame touch My sealed eyelashes And my astonishing muteness?75

While Akhmatova is remarkably prolific during this period, her poems are full of foreboding about the potential loss of her poetic gift, as if she were prescient of her impending fate. The effects of the war on the Russian psyche and soil are reflected in her soulful wartime poems. This one is entitled “July 1914”: 1 It smells of burning. For four weeks The dry peat bog has been burning. The birds have not even sung today, And the aspen has stopped quaking. The sun has become God’s displeasure, Rain has not sprinkled the fields since Easter. A one-legged stranger came along And all alone in the courtyard he said: “Fearful times are drawing near. Soon Fresh graves will be everywhere. There will be famine, earthquakes, widespread death, And the eclipse of the sun and the moon.76 But the enemy will not divide Our land at will, for himself: The Mother of God will spread her white mantle77 Over this enormous grief.” 2 The sweet smell of juniper Flies from the burning woods, Soldiers’ wives are wailing for the boys, The widow’s lament keens over the countryside.



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The public prayers were not in vain The earth was yearning for rain! Warm red liquid sprinkled The trampled fields. Low, low hangs the empty sky And a praying voice quietly intones: “They are wounding your sacred body, They are casting lots for your robes.”78

A new maturity now emerges within Akhmatova’s art, as her perspective turns from personal sorrows and disappointments and toward the nation’s tragedies. The juxtaposition of the parched earth waiting for rain and the bloody red liquid that sprinkles the fields creates an indelible wartime image. Furthermore, the figural connection between the wounds of Christ’s body and the suffering of the Russian people anticipates the images that will dominate her epic poem “Requiem.” But no poem is more terribly prescient than her 1915 verse entitled “Prayer.” Give me bitter years of sickness, Suffocation, insomnia, fever, Take my child and my lover, And my mysterious gift of song – This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays.79

Each petition of that prayer will come to pass in Akhmatova’s personal life over the next 30 years. She will suffer long bouts of illness, suffocating attacks of pneumonia and tuberculosis, and unceasing insomnia; she will lose her son to the Gulag, and her former husband to the revolution. As the Bolshevik revolution breaks into the already war-torn nation, uncertainty clings to both personal and public life. In the midst of the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary battles of the early years of communist rule, Akhmatova’s former husband and poetic colleague Nikolai Gumilev is arrested and executed for alleged complicity in an anti-Bolshevik conspiracy. A continuing sense of

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foreboding characterizes her poetry, one that presages the more terrible events on the near horizon. Fear picks out objects in the dark And guides the moonbeam to an axe, Behind the wall is an ominous noise— What is it: rats, a ghost, a thief ? Better to lie against the bare boards Of a scaffold raised out on the green square And to the cries of joy and the groans Pour out red blood to the end. I press the smooth cross to my heart: O God bring back peace to my soul. The sickly sweet smell of decay Is given off by the cold sheet.80

The volumes from which these poems are taken were published in 1921 and 1922 and were the final books of poetry that Akhmatova would be allowed to publish until the 1940s. As the Bolsheviks gained full political control of Russia they began systematic attacks on the artists whose works did not support the new communist ideology. Akhmatova and the Acmeists were accused of representing the reactionary values of Tsarist and Orthodox Russia. G. Lelevich, a prominent Marxist critic, would provide the political critique that would ultimately lead to the banning of her work for nearly twenty years. Restating the classical gender stereotype used by her earlier critics, he characterizes her as not quite a harlot burning with passion, not quite a mendicant nun able to pray to God for forgiveness […] Akhmatova’s poetry is a small and beautiful fragment of aristocratic culture […] The circle of emotions open to the poetess is exceptionally limited. She has responded to the social upheavals, basically the most important phenomenon of our time, in a feeble, and, at that, hostile manner. There is no broad sweep of vision or depth of understanding in Akhmatova’s world.81

With this judgment, Lelevich has made clear that there would be no place for Akhmatova in revolutionary communist society. Despite her



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rejection by the communist leadership, however, Akhmatova refused to join the many Russian artists who emigrated from the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Her fate, she believed, belonged to that of her countrymen and women, and so she remained to face with them a most terrible time of suffering. Akhmatova would continue to write poetry even though she had no chance of seeing her poems published. When asked later in life how she survived those years of official silencing, she responded, “I am a poet, so I wrote poetry. What else could I do?” Still the pain of her silencing is obvious in a poem written in 1924. Oh had I known when, clothed in white, The Muse would visit my cramped abode, That my living hands would one day fall On to a lyre turned forever to stone.82

Despite the despair of those lines, Akhmatova continued to write; indeed, some of her most dramatic works were produced during the years of silence. She developed an affinity for biblical materials and turned her attention particularly to three biblical figures: Rachel, Lot’s wife, and Michal, the daughter of Saul. Her poem “Lot’s Wife” grants a powerful human presence to an otherwise obscure biblical figure. In Akhmatova’s hands, Lot’s wife becomes not a symbol of disobedience or carelessness, but a poignant woman who gave up her life for a final glance toward home. And the righteous man followed God’s messenger, huge and radiant, along the dark hill. while a restless voice of alarm spoke to his wife: ‘It’s not yet too late, you still can look back. At the red towers of your native Sodom, at the square where you once sang, the spinning shed, at the empty windows of the tall house where your sons and daughters blessed your marriage bed.’ A single glance, a sudden dart of pain stitching her eyes before she made a sound …. Her body flaked into transparent salt, her swift legs rooted to the ground.

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Like the unnamed woman at Bethany whose acts will be told “in memory of her,” this woman known only by her husband’s name is lifted up in Akhmatova’s verse and becomes a symbol of all those who have mourned the loss of a home or homeland. Sentenced to exile within a land she no longer knows as home, Akhmatova finds in this biblical woman a figure for all those displaced by her country’s increasingly tyrannical regime, and in so doing transforms the biblical image itself, imbuing this woman with new meaning and significance. Another poem about a biblical woman, Michal, combines precisely those elements so loathed by Akhmatova’s critics: sexual desire and religious faith. But David was loved … by the daughter of Saul, Michal. Saul thought: I will give her to him, and she will be a snare for him. First Book of Kings And the youth plays for the mad king. And annihilates the merciless night, And loudly summons triumphant dawn And smothers the specters of fright. And the king speaks kindly to him: “In you, young man, burns a marvelous flame, And for such a medicine I will give you my daughter and my kingdom.” And the king’s daughter stares at the singer, She needs neither songs nor the marriage crown; Her soul is full of grief and resentment, Nevertheless, Michal wants David. She is paler than death; her mouth is compressed, In her green eyes, frenzy; Her garments gleam and with each motion Her bracelets ring harmoniously. Like a mystery, like a dream, like the first mother, Lilith …



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She speaks without volition: “Surely they have given me drink with poison And my spirit is clouded. My shamelessness! My humiliation! A vagabond! A brigand! A shepherd! Why do none of the king’s courtiers, Alas, resemble him? But the sun’s rays … and the stars at night … And this cold trembling …”84

Surely Amanda Haight understands Akhmatova better than the poet’s more churlish critics when she writes, Now Akhmatova can show that the Old Testament woman torn by sexual desire is not outside God’s love and purpose […] and that, despite herself, her desire is actually helping to fulfill that purpose. Even those who feel themselves damned are shown to be at that moment close to God.85

By depicting these biblical women as real flesh-and-blood persons— mothers who long for home and young women who desire their lovers—Akhmatova does a great service to those who seek to identify with the biblical characters—especially the women—whom we barely glimpse in the text, but perhaps know as well as our own bodies. By portraying them realistically as persons, she advances the cause of sacramental realism, of discovering God in those unlikely and unexpected places in our lives. For the next decade Akhmatova moved from place to place, accepting the kindness of friends who risked their own safety in offering her shelter. Plagued by recurring bouts of pneumonia and living in extreme poverty, she continued to keep in touch with others in her literary circle who lived under similar duress. In May of 1934 her dear friend and colleague Osip Mandelstam was arrested for “crimes against the state” and sent to the work camps in Siberia where he would soon die. Then, in December of that same year, following the murder of a member of the Politburo, Stalin ordered the arrest of thousands of Russians who, because of their “terrorist acts,” were denied any right of defense. Among those taken into custody was Akhmatova’s son Lev Gumilyov. Though he was released just a few days later, the terror continued, and in early 1935 both her son Lev and her husband, Aleksandr Punin, were arrested. Though terribly thin and weak, she would regularly go to

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the prison to join the long lines of people who hoped merely to catch a glimpse of the loved ones they were not allowed to visit. Later she would write about one particular encounter. In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day someone in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman with lips blue from the cold, who had of course never heard me called by name before. Suddenly she awoke out of the benumbed condition in which we all found ourselves at that time and whispered in my ear (in those days we all spoke in whispers): “Can you put this into words?” And I said, “I can.” Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.86

This exchange, which appears under the heading “Instead of a Preface,” establishes the deep connection between Akhmatova’s own experience of suffering and that of her fellow countrywomen. The “I” of “Requiem” has three references: Akhmatova herself, the women of Russia, and—later in the poem—Mary the mother of Jesus. Each referent has its own individual integrity, but the full extent of suffering can only be captured by multiplying the res signified by the “I.” Akhmatova’s personal pain, though unbearably great, cannot fully shoulder the responsibility of communicating the agony of Russia herself without her words also representing the women of the nation. And the full world-historical, theological, significance of this suffering can only be rendered through the figure of Mary swooning at the foot of the cross.87 Only through the sacramental and realist form of the poem could Akhmatova truly become a witness to these unbearable, almost unspeakable, events. Like an ecclesial sacrament, “Requiem” both represents and re-presents the suffering of the Russian people; the poem not only vividly depicts that suffering, it renders it palpably to the reader “in, with, and under” its simple poetic words.88 Like a sacrament, “Requiem” is both remembrance and witness (“do this in remembrance of me”)—both memory and testimony. And so she begins this lyric epic with a word of witness: No foreign sky protected me, no stranger’s wing shielded my face, I stand as witness to the common lot, Survivor of that time, that place.89



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Though the writing of the words was banned, the words themselves could not be silenced. She committed the words to memory and then taught them to her friends, who memorized them as well. Sometimes she would write the words on small scraps of paper and then burn them as soon as she knew they had been committed to memory.90 In this fashion, one of the greatest poems she was ever to write, “Requiem,” existed until finally, in 1956, she was able to type it in full. As she said at that time, “Eleven people knew Requiem by heart, and not one of them betrayed me.”91 Here the religious imagery of her imagination holds sway as she identifies herself and all of suffering Russia with the figure of Mary at the foot of the cross. But true to her instinct for the particular, she does not hide the concrete reality of her own Golgotha in the section she calls “Dedication.” Such grief might make the mountain stoop, reverse the waters where they flow, but cannot burst these ponderous bolts that block us from the prison cells crowded with mortal woe … For some the wind can freshly blow, for some the sunlight fades at ease, but we, made partners in our dread, hear but the grating of the keys, and heavy-booted soldiers’ tread. As if for early mass, we rose and each day walked the wilderness, trudging through silent street and square, to congregate, less live than dead. The sun declined, the Neva blurred, and hope sang always from afar. Whose sentence is decreed? … That moan, that sudden spurt of woman’s tears, shows one distinguished from the rest, as if they’d knocked her to the ground and wrenched the heart out of her breast, then let her go, to reel, alone. Where are they now, my nameless friends from those two years I spent in hell? What specters mock them now, amid

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The central stanzas of the poem offer the reader a sense of the intensely personal character of the pain caused by the Stalin terror. Stalin and his henchmen knew that they could create a greater sense of fear by threatening the loved ones of Russia’s women. While some women were imprisoned in the Gulag, most of Russia’s women suffered through loss, uncertainty, and despair over the fate of their loved ones. While it was impossible for Stalin to imprison a beloved public person like Akhmatova, he could still do inestimable damage by arresting her son, Lev. At dawn they came and took you away. You were my dead: I walked behind. In the dark room children cried, the holy candle gasped for air. Your lips were chill from the icon’s kiss, sweat bloomed on your brow – those deathly flowers! Like the wives of Peter’s troopers in Red Square93 I’ll stand and howl under the Kremlin towers.94

The poem further depicts the near-madness that afflicts those who wait unknowingly to learn of their loved ones’ fate. A sense of disintegration of the self is evident in many of the stanzas. Not, not mine: it’s somebody else’s wound. I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground Whisk the lamps away … Night.

Or again: So much to do today; kill memory, kill pain, turn heart into a stone, and yet prepare to live again.



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Already madness lifts its wing to cover half my soul. That taste of opiate wine! Lure of the dark valley!

And finally, when the pain cannot be captured in her own person or that of her countrywomen, she turns to Mary standing at the foot of Jesus’ cross. CRUCIFIXION “Do not weep for me, Mother, When I am in my grave.”95

1 A choir of angels glorified the hour, the vault of heaven was dissolved in fire. “Father, why hast Thou forsaken me? Mother, I beg you, do not weep for me …” 2 Mary Magdalene beat her breasts and sobbed, His dear disciple, stone-faced, stared. His mother stood apart. No other looked into her secret eyes. Nobody dared.96

This extraordinary lyric and epic poem captures the unbearable pain of those women who waited, watched, and mourned for their loved ones during the eight long years of terror. By writing poetry in the midst of unspeakable horror Akhmatova gave words to the sighs and moans that would otherwise have gone unmarked. By keeping the memories alive through unwritten recitation of her powerful verse, the story was preserved in the hope that someday it might inspire her countrymen and women. In 1941, during the terrible siege of Leningrad, Akhmatova delivered a radio address to the women of Russia urging them to resist the onslaught of the Fascist German troops. In response to this act Stalin lifted the publication ban in 1944. Akhmatova quickly set to work collecting and rewriting the poems she had composed during her 20-year silencing. By 1946 a new collection of her poems was in production at a Moscow publisher when the dark clouds of censorship reappeared. Communist party boss Andrey Zhdanov, following the orders of Stalin, reinstated the

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ban and moreover expelled Akhmatova from the Soviet Writers Union, thus making it impossible for her to earn any money as a writer. Repeating the now classic slur, “Half nun, half harlot, or rather a harlot-nun whose sin is mixed with prayer,” he condemned her work as incompatible with the post-war aims of the party and the state.97 The volumes in the Moscow publishing house were destroyed and Akhmatova entered one of the most difficult periods of her life. Most of her friends and colleagues were either exiled, imprisoned, or killed in the war. Her son, Lev, remained a prisoner in Siberia and her own health continued to deteriorate. This cruel age has deflected me, like a river from its course. Strayed from its familiar shores, my changeling life has flowed into a sister channel. How many spectacles I’ve missed, the curtain rising without me, and falling too. How many friends I never had the chance to meet. Here in the only city I can claim, where I could sleepwalk and not lose my way; how many foreign skylines I can dream, not to be witnessed through my tears. And how many verses have I failed to write!98

It was not until 1956, when Nikita Khruschev finally revealed the extent of the Stalin terror, that the ban on Akhmatova’s poetry was finally lifted. For the final ten years of her life, volume after volume of poetry flowed from the Russian presses, and the world could at last read two of the greatest poems of the twentieth century: “Requiem” and “Poem without a Hero.” In 1964 she was allowed to travel to Italy to receive a literary prize from the Italian government, and in 1965 she received an honorary degree from Oxford University. With her words now available for publication and eagerly translated throughout the world, her unstinting commitment to the everyday cares and sorrows of the people of her country gave her worldwide fame. And so, too, the dark veil that had for so long been draped over her person and her poems began finally to lift. She gave expression to the hopes that were rekindled in the final years of her life in the poem, “The Return”:



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The souls of all my dears have flown to the stars, Thank God there’s no one left for me to lose – so I am free to cry. This air was made for the echoing of songs. A silver willow by the shore trails to the bright September waters. My shadow, risen from the past, glides silently towards me. Though the branches here are hung with many lyres, a place has been reserved for mine, it seems. And now this shower, struck by sunlight, brings me good news, my cup of consolation.99

Anna Akhmatova’s poetry exemplifies the essential characteristics of “sacramental realism,” and her life bespeaks the “sacramental character”100 that emerges from her literary art. Deeply grounded in the techniques of her craft, in touch with her own emotional and intellectual life, and organically connected to the people—particularly the women of her nation—she became the soul and conscience of Russia by simply doing what she did best, writing poetry. Her ability to see poetic drama in the ordinary everyday events of human life prepared her to chronicle the world-historical events of her time through the lives of women whose stories might otherwise never have been told. Her insight into the biblical narratives, and her imaginative capacity to see herself and others as figures in a larger divine story enabled her to hold together the mundane and the cosmic without allowing one to overwhelm the other. Like many other great figures of faith, especially those in the Hebrew Bible about whom she wrote so beautifully, Akhmatova was a flawed and fallible person. She was, by her own admission, openly promiscuous in her sexual relationships. She seemed unable to find happiness in her relationships, going through three marriages and countless affairs without ever finding the love she so desperately sought. She was relentless in her sardonic criticism of those writers who failed to meet her high standards of literary excellence. She found motherhood extremely difficult. Having given up the care of her only son when he was eight months old, she had a distant and estranged relationship with him throughout her life, even after his return from the camps in the Gulag.101 To the ordinary

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eye she would not appear a candidate for spiritual heroism; but, when the historic moment arose, she became the chronicler of Russia’s sorrow because she shared the religious and cultural heritage of those for whom she spoke. Akhmatova’s commitment to the Orthodox tradition and the legacy of Russian literary culture prepared her for the courageous acts of prayer and righteous action we glimpse in her poetry: her witness to suffering, survival, resistance, and even hope.

3

REALISM AS RESISTANCE AND REVERSAL LANGSTON HUGHES

I want my readers to imagine and feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves. George Eliot Realist and reformist writing sought to make visible what had been invisible and to draw attention to what had gone unseen – whether it was the conditions inside a factory or on a slave plantation, or the lives of ordinary people and events of every day. Amanda Claybaugh

The Strangeness and Beauty of Familiar Things: Literary Realism as Social and Cultural Practice “Realism” is one of those words seemingly capable of endless uses, definitions, and applications. Moreover, the term is highly charged both ethically and politically, as the many philosophical battles between realism and idealism, realism and constructivism, realism and nominalism, and realism and romanticism demonstrate. My interest here is in the notion of “literary realism,” but that term is equally controverted and controversial, referring—among other things—to a historical period, a literary technique, a representational form, an epistemological or ontological doctrine, and a political and ethical stance.1 While I cannot review here the immense literature on realism, I do want to stipulate at the outset of this chapter the way in which I am employing the term. I understand realism to be a representational discursive cultural practice through which authors construct a social world for their readers,2 a world they designate as “real” and hope their readers will as well. I am in complete agreement with Amy

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Kaplan when she writes, “realists do more than passively record the world outside; they actively create and criticize the meanings, representations, and ideologies of their own changing cultures.”3 In addition, the realist writers I discuss here employ literary realism in the service of political and ethical aims. Thus they stand in the tradition Amanda Claybaugh has called “the novel of purpose.” Like the nineteenth-century authors she so ably analyzes, twentiethcentury writers like Hughes, Baldwin, Orwell, and Camus likewise thought of novels not as self-contained aesthetic objects but rather as active interventions into social and political life. They thought of novels as performative, and they took their conception of performativity from the writings of social reform […] The novel of purpose […] was not simply moral but social, indeed, political. It was actively seeking to remake the world that it was also seeking to represent.4

At the same time these writers resist the temptation to allow their ethical and political purposes to override the peculiar art of literary realism: to construct a world filled with ambiguity, complexity, and human diversity—at once recognizable and strange. No one has captured this aim of realism with greater eloquence than James Baldwin: In overlooking, denying, evading [human] complexity – which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves – we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims.5

And as Milan Kundera argues so forcefully, literary realism of this sort is deeply anti-totalitarian and thus implicitly democratic.6 To take, with Cervantes, the world as ambiguity, to be obliged to face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths […] to have as one’s only certainty the wisdom of uncertainty, requires no less courage […] The world of one single Truth and the relative, ambiguous world of the novel are molded of entirely different substances. Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel.7



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Kundera’s observations serve to remind us that “literary realism” is in no way tied to epistemological realism. Although some early theorists of realist art sought to connect this aesthetic to the rise of the empirical sciences, there is no inherent link between empiricism (or any other epistemology) and artistic realism. Pam Morris is certainly correct when she writes that realism neither requires nor claims certainty. In practice, it does not aim at scientific or objective truth, and most especially its goal is not any authoritative or singular notion of truth. Its use of surface detail is governed by poetic selection and historicizing imagination, not documentary inventory.8

While realism is certainly a representational form of art, it remains a constructive enterprise, and its representational aims neither require nor imply a realist epistemology or a correspondence theory of truth.9 Like the nominalists, reformers, visual artists, and poets we have discussed in earlier chapters, twentieth-century realist writers have an intense interest in the lives of everyday persons living in ordinary situations.10 They are particularly concerned to make present the hidden lives of those whom society has ignored or pushed to the margins. Orwell’s interest in the working poor of northern England, Hughes’ concern to make the lives of invisible African Americans accessible to a white readership, and Camus’ fascination with marginalized characters like Meursault and Grand, all exemplify the realist artists’ dedication to introduce their readers to persons at once familiar and unfamiliar. Rather than simply “reflect” or “mirror” the world, realist writers actively engage the social world in which they live; through their discursive practices they seek to “produce” or “construct” the “real world,” thereby seeking to convince their readers to see the world in new ways. The realists inhabit a world in which, according to the historian Jackson Lears, “reality itself began to seem problematic, something to be sought rather than merely lived.” Realistic narratives enact this search not by fleeing into the imagination or into nostalgia for a lost past but by actively constructing the coherent social world they represent, and they do this not in a vacuum of fictionality but in direct confrontation with the elusive process of social change.11

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The technique of “verisimilitude” employed by realist writers engages in a subtle dialectic between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Charles Johnson, one of the most important theorists of the “New Negro Aesthetic” of the Harlem Renaissance, located this aesthetic within the larger American movement “back to the concrete,” which has yielded the new fascination of watching the strangeness and beauty of familiar things […] This compulsion exists now for the new generation of Negroes – the compulsion to find a new beauty in their own lives, ideals, and feelings […] It is revising old patterns, investing Negro life with a new charm and dignity and power. No life for them is without beauty, no beginning too low.12

Just as women writers like George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Stoddard, and the Brontë sisters used the realist genre to engage social issues of the nineteenth century,13 so also African American writers used the genre to address issues of race in the twentieth. Zora Neale Hurston expressed with typical bluntness the challenges facing African American writers in her essay “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” Argue all you will or may about injustice, but as long as the majority cannot conceive of a Negro or a Jew feeling and reacting inside just as they do, the majority will keep right on believing that people who do not look like them cannot possibly feel as they do, and conform to the established pattern.14

Harlem Renaissance authors turned to literary realism to depict the life-world of ordinary African Americans to both white and black readers. Hurston, who was trained in anthropology by Franz Boas, was particularly interested in ethnographic vernacular realism, and did extensive fieldwork in the rural south to prepare for writing Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her use of southern black dialect in the novel drew sharp criticisms from her literary colleagues who worried that white readers would construe her characters as stereotypes of the uneducated rural poor, exotic primitives designed to amuse and titillate white middle-class tastes.15 How might it be possible, in racist America, to write realist stories, novels, and plays about African American culture that create the conditions for genuine



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empathy between readers and fictional characters without presenting that culture as an object for the voyeuristic interests of privileged spectators?16 How could the techniques of verisimilitude be used to create the dialectic between the familiar and unfamiliar in order to portray the “strangeness and beauty of familiar things” within African American culture to readers who are predisposed to racial prejudice and stereotyped views of that culture? Realist art, as practiced by writers like Hurston and Hughes, seeks to depict its characters, settings, and actions with sufficient vividness that they are rendered as uniquely real and available to the reader’s imagination. Such texts evoke from the reader an identification with the characters’ basic humanity and seek to reshape the reader’s deepest convictions in a situation of moral address. Moral and political persuasion take place within the context of this rich, nuanced, ambiguous but still inhabitable narrative world. The reader is invited to dwell within the real-but-imagined world of the text in the hope that the reader’s own beliefs and behavior might be transformed through this encounter with “the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves.”17 Through this situation of address, realist literature renders the reader vulnerable to the claims and challenges of those characters who both engage and disrupt the reader’s subjectivity. In so doing, such realist texts seek to call the reader to an ethic of responsibility in and for the “neighbor,” an ethic in which the reader herself is put at risk by the claim of the neighbor in both text and world. Such an ethic engages oppressive conditions with critique, resistance, and transformative action. By focusing attention on ordinary people coping with recognizable challenges, these authors seek to evoke a situation of mutual vulnerability between characters and readers. At the same time, their rhetoric is often comic, irreverent, and skeptical, thus resisting the melodramatic seriousness of works that sentimentalize suffering. Still these artists insist that individual lives of ordinary people are the locus of genuine historic forces and that social change takes place only through our empathetic understanding of the situations of everyday people. For the remainder of this chapter I will set forth the work of Langston Hughes as an example of realist art as “resistance and reversal.” I will show that Hughes, and other twentieth-century African American authors, employed literary realism in the service of a social and political practice that sought to undermine American racism.18 Hughes did so by presenting African American culture as

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strange and familiar, as beautiful and challenging, as resisting and rebellious. By using the conventions of verisimilitude long associated with American realist literature, he engaged in a strategy of resistance and reversal; by depicting the “strangeness and beauty” of his own African American culture to unfamiliar and skeptical readers, he enacted an ethic of empathy and disruption, of responsibility and risk, of connection and critique. Religion, Resistance, and Reversal in the Work of Langston Hughes “I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen. But not really saved. It happened like this […]” With these poignant words Langston Hughes opens the story “Salvation,” part of his longer autobiography The Big Sea.19 He proceeds to give a heart-rending account of 12-year-old Langston waiting to be saved at a revival at his Auntie Reed’s church. Sitting beside his friend Westley in the front of the church on the mourners’ bench, “with all the other young sinners who had not been brought to Jesus,” Langston heard the preacher’s “rhythmical sermon,” the moans, groans, shouts, and songs of the congregants, and the incessant plea: “Won’t you come? Won’t you come to Jesus? Young lambs, won’t you come?” One by one the young people approached the altar to be saved until only Westley and Langston were left on the bench. “Finally Westley said to me in a whisper, ‘God damn! I’m tired o’ sitting here. Let’s get up and be saved.’ So he got up and was saved.” Langston, now alone at the front of the church, was surrounded by the prayers, wails, and laments of the whole congregation as his Auntie knelt at his feet and wept. But still Langston waited to be saved … because, you see, his Auntie had told him that when he was saved he would see a great light and Jesus would come into his life. “And I kept waiting serenely for Jesus, waiting, waiting – but he didn’t come. I wanted to see him, but nothing happened to me. Nothing! I wanted something to happen to me, but nothing happened.” Finally, the pressure of the moment became overwhelming as his Auntie pleaded “Langston, why don’t you come? Why don’t you come and be saved? Oh, Lamb of God! Why don’t you come?” Overcome by embarrassment, “I decided that maybe to save further trouble, I’d better lie, too, and say that Jesus had come, and get up and be saved. So I got up.” The church burst into “a



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sea of shouting,” his Auntie embraced him, and “joyous singing filled the room.” That night, for the first time in my life but one for I was a big boy twelve years old – I cried. I cried, in bed alone, and couldn’t stop. I buried my head under the quilts, but my aunt heard me. She woke up and told my uncle I was crying because the Holy Ghost had come into my life, and because I had seen Jesus. But I was really crying because I couldn’t bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn’t seen Jesus, and that now I didn’t believe there was a Jesus anymore, since he didn’t come to help me.

This touching vignette exhibits Hughes’ remarkable literary artistry—his ability to conjure a culture, his vivid descriptive prose, his capacity to summon profound emotions with simple evocative words. But it also gives us an insight, however brief, into Hughes’ own spiritual life. By all accounts Hughes was diffident about his own feelings. His biographer, Arnold Rampersad, writes that even his closest friends knew little or nothing of his inner emotional life. He grew up a motherless and fatherless child who never forgot the hurts of his childhood […] He had paid in years of nomadic loneliness and a furtive sexuality; he would die without ever having married, and without a known lover or a child.20

Hughes himself wrote, “When my grandmother died, I didn’t cry. Something about my grandmother’s stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything.”21 And yet the 12-year-old Langston cried—about his deception, about disappointing his aunt, about his loss of faith in the Jesus who “didn’t come to help me.” In contrast to James Baldwin, whose conversion to Christianity is powerfully told in fictional form in Go Tell It On the Mountain and in autobiographical form in Notes of a Native Son, Hughes never converted at all.22 Like Baldwin he was born and raised in a deeply Christian culture, but unlike the boy preacher Jimmy, Langston remained oddly external to the religious piety that surrounded him. While Baldwin experienced radical and wrenching conversions to and then from the Christian faith,23 Hughes was a perceptive observer but not an adult participant in the practices of

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evangelical Christianity.24 Perhaps that is why Baldwin takes us so deeply into his own inner life and that of his fictional characters, while Hughes is the master of vividly described surfaces. Hughes and Baldwin both control the artistry of realism, but Baldwin writes about the deep emotional struggles of his African American characters while Hughes seems content to paint the beautiful— and not so beautiful—surfaces of African American culture. That is why many think Baldwin to be the greater writer, because of his ability to bring his readers into the soul of his stories. Hughes in my judgment is no less a writer than Baldwin; he simply describes what he sees and thereby creates a graphically depicted world for the reader to inhabit. Like Akhmatova, he employs a spare writing style that evokes powerful emotional reactions in his readers. SONG FOR A DARK GIRL Way Down South in Dixie (Break the heart of me) They hung my black young lover To a cross roads tree. Way Down South in Dixie (Bruised body high in air) I asked the white Lord Jesus What was the use of prayer. Way Down South in Dixie (Break the heart of me) Love is a naked shadow On a gnarled and naked tree.25 BEALE STREET LOVE Love Is a brown man’s fist With hard knuckles Crushing the lips Blackening the eyes,— Hit me again, Says Clorinda.26



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GODS The ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond and jade, Sit silently on their temple shelves While the people Are afraid. Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond and jade, Are only silly puppet gods That the people themselves Have made.27

Hughes was, of course, deeply influenced by the rhythms of jazz and blues, so the realism of his poetry extended to the tone and tempo of his poems. In “The Weary Blues” Hughes captured the alliterative sensuous beat of the blues man’s music. Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway … He did a lazy sway … To the tune o’ those Weary Blues. With his ebony hands on each ivory key He made that poor piano moan with melody. O Blues! Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool Sweet Blues! Coming from a black man’s soul. O Blues!28

Hughes had a remarkable ability to cast up images of bodies without really describing them. A few observations about a trumpet player’s eyes or a dancer’s red dress is all he needed to conjure these persons.

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And in those images the history of a people is marked on his subjects, on both body and soul.

TRUMPET PLAYER The Negro With the trumpet at his lips Has dark moons of weariness Beneath his eyes where the smoldering memory of slave ships Blazed to the crack of whips about thighs.29 WHEN SUE WEARS RED When Susanna Jones wears red Her face is like an ancient cameo Turned brown by the ages. Come with a blast of trumpets, Jesus! When Susanna Jones wears red A queen from some time-dead Egyptian night Walks once again. Blow trumpets, Jesus!30

Hughes’ poetry, including his interest in bodies as sites of enacted human character, is indebted to the work of Walt Whitman.31 Hughes’ famous poem “I, Too” is written in direct response to Whitman’s earlier “I Sing America” in which he celebrated the virtues of everyday American men and women. Absent from Whitman’s poem, of course, are the very black bodies that Hughes seeks to celebrate.32 I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh,



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And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then. Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed— I, too, am America.

Like most of the African American writers who emerge from the “new Negro aesthetic” of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes had a complex relationship to both black and white audiences. Hughes, Hurston, and others were supported by white patrons like Charlotte “Grandmother” Mason and had to fight vigorously to maintain artistic freedom from their financial backers. Both Hughes and Hurston employed black dialect in their writings in an effort to depict the authentic speech of both rural and urban African Americans, but dialect also appealed to the ideology of African exotic primitivism held by many white supporters of Harlem Renaissance writers. Hughes and others were deeply influenced by the work of many white scholars, including the anthropologist Franz Boas, pragmatic philosophers John Dewey and William James, and poets like Walt Whitman and Vachel Lindsey.33 While African American writers created many of their own journals (such as The Crisis and Opportunity), they also published in established white magazines like The Nation and The New Republic. While black readership rose dramatically during the 1920s and 1930s, publishing success still depended in large part on the ability of black authors to gain the readership of white audiences. Hughes in particular struggled with the question of how to engage white readers while still giving an authentic account of the racism that so deeply shaped black experience in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. He published “The Negro Artist and the

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Racial Mountain” in The Nation shortly after his break with Charlotte Mason over the question of his artistic freedom. After exploring the complex relationship between artistic creation and both race and class, Hughes ends his essay with his famous manifesto of the young black artist. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.34

Hughes adopted diverse literary strategies in order to engage the racism so deeply engrained in the American character. Some of his poems, especially those dealing with “white” Christianity, carry an obvious message of rage about racism.35 You can’t sleep here, My good man, You can’t sleep here, This is the house of God. The usher opens the church door and he goes out. Lord! You can’t let a man lie In the streets like this Find an officer quick. Send for an ambulance. Maybe he’s sick but He can’t die on this corner Not here! He can’t die here. Death opens a door. Oh, God, Lemme git by St. Peter, Lemme sit down on the steps of your throne Lemme rest somewhere.



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What did yuh say, God? What did yuh say? You can’t sleep here … Bums can’t stay ….36

Or again: God slumbers in a back alley With a gin bottle in His hand. Come on God, get up and fight Like a man.37

Then, again, he can write in complex and unpredictable ways about the Christian God. Christ is a nigger, Beaten and black: O, bare your back! Mary is His mother Mammy of the South, Silence your mouth. God is His father— White Master above Grant Him your love. Most holy bastard Of the bleeding mouth: Nigger Christ On the cross of the South.38

In his short stories Hughes is able to develop these themes at greater length in poignant poetic-like prose. In “On the Road” he tells the story of Sargeant, “a human piece of night with snow on his face – obviously unemployed,” who is turned away by the Reverend Mr. Dorset when he seeks shelter in the parsonage on a cold snow-filled evening. Sargeant stumbles on and soon finds himself at the church next door, gazing up at “Christ on the crucifix in stone.” He tries to

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force open the church door but passers-by report him to the police and soon “two white cops arrived in a car, ran up the steps with their clubs […] [and] began to beat Sargeant over the head.” Sargeant holds on for dear life to one of the church pillars “and then the church fell down […] the whole church fell down in the snow.” Sargeant begins to walk down the street with the stone pillar on his shoulder which he then “threw […] six blocks up the street and went on” walking until he notices “Christ walking along beside him, the same Christ that had been on the church […] just like he was broken off the cross when the church fell down.” “Well, I’ll be dogged,” said Sargeant. “This here’s the first time I ever seed you off the cross.” “Yes,” said Christ, crunching his feet in the snow. “You had to pull the church down to get me off the cross.” “You glad?” said Sargeant. “I sure am,” said Christ. They both laughed […] “And you been up there two thousand years?” “I sure have,” Christ said. “Well, if I had a little cash,” said Sargeant, “I’d show you around a bit.” “I been around,” said Christ. “Yeah, but that was a long time ago.” “All the same,” said Christ. “I’ve been around.”

Soon Sargeant and Christ come upon hobo jungle near the railroad tracks. “I can go there and sleep,” said Sargeant. “[…] That place ain’t got no doors […] I’m sidetracking,” said Sargeant, “I’m tired.” “I’m gonna make it on to Kansas City,” said Christ. “O.K.,” Sargeant said. “So long!” […] He never did see Christ no more […] “Wonder where Christ is by now?” Sargeant thought. “He musta gone on his way on down the road.”

When a freight train comes by Sargeant hops aboard but to his great surprise he find the car is full of cops with clubs. “Dammit it, lemme in this car!” “Shut up,” barked the cop. “You crazy coon!” He rapped Sargeant across the knuckles and punched him in the stomach. “You ain’t out in no jungle now. This ain’t no train. You in jail.”



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[…] Suddenly Sargeant realized that he really was in jail! He wasn’t on no train. The blood of the night before had dried on his face, his head hurt terribly, and a cop outside in the corridor was hitting him across the knuckles for holding on to the door […] The bruised fingers were his, but not the door. Not the club, but the fingers […] “You wait,” mumbled Sargeant, black against the jail wall. “I’m gonna break down this door, too.” “Shut up—or I’ll paste you one,” said the cop. “I’m gonna break down this door,” yelled Sargeant as he stood up in his cell. Then he must have been talking to himself because he said, “I wonder where Christ’s gone? I wonder if he’s gone to Kansas City?”39

Stories give Hughes a chance to sketch out his characters in deeply sympathetic ways. Sargeant’s humanity, sense of humor, and courageous spirit all come through, even as religious indifference, police brutality, and racial tension are displayed in vivid form. Hughes is able to create a sense of outrage in the reader without employing rhetoric that would make Sargeant a mere melodramatic victim of white racism. Sargeant keeps his dignity, and even his agency, in a situation of dire abuse, thanks to Hughes’ subtle but effective use of humor and dialect in the chats between Christ and Sargeant. Hughes is particularly masterful in showing how race, class, gender, and sexuality combine to create a social world that threatens to imprison—literally as well as metaphorically—African Americans. At the same time Hughes refuses to believe that black subjectivity is wholly determined by these oppressive social forces. Rather, he understands that freedom and agency are achieved precisely in the employment of those social forces in new and innovative ways. Human subjects are formed by the social worlds into which we are born and over which we initially exercise no control. We do not choose our race or gender; they are simply “given” to us at birth. Indeed, our very identities are shaped by these “givens” since they are not only biological attributes of our bodies but also carry social norms that determine how we act and who we are as raced, gendered, and sexed human beings. Thus we are born into “regimes of truth,”40 a set of social relations that set the conditions for our identities as human subjects and agents. There is no “I” that can fully stand apart from the social conditions of its emergence; no “I” that is not implicated in a set of conditioning social norms, which, being norms, have a social character that exceed a purely personal or idiosyncratic meaning.41

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It is only through participation in these normative social relations, only by submitting to the practices that constitute our subjectivity, that we can begin to exercise some degree of agency or freedom. “Ethical agency is neither fully determined nor radically free […] This struggle with the unchosen conditions of one’s life, a struggle— an agency—is also made possible paradoxically, by the persistence of this primary condition of our unfreedom.”42 Hughes recognizes that the social norms that constitute human beings as racial, gendered, and sexual persons serve, ironically, as the conditions for their unfreedom and freedom, their bondage and agency. Who we are is determined by the way we repeat, practice, and employ the very norms that society bestows upon us without our consent.43 Indeed, we are able to come to some sense of self-recognition only as we live and act “in, with, and under” these norms and then engage in a “mode of self-crafting” that resists them or rebels against them.44 To question the social norms that condition us as persons is to threaten the very regimes of truth that constitute our identities.45 To question, resist, and critique the social norms that “make us who we are” is to put ourselves into question as well. Only by putting ourselves at risk, however, can we genuinely challenge the social world into which we have been born. Only through a disruption of these norms, and thereby of our own subjectivity, can we come to genuine selfrecognition. Moments of self-recognition are thus “sites of rupture” through which we gain recognition from others and thereby come to recognize ourselves. When we repeatedly seek recognition from others but fail to receive it; when we seek to express ourselves through the social norms that we have inherited but cannot be seen or heard, we find ourselves in a situation in which the norms of recognition are interrupted and a moment of self-crafting occurs. Langston Hughes gives narrative expression to these philosophical notions in brilliant yet accessible fashion in his poems, stories, novels, and plays. His grasp of the vulnerability and creativity of human persons, his insight into the painful yet liberating process of selfrecognition and resistance to dominant norms, is most fully on display in his collection of stories The Ways of White Folks, a work few consider to be one of Hughes’ best.46 In my judgment, however, these stories are classic examples of how agency is exercised in relation to social norms in a fashion that both resists those norms and seeks to reverse them. In these stories African American characters take center stage while the white actors, apparently in control of the social norms, are



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seen through the eyes of their black counterparts, who absorb, then resist, and finally reverse the norms that have come to control and oppress them. Michael and Anne Carraway were Northern whites—well-to-do, liberal, sophisticated, and artsy. In addition, They were people who went for Negroes […] But not in the socialservice, philanthropic sort of way, no. They saw no use in helping a race that was already too charming and naïve and lovely for words. Leave them unspoiled and enjoy them.47

With these biting sardonic words, Langston Hughes opens the story “Slave on the Block.” The Carraways went in for the Art of Negroes […] They owned all the Robeson records and all the Bessie Smith. And they had a manuscript of Countee Cullen’s […] They saw all the plays with or about Negroes, read all the books, and adored the Hall Johnson Singers. They had met Doctor DuBois, and longed to meet Carl Van Vechten. Of course they knew Harlem like their own backyard […] They were acquainted with lots of Negroes, too – but somehow the Negroes didn’t seem to like them very much. Maybe the Carraways gushed over them too soon […] Or maybe they tried too hard to make friends, dark friends, and the dark friends suspected something.48

One can imagine African American readers smiling knowingly over Hughes’ descriptions of the Carraways, and white readers—urban, liberal ones especially—squirming, more than a little, with uneasy recognition of themselves and their friends. The Carraways are not stereotypes, exactly; rather, Hughes lifts up certain of their traits, those transparently clear to black readers but conveniently ignored by whites, for the consideration of all his readers. Anne was a painter and Michael a composer, and they had long dreamed of a joint “concert-exhibition” with paintings and music together. “The Carraways, a sonata and a picture, a fugue and a picture. It would be lovely, and such a novelty, people would have to like it. And many of their things would be Negro” (p. 21). This idea literally took on flesh when “the most marvelous ebony boy walked into their life; a boy as black as all the Negroes they’d ever known put together” (p. 20). He was Luther, the nephew of their maid Emma, who had

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died a few weeks earlier, and he had come to gather her belongings. As soon as they met him the Carraways offered him a job as their gardener and insisted that he move into Emma’s old room in their home. Besides, they thought, he would “be good company for Mattie,” their new black maid, who “claims she’s afraid to stay alone at night when we’re out, so she leaves.” She leaves, Hughes lets the reader know, because “Mattie just likes to get up to Harlem […] Once out, with the Savoy open until three in the morning why come home?” (p. 23). With these simple words and scenes Hughes depicts two cultures living side by side but understanding little or nothing of one another. One senses almost from the beginning that no good can possibly come from Luther’s moving into the Carraway home. And, sure enough, soon Anne decides that she wants to paint Luther “nude, or at least half nude. A slave picture, that’s what she would do. The market at New Orleans for a background. And call it ‘The Boy on the Block’” (p. 24). So Anne painted the half-nude Luther day after day while Michael went into rhapsodies over Luther on the box without a shirt, about to be sold into slavery. He must put him into music right now. And he went to the piano and began to play something that sounded like Deep River in the jaws of a dog. (p. 25)

Occasionally the Carraways asked Luther to sing and he would do so—“southern worksongs and reels, and spirituals and ballads […] About all Luther did was pose and sing. And he got tired of that” (p. 26). Mattie and Luther became lovers and though Anne mildly disapproved of this relationship she kept him on, at least until she could finish “The Boy on the Block.” To make matters worse, especially for Michael, “Luther had grown a bit familiar lately. He smoked up all their cigarettes, drank their wine, told jokes on them to their friends” (p. 27). The tension finally reached breaking-point when Michael’s mother (whom Anne had never liked) came to visit and encountered Luther—shirtless, singing, and carrying a bunch of red roses—as he sauntered through the library where she was reading her morning Scripture. “Oh, good morning,” said Luther. “How long are you gonna stay in this house?”



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“I never liked familiar Negroes,” said Mrs. Carraway, over her nose glasses. “Huh?” said Luther. “That’s too bad! I never liked poor white folks.” (p. 29)

With that Mrs. Carraway “screamed, a short loud, dignified scream” and Michael came running in, siding with his mother, and immediately discharging Luther. Anne is distraught—“I haven’t finished ‘The Slave on the Block.’” But Michael insists that Luther leave. “Don’t worry ’bout me!” said Luther. “I’ll go.” “Yes, we’ll go,” boomed Mattie from the doorway. “We’ve stood enough foolery from you white folks! Yes, we’ll go. Come on Luther.” What could she mean: “stood enough”? What had they done to them, Anne and Michael wondered. They had tried to be kind. “Oh!” […] “Oh,” Anne moaned distressfully, “my ‘Boy on the Block’!” (pp. 30–1)

While the ending may not be as artful as the rest of the story, Hughes does succeed in displaying several subtle forms of liberal white racism that continue until this very day: the sexualizing of the black male body, the viewing of black bodies as objects—artistic objects to be sure—but objects nonetheless, the callous treatment of slavery as an occasion for artistic and musical expression, and a demeaning dehumanization under the guise of “being nice.” And the resistance shown by Mattie and Luther, though not drawn with the subtlety one might expect from Hughes, still shows that these two characters, though they know how to live within the Carraways’ white social norms, haven’t lost their dignity or agency even as they are cast out of the household. Other stories in this collection develop similar themes. In “The Blues I’m Playing”49 Hughes tells the story of “Oceola Jones, pianist, studied under Philippe in Paris. Mrs. Dora Ellsworth paid her bills” (p. 99). Clearly drawing on his own experiences with his patron Charlotte Mason, Hughes draws a poignant portrait of a young artist who is empowered by the generosity of her white supporter while the supporter nonetheless seeks to control Oceola’s artistic expression. His description of Mrs. Ellsworth as a dignified, well-intentioned artistic philanthropist is respectful and fairly drawn. Though Mrs. Ellsworth

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had never had a black performer among the artists she supported, she immediately began to treat Oceola as her protégée, once she heard her play Rachmaninoff ’s Prelude in G Sharp Minor, Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante Défunte, and even W.C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues. Mrs. Ellsworth is also aware of the cultural gap that separates her from Oceola, but she is determined to learn more about Oceola’s life outside of the arts. “She made a mental note that she must go up [to Harlem] sometime, for she had never yet seen that dark section of New York, and now that she had a Negro protégée, she really ought to know something about it” (p. 106). Dora Ellsworth is clearly much more self-aware than the Carraways and seeks to acknowledge the differences between her and Oceola, even as she seeks to emphasize their common love of music. Still she thinks that for the sake of art Oceola should leave her tiny flat in Harlem, and “eventually art and Mrs. Ellsworth triumphed” (p. 110). Oceola moves out of Harlem and takes a place in Greenwich Village, where she meets many other young artists who live in that part of the city. She still plays occasionally for parties in Harlem but life is increasingly shaped by the artistic world of Dora and her friends. For two years Oceola lives, studies, and plays in Paris at Mrs. Ellsworth’s expense. “She studied with Philippe, had the little apartment on the Left Bank, and learned about Debussy’s African background” (p. 112). Even as she absorbed the cultural norms of white European art, she also resisted it from within some deep part of her soul. “Oceola hated most artists, too, and the word art in French or English. If you wanted to play the piano or paint pictures or write books, go ahead! But why talk so much about it?” (pp. 112–13). And as for the cultured Negroes who were always saying art would break down color lines, art could save the race and prevent lynchings! “Bunk!” said Oceola. “My ma and pa were both artists when it came to making music, and the white folks ran them out of town for being dressed up in Alabama. And look at the Jews! Every other artist in the world’s a Jew, and still folks hate them.” (p. 113)

Oceola was a brilliant classical pianist, but when she played in the West Indian ball rooms or in the nightclubs frequented by black party-goers she would take the piano and beat out a blues for […] the assembled guests. In her playing of Negro folk music, Oceola never doctored it up, or filled



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it full of classical runs, or fancy falsities […] Music, to Oceola, demanded movement and expression, dancing and living to go with it. (p. 114)

Dora Ellsworth did her best to support Oceola’s career and to tolerate her different cultural habits, including her choice of foods. “There’s nothing quite so good as a pig’s foot,” said Oceola, “after playing all day.” “Then you must have pigs’ feet,” agreed Mrs. Ellsworth. But Dora feared that Oceola’s love for a Pullman porter now about to graduate from Meharry Medical School would undermine her single-minded devotion to her art. And when she married Pete in Atlanta, Mrs. Ellsworth refused to attend the wedding. “When she saw how love had triumphed over art, she decided she could no longer influence Oceola’s life. The period of Oceola was over.” For her part Oceola was “genuinely sorry that the end had come. Why did white folks think you could live on nothing but art? Strange! Too strange! Too strange!” (p. 120). While the story has basically ended, Hughes, like the musicianartist he was, decided to conclude with a coda, a scene in which “Oceola Jones came down from Harlem for the last time to play for Mrs. Dora Ellsworth.” In a music room in which “the Persian vases […] were filled with long-stemmed lilies,” Oceola plays Beethoven and Chopin with unequaled beauty. Suddenly Mrs. Ellsworth bursts out: “You could shake the stars with your music, Oceola. Depression or no depression, I could make you great […] Art is bigger than love” (p. 121). ‘Being married won’t keep me from making tours, or being an artist.” “Yes it will,” said Mrs. Ellsworth. “He’ll take all the music out of you.” […] And [Oceola’s] fingers began to wander slowly up and down the keyboard, flowing into the soft and lazy syncopation of Negro blues, a blues that deepened and grew into rollicking jazz, then into an earththrobbing rhythm that shook the lilies in the Persian vases of Mrs. Ellsworth’s music room. […] “This is mine … Listen! … How sad and gay it is. Blue and happy—laughing and crying … How white like you and black like me … How much like a man … And how like a woman … Warm as Pete’s mouth … These are the blues … I’m playing.” (pp. 122–3)

While the ending might be a tad melodramatic, the theme is clear: black artists can learn and even adopt the cultural norms of

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white culture and still remain connected to the soul of their own culture, and to their quintessential musical form—the blues. Classical music without heart and soul is finally no music at all. “Music, to Oceola, demanded movement, and expression, dancing and living to go with it.” Other stories in this collection introduce us to Cora, the black nursemaid to the young white girl, Jessy, who loses her decades-long employment with the Studevant family because she defends Jessy’s honor when she bears a child out of wedlock.50 “Anyhow, on the edge of Melton, the Jenkins niggers, Pa and Ma and Cora, somehow manage to get along” (p. 18). We also meet Arnie, the black ward of the white Pemberton family, who, though educated in the best schools and fully at home in Paris, is rejected by the Pembertons when he decides to marry a white Romanian student whom they first think to be a prostitute. Why else would a beautiful white woman be with a black man, even their own Arnie?51 And, finally, we meet Roy Williams, the brown-skinned violinist and, the toast of Vienna, Berlin, and Prague, now returning to his home in the South to die of an incurable lung disease.52 Roy Williams will die an unexpected death, however—by lynching—simply because he shook hands with “the white woman in the red hat,” the local spinster high school music teacher. He will die simply because he forgot he wasn’t in Europe, and held out his hand to this lady who understood music. They smiled at each other, the sick young colored man and the aging music teacher in the light of the main street […] And when the white folks left his brown body, stark naked, strung from a tree at the edge of town, it hung there all night, like a violin for the wind to play. (pp. 47, 50)

The Ways of White Folks was written in the early 1930s during the great depression and toward the end of the time African Americans call “the nadir,” the period 1890–1940 when black civil rights were regularly trampled upon and lynching was horribly common in the Jim Crow Southern states. The NAACP estimates that during the period 1889–1922 more than three and a half thousand black men were lynched. And, in the Northern states, de facto segregation in housing and widespread job discrimination made the plight of African Americans one fraught with danger and uncertainty. While Hughes could express his rage against white supremacy, especially in his poems



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of this era, he was also able to write with remarkable sensitivity, respect, and honesty about the white culture that threatened his life and the lives of his people. He understood far better than many how human dignity and freedom could survive, even flourish, in those moments of “self-crafting” that emerge from resistance to and rebellion against oppressive social norms. He understood, as well, that such resistance was not without cost, since our own well-being depends in large part upon those social norms which we do not choose but which, nonetheless, determine our existence. To rebel against the norms of that world is to put ourselves at risk, but only in so doing can we experience the “motion and joy”53 of lives of ethical responsibility and personal accountability, of lives in which “we risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human.”54 Hughes finds great beauty, drama, and poignancy in the lives of ordinary people; his is an aesthetic of the everyday. A number of scholars of African American literature have pointed to the influence of pragmatism on black writers,55 and some have argued that pragmatism provides the best philosophical aesthetic for interpreting and developing black political thought.56 Cornel West has shown the deep pragmatist commitments of W.E.B. DuBois and includes him among the “canon” of American pragmatist philosophers. George Hutchinson has shown the way that pragmatist philosophy shaped the aesthetic theories of Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson, leading them to the conviction that the arts are the most effective instruments for training people to cultural pluralism, creative democracy, achieving the widest possible range of human sympathy and understanding […] The democratic ethos depends primarily […] upon ideas “spontaneously fed by emotion and translated into imaginative vision and fine art.”57

Indeed, Hughes’ own aesthetic seems a clear expression of John Dewey’s understanding of “art as experience”: The sources of art in human experience will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd; who notes the delight of the housewife in tending her plants, and the intent interest of her goodman in tending the patch of green in front of

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the house; the zest of the spectator in poking the wood burning on the hearth and in watching the darting flames and crumbling coals.58

While James, Dewey, and other pragmatists vigorously addressed the issue of slavery in American democracy, they did not take up the deeper issues of racism and white supremacy. Still, scholars like Eddie Glaude argue that Dewey in particular has a sufficient sense of the tragic to warrant the use of his aesthetic in the development of African American politics in the twenty-first century. To embrace pragmatism is to hold close a fundamental truth in the capacities of ordinary people to transform their circumstances while rejecting hidden and not-so-hidden assumptions that would deny them that capacity. To bind pragmatism and African American politics together […] is to open new avenues for thinking about both.59

Despite the influence of pragmatic philosophy on the Harlem Renaissance, it would be a mistake, in my judgment, to use pragmatism as an overarching philosophical category for the interpretation of Langston Hughes’ writings. Like Dewey, Hughes saw aesthetic beauty in the everyday actions of ordinary people. Like Whitman, Hughes celebrated the human body and its liberation from oppression. Like Zora Neale Hurston, Hughes resisted the abstraction of “the human,” preferring instead to provide detailed accounts of human action and human suffering so as “to redescribe the world in new vocabularies, thereby both exposing the cruelty of the powerful and bringing excluded persons into positions from which they could contribute powerfully to the definition of what it meant to be American.”60 But unlike white pragmatist philosophers or even African American theorists like Locke, Johnson, Cullen, and McKay, Hughes had a much deeper connection to the oppressive conditions that both constrained and enabled the exercise of black agency in racist America. He had a much better eye and ear for the presence of evil in both its obvious violent forms like lynching and its less obvious but still hurtful forms that rendered black subjects the sole object of the white “normative gaze.”61 For this reason, I do not think that Hughes is subject to the rather harsh criticism that Cornel West makes of the Harlem Renaissance: Instead of serious and substantive attempts to recover the culturally hybrid heritage of black folk, we witness the cantankerous reportage



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of a black, middle-class identity crisis […] In this sense the Harlem Renaissance was a self-complimentary construct concocted by rising black middle-class artistic figures to gain attention for their own anxieties at the expense of their individual and social identities, and to acquire authority to impose their conception of legitimate forms of black cultural production on black America.62

Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston (neither of whom West names in this critique) both suffered from the elitist attitudes and imperious demands made by the self-appointed leaders of the Harlem Renaissance63 even as both sought to give voice to the vernacular realism of urban and rural black dialect. Both were committed to “recover[ing] the culturally hybrid heritage of black folk” in their poetry, novels, plays, and short stories. Thus both resist any easy categorization as either “pragmatists” or “Harlem Renaissance artists,” despite the influence of both movements on their art. Their work cannot be reduced to the broad generalizations scholars make about larger philosophical and artistic movements. Pragmatist philosophers have been criticized, rightly in my opinion, for their underestimation of the power of evil and for their overly optimistic attitude toward the alleviation of the conditions of human suffering. Cornel West has argued, for example, that “the pragmatic emphasis on the future as the terrain for humans-making-a-difference (including a better difference) results in a full-blown fallibilism and experimentalism […] Unique selves acting in and through participatory communities give ethical significance to an open, riskridden future.”64 Yet, West goes on to argue, Dewey’s hopeful view of human communities fails to convince because the “sense of evil and the tragic makes no appearances in Dewey’s vast corpus.” He continues, [T]he culture of democratic societies requires not only the civic virtues of participation, tolerance, openness, mutual respect and mobility, but also dramatic struggles with the two major culprits – disease and death – that defeat and cut off the joys of democratic citizenship […] Such citizenship must not be so preoccupied – or obsessed – with possibility that it conceals or represses the ultimate facts of the human predicament.65

Eddie Glaude has recently defended Dewey against these charges, arguing that Dewey has a clear and defensible grasp of the tragic.66 According to Glaude, for Dewey,

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the world of action is a world of change, “a precarious and perilous place,” which, when it is all said and done, retains its hazardous character, in spite of our intelligent efforts. The dangers may be modestly modified but hardly eliminated.67

Moreover, Dewey—precisely because his naturalism rejects any notion of religious melioration of the tragedy—faces the tragic with great moral resolve and “a will to engage the world with a reasonable hope that our actions may make our world better than it would otherwise be.”68 Glaude goes on, ingeniously in my estimation, to employ the work of Toni Morrison to show the relevance of Dewey’s pragmatism for issues of both tragedy and race. He construes Sethe’s decision to kill her children in Morrison’s Beloved as a “choice […] between competing values, between incompatible, but morally justifiable courses of action. In this sense the novel exemplifies a pragmatic view of tragedy that takes seriously the blue note of American history.”69 Moreover, Glaude argues, Morrison’s characters refuse to take refuge in any notion of religious rescue from their plight. At the end of the story, we are faced with broken human beings trying to piece together a life with one another. No grace still, real or imagined […] I believe Morrison’s novel brilliantly realizes what I have called the pragmatic view of tragedy: we must look the tragedy of our moral experiences squarely in the face and, with little certainty as to the outcomes, humbly act to make a better world for ourselves and our children.70

Glaude makes a persuasive case that the pragmatic tradition can be developed in such a way as to deepen its resources for dealing with evil and tragedy; indeed, Cornel West’s own “prophetic pragmatism” is just one attempt to carry out such a task. But the fact remains that the historic moral languages of pragmatism—fallibilism, experimentalism, meliorism, choices between incompatible goods, voluntarism—seem highly intellectualized categories when placed beside the vivid examples of unjustified suffering that Hughes and other African American writers place before us. While Sethe’s decision may well be a choice “between competing values, between incompatible, but morally justifiable courses of action,” the narrative depiction of the conditions that present her with such horrible life options makes “choice” a feeble ethical category to employ.71



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As many contemporary philosophers have argued, the exercise of human agency should not be reduced to matters of mere choice. Construing ethical agency as choice runs the risk of conceptualizing the human subject as one constituted primarily by the exercise of an autonomous will that exhibits “the capacity for self-mastery and self-government.”72 Pragmatism’s historical ethical categories surely participate in just such a conception of the human person, despite the pragmatists’ own emphasis upon “ethics as a social practice.”73 Rather than construing the characters in Hughes’ stories and poems, or in Morrison’s novels, as persons “endowed with a will, a freedom, and an intentionality” which is “thwarted by relations of power that are considered external to the subject,”74 these characters should be seen as employing the very norms that oppress them—and which they have internalized—as a form of reiteration, resistance, and destabilization of those norms. Sethe’s action is truly tragic in large part because the norms which oppress her offer so few possibilities for the exercise of her agency. That her actions which end the life of her child should be seen as “morally justifiable” makes far greater sense against the background of “subject formation”75 than against the background of “choice” or “decision.” When Sergeant yells, “I’m gonna break down this [jail] door, too,” his action should not be seen as the powerless rant of a defeated, incarcerated man, but rather as an expression of human courage and dignity in the face of a white supremacist state bolstered by unconstrained police power. Sergeant’s cry is not the thwarting of his agency but the very exercise of that agency within a set of oppressive social norms. And the readers of both stories are more deeply affected by these events when they realize that the world they have made and continue to sustain has created the very conditions under which such tragic agency is exercised. While Hughes is certainly formed by the pragmatic aesthetic tradition, his employment, performance, and reiteration of that tradition creates the space within which he both destabilizes and resists the norms of that tradition.76 In Hughes’ able artistic hands, the pragmatic aesthetic not only embraces the lives of ordinary black folk, it also displays the remarkable forms of human dignity and agency exercised by those who might otherwise be seen as the mere victims of white supremacist social norms. In this way, Hughes employs but also subverts and reshapes the pragmatic aesthetic tradition.

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Longing for Salvation: Spiritual Desire and the Absence of God And I kept waiting serenely for Jesus, waiting, waiting – but he didn’t come. And so we return to the scene from which we began: Langston Hughes’ “Salvation.” By all accounts Langston Hughes was a melancholic man—growing up fatherless and motherless,77 in but never truly of the world of African American Christianity, a man of mixed race and uncertain sexuality, a person caught between the worlds of high culture and “low-down folk” but never fully at home in either.78 He writes of an early experience of hearing boys playing ball in the dusk, running and shouting across the vacant lot on the corner. For the first time loneliness strikes me, strikes me terribly, settling down in a dull ache round about, in the dusk of the twilight, in the laughter of playing boys … I am lonely.79

Hughes’ life, by his own account, was one of loss, loneliness, and longing—longing for Jesus, for family, for friendship, for belonging, for that ever elusive “home.” And yet he found a place of solace in his writing. Through his power of observation, his descriptive genius, his eye and ear for surfaces both lovely and ugly, he was able to depict and thereby render a “real world,” the world occupied by the people of African descent with whom Hughes so deeply identified, a world he made available to both black and white readers. Hughes’ attraction to the blues is well known, but though he was able to adopt the beat, rhythm, and cadences of the musical form, he was not himself a “blues man.” According to Rampersad’s biography, At an open air theatre on Independence Avenue, from an orchestra of blind musicians, Hughes first heard the blues. The music seemed to cry, but the words somehow laughed. The effect on him was one of piercing sadness, as if his deepest loneliness had been harmonized […] Between the church and the blues singers the world of black feeling and art opened before Langston. He neither felt religion nor could sing the blues, and yet both the religious drama and the secular music soothed and diverted him from his sense of solitude.80

There is a kind of melancholic spirituality that infuses all of Hughes’ work. He shows us a world—both white and black—from which God



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is absent, but in which the human soul in all its complexity plays out on the surfaces of human bodies and in the actions of human beings. His is a melancholic, soulful, blues spirituality—a spirituality of loneliness, longing, laughter, and life. The blues, as James Cone argues in his classic study The Spirituals and the Blues, emerge from slave seculars […] [which] expressed the skepticism of black slaves who found it difficult to take seriously anything suggesting the religious faith of white preachers […] While seculars were not strictly atheistic as defined by modern Western philosophy, they nonetheless uncover the difficulties black people encountered when they attempted to relate white Christian categories to their situation of oppression.81

The blues grow out of similar soil and express similar sentiments. Implied in the blues is a stubborn refusal to go beyond the existential problem and substitute otherworldly answers. It is not that the blues reject God; rather, they ignore God by embracing the joys and sorrows of life […] This is not atheism; rather, it is believing that transcendence will only be meaningful when it is made real in and through the limits of historical experience […] The blues people believe that it is only through the acceptance of the real as disclosed in concrete human affairs that a community can attain authentic existence.82

A blues spirituality is a realist aesthetic played out in the apparent absence of God. Hughes reacted to God’s absence in a variety of ways through his writing: anger, cynicism, sarcasm, irony, and humor. Recall some of the poetry that we considered earlier. In “A Christian Country” Hughes sees God as a drunk with a gin bottle slumbering in an alley and calls for God to “get up and fight like a man.” In the deeply ambiguous “Christ in Alabama” he refers to the “beaten and black […] Nigger Christ”; and in “Song for a Black Girl” he depicts a horrible scene of lynching and asks the “white Jesus, what is the use of prayer.” And perhaps most famously in the poem “Goodbye Christ”—later recanted by Hughes—he writes, “Goodbye, Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova. Beat it on away from here now.”83 In “Gods,” which carries a less angry but still cynical mode, he suggests that the gods people worship are simply “silly puppet gods that the people themselves have made.”

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Clearly Hughes believed that white Christianity was deeply implicated in American racism, and much of his anger is directed against the “white Christ.” At the same time, Hughes could describe the vibrancy and power of the black church with unequaled skill. Although he was neither a believer nor a participant in black Christianity, he could nonetheless render the beauty and energy of its remarkable spirituality. Here Hughes mixes together a heady brew of descriptive beauty, ironic distance, and good-natured humor. Some of his most delightful musings on black religion take place through his character Madam Alberta K. Johnson, an entrepreneur (owner of a hair salon, a barbeque stand, and now, in the depression, a cook) in the African American community, and a figure through which Hughes portrays the everyday challenges of black folks. Her encounter with the minister is a lovely example of Hughes’ multiple skills on display. MADAM AND THE MINISTER Reverend Butler came by My house last week. He said, Have you got A little time to speak? He said, I am interested In your soul. Has it been saved, Or is your heart stone-cold? I said, Reverend, I’ll have you know I was baptized Long ago. He said, What have you Done since then? I said, None of your Business, friend. He said, Sister Have you back-slid?



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I said, It felt good— If I did! He said, Sister, Come time to die, The Lord will surely Ask you why! I’m gonna pray For you! Goodbye! I felt kinder sorry I talked that way After Rev. Butler Went away— So I ain’t in no mood For sin today.84

So, too, in a first-person poem titled “Communion,” Hughes gives the reader a brief look into the incomprehensible spiritual power of the Eucharist. I was trying to figure out What it was all about But I could not figure out What it was all about So I gave up and went To take the sacrament And when I took it It felt good to shout!85

Hughes is a master of “doubleness.” His own life was a complex symphony of black and white, poverty and riches, doubt and longing, sexuality and abstinence. Hughes viewed the human condition as inevitably complex, a mixture of good intentions and bad, a mishmash of longing for salvation and pursuit of the delights of the flesh, a hodgepodge of the comic and the tragic. For Hughes these terms express not binary opposites, but rather the “doubleness” that clings to every human life—not either/or, but both/and. In a manner similar to Luther’s famous anthropological assertion, we are “simul iustus et

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peccator,” at one and the same time righteous and sinners, Hughes expands DuBois’ notion of racial doubleness and applies it to the human condition writ large. To understand the human condition we must recognize the deep conspiracy between the saint and sinner in each of us. Nowhere are these themes developed with such insight and maturity as in his short story “Big Meeting.” The story, first published in Scribner’s Magazine in July 1935, clearly draws upon Hughes’ own “conversion” experience as told in The Big Sea, but here the protagonists—two young teen black boys—sit outside the tent in which the meeting is being held. “We were young and wild and didn’t believe much in revivals, so we stayed outside in the road where we could smoke and laugh like the white folks. But both Bud’s mother and mine were under the tent singing.”86 The white folks from around the area would drive their cars into hearing distance of the revival in order to enjoy the singing or observe the spectacle. “You’ll hear some good singing out here […] I always did love to hear the darkies singing.”87 But the black folk inside the tent had come with serious purpose. Scores of Negroes from the town and nearby villages and farms […] came from miles around to bathe their souls in a sea of song, to shout and cry and moan […] and to pray for all the sinners who had not yet seen the light.

The two boys sat in a tree above the “ten or twelve parties of whites parked there in the dark, smoking and listening, and enjoying themselves, like Bud and I, in a not very serious way.”88 Hughes thus sets a scene with three locales—the African Americans inside the tent singing, dancing, and making noise before the Lord; the white visitors from another world smoking and enjoying the show; and the no-man’s-land of the two black young teenagers, neither under the tent with their kinfolk and friends nor alongside the visiting white folk, but perched precariously above it all in the branches of a tree. Hughes’ descriptions of the happenings rely again on his ear for dialect. The song ended as an old black woman inside the tent got up to speak. “I rise to testify dis evenin’ fo’ Jesus!” she said. “Ma Saviour an’ ma Redeemer an’ de chamber wherein I resusticates ma soul. Pray fo’ me, brothers and



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sisters. Let yo’ mercies bless me in all I do an’ yo’ prayers go with me on each travelin’ voyage through dis land […] Trials and tribulations surround me – but I’m goin’ on,” the woman in the tent cried. Shouts and exclamations of approval broke out all over the congregation.89

While the white spectators comment sarcastically on what they are seeing and hearing, the boys’ discomfort with their liminal position increases. Hughes heightens the tension of the scene by using the voice of the narrator to produce beautifully lyrical descriptions of the worship under the tent. Rocking proudly to and fro as the second chorus boomed and swelled beneath the canvas, Mama began to clap her hands, her lips silent now in this sea of song she had started, her head thrown back in joy – for my mother was a great shouter. Stepping gracefully to the beat of the music, she moved out toward the center aisle into a cleared space. Then she began to spring on her toes with little short rhythmical hops. All the way up the long aisle to the pulpit gently she leaped to the clap-clap of hands, the pat of feet, and the steady booming songs of her fellow worshipers. Then Mama began to revolve in a dignified circle, slowly, as a great happiness swept her gleaming black features, and her lips curved into a smile […] Mama was dancing before the Lord with her eyes closed, her mouth smiling, and her head held high.90

If realism is the most “visual” of prose styles, then Hughes describes and conjures Mama with a vividness not even a camera could match. We are there with Mama; we are mesmerized by the beauty and soulfulness of her movements, as if we were sitting in the tree with the two young men. That is why it is such a shock for the boys (and us) to hear the white woman laugh out loud, “My Lord, John, it’s better than a show!” The narrator recounts that “Something about the way she laughed made my blood boil.” But the power of the performance under that tent draws the boys’ attention away from the white folk and back to the singing, dancing, and shouting of the believers. To a great hand-clapping, body-rocking, foot-patting rhythm, Mama was repeating the chorus over and over. Sisters leaped and shouted and perspiring brothers walked the aisles bowing left and right, beating time,

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shaking hands, laughing aloud for joy, and singing steadily when, at the back of the tent, the Reverend Duke Braswell arrived.91

Hughes was not adverse to criticizing black preachers and their manipulation of the emotions and finances of their congregants. In his short story “Rock, Church” and his play “Tambourines to Glory,” Hughes exposes the deceit of black clergy who line their own pockets at the expense of their impoverished church members. As Essie says toward the end of “Tambourines,” “Religion’s got no business being made into a gyp game. The part of God that is in anybody is not to be played with—and everybody has got a part of God in them.” Hughes’ beautiful and deeply respectful account of the tent meeting is not the product of someone who romanticized the black church. But that such an account could come from someone who stood outside the tent, and yet understood profoundly the happenings inside, is a wonder to behold. Through the eyes of his young narrator, Hughes takes us step by step through Reverend Braswell’s sermon: the opening prayer imploring the grace of God upon the needy, the supplications for named members of the gathering in need of divine assistance, and finally the narration of the passion and crucifixion of Jesus. “Power,” the minister said. “Power! Without money and without titles, without position, he had power! And that power went out to the poor and afflicted. For Jesus said, ‘The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.’” “He sho did!” cried Bud’s mother.

The Passover meal, the prayer in the garden, the betrayal, the arrest, the denial, the trial, the mocking, the beatings, the crown of thorns, the cries of “crucify”—all these the preacher recounts with powerful heart-rending rhetoric. The assembly breaks into song as the preacher describes the pounding of the nails into Jesus’ hands and feet. “Don’t drive it!” a woman screamed. “Don’t drive them nails! For Christ’s sake! Oh! Don’t drive ’em.” In song I heard my mother’s voice cry: Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?



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The Reverend Duke Braswell stretched wide his arms against the white canvas of the tent. In the yellow light his body made a cross-like shadow on the canvas.

Oh, it makes me tremble, tremble! Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

“Let’s go,” said the white woman in the car beyond us. “This is too much for me!” They started the motor and drove noisily away in a swirl of dust. “Don’t go,” I cried from where I was sitting at the root of the tree. “Don’t go,” I shouted, jumping up. “They’re about to call for sinners to come to the mourners’ bench. Don’t go!” But their car was already out of earshot. I didn’t realize I was crying until I tasted my tears in my mouth.92

And with that the story ends. It is clear that standing “outside the tent” does not foreclose a remarkably attentive and sensitive account of what happens “inside the tent.” Nor does the longing for salvation, or the tears of desire, vanish simply because “we didn’t believe much in revivals.” And, amazingly, that longing for salvation extends even to the bystanders, spectators, and mockers, for they too will be called forward to the mourners’ bench. In the liminal space of that tree a young boy reaches out in two directions—toward the rituals of salvation and toward the enemies now become neighbors-in-need— and in the end, there are only tears. I have argued in the first two chapters that a sacramental spirituality always assumes the absence of God. God is hidden in the humanity and death of Jesus of Nazareth, in the ordinary elements of water, bread, and wine, elements which, when added to a word of promise, both represent and re-present the gracious, loving, promising God. Hughes’ aesthetic is so powerfully poignant because he once believed the promise—he longed to be saved—but when Jesus didn’t come to help him he abandoned his faith and no longer believed “there was a Jesus anymore.” His is thus a realist, blues spirituality lived out in God’s absence. And yet the longing remains powerfully present throughout his writing, a longing which, unable to believe the promise, now turns on to itself as melancholia.93 But the sacramental qualities of his work remain as well, as “Big Meeting” shows so clearly.94 Somehow the absent God is hidden there under the tent, if only we could find him.

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Longing for salvation in search of an apparently absent God has a long history within both Jewish and Christian spiritual practice.95 For both theological traditions, the recognition that God is hidden from human sight and therefore unknowable is not—as many moderns think—the rejection of faith; it is rather an essential component of all genuine faith.96 If God is to be known then God alone must take the steps to become manifest to human recognition. The encounter with God is a gift of God’s grace and requires an act of surrender on the part of the faithful recipient. The acknowledgment of God’s absence is therefore an essential step in the lifelong process of gratefully receiving God’s gracious presence. Perhaps there isn’t such a great distance after all between those who long for salvation but feel they never find it, and those who embark on the journey of discipleship with fear, trembling, and tears. Most people were shocked to learn, after the posthumous publication of her letters, of the profound doubts that plagued Mother Teresa throughout her life and ministry. “As for me,” she once wrote, “the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”97 In her worst moments, she bears a striking resemblance to Hughes, for whom Jesus did not come. “What do I labour for? If there be no God—there can be no soul.—if there is no soul then Jesus—You also are not true.”98 With her confessor, she regularly refers to Jesus as “the Absent one” and admits that she lives constantly with “the darkness in my soul.”99 God’s profound hiddenness is experienced in equal measure by those who commit themselves to a life of faith and discipleship and by those who long for that faith but cannot embrace it. In the case of Langston Hughes, coarse words like unbeliever, atheist, even agnostic seem strikingly inappropriate for one who sees, feels, and touches the heartbeat of faith with such remarkable sensitivity.100 Through his powerful descriptions, his eloquent words, his anger and humor, and his sense of the tragic and the comic, Langston Hughes sets before his readers “the strangeness and beauty of familiar things” and offers us models of lives lived well—with courage, dignity, good humor, and just enough resistance to carry on another day. “I wonder where Christ’s gone? I wonder if he’s gone to Kansas City?”

4

HUMANITY WITHOUT GOD FAITH WITHOUT ILLUSIONS: GEORGE ORWELL

Rethinking Faith: Atheism Reconsidered Consider two religious thinkers—one medieval, the other modern— on prayer and the absence of God. Lord, if you are not here, where shall I seek you, being absent? But if you are everywhere, why do I not see you present? Truly you dwell in unapproachable light. But where is unapproachable light, or how shall I come to it? Or who shall lead me to that light and into it, that I may see you in it? Again, by what marks, under what form, shall I seek you? I have never seen you, O Lord, my God; I do not know your form. What, O most high Lord, shall this man do, an exile far from you? What shall your servant do, anxious in his love of you, and cast out afar from your face? He pants to see you, and your face is too far from him. He longs to come to you, and your dwelling-place is inaccessible. He is eager to find you, and knows not your place. He desires to seek you, and does not know your face. Lord, you are my God, and you are my Lord, and never have I seen you. It is you that hast made me, and has made me anew, and has bestowed upon me all the blessing I enjoy; and not yet do I know you. Finally, I was created to see you, and not yet have I done that for which I was made. Be it mine to look up to your light, even from afar, even from the depths. Teach me to seek you, and reveal yourself to me, when I seek you, for I cannot seek you, except you teach me, nor find you, except you reveal yourself. Let me seek you in longing, let me long for you in seeking; let me find you in love, and love you in finding. Lord, I acknowledge and I thank you that you have created me in this your image, in order that I may be mindful of you, may conceive of you, and love you; but that image has been so consumed and wasted away by vices, and obscured by the smoke of wrong-doing, that it cannot achieve that for which it was made, except you renew it, and create it anew. I do not endeavor, O Lord, to

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penetrate your sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my understanding with that; but I long to understand in some degree your truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe,—that unless I believed, I should not understand. (Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, twelfth century ce)1 “O Lord, open Thou my lips.” I pray the Lord that he allow me to pray. I don’t pray the Lord for just asking this or that, but I pray for Him or Her, for the Unique One, to free my prayer, to allow me to pray. That’s why it’s a prayer and an order at the same time: be the one who allows me to pray. So, be the addressee, be the addressee of my prayer, and allow me to pray. It’s prayer after the prayer – which is the prayer before the prayer, the prayer for the prayer. So, I am not, I should not be sure that the addressee is here, and I even have to imply that the addressee might not be here. And might never be here. Please be here, open my lips. So the prayer of the prayer, the prayer which is encrypted or included in the prayer is this address to an invisible addressee, God is perhaps present, I don’t know, I’m not sure of that, I’m not sure. If we were sure that at the other end of the prayer God would show up, and that we produce the addressee, that wouldn’t be a prayer. The possibility that God remains eternally absent, that there might be no addressee at the other end of the prayer is the condition of the prayer. If I was sure that my prayer would be received by some addressee, there would be no prayer. So, that’s why I would go so far as to say there should be a moment of atheism in the prayer. The possibility that God doesn’t answer, doesn’t exist. And I pray God that He, but that’s up to Him, that He be there. But the possibility for Him not to listen to, not to respond to His name, is included in the essence of the prayer. ( Jacques Derrida, Body of Prayer, twenty-first century ce)2

Medieval Catholicism and modern Judaism both have an acute sense of the hiddenness, even absence, of God. For Anselm, writing in the twelfth century ce, God’s absence incites his desire to seek God wherever God might be found. Anselm’s longing for God, his desire to become “that for which I was made,” can be satisfied only if God provides the means and access to God’s hidden reality. For that reason Anselm assumes the prayerful stance of the “believing unbeliever,” the seeker who believes not because he knows with certainty but because he



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loves with a desire that cannot be stilled. Anselm becomes the faithful supplicant in order that he might comprehend the incomprehensible God. He believes in order that he might understand (fides quaerens intellectum). “Lord, I believe; help Thou my unbelief ” (Mark 9:24). Jacques Derrida shares Anselm’s sense of the incomprehensibility and inaccessibility of God. Like Anselm his reflections upon God are shaped by a desire to pray. He knows, as does Anselm, that prayer itself is possible only if God “allows” the pray-er truly to pray. That is why Derrida’s prayer begins with the petition, “be the addressee, be the addressee of my prayer, and allow me to pray.” But unlike Anselm, whose desire for the absent God creates a confidence that God will become accessible to his seeking, Derrida introduces a further note of uncertainty. Inherent in the act of prayer itself is “a moment of atheism,” a recognition that God—the addressee of the prayer—may “not to listen to,” or may “not to respond to His name.” For the possibility that “God does not exist” is the condition of making this form of address a true prayer and not, for example, a command or an order. If Anselm is the “believing unbeliever” then Derrida is the “atheistic believer.” But neither unbelief nor atheism keeps either supplicant from offering his prayer to God. Ours is an age in which belief and unbelief, theism and atheism, religion and non-religion are contrasted as binary opposites. Representatives of both opposing camps seem dedicated to offering these alternatives as forced choices. Either you are a believer or an unbeliever, an atheist or a theist, religious or non-religious. Prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins3 and Christopher Hitchens4 (Terry Eagleton charmingly calls them “Ditchkins”5) have offered vigorous defenses of atheism combined with virulent critiques of religion and religious belief. We are accustomed to conservative believers—orthodox or fundamentalist—denouncing unbelief or atheism in its many forms in the name of God, Christ, or true religion, but this particular binary is so deeply ensconced in our culture that even otherwise thoughtful writers join the chorus of forced-choice advocates. So Charles Matthewes in his otherwise quite balanced A Theology of Public Life engages in rhetorical overkill, accusing “secular liberals” of constructing religious believers as the unspoken ‘other’ against which ‘we’ define ourselves. On its picture, for example, America is split between decent, right-thinking liberal moderates who are content to let others do what

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they want, so long as they can sip their lattes, flip through the New York Times, and zip to the organic market in their SUVs; and psychologically corseted redneck rubes who mutter darkly about black helicopters and UN conspiracies and pause from stacking school boards, propagating patriarchy, and promoting creationism only to bomb abortion clinics and field-strip their M-16s […] Driven by this anxiety, liberal theorists marginalized all those who opposed liberalism as reactionaries or relics of the past, a crotchety old lunatic fringe of back-country wackos who should be ignored, or better, put on cognitive reservations until they die off.6

That such rhetoric can be employed by an author devoted to advocating a form of Augustinian theology in which the human person is seen as created for communion with others, characterized by openness to others, and devoted to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, shows how deeply the sacred/secular, believing/non-believing, religious/non-religious dichotomy shapes our thought patterns in the modern world. It is especially surprising that the believer/unbeliever dichotomy has such a hold on both public perception and academic discourse, because scholars in the study of religion have over the past few decades sought to demystify and relativize the term “religion.” Jonathan Z. Smith has long reminded scholars that “religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytical purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.”7 Religion, Smith has consistently argued, is not a “native term” but an analytical construction created by the scholar for purposes of definition and generalization. Scholars call certain beliefs and practices “religious” because the term helps the scholar to categorize and analyze aspects of human experience under a common rubric. Talal Asad has more recently argued that the notions of “religion” and the “secular” are paired terms which arise in the contestation concerning the nature of the modern state.8 The term “secular” is employed in order to exclude certain practices from the exercise of political power by consigning those practices, usually called “religion,” to the private realm. “Secular” and “religion” do not designate natural or stable fields of discourse and practice; rather, they are constructed notions designed to assert power and specify fields of influence within the modern nation-state. Ann Taves, building on the work of Emile Durkheim, helpfully distinguishes between “things people view as special or they set apart



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[…] and the systems of beliefs and practices some people associate with some special things.”9 “Sacred things” are those things “set apart” by individuals or communities because they are considered “special”; “beliefs” are ideas or notions people associate with “sacred things”; and “rites or rituals” are those disciplining practices by which communities enact the “specialness” or “sacredness” of things set apart. Scholars use “religion” and “religious” to describe all three aspects of sacred experiences, often without acknowledging the important differences among sacred things, beliefs, and rites or rituals. Taves rightly asserts that there is “an infinite variety of things, including experiences, that people set apart” so that the attempt to divide the world “into two domains, one containing all that is sacred and the other all that is profane”10 is doomed to failure. The Christian tradition has a long history of seeing deep connections between belief and unbelief, between believer and unbeliever, in large part because the tradition at its best has always recognized the unbeliever in all of us. Christianity has always recognized an apophatic11 dimension to faith, a recognition that—as Anselm so clearly saw—God remains a mystery inaccessible to finite and fallible human creatures. It is only by divine grace, by God’s merciful self-emptying, that one can gain a glimpse of the majestic and almighty divine presence. But as Gregory of Nyssa reminds us, all our “knowing” of God takes place in the darkness that surrounds the divine presence. “This is the true knowledge of what is sought: this is the seeing that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness.”12 If Christians are to live by faith and not by sight, if the God Christians worship and adore is both hidden and revealed, then the Christian life itself combines knowing and unknowing, belief and unbelief, in equal measure. That is why Martin Luther characterized Christians as simul iustus et peccator—at the same time both righteous and sinner—and urged believers to look always and only to the God clothed in flesh, to Jesus Christ, for their salvation. Karl Barth, the modern theologian most clearly associated with the Christian doctrine of revelation, understood more deeply than many the profound connections between believers and unbelievers. In his book Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, written in 1932, Barth makes the following observations.

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We can start from Anselm’s astonishing recognition (put into the mouth of Boso) that what the believer and the unbeliever are meaning and seeking in their questions is exactly the same […] Thus Anselm gives credit to the unbelievers to the extent that the ratio of faith which they lack and for which they ask is one and the same ratio that he himself is seeking […] Anselm assumed his own ground, the ground of the strictly theological […] to be likewise a ground on which the ‘unbeliever’ could quite well discuss and would want to discuss […] The unbeliever’s quest is not simply taken up in any casual fashion and incorporated into the theological task but all the way through it is in fact treated as identical with the question of the believer himself […] What question of the unbeliever could be new to him and what answer could he give him save that which he gives to himself ?13

It is important, however, not to treat self-identified “unbelievers” as though they were covert believers or “anonymous Christians.” That approach would deny the freedom of persons to identify their own commitments and convictions and thereby to adopt the identifiers which they believe to be most appropriate for themselves. But it is equally important to acknowledge the porousness of disjunctive categories like believer/unbeliever. Just as it is true that “believers” carry within themselves and enact many of the characteristics of “unbelievers,” so too “unbelievers” often willingly acknowledge the deep moral convictions that shape their actions and identities, convictions that may well be the secular correlates of religious faith.14 Considerable attention has been given recently to the place of literary texts in cultural and social criticism. The late Richard Rorty argued that philosophy needs to give up its epistemological pretensions and adopt the ironic and conversational practices of literary criticism.15 Feminist political theorists like María Pía Lara,16 Martha Nussbaum,17 and the late Iris Marion Young18 have urged the acceptance of narrative texts into the discourse of democratic societies in order to provide a wider and more inclusive range of legitimate forms of persuasive democratic speech. Anthropologists like Michael Jackson,19 Arthur Kleinman,20 and Veena Das21 have argued that narratives play an essential function in the recovery of identity and agency among traumatized refugee populations worldwide.



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In this chapter I will employ insights from narrative theory to offer an account of George Orwell’s social criticism as a form of sacramental realism. My argument bears similarity to a claim about the place of literary works in social criticism made by Jeffrey Stout in his important book Democracy and Tradition.22 Glossing a remark by Robert Musil that essays occupy a space “between example and doctrine,” Stout argues that essays, plays, and novels “represent forms of moral inquiry that constantly frustrate the desire for characters that straightforwardly personify abstractions, just as they frustrate the desire for stories that straightforwardly illustrate morals.”23 In so doing these literary forms allow us to consider with utmost seriousness the “‘concrete other’ as an individual with a life of her own” instead of a “generalized other” who is simply a “bearer of rights, or a locus of dignity.”24 Stout’s remarks echo those of James Baldwin who, perhaps more than any other critic, has taught us the importance of literary art as a means of social and cultural critique. I can imagine no better introduction to the work of George Orwell than to revisit Baldwin’s sentiments from our previous chapter. [The human being is] resolutely indefinable, unpredictable. In overlooking, denying, evading his complexity […] we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims […] The truth as used here is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment […] it is not to be equated with a devotion to Humanity which is too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause; and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.25

Narrative Art as Social Criticism: George Orwell The real problem here is how to restore the religious attitude while accepting death as final.26 The Kingdom of Heaven has somehow got to be brought on to the surface of the earth. We have got to be children of God, even though the God of the prayer book no longer exists.27

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To compose a chapter on Orwell and religion is, one might imagine, to write a very short piece, indeed. Orwell is generally understood to be an agnostic or an atheist, a humanist whose most well-known utterances about religion are sardonic, sarcastic, and occasionally even contemptuous. He had a particular dislike for the Roman Catholic Church, an institution he compared to both Nazism and Communism in its totalitarian aims. He expressed equal disdain for Anglo-Catholicism, abhorring its vain and empty ritual and noting the proclivity for Anglo-Catholic writers to embrace aspects of Fascist ideology.28 Among his favorite epithets is “creeping Jesus,” by which he seems to mean a person of evangelical persuasion whose piety he found to be intellectually and ethically offensive. At the same time, Orwell, like most Englishmen of his time, was steeped in the religious culture of Britain; he had a particular love of church architecture, a decent knowledge of the Bible, and an appreciation for some of the values Christianity had instilled in the English working class. Like most “lower-upper-middle-class” persons of his time, Orwell was baptized, confirmed (by the socialist bishop Charles Gore), and married in the Church of England. (On his marriage day Orwell wrote to a friend, “I have been studying [the prayer book] for some days past in hopes of steeling myself against the obscenities of the wedding service.”29) In his will, to the surprise of many of his friends, he specifically requested a burial “according to the rites of the Church of England,” and insisted that he not be cremated. In this chapter I will focus on the development of Orwell’s thoughts on religion during the crucial period 1932–6. These four years encompass a number of significant changes in Orwell’s life, not least of which was his decision to change his name from Eric Blair to George Orwell. At the outset of this period he emerged from his four-year tramping expedition in London and Paris facing serious and sustained poverty. He suffered the second publisher’s rejection of the manuscript that would finally become Down and Out in Paris and London. He experienced his first sexual affair, one that ended unhappily when the woman who was the object of his desire married another man. In order to support himself he took up a teaching post, one that provided much of the detail for A Clergyman’s Daughter, a novel he wrote during this period. These years also marked his engagement with members of the Independent Labour Party, an encounter that helped to shape his peculiar form of left-wing,



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egalitarian, non-communist Marxism. And this period concludes with his tour of the coal-mining regions of northern England and the publication of his important but controversial The Road to Wigan Pier. I will argue that Orwell emerged from these years confirmed in his judgment that he could not adopt the beliefs of traditional Christianity but with an equally firm commitment to the “spiritual” (his word) aspects of socialist practice. The “religious attitude” that was crucial to the vitality of British culture could only be sustained, he believed, by a form of non-ideological socialist practice that would be relevant to the working-class people of England. In his grasp of socialism as a set of moral practices designed to promote freedom and equality, Orwell manifests a humanist faith without illusions, a “religious attitude” that accepts “death as final” but never ends its quest for social justice.30 The Years of Uncertainty: 1932–4 At Christmas time 1931 Eric Blair, having returned from the journeys described in Down and Out in Paris and London, was living in tenement housing along the Thames River across from Westminster. Though he had no regular source of income, he still harbored strong hopes of becoming a published writer. Those hopes suffered a serious setback however, when, on February 19, 1932, he received a letter from T.S. Eliot on behalf of Faber and Faber Publishing Company, which read, Dear Mr. Blair, I am sorry to have kept your manuscript. We did find it of very great interest, but I regret to say that it does not appear to me possible as a publishing venture. It is decidedly too short, and particularly for a book of such length it seems to me too loosely constructed, as the French and English episodes fall into two parts with very little to connect them. I should think, however, that you should have enough material from your experience to make a very interesting book on down-and-out life in England alone. With many thanks for letting me see the manuscript. I am, Yours faithfully, T.S. Eliot31

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Whatever solace we might take from the fact that a rejection letter from one great writer to another bears all the marks of the standard letter every writer or scholar has received, it certainly was a great blow to Blair’s desire to continue in his craft. So, after a brief stay with his sister and brother-in-law in Leeds, he took up an offer to become headmaster of a small boys’ school in Hayes, Middlesex, north of London. The experiences at The Hawthorns provided much of the material included in his novel A Clergyman’s Daughter. Dorothy’s teaching adventures at Ringwood House Academy for Girls were a mildly exaggerated version of Blair’s own experiences at The Hawthorns, and her famous encounter with the noxious glue-pot while making costumes for a church play reflected Blair’s own venture of making hand-made costumes for a play he wrote and produced at the school. But the most important influence on George-Orwell-inthe-making during this time was his friendship with the vicar of the parish church in Hayes, The Rev. Thomas Brownbill James Parker. Despite his continuing skepticism about matters religious, Blair regularly attended mass at the Anglican parish, and, according to the Rev. Parker’s widow, Madge, assisted with communion distribution and even helped the vicar to administer last rites to the dying.32 She further reports that he helped to wash dishes after Church Guild meetings, chopped wood for the stoves, and filled coal buckets for the furnaces. “You know, the kind of person who fits into a kitchen and helps you with everything in your own house, didn’t stand on ceremony.”33 She also recalled that he had cleaned the crown of a statue of the Virgin Mary, an incident Blair himself confirms in a letter to his friend and soon-to-be-lover, Eleanor Jaques. Sir Bernard Crick, Orwell’s biographer, reports that “Mrs. Parker is indignant at the idea that he was not a genuine believer. She argues that her husband looked him over very carefully indeed,”34 since the previous head had been removed for financial fraud, and the new head had to assist in bringing other local clergy on to the school board. In addition, the Parkers were burgeoning Christian socialists and they shared with Blair a deep concern for the plight of the poor and unemployed. While Crick has no reason to doubt the accuracy of Mrs. Parker’s memories, Blair himself gave a somewhat different account of his time in Hayes, one that affirms his genuine friendship with the Rev. Parker but raises doubts about the authenticity of his piety.



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Hayes […] is one of the most godforsaken places I have ever struck. The population seems to be entirely made up of clerks who frequent tinroofed chapels on Sundays and for the rest bolt themselves within doors. My sole friend is the curate—High Anglican but not a creeping Jesus & a very good fellow. Of course it means that I have to go to Church, which is an arduous job here, as the service is so popish that I don’t know my way about it and feel an awful BF when I see everyone bowing and crossing themselves all around me & can’t follow suit. The poor old vicar, who I suspect hates all this popery, is dressed up in cope and biretta and led round in process with candles etc. looking like a bullock garlanded for sacrifice.35

Blair’s confirmation of the statue story is told in a rather different tone from that suggested by Mrs. Parker. “I have promised to paint one of the church idols (a quite skittish-looking B.V.M., half life-size, & I shall try & make her look as much like one of the illustrations in La Vie Parisienne as possible).”36 His concluding remarks show little sign of authentic faith. “I would ‘communicate’ too, only I am afraid the bread might choke me.”37 What are we to make of the sharp differences between Mrs. Parker’s memories and Blair’s own account in his letter to Ms. Jaques? If we grant integrity to both accounts, it is probable that Blair is exaggerating his skepticism in his remarks to Eleanor, since she was a notable freethinker and religious agnostic in her own right. Since he was also courting her favor in these days, one might well imagine that he thought that she might especially appreciate the humor in his compromising situation. For he wrote again, in October of 1932, I take in the Church Times regularly now and like it more every week. I do so like to see that there is life in the old dog yet – I mean in the poor C. of E. I shall have to go to Holy Communion soon, hypocritical tho’ it is, because my curate friend is bound to think it funny if I always go to Church but never communicate.

How these comments square with Mrs. Parker’s claim that he actually assisted in the distribution of communion is hard to say. But Blair’s clear and consistent sardonic tone in these letters leads the reader to doubt whether his piety was anything more than a concession to the religious practice of his sole friend in “godforsaken” Hayes.

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Still, there is some evidence to suggest that Blair struggled with the question of religious faith during these years. He certainly reviewed a number of religious works for publication and remarked to Eleanor in a subsequent letter that he was “reading a book called Belief in God by Bishop Gore – late Bishop of Oxford, who confirmed me.” He also engaged in a brief published exchange with one of Britain’s most distinguished Christian socialists, the Jesuit ethicist C.C. Martindale. In his 1932 review of Martindale’s book Catholic Social Guild, Blair opined, Father Martindale, being committed to the statement that faith is reasonable, can neither stand up to his difficulties nor ignore them. Consequently he evades them, with considerable nimbleness. He sails over the theory of evolution in a sort of balloon flight with common sense flying overboard for ballast; he dodges past the problem of evil like a man dodging past his creditors’ doorway.38

Martindale did not reply directly to Blair’s critique of his own work but rather wrote a letter to The New English Weekly in which he characterized Blair’s criticisms of Karl Adam’s The Spirit of Catholicism as “disingenuous.” Blair responded briefly in the next issue of the journal, simply reversing the charge and calling Martindale “disingenuous” in his own remarks.39 Despite the snippiness of this brief exchange there is evidence that Orwell and Martindale remained in contact throughout the years. Orwell, despite his disagreements with the Jesuit socialist, apparently respected both his intellect and his moral judgment. In a letter of July 8, 1932 he wrote, “I have had a small controversy with Fr. Martindale, S.J. & he wrote & told Mrs. Carr that he would like to meet me as I was deeply in error & he could put me right. I must meet him sometime if possible.”40 Blair also wrote a poem in 1932 that was published in March 1933 in the Adelphi. Here he reflects on the reality of death and the possibility of faith before “the silent grave.” Sometimes in the middle autumn days, The windless days when the swallows have flown, And the sere elms brood in the mist, Each tree a being, rapt, alone,



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I know, not as in barren thought, But wordlessly, as the bones know, What quenching of my brain, what numbness, Wait in the dark grave where I go. And I see the people thronging in the street The death-marked people, they and I Goalless, rootless, like leaves drifting, Blind to the earth and to the sky; Nothing believing, nothing loving, Not in joy nor in pain, not heeding the stream Of precious life that flows within us, But fighting, toiling as in a dream. So shall we in the rout of life Some thought, some faith, some meaning save, And speak it once before we go In silence to the silent grave.41

While such existential sentiments are rare in Orwell’s writings they do remind one of the concluding section of A Clergyman’s Daughter, the novel that Orwell wrote in its entirety during these years. Most observers consider this novel Orwell’s least distinguished, and Orwell himself had grave doubts about its artistic quality. “It was a good idea,” he wrote to Leonard Moore,42 “but I am afraid I have made a muck of it – however, it is as good as I can do for the present. There are bits of it that I don’t dislike, but I am afraid it is very disconnected as a whole, and rather unreal.”43 While most critics would agree that this book is “the least successful of Orwell’s novels,”44 I find myself in concurrence with Christopher Hitchens’ judgment that “A Clergyman’s Daughter is a finer novel than Orwell believed it to be.”45 It is true that the novel relies upon the hackneyed plot device of an amnesiac blackout and centers upon a pallid heroine of “watery personality”;46 still, the book has many redeeming literary qualities.47 And, of more importance for my own purposes, it also gives us a brief window into Orwell’s own reflections on the question of faith’s viability in the modern world. In his depiction of Dorothy Hare, the subservient and repressed daughter of the Reverend Charles Hare, Orwell shows his talent

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for sympathetic identification with characters who find themselves trapped in circumstances not of their own making. While Orwell clearly struggles with Dorothy’s own inner motivations, he still manages to evoke in the reader a genuine sense of connection to her plight. Her behavior demonstrates the thoroughness by which she has internalized the suffocating and repressive environment in which she lives. In the early stages of the novel she goes about rather mindlessly acting in ways in which her father has instructed her. But Orwell’s control of his narrative art allows him to describe Dorothy’s masochistic actions in a good-humored manner that makes her an engaging character even in her self-flagellating moments. Her body had gone goose-flesh all over. She detested cold baths; it was for that very reason that she made it a rule to take all her baths cold from April to November. Putting a tentative hand into the water—and it was horribly cold—she drove herself forward with her usual exhortation. Come on, Dorothy! In you go! No funking, please!

Orwell’s description of an early morning mass is a minor classic that clearly draws on his own experiences in the parish church of Hayes. As Dorothy enters the church she notices that the only other communicant is “old Miss Mayfill, of the Grange.” Miss Mayfill was very old, so old that no one remembered her as anything but an old woman. A faint scent radiated from her—an ethereal scent, analysable as eau-de-Cologne, mothballs and a subflavour of gin. Dorothy drew a long glass-headed pin from the lapel of her coat, and furtively, under cover of Miss Mayfill’s back, pressed the point against her forearm. Her flesh tingled apprehensively. She made it a rule, whenever she caught herself not attending to her prayers, to prick her arm hard enough to make blood come. It was her chosen form of self-discipline, her guard against irreverence and sacrilegious thoughts. With the pin poised in readiness she managed for several moments to pray more collectedly.48

Dorothy’s plight becomes even more dire, however, as she realizes that she may have to commune from the common cup after Miss Mayfill has already done so. Orwell’s power of description combines with his sense of humor to create an atmosphere of comic dread that actually makes Dorothy, even in her masochism, an appealing and sympathetic person.



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Dorothy remained on her feet a moment longer. Miss Mayfill was creeping toward the altar with slow, tottering steps. She could barely walk, but she took bitter offence if you offered to help her. In her ancient, bloodless face her mouth was surprisingly large, loose and wet. The under lip, pendulous with age, slobbered forward, exposing a strip of gum and a row of false teeth as yellow as the keys of an old piano. On the upper lip was a fringe of dark, dewy moustache. It was not an appetising mouth; not the kind of mouth that you would like to see drinking out of your cup. Suddenly, spontaneously, as though the Devil himself had put it there, the prayer slipped from Dorothy’s lips: “O God, let me not have to take the chalice after Miss Mayfill!” The next moment, in self-horror, she grasped the meaning of what she had said, and wished that she had bitten her tongue in two rather than utter that deadly blasphemy upon the very altar steps. She drew the pin again from her lapel and drove it into her arm so hard that it was all she could do to suppress a cry of pain. Then she stepped to the altar and knelt down meekly on Miss Mayfill’s left, so as to make sure of taking the chalice after her.49

Orwell’s vivid but wry style allows him to depict Dorothy in a critical yet sympathetic manner that presages his discussion of faith and faithlessness in the concluding section of the novel. There, once Dorothy had returned from her days in London, the hops fields, and teaching, she finds herself again in the presence of Mr. Warburton, the man whose sexual advances had triggered her initial fall into amnesia. As they travel back to Dorothy’s home in a first-class train carriage bound for Knype Hill, she and Warburton engage in a fascinating debate about faith and doubt. Orwell’s own views emerge only in the dialogue between the two and should not be identified with just one or the other character. Sometimes he speaks through the caustic irreverence of Mr. Warburton. “Surely I don’t take you to mean that you actually regret losing your faith, as you call it? One might as well regret losing a goiter […] Is it the hypocrisy that’s worrying you? Afraid that the consecrated bread might stick in your throat, and so forth? I shouldn’t trouble. Half the parsons’ daughters in England are probably in the same difficulty. And quite nine-tenths of the parsons, I should say […] What you’re trying to do, apparently, is to make the worst of both worlds. You stick to the Christian scheme of things, but you leave Paradise out of it. And I suppose, if the truth were known, there are quite a lot of your kind wandering about

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among the ruins of the C. of E. You’re practically a sect in yourselves,” he added reflectively, “the Anglican Atheists. Not a sect I should care to belong to, I must say.”50

At other times Dorothy’s struggles seem to echo Orwell’s own, or at least Orwell’s concern about the fate of Christian culture. “I don’t believe in it any longer, if that’s what you mean. And I see now that a lot of it was rather silly. But that doesn’t help. The point is that all the beliefs I had are gone, and I’ve nothing to put in their place […] But don’t you see—you must see—how different everything is when all of a sudden the whole world is empty? […] Yes … I suppose that’s what I do mean. Perhaps it’s better—less selfish—to pretend one believes even when one doesn’t, than to say openly that one’s an unbeliever and perhaps help turn other people into unbelievers too.”51

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Orwell seems to be reflected as well in the voice of the narrator. What she would have said was that though her faith had left her, she had not changed, could not change, did not want to change, the spiritual background of her mind; that her cosmos, though now it seemed to her empty and meaningless, was still in a sense the Christian cosmos; that the Christian way of life was still the way that must come naturally to her […] Beliefs change, thoughts change, but there is some inner part of the soul that does not change. Faith vanishes, but the need for faith remains the same as before […] Life, if the grave really ends it, is monstrous and dreadful. No use trying to argue it away. Think of life as it really is, think of the details of life; and then think that there is no meaning in it, no purpose, no goal except the grave […] Either life on earth is a preparation for something greater and more lasting, or it is meaningless, dark and dreadful.52

It is, of course, speculative to suggest that the struggle between Dorothy and Warburton reflected a struggle within Orwell’s own soul. Still the themes enunciated in these three sections of text—irreverent skepticism, well-intentioned hypocrisy, faith and meaning at the edge of the grave—all echo aspects his life and work during these two years of uncertainty. I do not intend to take these biographical speculations any further. Rather, I want to suggest that the issues



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that emerge at the end of A Clergyman’s Daughter presage the urgent questions he will ask about the future of secularized British culture and the place of humanistic socialism within it. What will sustain the moral sensibility of British citizens once the explicit influence of Christianity has disappeared? What will sustain a commitment to freedom and justice within the socialist movement if there is no place for a “spiritual dimension” within socialist practice? How will socialist practice engage the working classes of Britain who have been shaped by Christian culture and exhibit the virtues attributable to that culture? Orwell’s own zeal for equality and his equally zealous critique of the British left must be understood in part against the background of the existential questions he posed to himself during these two years of uncertainty. Thus the quotations posed at the outset of this essay return to set the stage for my consideration of the next two years of Orwell’s life. “The real problem here is how to restore the religious attitude while accepting death as final”; “The Kingdom of Heaven has somehow got to be brought on to the surface of the earth. We have got to be children of God, even though the God of the prayer book no longer exists.”53 Socialism’s Spiritual Side: A Commitment to Justice and Common Decency, 1934–6 Sometime late in 1932, shortly before the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London, Eric Blair changed his name to George Orwell. Given the alternatives he was considering at the time—Kenneth Miles and especially H. Lewis Allways—posterity should be grateful that Blair chose the name of a small English river for his new identity. The summer of 1933 witnessed two other important changes in his life: Eleanor Jaques, with whom he had carried on a long-distance relationship, became engaged to another man; The Hawthorns was sold to a new owner who immediately changed headmasters. Orwell then took up another teaching position at a larger school in Uxbridge. It was there, after being soaked by a mid-December cold rainstorm, that Orwell was hospitalized for the first time with pneumonia and thus began his battle against the lung ailments that would finally take his life 16 years later. Teaching clearly was not Orwell’s vocation, and so in the fall of 1934 he accepted a job as a clerk in a bookshop owned by Francis and

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Byfanwy Westrope, two prominent members of Britain’s Independent Labour Party. It was through the Westropes and their acquaintances that Orwell was introduced to the form of socialism that would shape his political views for the rest of his life. The ILP positioned itself firmly between traditional liberalism on the one hand and Communism on the other.54 It sought to provide a peculiar form of ethical socialism as a leaven to the purely economic approach characteristic of the traditional labor movements. It was “[l]eft-wing, egalitarian, a strange English mixture of secularized evangelism and non-Communist Marxism.”55 The party attracted significant numbers of Christian socialists, especially those in the non-conformist churches and others associated with the Labour Church Movement.56 The ILP was both anti-capitalist and strongly democratic. It anticipated and welcomed a left-wing revolution that would bring down Western capitalist economies, but it parted company with the communist doctrine that “bourgeois liberty” should be destroyed in the process. The ILP urged the expansion of liberty to all classes of society, thereby achieving the equality central to the socialist platform. It was ambivalent on the question of war, recognizing war as an implement of capitalist domination that would ultimately bring about capitalism’s demise, yet recognizing the horrors that inevitably accompany armed conflict. The party thus tended to be anti-militarist though not quite pacifist, but often found itself in alliance with pacifist movements in opposing state-sponsored violence. Finally, the ILP saw in both Soviet Communism and Fascism similar forms of totalitarian statemonopoly economies. Both regimes stood under the condemnation of the ethical socialism espoused by the ILP. We know that Orwell often attended ILP meetings and even participated in retreats sponsored by the Adelphi that focused on the “mystic Marxist or Christian Socialist”57 aspects of ILP ideology. The resonances between the ILP platform and Orwell’s more mature socialist reflections are obvious, and thus it is safe to say that Orwell’s emerging political beliefs were nurtured in the context of the peculiar form of ethical socialism represented by the ILP.58 Orwell’s unique brand of socialist humanism is best represented by his The Road to Wigan Pier.59 This fascinating book—part realistic narrative, part autobiography, part social criticism—occupies an interesting middle ground between fact and fiction, historical reportage and imaginative construction. Late in 1935, Orwell was invited by Victor Gollancz, chief editor of the Left Book Club, to



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tour the mining towns of northern England in order to document the dire working and living conditions of the miners and their families. Orwell spent two months (February and March, 1936) living among the miners and observing their back-breaking work in the coal mines of the northern cities of Wigan, Barnsley, and Sheffield. The result was one of the most graphic descriptions of working-class poverty ever written.60 Combining historical narrative, ethical analysis, and ideological critique, this book allowed Orwell to hone his skills as a social critic to razor-sharp precision. In this early work we see the emergence of the distinctive qualities that mark Orwell as a superior writer and an insightful critic: vivid descriptive prose, political and ethical purpose, social critique in narrative form, ideological impatience, and engaged self-critical analysis. Wigan Pier reveals Orwell as a prophetic social critic of the highest order. The Left Book Club gave Orwell the assignment to create “a documentary report on conditions among the unemployed in the north of England” (p. vii). The first section of the book, writes Victor Gollancz, gives a first-hand account of the life of the working class population in Wigan and elsewhere. It is a terrible record of evil conditions, foul housing, wretched pay, hopeless unemployment and the villainies of the Means Test: it is also a tribute to courage and patience—patience far too great. We cannot imagine anything more likely to rouse the ‘unconverted’ from their apathy than a reading of this part of the book […] These chapters really are the kind of thing that makes converts. (p. xi)

Gollancz then proceeds to savage the second autobiographical and critical section of the book—but more on that later. It is clear that Orwell was commissioned to write a documentary that would describe and extol, depict and inspire, evoke and convert—a documentary with the imaginative power to move people to action. And he fulfilled his assignment all too well. “The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the millgirls’ clogs down the cobbled street.”61 With this simple but evocative sentence Orwell began to open the world of the northern mining country to his readers. With its deceptive simplicity and alliterative repetition, the sentence simultaneously describes the sounds that awakened the author every morning and reproduces those sounds in the reader’s ears in the hopes that their eyes might also be opened

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to the abject poverty of this place. Orwell had few peers who could rival the power of his descriptive narrative art. With acute attention to the minute details of the world in which he lived, Orwell provided a realistic but ethically charged account of his own experience. His prose simultaneously described that world and evoked a sense of identification with it in his readers. His gaze was relentless, taking in even the gruesome details and laying them before his audience. The meals at the Brookers’ house were uniformly disgusting. For breakfast you got two rashers of bacon and a pale fried egg, and bread-and-butter which had often been cut overnight and always had thumb-marks on it. However tactfully I tried, I could never induce Mr. Brooker to let me cut my own bread-and-butter; he would hand it to me slice by slice, each slice gripped firmly under that broad black thumb.62

Orwell’s descriptions were interlaced with the narrator’s comments designed to enhance and intensify the feelings evoked by the descriptions themselves. He was acutely attuned to matters of the senses and often remarked upon the power of smell. [T]his is where it [i.e., industrialized civilization] all led – to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping round and round them like blackbeetles. It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist.63

No passage more clearly illustrates the power of Orwell’s morally engaged narrative than one that appears toward the end of the first chapter of Wigan Pier. The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of the slagheaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time



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to see everything about her – her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen […] She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.64

This is realistic narrative at its best. The meaning of this passage depends upon the careful account Orwell gives of even the smallest details. By attending to the slag heaps, the cindery mud, and the blackened snow Orwell evokes a vivid but desolate scene for the reader. By focusing initially on the houses, the clogged drainpipe, and the woman kneeling on the stones, he slowly directs our attention from the grim natural surroundings to the equally forlorn human environment. Only once he has done that does he attend to the woman’s round, pale, and exhausted face—a face that reflects in her identity the desolation of the surrounding scene. It is as if we are watching Walker Evans develop a black and white photograph. The details of the human visage emerge slowly from the blurred background, but as the silver nitrate works its magic we find ourselves confronted by a human face from which we cannot avert our eyes. The words, “how dreadful a destiny,” have impact precisely because we see in the face of this no-longer-young girl something of ourselves. Thus the moral impact of the prose emerges only when the full narrative description is complete. This is no jeremiad; rather this is ethically informed social critique with a narrative shape. It is also realistic narrative that serves a moral and political purpose65 and should not be confused with mere historical description. One of Orwell’s great accomplishments was to break down the artificial barriers between the essay, the story, and the novel. It would be no exaggeration, nor criticism, to characterize Orwell’s novels as extended essays in narrative form. The historical, political, and ethical meaning of his writing cannot be extracted from the narrative descriptive itself. There is no extractable moral to these stories. The moral meaning is found only in, with, and under the narrative account.66

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This literary form was, of course, a perfect vehicle for the kind of ethical socialism that Orwell wanted to advance. The first half of Wigan Pier was designed to depict simultaneously the plight of the working-class poor and their courage, good humor, and dignity. A working man does not disintegrate under the strain of poverty as a middle-class person does […] [T]hey realise that losing your job does not mean that you cease to be a human being […] Families are impoverished but the family-system has not broken up. The people are in fact living a reduced version of their former lives. Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards.67

Even when we note the “dreadful destiny” of the poor young woman poking her stick up the drain-pipe, we do not see her merely as a victim. Orwell skillfully granted agency to the persons he described in the north of England, even as he indicted those whose lives benefited from the labor of the poor. “[A]ll of us really owe our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to their eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.”68 Orwell’s literary and ethical procedure in the first half of Wigan Pier is essential to understanding the oft-criticized and controversial second half. By depicting the poor of northern England as genuine persons with families, clogged drain-pipes, and dilapidated living quarters, he hoped to give them a particularity that generalizations like the “proletariat” could not illumine. Orwell approached socialism “from below,” by a consideration of the actual conditions in which the poor lived, worked, made love, and reared children. For him socialism was primarily a set of moral practices designed to create a world in which children were no longer malnourished and society’s resources were more equitably distributed among all classes. He rebelled against highly theorized versions of socialism because he was convinced that they blinded their advocates to the plight and personhood of the poor—the real poor and not simply the “poor” as constructed by socialist theory. In this sense, then, Orwell advocated a non-ideological understanding of socialism.69 He shared the goal of all socialists: equality across all classes of society; but he understood socialism to be “a moral code in action”70 that could not be fully articulated through traditional socialist theory. He believed that he



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had seen this moral code embedded in the culture of the workingclass poor with whom he lived in northern England. Thus he extolled “the irreducible belief in decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people […] [E]verywhere, under the surface, the common man sticks obstinately to the belief that he derives from Christian culture.”71 For Orwell “Socialism means justice and common decency,”72 a point he repeats again and again in The Road to Wigan Pier. Socialism, understood as a set of moral practices designed to promote justice and common decency, could, he believed in 1936, “bring the Kingdom of Heaven down to the surface of the earth,” i.e. provide ethical orientation and moral motivation in the struggle for justice in a postChristian culture. “[I]n order to defend Socialism it is necessary to start by attacking it.”73 Many critics, including Orwell’s editor Victor Gollancz, have taken great exception to his sharp criticisms of socialism in the second of half of The Road to Wigan Pier. By contrast, I want to argue that Orwell’s critique of socialism grows naturally and directly out of his commitment to socialism as moral practice. In engaging in this form of critique, Orwell exemplifies a practice I have called “connected criticism.”74 Connected criticism is a form of critique that oscillates between the poles of criticism and connection, solitude and solidarity, alienation and authority. Connected critics are those who are fully engaged in the very enterprise they criticize, yet alienated by the deceits and shortcomings of their own community. Because they care so deeply about the values inherent in their common enterprise, they vividly experience the evils of their society even as they call their community back to its better nature. Connected critics recognize that fallibility that clings to the life of every political or social organization, and they seek to identify both the virtuous and the vicious dimensions of the common life in which they participate. Connected critics exemplify both the commitment characteristic of the loyal participant and the critique characteristic of the disillusioned dissenter. This dialectic between commitment and critique is the identifying feature that distinguishes acts of dissent that display genuine moral integrity from those that represent mere expediency or self-interest. Connected critics are socially situated within the community to which their criticisms are directed, yet still find within the common life of the society principles of justice that serve as the basis for hope. Living in a state of “antagonistic

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connection,” the connected critic discerns the principles of justice that provide the basis for both critique and hope. I know of no thinker who exemplifies this category with greater integrity than does Orwell. He begins his criticism of socialism by implicating himself in the very community he is about to critique. “I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class.”75 With that sentence Orwell identifies himself with the class system that he believes must be dismantled if Britain is to gain genuine equality. In contrast to many British socialists, however, Orwell understands the class system to be as much cultural as economic. The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself […] What is involved is not merely the amelioration of working-class conditions, nor an avoidance of the more stupid forms of snobbery, but a complete abandonment of the upper-class and middle-class attitude to life.76

As long as theoretical and solely economic understandings of socialism predominate, the deeper problems of class division cannot be adequately addressed. If the cultural aspects of the class system remain untouched an economic revolution will fail to bring about genuine justice and equality. Orwell’s concern about the primacy of culture also reflects itself in his insistence on the importance of the “spiritual” side of politics. Socialists fail to understand the attraction of the British to Fascism because they tacitly assume that the spiritual side of it is of no importance […] With their eyes glued to economic facts, they have proceeded on the assumption that man has no soul, and explicitly or implicitly they have set up the goal of a materialist Utopia.77

As long as socialists fail to grasp the importance of the cultural, spiritual, and soulful aspects of human life, they will be at a huge disadvantage in the fight against Fascism. As long as socialism itself remains disconnected from the deeper cultural values of postChristian England it will fail to win the hearts of the very people they say they want to rescue. Thus true self-critical socialists must face a very uncomfortable truth. “The only possible course is to examine the Fascist case, grasp that there is something to be said for it, and then



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make it clear to the world that whatever good Fascism contains is also implicit in Socialism.”78 In order to do that, however, socialism must move beyond its narrow materialist theory and reassert “the underlying ideal of Socialism: justice and liberty […] Justice and liberty! Those are the words that have got to ring like a bugle across the world.”79 By the end of 1936 George Orwell had emerged from a period of serious self-examination to become a formidable social critic with a clear moral vision. While he had rejected, once and for all, the belief system of Christianity, he continued firm in the conviction that the most important values represented by Christianity, particularly human decency and a commitment to justice and equality, must be incorporated into the form of ethical socialism he so fervently advocated. Operating as a connected critic, he sought to develop an internal critique of theoretical materialist socialism that would awaken British socialists to the cultural and spiritual aspects of human life. He feared that without a full engagement with the matters that engaged human souls, socialism would lose the battle with Fascism. Moreover, he saw that socialism itself was threatened by its own totalitarian materialist obsessions. If it failed to make a place for the spiritual within its own practice, then its humanitarian aspirations could never be achieved, and thus it would provide no real alternative to the totalitarianism of the right. Thus we can glimpse in these early years the critique that would finally take full flower in Orwell’s later novels. It was in the name and for the sake of decency and justice that Orwell sought, without full success, “to restore the religious attitude” and to bring “the Kingdom of Heaven to the surface of the earth.” Whether it is possible in this time of fundamentalist fanaticism to achieve the kind of modest humanistic “faith” that Orwell exemplified seems very much in doubt. Some of us will, nonetheless, continue to aspire to such lives of commitment, criticism, and conviction. And that George Orwell should serve as an inspiration, a goad, perhaps even a curmudgeon for us in our own struggles, seems a very good thing indeed. George Orwell: An Ethical Analysis I have offered a view of George Orwell in this chapter as an exemplary literary artist and social critic, but many of Orwell’s detractors would

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undoubtedly point out his many personal flaws and ethical failings to counter the more positive view I have offered here. Orwell had difficulty maintaining intimate friendships, especially with women,80 and was acerbic to the point of being rude in social situations. Many commentators have noted Orwell’s deep masochistic tendencies and his macabre attraction to cruelty.81 But it is precisely his familiarity with cruelty that made possible his vivid yet sympathetic portrayal of Winston’s torture in 1984.82 One of Orwell’s biographers, the psychiatrist Jeffrey Meyers, writes, Orwell’s life in essence was a series of irrational, sometimes lifethreatening decisions. All these risky moves were prompted by the inner need to sabotage his chance for a happy life, but the life he chose supplied the somber material of his art.83

Two additional charges of ethical failings need to be addressed: (1) Orwell’s decision toward the end of his life to pass on the names of communist fellow-travelers to the British Foreign Office, and (2) the claim that he fabricated some of the details he reports in The Road to Wigan Pier. I will deal with each charge in turn. The List In July 1996, the Public Records Office of the United Kingdom released documents that revealed that Orwell had, indeed, offered the names of persons he considered “unreliable” to the British Foreign Office in spring 1949. Critics have suggested that this list represented an act of betrayal of his deep left-wing sentiments. “To some, it was as if Winston Smith had cooperated with the Thought Police in 1984.”84 Orwell developed the list in response to a visit from his friend, Celia Paget Kirwan, who was working for the Independent Research Department (IRD) of the Labour Government’s initiative to “combat Communist propaganda.” Paget specifically asked Orwell to recommend persons who could reliably write for the Foreign Office and he offered her a number of names. In addition he wrote a list of “actors, journalists, and writers who in my opinion are cryptoCommunists, fellow-travelers or inclined that way and should not be trusted as propagandists.”85 That last phrase is telling. Orwell was not offering a list of persons who should be investigated or black-



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listed; his action was not tantamount to cooperation with the House of Un-American Activities Committee in the United States. Rather, he was simply trying to suggest a list of persons who wouldn’t be reliable as anti-Soviet propaganda writers. The list, he wrote, “isn’t very sensational and I don’t suppose it will tell your friends anything they don’t know.” But perhaps it might prevent such persons from “worming their way into important propaganda jobs where they [could] do us a lot of harm.”86 Two things are true of Orwell: he was deeply anti-Soviet and he was an English patriot; the list he developed expressed both of those sentiments. As Timothy Garton Ash wrote in his remarkably balanced essay on the list: “If the charge is that Orwell was a cold warrior, the answer is plainly yes […] If the charge is that he was a secret police informer, the answer is plainly no.”87 Ash clearly shows that the Independent Research Office was nothing like America’s HUAC, and further argues that no harm came to any of the persons mentioned on the list. Moreover, the IRD subsidized publications which, in keeping with Orwell’s own convictions, supported “social democracy as a successful alternative to Communism.”88 In his attempt to provide a sympathetic yet critical account of this incident, Ash also points out the complex connection between Orwell’s decision to send the list and his personal relationship with Celia Kirwan. Orwell had met Celia at Christmas time 1945 and had developed deep feelings for her. He was lonely and in some emotional turmoil after the death of his first wife earlier that year. Celia and he got on very well, and met again several times in London. One evening just five weeks after their first meeting, he sent her a passionate letter, full of tender feeling and rather clumsily proposing either marriage or an affair. It ended, “good night my dearest love, George.” Celia gently refused him in what she later described as a “rather ambiguous letter,” but they remained close friends.89

When Celia came to call on him in March 1949, Orwell was on his sickbed, suffering from the pneumonia that would kill him less than a year later. Ash, while not minimizing “his conscious political choice to supply those names to a department of the Foreign Office,” still offers a sympathetic account of the complex motives animating that decision.

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There is, in his letters to Celia, an almost painful eagerness. You sense in them his continued strong feelings for a particularly attractive, warmhearted, and cultured woman. But in all we know about him at this time, you also sense something broader: the more generalized, rather desperate craving of a mortally sick man for affectionate female support. One recalls the emotional turmoil of three years before, when he precipitately proposed not just to Celia but also to two or three other younger women. Lonely, stuck in that Cotswold sanatorium, loathing the thought that he was physically done for at the age of forty-five, did he yearn to combat approaching death with the love of a beautiful woman? […] [Y]ou have to ask yourself this question: Had it been a bowlerhatted and pin-striped Mr. Cloake who came to visit him on March 29, 1949, would he have offered to send him the list? But it wasn’t Mr. Cloake. It was his “dearest Celia.”90

Orwell had written about Gandhi that “saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” and if Orwell has become in some sense a modern secular saint then we must view his own actions with clear-eyed moral judgment.91 Persons of goodwill can surely disagree about Orwell’s political and ethical judgment in passing on this list of names to the IRD, but that act does not, in my estimation, constitute an act of “betrayal” or “hypocrisy” by the writer of Animal Farm and 1984. More troubling, to my mind, are Orwell’s continued gender,92 sexuality, and race stereotypes, as the list identifies a number of persons as “Jewish,” “Polish Jew,” “English Jew,” and “Jewess,” and characterizes the African American Paul Robeson as “very anti-white.” While I cannot follow writers like Jeffrey Meyers and John Rodden, who characterize Orwell’s actions as “not only defensible but commendable,” I do not find that his character flaws, real as they are, undermine his importance as a social critic of high ethical standing. The Scene Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier has been widely praised as descriptive historical prose of the highest order. Reviewers have called it “sympathetic,” “honest,” “a straightforward account [containing] detached and realistic observation.”93 His descriptions of life in the north of England have been praised as providing “accurate, concise



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information” and a refusal “either to inflate or aestheticize the ugly facts.”94 Recently, however, historical critics have raised serious questions about the accuracy of part one of Wigan Pier. Robert Pearce, an English historian, has been especially critical of the historical inaccuracies and exaggerations of Orwell’s descriptive accounts. While admiring Orwell’s powerful writing, Pearce notes that “quality of prose is no guarantee of accuracy or honesty.”95 More seriously, Pearce argues “that episodes in Part I of Wigan Pier should be considered as fiction rather than fact” (p. 416) and that Orwell’s honesty as a writer and historian should be called into question. “To employ a phrase Orwell used about Dickens, he was telling ‘small lies to emphasize what he regards as a big truth’” (p. 422). Pearce bases his allegations on Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier Diary,” an unpublished manuscript available to scholars at the Orwell archive at the University College of London. Even though Orwell’s biographer, Sir Bernard Crick, judges the diary not to be a contemporaneous document but one typed as a first draft of the book following his return from the north, Pearce asserts that it is a “primary source […] written soon after the events it described […] It is therefore likely to be more factually accurate than the finished book” (p. 415). Pearce’s evidence is thin and idiosyncratic,96 but his views have influenced many subsequent discussions of Orwell’s “honesty” as a writer, so they deserve some attention here. For Pearce the diary serves as the historical touch-point for evaluating the accuracy of Orwell’s descriptions in Wigan Pier. Wherever the two manuscripts part company, the diary is always to be preferred as the more precise. Pearce deals at length with two of the episodes I have treated above: the Brookers’ tripe shop and the woman digging at the drain-pipe. Pearce identifies five differences in Orwell’s description of the Brookers in the two manuscripts: a lodger named Joe is placed in two different dwellings; Mrs. Brooker’s ailment is described as a “weak heart” in the diary and as a result of “overeating” in Wigan; Mrs. Brooker is identified in the book as the primary house-keeper while the diary mentions that a fiancée and a daughter-in-law do most of the work in the house; Orwell’s account of his reason for leaving the Brooker’s (an unemptied chamber pot) differs in the two manuscripts; and Orwell uses two different names for the tripe shop owners—Brookers in the book and Forrests in the diary.

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Orwell was remarkably reluctant to change people’s names, even when he knew he was being libelous. May he not therefore have used a fictional name because, as he well knew, his account contained too many fictitious elements to be considered factual? (p. 417)

Now these differences may appear to most readers (as they do to me) to be trivial and hardly worth the charge that Orwell is duplicitous and misleading when he “fancifully embroiders” some of his facts. But Pearce goes on to tackle the account of the woman at the drain-pipe, one of the most moving and important descriptions in The Road to Wigan Pier. Since this scene carries much of the moral punch of the first half of the book, its “accuracy” seems especially important. If this description is more fiction than fact, more creation than discovery, then Orwell’s reliability as historian and political ethicist may well be called into question. Here is the “description” Orwell records in the “Wigan Diary”: Passing up a horrible squalid side-alley, saw a woman, youngish but very pale and with the usual draggled exhausted look, kneeling by the gutter outside a house and poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe, which was blocked. I thought how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling in the gutter in a back-alley in Wigan, in the bitter cold, prodding a stick up a blocked drain. At that moment she looked up and caught my eye, and her expression was as desolate as I have ever seen; it struck me that she was thinking just the same thing as I was.97

Pearce rightly points out the important differences in the accounts given in the diary and the book. Orwell changes the date from February to March; he places himself on a moving train in the book while that reference is absent from the diary; he borrows details from an entirely different account in the diary (taken from his observations of a housing caravan) and transposes them into the drain-pipe scene in the book. Pearce also echoes the criticisms made by more sympathetic scholars that in both manuscripts Orwell speculates about matters—the woman’s age, her inner thoughts, the fact of her miscarriages—which no historian can possibly know. Orwell’s “mind reading,” Pearce argues, should not be trusted, and “we should doubt Orwell’s ability to find the mind’s construction in the face and to empathize with people from backgrounds very different from his own” (p. 419).



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How vulnerable is Orwell to these criticisms? Has his literary art overwhelmed his historical veracity in such a way as to cast doubt on the ethical and political case he seeks to make? Has Orwell’s creative imagination swamped his discovery of the facts, thereby turning his historical account into little more than fictional fancy? This seems to be Pearce’s judgment since he urges readers no longer to accept Orwell’s descriptions as “literally true” or even to acknowledge his overall depictions in the book as “essentially true” (p. 419). Pearce represents a school of historians who want straightforward “literal” descriptions of the “facts and only the facts,” and who reject imaginative embroidery as fundamentally dishonest within historical accounts. Literature scholar Margery Sabin offers an alternative view of Orwell’s procedure in Wigan Pier: Orwell quite blithely releases the term fact from statistical or theoretical rigor. Still with the miners there is the example of dirt. “Middle-class people,” he generalizes, “are fond of saying that the miners would not wash themselves properly even if they could, but this is nonsense, as is shown by the fact that where pit-head baths exist practically all the men use them.” The term fact here is not a matter of statistics, but works more loosely as the corrective that direct observation brings to prejudice and received opinion. The usage is respectable in ordinary speech. “As a matter of fact,” he goes on to note, “it is surprising that miners wash as regularly as they do, seeing how little time they have between work and sleep.” Orwell’s matter of fact is a colloquial synonym of actually, in truth, really, the way it really is if you go to see for yourself and then think it over intelligently.98

I am in basic agreement with Sabin’s analysis here, but her views, like Orwell’s, are not very highly theorized, so I would like to offer a further modest theoretical account of Orwell’s procedure in Wigan Pier, one that defends both his power of observation and his rhetorical construction. A near-unanimous consensus among philosophers of history and literary theorists holds that events in the world have meaning only as they are configured into some sort of framework within which individual occurrences make sense. Historical meaning, in particular, takes place only as these occurrences are given narrative shape within a larger story.99 By themselves, occurrences are mute. Events do not impose themselves upon the historian or narrator; rather, events

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are configured into meaningful wholes by the very act of narration. Thus facts, pace Pearce, do not speak for themselves. Facts speak only as they are narrated by the historian and such narration always involves an act of imaginative configuration. It also always involves a process of selection from the welter of possible episodes that might be configured into a narrative. Narration is both configuration and selection. “Every narrative, however seemingly ‘full,’ is constructed on the basis of a set of events that might have been included but were left out; this is as true of imaginary narratives as it is of realistic ones.”100 Just as importantly, the very act of narration is an imaginative configuration with moral intent. In his brilliant analysis of annals, chronicles, and narratives, Hayden White demonstrates that stories provide meaning because they relate sequential episodes to “an integrated whole” of which those episodes are integral parts. Moreover, the integrated whole is itself related to “a notion of a social center by which to locate [those episodes] with respect to one another and to charge them with ethical and moral significance.”101 Narration provides meaning because it relates to the human desire that lives have moral and ethical significance. And this suggests that narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling and probably in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine.102

“The discourse of the real,” White argues, is thus moral and not just descriptive discourse. To say that something is “real” or “true” is to make a moral claim or, better, to assign moral meaning to the events so considered. The coherence that narratives provide for otherwise mute events relates to the human desire for moral meaning. The demand for closure in the historical story is a demand, I suggest, for moral meaning, a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama. Has any historical narrative ever been written that was not informed not only by moral awareness but specifically by the moral authority of the narrator? […] Where, in any account of reality, narrativity is present, we can be sure that morality or a moralizing impulse is present too.103



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If White is correct, and I believe he is, then the work of any author must be evaluated according to multiple standards, including moral/ ethical ones. Given these observations, how do Orwell’s narratives stack up? It is clear that Orwell constructs the scene of the woman at the drain-pipe from two different sources and juxtaposes them for greater emotional and moral impact. As literary artistry, the scene is an example of skillful realistic narrative as moral argument. As historical chronicle, the scene has the marks of verisimilitude even in its highly constructed character. Would a strict historian have preferred more straightforward description and less creative composition? Undoubtedly so. But does Orwell’s constructed account make him susceptible to charges of dishonesty, unreliability, and deception? Absolutely not. Everything Orwell describes in the scene “actually happened.” His decision to juxtapose observations of the same mining community made on different days into one account serves the goal of verisimilitude even if it fails to meet the strict standards of historical precision. Orwell was sent to the north of England to discover the conditions under which the miners and their families lived and worked and to write an account that would stir his readers to indignation and action. He accomplished that task with great skill and persuasiveness. While we should not hide from the fact that the resulting narrative falls short of the highest standards of historical accuracy, that flaw does not, in my estimation, open Orwell to the intellectual and moral charges that Pearce lodges against him. In the final reckoning, George Orwell, like all of the writers featured in this book, falls short of anything approaching sainthood. In that regard he stands shoulder to shoulder with most readers of these pages. But his own obvious flaws and evident fallibility do not undermine the importance of his literary art and his social critique. Orwell employed his literary art in the service of moral and political purposes of great importance. By experiencing for himself the abysmal conditions in the mining north, Orwell “discovered” a set of facts of which middle-class Britain was blissfully unaware. By imaginatively constructing a realistic narrative of those experiences, he provided a literary window into that world upon which Britain depended for its wealth and well-being but from which it had averted its eyes. And by “creating” a narrative of such moral and political power he was able to motivate his readers to action on behalf of those real poor people whose lives he depicted with such accuracy and compassion.

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Discovery and creation are both acts of the human imagination with profound moral and political implications, and George Orwell was a master of the craft. It was Orwell’s ability to see and depict the lives of real persons— not just classes or categories or concepts, but real persons living lives both similar and distinct from our own—that establishes him as a realist social critic with sacramental instincts. His capacity to identify with “the lowest of the low” without ever losing a sense of his own peculiar “upper-lower-middle-class” status allowed him to see into the hidden depths of English culture and long for a better, more just, more humane, more spiritual future for the English people.104 To the end he maintained a humanist faith in the basic decency of the British working class and a realistic understanding of the consequences of dismantling England’s class system. He held to a humane faith without illusions and practiced an incarnational and sacramental craft without Christ or ecclesial ritual. In some sense of the word he was surely an “unbeliever,” perhaps even an atheist; but still he deemed human persons, especially those who suffer unjustly, as special, set apart, even sacred. And thus he allows us to blur the distinction between believer and non-believer, between sacred and secular, and to see the plight of suffering human beings as worth our special attention, consideration, and action.

5

A STRANGE FORM OF LOVE REALIST HOPE AND REBELLIOUS POLITICS: ALBERT CAMUS

I have Christian concerns, but my nature is Pagan. Albert Camus

Absurdity As I write the final chapter of this book manuscript I do so with a recent diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer. My family has no history of this type of cancer; indeed, there are almost no incidents of any cancer in my family. I have never been a smoker; I drink in moderation; and my lifestyle exhibits few if any contributing factors to this invidious disease. How absurd! While I am 65 years old, I have felt as though I am in the prime of life. My teaching last term was as good as it has ever been; I am committed to co-authoring a book on Luther and Roman Catholicism in anticipation of the 500th anniversary of the posting of the 95 theses, and I had expected to co-edit and contribute to a book on the so-called Yale School and its influence on contemporary theology. And then there is this book, nearly ten years in the making. How absurd! The “absurd” is, of course, a key term in Albert Camus’ literary and philosophical corpus. His own life was dominated by arbitrary disadvantages. Born into poverty among the pied noir community of Algeria, his father died when Albert was two and his mother, an illiterate cleaning woman, remained emotionally distant from her talented son throughout her life. Further, he was plagued throughout his life by tuberculosis, a disease that robbed him of energy, often plunged him into depression, and muted his considerable intellectual vitality. Having been sent to the countryside of France in August 1942 to recover from a particularly painful recurrence of the disease, he found himself cut off from his homeland of Algeria when the Nazis invaded North Africa

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in November 1942, thus separating him from his wife and family whom he would not see again until 1945. His experiences during this time contributed significantly to his descriptions of separation, exile, and illness in The Plague. And, of course, the ultimate absurd irony of his life was its tragic ending, in a fatal automobile accident in January 1960, at the age of 46 and just three years after he had won the Nobel Prize for literature. While personal experiences can make one sensitive to the absurd, the concept is not primarily biographical but philosophical. For Camus, the absurd captures the sense of anomie that emerges in the face of “the death of God,” the collapse of meaning—especially religious meaning—that follows in the wake of the senseless horrors of the twentieth century. In sentiments that echo Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, Camus lays out the obvious consequences of a world without meaning: If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning, and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then anything is possible and nothing has any importance. There is no pro or con: the murderer is neither right nor wrong. We are free to stoke the crematory fires or to devote ourselves to the care of lepers. Evil and virtue are mere chance or caprice.1

The clearest example of the nihilist response to an absurd universe is Meursault, the main character in Camus’ novel The Stranger, who moves conscienceless through an absurd world, unable to mourn his mother’s death, indifferent to his sexual liaisons, committing murder as if it were just another everyday act, and sitting through his own murder trial oddly bemused and puzzled by his impending execution. This brilliantly drawn character exemplifies the absurd as Camus understood it in his early work. “The question of the twentieth century […] how to live without grace and without justice.”2 Like many post-Holocaust writers, Camus acknowledges that the world offers us no final solace, no ultimate harmony, no definitive victory. The only question that remains is how one is to live in the face of an absurd universe. Shall we choose nihilism, hedonism, political ideology, religious fanaticism, mere indifference? It is in reaction to this crucial question of the nature and quality of our lives lived in the face of the absurd that Camus makes his most important contribution to philosophical reflection on the ethics of responsibility.



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Camus names his philosophical position “absurdism.” It is a form of ethical practice that fully embraces the absurdity of the universe without, however, affirming nihilism as the inevitable outcome of that embrace. The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning is, in fact, the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe. Suicide would mean the end of the encounter, and absurdist reasoning considers that it could not consent to this without negating its own premises […] Absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis. To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive.3

While Camus’ critics often accused him of philosophical naïveté, I find this argument both subtle and compelling. Camus seeks to show that the nihilist argument is internally inconsistent, at least for those who choose not to engage in either murder or suicide. The mere practice of continuing to live one’s life refutes the very premise of nihilist philosophy. While nihilism might be sustainable as an abstract intellectual position, it cannot be sustained as a genuine human practice. To refuse suicide is to commit oneself to the continuation of human life; indeed, Camus believes that the repudiation of suicide is in itself an affirmation that human life is the only necessary good. And that affirmation implies that “the conscience must be alive.” Absurdism continues to deny theodicy in every form, but it asserts a humanism that forms the basis for living a life of responsibility in the face of a meaningless world. Camus stands in a long line of absurdist thinkers throughout Western history, one of the most prominent of whom is the religious philosopher and Christian theologian Søren Kierkegaard. While many critics point to Camus’ views of the absurd as a key indication of his rejection of Christianity’s values, the case is not nearly as clear as these critics—and Camus himself—believe. At the very heart of the Christian gospel rests a set of absurdist convictions. In the Synoptic Gospels Jesus is identified as the one sent from God, God’s very son, the savior of the world. Yet this chosen one of God is given over to his enemies for crucifixion and executed as a political prisoner outside the walls of the holy city of Jerusalem. How could the Holy

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One of God meet such a horrid and humiliating end? Even Jesus himself, when confronted with this reality, utters the absurdist cry of the one abandoned by God: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani […] My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). Yet the Christian gospel proceeds to reverse its own tragic absurdity with the affirmation of an equally absurd assertion of the triumph of life over death, of God’s love over the apparent negation of all meaning: “If Christ has not been raised then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain […] But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Corinthians 15:14, 20). The Marxist literary critic, Terry Eagleton, has elegantly captured this double movement of divine love: The irony, however, is that once suffering is conceived in [an] instrumental or consequentialist way, it ceases to be redemptive, rather as a gift ceases to be truly a gift when one is thinking of a return. This is another reason why Jesus’ crucifixion is genuinely tragic. If his death was a mere device for rising again in glory, then it was no more than a cheap conjuring trick. It was because his death seemed to him a cul-de-sac, as his despairing scriptural quotation on the cross would suggest, that it could be fruitful […] Only by accepting the worst for what it is, not as a convenient springboard for leaping beyond it, can one hope to surpass it. Only by accepting this as the last word about the human condition can it cease to be the last word.4

This double movement of divine love lies behind Kierkegaard’s treatment of faith and the absurd in Fear and Trembling. Writing under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard reflects on the apparent incomprehensibility of Abraham’s willingness to murder his own son, the son of promise, Isaac. “If faith cannot make it into a holy deed to murder one’s son, then let the judgment fall on Abraham as on anyone else […] Abraham was a murderer.”5 Nonetheless, Johannes struggles to understand this act of murder at one and the same time as an act of faith, despite “that monstrous paradox that is the content of Abraham’s life.”6 Recognizing that he himself “cannot close my eyes and trustingly throw myself into the absurd,” he still seeks to trace the “double movement” that Abraham, the knight of faith, makes in believing on the strength of the absurd.



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We let Isaac actually be sacrificed. Abraham had faith. His faith was not that he should be happy sometime in the hereafter, but that he should find blessed happiness here in this world. God could give him a new Isaac, bring the sacrificial offer back to life. He believed on the strength of the absurd […] The knight of faith […] does exactly the same as the other knight, he infinitely renounced the claim which is the context of his life; he is reconciled in pain; but then comes the marvel: he makes one more movement more wonderful than anything else, for he says: ‘I nevertheless believe that I shall get [him] back, namely on the strength of the absurd, on the strength of the fact that for God all things are possible.’7

The knight of faith thus follows the double movement of the divine love: abandonment and restoration of the beloved. For Kierkegaard, this encounter with Abraham renders him simultaneously strikingly ordinary and utterly unique. The knight of faith is, on the one hand, a familiar figure going about his everyday tasks. “He belongs altogether to the world. One detects nothing of the strangeness and superiority that mark the knight of the infinite […] He resigned everything infinitely and then took everything back on the strength of the absurd.”8 On the other hand, he remains utterly opaque, a heinous murderer who calmly accepts his action because by faith he knows that he will receive Isaac back. In an odd but telling way, Abraham seems more like Meursault—horrid yet ordinary, fascinating yet unapproachable—than any casual comparison between Camus and Kierkegaard might suggest. Yet one enormous difference separates the two thinkers on absurdity. For Kierkegaard, the encounter with the absurd requires a movement away from ethics—indeed a “teleological suspension of the ethical” and an embrace of the absurd. For Camus, on the contrary, the encounter with the absurd creates the very conditions for a life of political solidarity and ethical responsibility. At the risk of oversimplifying Kierkegaard’s position on the suspension of the ethical, it appears correct to say that faith requires an “absolute relation to the absolute” which inevitably reduces the knight of faith’s capacity to speak or communicate in any way to his fellows. In Camus’ account, however, the very inconsistency of the absurdist position requires a resolution not in theory but in practice. Precisely by rebelling against the nihilistic implications of absurdity, Camus’ political actors enact ethical lifestyles designed to restore some sense

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of justice and even happiness to the world and to do so in way that makes a “free exchange of conversation” possible.9 We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is necessary to reduce it. Our task as men is to find the few principles that will claim the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century.10

Rebellion and Solidarity So what exactly does Camus mean by rebellion (révolte)? Camus carefully distinguishes three forms of rebellion: first his own, which he usually terms simply “rebellion” but which we will designate “humanist rebellion”; second, “metaphysical rebellion,” a philosophical revolt against absurdity, one which Camus associates primarily with the Marquis de Sade, Ivan Karamazov, and Friedrich Nietzsche; and finally “historical rebellion,” exemplified by the terror of the French Revolution, Fascism (especially Nazism), and, most definitively, Russian Communism. Rebellion occurs when persons are so repulsed by the apparent meaninglessness of the universe that they take up a position of fundamental opposition to the forces that enslave and humiliate them. Camus uses Hegel’s master/slave dialectic to illustrate the structure of the three forms of rebellion. In the master/slave relationship, there comes a time when the slave will no longer accept the conditions which the master imposes upon him/her and thus “rebels.” Camus sketches his own conception of “humanist rebellion” in a similarly subtle dialectic of negative and positive elements. “[Rebellion] means […] ‘there is a limit beyond which you shall not go.’”11 Once that limit is reached, the slave actively refuses to embody the role which the master assigns and actively seeks to throw off the shackles of absurd enslavement. In enacting this double movement of resistance and revolt the slave engages in a twofold dialectic of action. It is in this way that the rebel slave says yes and no simultaneously […] [H]e confronts an order of things which oppresses him with the



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insistence on a kind of right not to be oppressed beyond the limit that he can tolerate […] In every act of rebellion, the rebel simultaneously experiences a feeling of revulsion at the infringements of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself.12

Precisely at this point, however, the humanist rebel recognizes that this loyalty to himself is not a mere individual experience; rather, it is the discovery of the fundamental value of human life per se. The slave who opposes his master is not concerned […] with repudiating his master as a human being. He repudiates him as a master […] If men cannot refer to a common value, recognized by all as existing in all, then man is incomprehensible to man.13

John Foley aptly summarizes Camus’ position as follows: The instant that the slave, or any human being who becomes aware of the weight of oppression on his shoulders, realizes that his master has exceeded certain limits, has trespassed upon certain rights that the slave holds to be inalienable, revolt is born. The rebel affirms the existence of a value, which must be recognized by both slave and master, and a limit to the absolute freedom the master assumes he should enjoy.14

Thus there are three discernible moments within humanist rebellion: the “no” of resistance to absurd oppression, the “yes” of asserting an inalienable right not to be dominated, and a further “yes” of recognizing this value of life as the possession of every human being. This complex recognition allows the humanist rebel to affirm that there are limits that ought not to be violated by anyone.15 Even freedom, the glorious gift of rebellion, is never absolute but is always limited by the inalienable dignity of all human beings, even the oppressor. The two other forms of rebellion, metaphysical and historical, share a fundamental flaw that places them in opposition to humanist rebellion. Once the initial act of rebellion takes place, representatives of these forms lose sight of the very value that gave birth to their revolt, the notion of limits. Camus points to the biblical figure Cain as the first nihilist; for in murdering his brother Abel, Cain not only violates the bond of fellowship that united the two brothers but also willfully violates the divine command not to murder. This double act

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reveals that Cain is unwilling to accept any limits to his behavior and so, like his mythical parents before him, he seeks to become a god himself, holding power over life and death itself. By asserting an absolute will to power, metaphysical rebels betray the very original insight of human solidarity that had energized the first movement of their rebellion, thereby reducing the act to the valorization of a single absolute value. Similarly, historical rebellion is characterized by “a forgetfulness of origins.” While the original act of rebellion is rooted in the values of freedom and justice, Camus writes, “there comes a time when justice demands a suspension of freedom. Then terror on a grand or small scale makes its appearance to consummate the revolution.”16 The French Revolution constitutes a clear example of historical rebellion turned to “revolutionary terror,” but the Russian communist revolution marks a further evolution of this model into the development of “state terrorism.” Here state power itself combines with its misappropriation of both reason and technology to obliterate any notion of the limits of the exercise of power. State terrorism thus combines with absolute political power to create the death-dealing totalitarian state. By contrast, “humanist rebellion” claims the common origin of all human beings in the recognition that the experience of absurdity itself creates a bond between all persons who ultimately share in this experience. The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe […] In our daily trials rebellion plays the same role as does the “cogito” in the realm of thought: it is the first piece of evidence. But this evidence lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel— therefore we exist.17

Despite the charge by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Francis Jeanson, and others that Camus is a “beautiful soul” who prefers personal wholeness to revolutionary politics, it is clear that Camus sees a very specific ethic emerging from human solidarity. Humanist rebellion asserts only “that a morality is possible and that it costs dearly.”18 Inaction is an impossible stance because it abandons the



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oppressed to their suffering and chooses silence over protest in solidarity with one’s fellow human beings.19 At the same time, however, Camus wants to deny the relevance of all forms of absoluteness for his rebellious ethic. In addition to rejecting what he calls “formal morality” and “absolute dogma,” he also rejects any notion of absolute freedom or justice. Absolute freedom is the right of the strongest to dominate. Therefore it prolongs the conflicts that profit by injustice. Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction; therefore it destroys freedom. The revolution to achieve justice, through freedom, ends by aligning them against each other.20

The only philosophy compatible with this non-absolutist ethic is what Camus calls “a philosophy of limits, la mesure” or moderation. In “Defense of The Rebel,” Camus writes: Moderation [la mesure] is not therefore the casual resolution of contraries. It is nothing other than the affirmation of contradiction, and the firm decision to insist upon it in order to outlive it. What I call “excess” is that movement of the soul that passes blindly beyond the frontier where opposites balance each other in order to finally take its stand in drunken consent, the cowardly and cruel examples of which stand before our eyes.21

And, in The Rebel: Art and society, creation and revolution […] must rediscover the source of rebellion, where refusal and acceptance, the unique and the universal, the individual and history, balance each other in a condition of acute tension […] Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live: in fact, for the humiliated.22

A philosophy and ethics of limits thus yields an ethic of moderation that bears some similarity to various forms of non-foundational ethics developed over the past 150 years. By denying all dogmatic foundations and absolute notions of freedom and justice, rebellious humanism places the agent in a situation where decisions must be

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made and action ventured, but without the false security of dogmas and absolutes. Rebellious ethics does not seek a resolution in theory of the moral and political challenges the rebel faces; rather the agent acts precisely in the midst of contradiction in order to exemplify the solidarity discovered in the shared experience of absurdity. As Camus wrote in another short essay: We know that we live in a contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is necessary to reduce it […] We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century.23

In rejecting the orthodoxies (Orwell called them “the smelly little orthodoxies”) of the European, and especially French left wing, Camus also broke with those who encouraged revolutionary violence in the name of the “proletariat.” Like Orwell, Camus abhorred the tendency of the Left to make abstractions of the actual lives of persons living under conditions of oppression. As one who had risked his own safety in the context of the French resistance movement against the Nazis, Camus was repulsed by members of the Left who, sitting in the safety of their Parisian coffee shops, called for revolutionary action without consideration of the terrible consequences—the terror—that so often followed such political revolutions. Camus’ own ambivalence about the Algerian war for independence demonstrated his resistance to any solution in which there were clearly winners or losers.24 Many saw Camus’ reluctance to support the revolutionary claims of the Algerians against their French masters as a clear indication that la mesure led only to muddled thinking and delayed action. Camus did not engage in inaction; indeed, he offered a comprehensive peace plan that he thought would make peaceful coexistence in a post-colonial Algeria possible, but the plan was so deeply at odds with the positions of the French intelligentsia and revolutionary leaders in Algeria that there was no hope that it would be adopted. In The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus Camus sketches the contours of an ethic of humanist rebellion, one that affirms the solidarity that emerges from a shared sense of absurdity but that refuses to invoke dogmas or absolutes in justification of the ethic. But his sketch remains oddly lacking in concreteness, even as the overall argument,



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especially the critique of nihilism, carries a great deal of persuasive power. I find this kind of non-foundational ethic greatly appealing, especially in light of the horrors of the twentieth century, or indeed in light of the kind of global politics that have emerged since 9/11. Many of Camus’ insights are carried forward in contemporary neopragmatism, in French thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, and in the work of the queer theorist and cultural critic Judith Butler. But Camus’ own account, at least as we find it in his philosophical essays, lacks full persuasiveness, in my opinion, because it remains at such a high level of abstraction—and this from a writer who was such a devastating critic of abstract philosophy. As I said earlier in the chapter, I find Camus’ argument against nihilism to be powerful and convincing, and the deft dialectic he develops in his philosophy of limits also has great appeal. But it is not as clear to me that Camus’ critique of nihilism yields quite the range of positive elements that he wants to claim for humanist rebellion. Camus claims that the very drawing of limits, the refusal on the part of the oppressed to allow continued domination, implies the affirmation of a basic notion of human dignity—something inviolable that inheres in human life itself. And since this idea of dignity is recognized as part of the human condition per se, it creates the conditions that make human and political solidarity possible. The acknowledgment of something inviolable in oneself leads ineluctably, Camus argues, into the recognition of this quality in all human beings, persons with whom one now stands in a web of solidarity and responsibility. It is clear that Camus is moving swiftly to assert a series of complex and contested claims about human dignity, solidarity, and rights. While his points about the internal inconsistency of the nihilist position are philosophically convincing, his attempt to generate positive content from the notion of limits seems less well argued. Although it might be the case that some moral norm or other is implied by the acceptance of human limits, it is not nearly as clear that the kind of universal content which Camus hopes for, such as dignity, rights, and solidarity, can be derived from the argument merely from consistency.25 Toward the end of The Rebel, however, Camus makes some brief but provocative comments about the importance of art for the ethic of solidarity and responsibility that emerges from humanist rebellion.26 The novel in particular exemplifies the dialectical

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movement that Camus believes is characteristic of a rebellious ethics. The novelist must neither fully reject reality nor merely reproduce that reality without imaginative nuance. The novelist accepts the inevitable complexity of lived human life, but through the free power of the imagination constructs a fictional world that allows the reader to imagine new possibilities for his or her life. The novel must bear sufficient similarity to the world of lived experience to create a familiar environment for the reader, but at the same time the imaginative power of the novel resides in the novelist’s ability to offer up the surprising, the unexpected, and the unfamiliar not only for the reader’s entertainment but also to challenge and augment her own identity and life experience. The novelist can open up new pathways for imagining ways of living a life of solidarity and responsibility in the world of limited but lived experience. Perhaps it is only in beauty, Camus surmises, that ethical agents can find their way back to the ethical origins of rebellion. But perhaps there is a living transcendence, of which beauty carries the promise, which can make this mortal and limited world preferable to and more appealing than any other. Art thus leads us back to the origins of rebellion, to the extent that it tries to give its form to an elusive value which the future perpetually promises, but of which the artist has a presentiment and wishes to snatch from the grasp of history.27

We should therefore not be surprised that we do not get Camus’ fullest and most persuasive account of a positive ethic of responsibility from his philosophical writings. In order to view this ethic in its full imaginative beauty and concrete reality, we must turn to his novels, particularly to The Plague. The Plague: An Ethic of Responsible Healing The Plague may be read in three different ways. It is at the same time a tale about an epidemic, a symbol of Nazi occupation (and incidentally the prefiguration of any totalitarian regime, no matter where), and thirdly, the concrete illustration of a metaphysical problem, that of evil […] which is what Melville tried to do with Moby-Dick, with genius added. (Albert Camus, Preface to The Plague)28



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The Plague was Camus’ most successful novel. The book sold 22,000 copies in the first two weeks after its appearance in 1947, and to date more than five million copies have been sold; the book has never been out of print and has been translated into more than thirty languages. As the quotation above from Camus’ own introduction to the novel indicates, the book can be read as “a tale about an epidemic,” or beyond that as a kind of allegory of the Nazi occupation of France, and finally as an inquiry into the problem of evil. All three levels of reading are likely to engage a broad literate public, as all three address issues at the heart of modern existence. So it is perhaps not surprising that the book has gathered such strong public support for more than sixty years. In his novels, in contrast to his extended philosophical essays, Camus is a brilliantly clear writer. His books capture readers’ imaginations not primarily by the development of plot but by deeply insightful forays into the psychological, cultural, and social condition of the individuals and societies he describes. In The Stranger, the reader surely is interested in finding out Meursault’s fate after his senseless murder of an Arab stranger on the beach, but it is the riveting account of Meursault’s absurd psychological state that holds the reader’s attention and makes the book a genuine page-turner. Of all Camus’ novels, The Plague may be the most complicated and artful. Not only do the meanings of the story travel along the three lines indicated, but the form of the novel is at once clear and complex. Nowhere is this artful complexity more apparent than in Camus’ manipulation of narrative voice in the novel. In the first few pages, Camus, apparently speaking as the author, informs his readers that the identity of the narrator “will be made known in due course” but that it is much more important for readers to understand that the narrator sees himself [sic] primarily as a chronicler, reporting data that “he saw himself […] accounts of other eyewitnesses […] and documents that subsequently came into his hands.”29 Three voices seem to be in play here: the author, the narrator, and the narrator/ character whose identity will be revealed subsequently. By writing in the third person about the narrator, the author seeks to distinguish himself from the narrator, whose voice will appear, beginning in the next paragraph of the novel. What is going on here? Why does Camus engage in such complex use of narrative voice, and why is it important that he share this information with the reader at the outset of the novel? To some extent,

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Camus is surely being ironic in insisting that the narrator is primarily a chronicler, simply reporting data as he has seen it or as it has been reported to him by eyewitnesses or documents. In The Rebel Camus is a harsh critic of the crude realism that he believes characterizes many modern novels. Indeed, Camus argues that realism, understood as the mere repetition and representation of reality, is an “absurd concept.” He writes that realism cannot dispense with a minimum of interpretation and arbitrariness […] Realist novels select their material, despite themselves, from reality, because the choice and the conquest of reality are absolute conditions of thought and expression. To write is already to choose.30

Still, his comments about narration cannot be merely ironic. Camus is about to depict an ethic of responsibility in which ambiguity and vulnerability are inescapable conditions for ethical action. At the same time, however, he does not want ambiguity in any way to suggest relativism or meaninglessness. He understands his account to be a true, although fictive, report of the events which both he (Camus the author) and his narrator have experienced. The novel made its appearance in a post-war France in which the heroic myth of noble French resistance to Nazism had been accepted as true in all those countries that had fought against Fascism. Camus’ intervention into the discussion about resistance offers a more nuanced view, one which “distinguished good from evil but abstained from condemning human frailty.”31 In order to combat the self-aggrandizing view of heroic French resistance, Camus seeks to offer an account that combines forthright truth-telling with careful attention to moral ambiguity. Thus the narrator must be seen as a reliable reporter, a chronicler who uses his artistic construction to depict true ethical actions in the midst of great human vulnerability and frailty. Like the previous literary works we have surveyed, The Plague exemplifies the forms of realism that are “fraught with background” and thus cast up mysterious undertones from the realist prose that shapes the novel. In some way Camus seems to be offering the reader a kind of incomplete blueprint of the surprises yet to come by telling us that the narrator’s identity will be revealed but not until the close of the novel. Though the novel is an example of gripping storytelling, the author often interrupts the flow of the story to focus upon detailed examinations of the behavior, character, actions, and histories



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of the main characters. He describes the town of Oran, “its back to the sea,” in ways that capture the suffocating nature of its geography, architecture, and climate. In addition, Camus’ realist descriptions of the plague’s horrific physical symptoms and his heart-rending accounts of victims’ death-throes connect the reader powerfully to forms of suffering being endured by those infected with the plague. This use of verisimilitude renders these characters as genuinely real and recognizable in the reader’s own world of experience. At the same time, however, he upsets our expectations by filling those accounts with multiple examples of absurd occurrences: the elderly asthmatic Spaniard who marks the passage of time by transferring peas “pea by pea” from one pot to the other;32 the arbitrariness of the plague’s contagion striking down its victims seemingly at random; and the deeply sympathetic character Joseph Grand who spends each day writing and rewriting the first sentence of his proposed novel.33 Camus’ self-reflective use of various narrative voices places The Plague in a long tradition of writerly anxiety about narrative voice. Beginning already in the 1830s, writers came to distrust the use of omniscient narration, in part because of growing doubts about the meaning of omniscience itself. According to Laura Thiemann Scales, “The inability to identify the author, the narrator, or the character had become, in both a theological and literary sense, the cultural norm […] [emblemizing] a narrative form that embraces, rather than fears, that ambiguity.”34 Given Camus’ own grave doubts about the existence of God, it is no surprise that he might share these doubts about omniscient narration. Narration is, of course, an assertion of authority and Camus is rightly concerned about the authority of his own narration since he was a participant in the resistance movement being described in allegorical form. On the one hand, he wants to assert his own authority and the trustworthiness of his narration, while at the same time he wants to avoid falling victim to any form of crude realism. In addition, the novel appears in the midst of ideological battles about the meaning of the terrible events of World War II and the Holocaust. Camus wants to oppose both the myths of heroism of French resistance and the myth that the war constituted a key moment in the triumph of Marxism over both Fascism and Capitalism. Thus Camus wants simultaneously to embrace truth-telling and ambiguity. By being so candid about the kind of narrative he is constructing, he shows the necessity of multiple sources of authority. The reader may interpret as she pleases, but Camus hopes at the very least to be a

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reliable guide to the interpretation he finds most plausible. By placing the narration in his own voice, the voice of the narrator, and the voice of Dr. Rieux (ultimately identified as the character/narrator), Camus shows the complex interaction of subjectivity and objectivity that must characterize all persuasive writing. Narrative objectivity can only be mediated through human subjectivity but both must remain in dialectical tension with one another if crude realism or illusory utopianism is to be avoided. John Cruickshank35 has used the helpful phrase “symbolic realism” to capture the complexity of Camus’ style in The Plague. As I have shown, Camus combines elements of realism and symbolism in his construction of the art of this novel. Oran is a specific place with its own geography, culture, and climate. Characters like Rieux, Tarrou, Rambert, Paneloux, and even Grand are familiar figures, and Camus employs the techniques of verisimilitude to render these persons as genuine unsubstitutable individuals. At the same time, these realistic characters function symbolically to point beyond themselves toward ethical types which can provide guidance for readers seeking to find their own moral orientation in a world of ambiguity and vulnerability. Cruickshank rightly disagrees with those who categorize The Plague as an allegory since the novel neither posits a strict one-to-one correspondence between character and type nor seeks to extend the symbolism consistently throughout the text. Rather, Camus’ approach bears a strong resemblance to the “figural interpretation” that Eric Auerbach so brilliantly describes and which was treated in the first chapter of this book. The concrete particularity of each character is never subjugated to its symbolic function. Thus when the realist characters point beyond themselves to ethical options available to any reader of the text, they do so in a way that always gestures back toward the concrete character. Would you hope to be a healer in a pestilence-ridden world? Then look to the specific actions Dr. Rieux performs as he goes about his responsibilities as a doctor and healer. Would you seek to find a way out of the ethical paralysis entailed by a weight of guilt about past complicity with evil? Then look to Tarrou’s particular actions as he joins the fight against the plague despite bearing a load of moral remorse. Thus Camus’ prose style reiterates the forms of realism that are “fraught with background,” that insist on pushing the reader beyond the merely realistic and toward the symbolic, without, however, losing touch with the concrete particularity of the character.



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Cruickshank suggests that The Plague insists on three different but related readings. The nature of the symbolist novel requires two readings – one for each of the two levels of interpretation which even the simplest symbol contains. But one should add, I think, that a third reading is also necessary. Having responded as completely as possible to the literal and latent meanings of the symbol, the critic should then read the novel again so as to reconstitute it in its organic duality. Only in this way, and at this third reading, can one fully appreciate the richness of texture and the continuous interplay of the explicit and the implicit which are a fundamental part of the symbolist novel’s effect on the reader. The real justification for taking the symbol apart and distinguishing its literal and non-literal aspects is the increased response to its recreated wholeness which such a procedure makes possible […] This emphasis on the literal meaning helps to ensure that the gap is not too great between the explicit and implicit levels, and that the critic will not be tempted to strain the symbolism. In this last analysis, however, the limit can never operate with precision. There must always be an ill-defined area where the appropriateness and validity of a particular interpretation will remain a matter for individual judgment. The symbolist novel will always have a fringe of uncertainty and an aura of imprecision.36

An Ethic of Happiness and Hope What is beyond doubt is that The Plague was an intensely personal book. Camus put something of himself – his emotions, his memories, and his sense of place – into all his published work; that is one of the ways in which he stood apart from the other intellectuals of his generation, and it accounts for his universal and lasting appeal. But even by his standards The Plague is strikingly introspective and revealing. Oran, the setting for the novel, was a city he knew well and cordially disliked, in contrast to his much-beloved home town of Algiers. He found it boring and materialistic and his memories of it were further shaped by the fact that his tuberculosis took a turn for the worse during his stay there. As a result he was forbidden to swim – one of his greatest pleasures – and was constrained to sit around for weeks on end in the stifling, oppressive heat that provides the backdrop to the story.37

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Camus’ self-involvement in the substance of this novel reveals once again the deep connections between subjectivity and objectivity in his realistic aesthetic. His “presence” (in the many senses of that word) in the events of novel, though fictively rendered, nonetheless establishes his authority as a reliable chronicler. Profound self-involved subjectivity, especially when combined with other eyewitnesses and trustworthy documents, increases authorial legitimacy rather than undermining it. Elements of Camus’ own persona are woven in and through a number of the characters in the novel. Like Camus during the Nazi occupation, the journalist Raymond Rambert is exiled in Oran and thus cut off from his own beloved city and from his wife. Throughout the novel Rambert slowly evolves from a man obsessed with his own personal suffering to someone committed to the communal effort of fighting the plague through his volunteer service with the sanitary squads. Jean Tarrou, the town clerk, develops a bond of friendship with Dr. Bernard Rieux, the physician/organizer of the fight against the plague and the character/narrator whose identity Camus reveals toward the end of the book. While Dr. Rieux is the key carrier of Camus’ philosophy of health and happiness, Jean Tarrou is especially important in raising one of Camus’ central concerns regarding murder and the senseless ending of life. Like Camus as a young man, Tarrou witnessed an execution, and his guilt over the fact that his father had sentenced the man to death is a constant source of regret and remorse. Moreover, Tarrou’s profound sense of complicity in this man’s death, even though he bore no direct responsibility for it, raises the question of shared moral responsibility in nationstates that use murder (including state-sponsored executions) as an instrument of politics. I have realized that we all have plague, and I have lost my peace. And today I am still trying to find it; still trying to understand all those others and not to be the mortal enemy of anyone. I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken and that’s the only way we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death […] So that is why I resolved to have no truck with anything which directly or indirectly, for good reasons or for bad, brings death to anyone or justifies others’ putting him to death.38



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But it is finally Bernard Rieux who exemplifies and enacts the moral insights that guide Camus’ ethic of responsibility. Like Dr. Rieux, Camus took up his leadership role in the resistance reluctantly, finally succumbing to pressure to use his literary notoriety in service to the resistance by becoming editor of the resistance newspaper Combat. Even then, Camus, like Rieux, did not understand this leadership as an act of heroism or moral superiority; leadership, rather, was simply an extension of his vocation as a writer to the new situation of political resistance. Leadership is, in some important sense, “just doing one’s job.” The key section of the novel, its “climax” if you will, is a scene in which Rieux, Tarrou, Grand, and the Jesuit preacher and scholar Fr. Paneloux witness the horrendous death of a young child, “a grotesque parody of crucifixion.”39 On the previous day, Dr. Rieux had given the child one of the first doses of plague serum that had reversed the consequences of the disease in many adult victims. But the serum had the horrible effect of extending the boy’s life only to increase the measure of his suffering. The onlookers view the scene with a sense of utter powerlessness in the face of the absurd and useless suffering. The four men find themselves overcome with grief as they watch this boy in his death-throes. Two of the men reach out to touch his face; Father Paneloux prays, “My God, spare this child!” But his suffering continues unabated and the men decide to leave the room, unable to bear the boy’s “long, incessant scream […] filling the ward with a fierce indignant protest.”40 But just as Rieux turns to leave, an eerie silence settles over the scene, signaling the boy’s death. The four men leave the room in anger and despair over the suffering of this innocent young boy. In his exhaustion, Rieux admits to a feeling of “mad revolt” at the absurd arbitrariness of the deathdealing plague. To the Jesuit’s suggestion that “perhaps we should love what we cannot understand,” Rieux responds with a decisive Dostoyevskian comment: “No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”41 Father Paneloux continues to press his theological point, suggesting that the two men together “are working for man’s salvation.” With a weary wry smile, Rieux responds, “Salvation’s much too big a word for me. I don’t aim so high. I’m concerned with man’s health, and for me his health comes first.”42 Yes, Rieux continues, the two men are working in solidarity

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with one another—not for human salvation but for human health under siege of death and disease. Bernard Rieux has a profound understanding of the ubiquity of the plague and the limited resources human beings can bring to the deadly power of the disease. He rejects any utopian notion that the plague can ever be defeated once and for all; a reminder of Camus’ opposition to all forms of utopian visions and absolute victories in The Rebel. At the same time he refuses to accept the notion that human beings are powerless in the face of the plague. In another key passage, Rieux and Tarrou have a moving exchange about the kind of solidarity that they share with one another, a solidarity that began between two strangers but has now developed into something like friendship. Tarrou shares with Rieux the story of his childhood as a boy growing up with great admiration for his father, a prosecuting attorney. At age 17, Tarrou is invited by his father to attend a court session at which his father urges the execution of a man accused of murder. He is horrified by the events he witnesses. From that day on I couldn’t even see the railway directory without a shudder of disgust. I took a horrified interest in legal proceedings, death sentences, executions, and I realized with dismay that my father must have often witnessed those brutal murders.43

Unable to bear the weight of his father’s professional commitment to being a murderer on the state’s behalf, he flees from home, never to return. Tarrou then commits himself to fight the death penalty with all the vigor he has available to him, since he has recognized that “the social order around me was based on the death sentence, and by fighting the established order I’d be fighting against murder.”44 He became part of a radical international network of anti-death penalty activists. “Needless to say, I knew that we, too, on occasion, passed sentences of death.” Such complicity with murder was morally acceptable to Tarrou because “these few deaths were inevitable for the building up of a new world in which murder would cease to be,” a position Tarrou could maintain until he witnessed with his own eyes an execution by firing squad of a treasonous soldier. At that point all justifications of murder as somehow “necessary” dissipated before the searing vision of a man whose chest was shredded by the effects of six rifles firing just a yard and a half from the victim. It was then that Tarrou realized that



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we are all caught up in political and economic systems that condone murder for the apparent well-being of the larger body politic. But, to Tarrou, that now simply meant that we are all victims of the plague ourselves, no matter how we might proclaim our innocence. This, too, is why this epidemic has taught me nothing new, except that I must fight it at your side […] [for] each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in someone else’s face and fasten the infection on him.45

As the conversation continues, Tarrou speculates about how one might “be a saint without God.” Rieux replies, “[Y]ou know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.” In response Tarrou makes a suggestion that will enact the solidarity that the two have now achieved: “‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘what we now should do for friendship’s sake?’ ‘Anything you like, Tarrou.’ ‘Go for a swim.’”46 And what follows is one of the most beautiful passages in a book filled with aesthetic delights. Using their free passage credentials, the two men go through the sealed and guarded gates of the town and approach the sea. Once they were on the pier they saw the sea spread out before them, a gently heaving expanse of deep-piled velvet, supple and sleek as a creature of the wild. They sat down on a boulder facing the open. Slowly the waters rose and sank, and with their tranquil breathing sudden oily glints formed and flickered over the surface in a haze of broken lights. Before them the darkness stretched out into infinity. Rieux could feel under his hand the snarled, weather-worn visage of the rocks, and a strange happiness possessed him. Turning to Tarrou, he caught a glimpse on his friend’s face of the same happiness, a happiness that forgot nothing, not even murder.47

After a few minutes of vigorous swimming, Rieux “lay on his back and stayed motionless, gazing up at the dome of the sky lit by the stars and moon.” Once Tarrou had caught up with the doctor, they began swimming side by side, “in the same rhythm, isolated from the world, at last free of the town and of the plague.” Soon they returned to the shore and “they dressed and started back. Neither had said

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a word, but they were conscious of being perfectly at one, and the memory of this night would be cherished by them both.”48 This passage is strikingly similar to Henri Lefebvre’s description of the country church discussed at the outset of the first chapter. The sublimity of friendship’s happiness is captured with the description of a very simple and ordinary experience, a night-time swim in the Mediterranean Sea. The gorgeous description of the sea at night evokes from the reader a sense of beauty, tranquility, and well-being, even with the plague-filled city looming like a dark fortress above them. Here again we see Camus as the master of “symbolic realism.” Without the exquisite description of the sights, sounds, smells, and touch of the summer night-time air and sea, this passage could not have the aesthetic power it possesses. Realist description makes the experience completely believable as it touches upon experiences familiar to almost all readers. But the power of the description clearly reaches beyond itself with a symbolic gesture toward the happiness that only shared friendship can evoke. The power of the passage requires both the real and the symbolic, both the mundane and the sublime. Just as remarkably, this passage exhibits a realistic yet hopeful ethic that is available to the reader for his or her own examination or possible enactment. Here we see an ethic of limits in all its concrete reality. The escape from the plague-scarred town is real and exhilarating. The relief that the two men feel during their swim is palpable and genuine. And their shared but wordless happiness is a moment of great sublimity. And yet there is not a hint of utopianism in this depiction. This is not an ethic of aesthetic forgetfulness; this is not an understanding of solidarity that invokes political amnesia. No, this is an ethic of happiness “that forgot nothing, not even murder.” Thus the burdens of the past are taken up into the shared experience of happiness and embraced within it. The plague has not disappeared; indeed, with their return to the shore the men understand all too well what awaits them in that suffocating city with its back to the sea. “When they caught sight of the plague watchman, Rieux guessed that Tarrou, like himself, was thinking that the disease had given them a respite, and this was good, but now they must set their shoulders to the wheel again.”49 This ritual swim serves as a renewal of both happiness and hope, but also provides both men with a source of courage and persistence in the neverending battle against the plague.



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Camus’ ethic of responsibility avoids the extremes of utopianism and despair by applying the standard of la mesure, or moderation, to all ethical situations—a position which leads to his rejection of all moral absolutes. When faced with a situation that calls for ethical action, the agent must seek proximate results by applying both a realist sense of plausible outcomes and an imaginative grasp of new ethical possibilities. Above all, one must act in such a way that the consequences of our actions (which we cannot, of course, always predict) do not produce even greater suffering for those implicated in our action. Ethical action thus takes place within the “gray zone” where action must be risked even though we cannot know all the factors that impinge on our decision making or that of others. We understand better that in conditions of extremity there are rarely to be found comfortingly simple categories of good and evil, guilty and innocent. We know more about the choices and compromises faced by men and women in hard times, and we are no longer so quick to judge those who accommodate themselves to impossible situations. Men may do the right thing from a mixture of motives and may with equal ease do terrible deeds with the best of intentions – or no intentions at all.50

In the final pages of The Plague, Rieux characterizes himself as simply “a healer.” He rejects titles like “hero” and “saint” as being far too elevated for his single-minded dedication to healing as many victims of the plague as possible. Some of the most beautiful and powerful statements about the importance of healing appear immediately after Camus, the author, reveals Rieux to have been the narrator of this chronicle; thus all three narrators come together in a single voice. The soliloquy with which the book ends deserves to be quoted at length for its aesthetic and moral power. Dr. Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise. Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done,

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and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.51

Camus on Christianity Camus often uses the modifier “strange” when he writes about human states like happiness, hope, and love. “Strange” designates his own realist version of such affective states. While some might want to believe that a true expression of happiness constitutes the erasure of all memory of murder from one’s mind, Camus clearly understands such sentiments to be unrealistic and illusory. His strange happiness is one that embraces the most deeply unhappy occurrences of one’s past and resolves to continue on despite the ongoing pain generated by guilt and remorse. So also hope, understood from this realist perspective, acknowledges the truly absurd character of the world and yet resolves to carry on with responsible, and always fallible, ethical actions. Then, finally, there are Camus’ poignant comments about “a strange form of love.” Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange kind of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live: in fact, for the humiliated […] At this meridian of thought, the rebel thus rejects divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men.52

Rebellious humanism seems to require the rejection of God, and yet Camus’ works have an almost God-obsessed quality about them. Camus’ attitude toward Christianity is particularly complex and interesting. As he said in an answer to a letter from a Belgian divinity student, “I have Christian concerns but my nature is Pagan.”53 Christianity and Humanist rebellion are both concerned with the fundamental problem of evil, the apparent irreconcilability of absurd human suffering and the affirmation of an all-powerful, good, and loving God. Camus finds Christianity to fall short in three interrelated ways. First, in seeking a solution to the problem of evil with reference to a transcendent almighty God, Christianity places the resources for fighting evil outside the human realm, thereby directing human



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attention to the afterlife rather than to the here-and-now. Secondly, Christianity has failed to live out its own ethic of solidarity with the marginalized in a consistent fashion, refusing time after time to speak out against the horrid injustices of the modern world. (Camus is thinking particularly of the failure of both Catholic and Protestant Christianity to oppose the mass murder of European Jewry.) What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnations in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man.54

Thirdly, the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, “the irreducible originality of Christianity,”55 significantly intersects with the humanist claim that resources for fighting evil must always reside in human hands. Had Christianity been willing to think through thoroughly its doctrine of incarnation, Camus might have drawn a more favorable conclusion about its role in fighting injustice, but in the end he believes that the “divine principle” usurps the “human principle” in the doctrine so that once again “salvation” resides primarily in the divine nature which in some sense takes the human “along for the ride.” Still, Camus deeply admires the Christian insight that God so completely identifies with human beings that God becomes a human being in order to secure their salvation. But, alas, that salvation is itself other-worldly and transcendent, which once again draws power and energy away from the primacy of concrete human solidarity. Despite Camus’ lifelong fascination with Christianity he could not adopt it as his own ethical and philosophical path. “God always has and remains, I suppose, one of man’s great opportunities. But all those who have turned away from him must find another path, and must do so without too much pride or illusion.”56 I ended the previous chapter by suggesting that the work of George Orwell should make us suspicious of too sharply distinguishing categories like the believer and the unbeliever, or the sacred and the secular. Close analyses of these writers’ literary art forces us to adopt (and perhaps create) new categories for analyzing the form and content of works that unsettle our simple critical dichotomies. While Albert Camus may seem at first blush an unbelieving atheist, he himself rankled at having that category applied to his person and work. To claim atheism for himself he must violate his own

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categorical rejection of absolutes. To be an atheist is to assert what can never be the case, that we have knowledge of the non-existence of God. All Camus is willing to say is that the notion of God has done irreparable harm throughout human history, and that Christianity does not offer a form of ethical life that he can affirm or a moral path that he can follow. Despite the apparent deep divide between rebellious humanism and Christian practice, I want to suggest that there are some remarkable and surprising overlaps between Camus’ position on the ethic of responsibility and similar views found in some Christian theologians. In particular, the later theology of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer echoes many of the claims that Camus makes about absolutes, vulnerability, a philosophy of limits, and the fundamental importance of an ethic of mutual responsibility and solidarity. We know that both men were influenced by Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, but those common sources are not sufficient to account for the significant overlap in their development of an ethic of responsibility. The purpose of this comparison is not primarily to offer a causal account of their convergences; rather, it is to show how similar paths of the moral life are recommended by two thinkers who have such strikingly dissimilar “starting points.” Seen together, the ethical proposals of these quite different thinkers provide a clear account of overlapping moral worlds that believer and unbeliever, agnostic and disciple, humanist intellectual and Christological theologian recommend to their readers. I will reserve my comparative comments for the end of this chapter after I have given a fairly detailed sketch of Bonhoeffer’s ethic of vulnerability and responsibility. Vulnerability and Responsibility We have learnt by experience that we cannot plan even for the coming day […] and that our life […] has become formless or even fragmentary […] we shall have to keep our lives rather than shape them, to hope rather than to plan, to hold out rather than to march forward. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge,” May, 194457

The words above, written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his cell in Berlin’s Tegel Prison, reflect the historical particularity of the



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imminent collapse of the Nazi regime toward the end of World War II and the uncertain future facing German society and culture in a war-weary Europe. But they are also, in a way Bonhoeffer could not know at the time, prescient remarks about his own personal future. Despite his involvement in the plot against Adolf Hitler through an operation deep within the Abwehr, or German military intelligence, Bonhoeffer was confident that one of the attempts on Hitler’s life would be successful and that he and the other plotters would be released from prison. But the failed assassination attempt in July 1944 blew the cover off the secret operation and ultimately led to the execution of the conspirators in early April, 1945, shortly before the end of the war. Bonhoeffer’s courageous decision to leave the safety of the United States and the security of a teaching position at Union Theological Seminary to return to Germany in the summer of 1939 is a story often told and widely remembered. As he wrote in a letter to Reinhold Niebuhr immediately prior to his return to a Germany now at war: I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people […] Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose; but I cannot make that choice in security.58

Bonhoeffer’s later writings, particularly his Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison, serve as a testament to the character of Christian life lived in full recognition of the fundamental vulnerability of human existence. While the historical circumstances of his times— the two world wars, the Armenian genocide, the rise of Fascism, Nazism and Bolshevism, the Spanish Civil War, the persecution of the Jews and the horrors of the Holocaust, and the imminent unleashing of atomic weapons on civilian populations—made human vulnerability inescapably obvious, Bonhoeffer knew that the historical moment pointed to a deeper truth about the precariousness of human life. Despite all attempts to hide from the truth of our vulnerability, despite modern philosophical monuments to human autonomy and

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self-aggrandizement, despite the Promethean efforts of totalitarian forms of government to assert total control over all forms of civil and personal life, vulnerability—both human and divine—remains an inescapable element of the human condition. For Bonhoeffer, it is the Christian gospel that identifies vulnerability as a mark of the human. But Bonhoeffer found that mark not in human existence per se but in the particularity of Jesus of Nazareth, the God become man. Bonhoeffer held in scorn various theological attempts to emphasize human vulnerability so as to “necessitate” divine strength. [W]e should frankly recognize […] that we shouldn’t run man down in his worldliness, but confront him with God at his strongest point, that we should give up all our clerical tricks, and not regard psychotherapy and existentialist philosophy as God’s pioneers.59

Vulnerability is not a general predicate of human beings discoverable through philosophical inquiry; rather, it is an attribute of the God incarnate discoverable in the proclamation of a God whose strength is made perfect in weakness. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. [God] is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which [God] is with us and helps us […] Only the suffering God can help.60

This discourse, explicitly indebted to Luther’s theology of the cross, thus intersects with the various themes of the humble sublime and sacramental realism we have traced through the first four chapters of this book: “Before God and with God we live without God.” As the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus makes clear, to “have Christ present” is to experience Christ’s absence. To recognize Christ “in the breaking of the bread” is to have Christ “disappear” from our sight. Thus the vulnerable God is present precisely under the sign of God’s absence. God’s incarnational and sacramental presence always appears under the sign of God’s absence, under that which is apparently not God, under that which is in fact the sign of



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death. To experience the vulnerable God’s presence is precisely to experience God as powerless, suffering, dying, and even absent. God’s vulnerability does, indeed, imply God’s opacity, or as theologians have argued, “God’s hiddenness.” While our other authors have gestured toward the ethical and political implications of these themes for ethics, Bonhoeffer sought in his incomplete and posthumously published work to develop a fuller sense of the meaning of ethical responsibility in a situation of precarious vulnerability. For Bonhoeffer, human responsibility emerges not from assertion of human strength and power but from a shared vulnerability that makes ethics a social and collaborative exercise. Solidarity emerges, Bonhoeffer argues, not from our discovery of some shared human self-assertion but from the recognition that our shared vulnerability makes possible a sense of common responsibility for our human future. Ethics is for Bonhoeffer a concrete endeavor concerned not primarily with knowledge but with action. The knowledge of good and evil seems to be the aim of all ethical reflection. The first task of Christian ethics is to invalidate this knowledge […] This leads us away from any kind of abstract ethic and toward an ethic which is entirely concrete.61

Ethical inquiry that assumes that knowledge of good and evil will place the ethical agent in a position to make a right decision based upon secure philosophical principles is ultimately self-deluding. This view of ethics seeks to place the inquirer into a neutral space prior to all action, a view from nowhere that belies the fact that ethical agents are inescapably enmeshed in networks of action and responsibility that bear directly on their beliefs, behaviors, and decisions. Further, knowledge-based ethics establishes inquirers as autonomous agents responsible only to themselves and their principles of ethical deliberation. As such, these inquirers deny their deeper responsibility to the origin of all things in God. In a subtle interpretation of the Israelite myth of the fall, Bonhoeffer sees the “knowledge of good and evil” as human beings’ attempt to usurp the divine origin of all good and evil. Instead of finding all things in God, the creatures seek to establish themselves as the origin and deliberator of all things good and evil. “Instead of knowing themselves within God, who is their origin, they now must know themselves as

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the origin.”62 In eating the fruit of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” they deny their own creatureliness and cast off all notions of creaturely limitation. “And you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”63 This failure to see that all created things have their origin in a creator God has further ramifications for ethics, especially in its Christian expressions. “Traditional ethical thought,” according to Bonhoeffer, has conceived of the problem of ethics as residing in “a juxtaposition and conflict of two spheres, the one divine, holy, supernatural and Christian, and the other worldly, profane, natural, and un-Christian.”64 Such a view, however, assumes that there are aspects of reality that lie outside the realm created and governed by God in Christ. Moreover, these elements of reality, usually called secular, have their own inner rationale and logic and can be accessed, interpreted, and understood by anyone, independent of the reality of Christ. Bonhoeffer does not entirely erase the distinction between sacred and secular, but he rejects the notion that these two realities constitute separate spheres. Within the one reality that has its origin in God, one can properly distinguish between the “penultimate” and the “ultimate” dimensions of that reality. Bonhoeffer’s polemic here is directed against those who separate the secular sphere in order to vilify it on Christian grounds. He has in mind the long tradition of Christian opposition to the world. But most importantly he is directing this critique to those within his own German evangelical community who used two-spheres thinking to oppose the German experiment with democracy in the Weimar Republic and also to those within the Confessing Church who refused to extend their critique of National Socialism to condemn the Nazi treatment of the Jews. Bonhoeffer does not deny that there may at times be tensions between the secular and religious aspects of the one reality in Christ or that Christian criticism of the secular may sometimes be appropriate. He writes, however, that when Christianity is employed as a polemical weapon against the secular, this must be done in the name of a better secularity and above all it must not lead back to a static predominance of the spiritual sphere as an end in itself.65

While in principle all reality is one in Christ, Bonhoeffer recognizes that in a fallible and fallen world, tension will still remain between



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the Christian and the secular. Nonetheless, ethical action undertaken in the name of Christ and ethical action undertaken in the name of secularity should ultimately converge with one another. And the course of his own life confirmed this fundamental insight. Bonhoeffer’s experience with members of the conspiratorial circle in the Abwehr, when combined with his own humanist upbringing, convinced him that Christ could be manifest in those who do not confess his name. In reflecting upon the barbarous ideology of Nazism, “the deification of the irrational, of blood and instinct, of the beast of prey in man,” Bonhoeffer notes that reason, culture, humanity, tolerance and self-determination, all these concepts which until very recently had served as battle slogans against the Church, against Christianity, against Jesus Christ Himself, had now, suddenly and surprisingly, come very near indeed to the Christian standpoint.66

Thus Bonhoeffer can assert that “Jesus gives his support to those who suffer for the sake of a just cause, even if this cause is not precisely the confession of his name.”67 If justice finds its true origin and goal in Jesus, the crucified and resurrected, then all those who engage in righteous action come under the protective lordship of Christ. “[T]he crucified Christ has become the refuge and the justification, the protection and the claim for the higher values and their defenders that have fallen victim to suffering.”68 Bonhoeffer’s distinction between the ultimate and the penultimate follows the classic logic of the relation between faith and works of love in the Lutheran tradition.69 For Luther, the Christian’s ultimate destiny is determined solely by the free exercise of God’s loving grace, by grace, through faith, for the sake of Christ. But Bonhoeffer proceeds to say (as Luther himself did), “but faith is never alone.”70 Faith is made active in love, and works of love are performed for the sake of the penultimate, for the sake of the neighbor in need. The hungry person needs bread, the homeless person needs shelter, the one deprived of rights needs justice, the lonely person needs community, the undisciplined one needs order, and the slave needs freedom. It would be blasphemy against God and our neighbor to leave the hungry unfed while saying that God is closest to those in deepest need. We break bread with the hungry and share our home with them for the

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sake of Christ’s love, which belongs to the hungry as much as it does to us.71

So what is the shape of a responsible life lived in the face of a hidden God, unreliable and unrealistic ethical universals, and a world rife with vulnerability, suffering, and death? Bonhoeffer insists that an ethics of responsibility is marked by concreteness and sociality.72 Concrete ethical action always takes place within a web of social relations in which deliberation regarding the good is an integral aspect of living out our lives. The question about the good […] is definitely not an abstraction from life, such as a realization of certain ideals and values that are independent of life, but life itself. Good is life as it is in reality, that is, in its origins, essence, and goal […] Good is not a quality of life but ‘life” itself. “Being good” means to live.73

Ethics does not begin when we abstract ourselves from our lived experience; rather ethics is happening in every moment of action that constitutes a human life. The question is how we might discern the good in the midst of the ebb and flow of our daily activity. As we have seen, Bonhoeffer rejects reliance on abstract principles or mere casuistry. For Bonhoeffer ethics is a matter of discernment, formation, and conformation. And for Christians the life of responsibility has a specific, concrete, and Christological focus. Ethics as formation, then, means the bold endeavor to speak about the way in which the form of Jesus Christ takes form in our world, in a manner which is neither abstract nor casuistic, neither programmatic nor purely speculative. Concrete judgments and decisions will have to be ventured here. Decisions and action can here no longer be delegated to the personal conscience of the individual. Here there are concrete commandments and instructions for which obedience is demanded.74

Following Luther in The Freedom of a Christian, Bonhoeffer understands an ethic of responsibility to be played out in the dialectic between the exercise of human freedom and the bond of relationship to the neighbor in need. Bonhoeffer insists that the tension within this dialectic should never be released. To prefer bondage to freedom is to run the risk of an ethic of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation, both



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of which render the agent incapable of discerning new possibilities and taking more radical ethical action. Bonhoeffer is particularly worried about the tendency within his own Lutheranism to affirm ethical quietism which, because it takes a stance of relativism within the penultimate and takes refuge in the ultimate alone, thereby eliminates the need for exceptional and courageous ethical action. Such a stance makes impossible the bold stroke of ethical action which must sometimes be taken in the midst of our lived experience. In the course of historical life there comes a point where the exact observance of the formal law of a state, of a commercial undertaking, of a family, or for that matter of a scientific discovery, suddenly finds itself in violent conflict with the ineluctable necessities of the lives of persons; at this point responsible and pertinent action leaves behind it the domain of principle and convention, the domain of the normal and regular, and is confronted by the extraordinary situation of ultimate necessities, a situation which no law can control.75

Bonhoeffer developed the phrase “vicarious representative action” to characterize the bond of responsibility that obtains among persons who live and work with one another in a network of solidarity. Ethical action is ineluctably social action in relation to others; indeed, Bonhoeffer went so far as to question whether the individual can be an ethical agent in any true sense of the word. But Bonhoeffer is also aware of the potential that this notion can be distorted into a form of paternalism, a kind of smug noblesse oblige exercised by the “free” on behalf of those who suffer under bondage. Bonhoeffer insists that vicarious representative action is fully reciprocal. Both parties in an ethical relationship bear responsibility for one another. “There can never be an absolute responsibility that does not find its essential limit in the responsibility of the other person.”76 It is important to understand that while Bonhoeffer urges a Christian ethic of conformity to Christ, an ethic of formation shaped by the habitual practice of obedience to the divine command, he considers this ethical deliberation neither easy nor self-evident. The will of God may lie very deeply concealed beneath a great number of available possibilities. The will of God is not a system of rules which is established from the outset; it is something new and different in each different situation in life, and for this reason human beings

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must ever anew examine what the will of God may be. The heart, the understanding, observation, and experience must all collaborate in this task.77

An ethics of responsibility confronts uncertainty, ambiguity, and vulnerability at every turn. There is no “magic bullet,” no “deus ex machina” which will suddenly appear to illuminate the path of discipleship that Christians seek to traverse. Bonhoeffer is, of course, aware of the dangers of this highly relative (but not relativistic) ethic, and so toward the very end of his life he began to think through the ways in which intentional Christian communities might serve as the necessary context within which the traits of character that shape the responsible life might be cultivated. These thoughts on the “arcane discipline” were only briefly articulated in some of the later of his prison letters.78 I will return to this tantalizing and elusive notion in the constructive conclusion to this chapter. The closest that Bonhoeffer comes to developing a pragmatic principle for the conduct of the responsible life is in his assertion that Christians need always to be in solidarity with those who suffer for a just cause. If the saving work of Christ embraced the world, and not simply the Christian community, then Christ’s solidarity with all those who suffer becomes an imperative for Christian action as well. Even with this strong imperative, ethical agents will continue to face the formidable task of seeing how that imperative takes shape within lived ethical action. This theme will be a focal point for the concluding section of this work. For now we must engage in a brief comparison of the ethics of responsibility offered up by Bonhoeffer and Camus. Camus and Bonhoeffer Compared Divine Absence The reality of the divine absence/hiddenness is a given for both Camus and Bonhoeffer. Humanist rebellion is occasioned by the recognition that resistance itself arises from a conviction that only humans in solidarity can address the injustices of the human condition. Any appeal to transcendence is, Camus believed, a self-alienating act of a human being unable to find the courage to admit the death of God in



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light of the senselessness of mass murder. Camus rejects any attempt to mitigate the problem of evil by appeal to theodicy. At the same time he refuses to give in to any of the surrogate solutions to evil’s reality: nihilism, fanatical ideology, utopian illusions, indifference. The human rebel must accept that a world without God creates the necessity for human beings to fight the plague in solidarity with one another. Bonhoeffer, too, has a keen sense of the divine absence. Bonhoeffer writes in Letters and Papers from Prison that God is absent from a world-come-of-age in which knowledge of God cannot be obtained from nature, or human possibilities, or revelatory “mountain top” moments of illumination and inspiration.79 Our secular age has done away with the need for human beings to rely upon a God-of-thegaps, a God whose existence we posit simply to explain the things we do not yet know. But Bonhoeffer has a much more profound sense of the absence of God, one grounded in his Christology. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God.

And yet, he continues: God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which God is with us and helps us […] Only the suffering God can help.80

The incarnate God has died but God is not dead; rather, God now remains hidden under those things that are not God—flesh, water, bread, wine, and words of faith, hope, and love. Bonhoeffer is, next to Luther, the clearest representative of “sacramental realism” among the writers featured in this book, but I have also tried to show that Camus’ “symbolic realism” leaves ample place for background, mystery, and even the transcendent in his own writing style. As he writes near the end of The Rebel: Perhaps there is a living transcendence, of which beauty carries the promise, which can make this mortal world preferable to and more appealing

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than any other. Art thus leads us back to the origins of rebellion to the extent that it tries to give its form to an elusive value, which the future perpetually promises, but of which the artist has a presentiment and wishes to snatch from the grasp of history.81

Suffering and Solidarity Suffering is the centerpiece of both thinkers’ ethic of responsibility. Camus and Bonhoeffer were both active in resistance movements against the scourge of Nazism, and both learned not to look away from suffering but to incorporate suffering into their own ethics. For Camus, “useless suffering” (the phrase is from Emmanuel Levinas) is one of the key characteristics of the ethics of the absurd. According to Levinas, The humanity of those who suffer is overwhelmed by the evil that rends it […] All evil relates back to suffering. It is the impasse of life and being – their absurdity – in which pain does not just innocently happen to ‘color’ consciousness with affectivity. The evil of pain, the deleterious per se, is the outburst and deepest expression, so to speak, of absurdity.82

The suffering of the innocent, particularly of children, lies at the heart of the outrage that creates the spark of rebellion. And that outrage fuels the lifelong commitment one must have to work in solidarity with others—not to triumph, not to win a final victory, but simply to heal. To share in the fate of the victims of violence is to exhibit that “strange form of love” that embraces the life and suffering of the humiliated. Suffering plays an equally central role in Bonhoeffer’s ethic of responsibility, but his understanding of suffering is shaped not by a phenomenological analysis of suffering as a universal experience but by his understanding of Christ’s incarnation, suffering, and death. By taking on the human condition in Christ, God’s very being is at stake in a world of suffering and violence. Indeed, the incarnation is that great act of love by which God stands in solidarity with all those who suffer, and particularly with those who suffer for a just cause. While many Christian theologians have been unwilling to assert that God suffers and dies in the suffering and death of Christ, Bonhoeffer risks some radical sentiments in that regard.



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God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which God is with us and helps us […] Only the suffering God can help.

Because of God’s great act of solidarity with those who suffer, all those who would follow in his train must engage in solidarity with the most vulnerable among us. “Solidarity with the humiliated” is a key aspect of the ethic of responsibility for both thinkers, even though they begin from such strikingly different “starting points” in their ethics. Perhaps that is a reminder that the very notion of a “starting point” carries little or no analytical or explanatory power. Radical Incarnation As we have seen, both Camus and Bonhoeffer believe that the virtues of the responsible life—faith, hope, happiness, and love—are born of the deepest forms of human intersubjectivity. For Camus, this intersubjectivity leaves little room for a transcendent God, whereas for Bonhoeffer the notion of a fully incarnate God is the heartbeat of his entire ethic. At times Bonhoeffer’s radical incarnational views drive him close to some of the key themes of Camus’ ethic. In some of the last extant letters from his hand in the spring and early summer of 1944, Bonhoeffer muses about a notion of “religionless Christianity.”83 This phrase captures in part Bonhoeffer’s conviction that Christianity needs no metaphysic in order to propagate its message. In his critique of metaphysical thinking, Bonhoeffer stands shoulder to shoulder with Camus. For both men, ethics is a matter of action and not primarily of knowledge. For both, ethical responsibility is cultivated through a set of practices which function to socialize the agent into patterns of discernment and action that become engrained within the agent’s form of life. But religionless Christianity can have more radical implications for an ethic of responsibility. If God has been pushed out of the world on to the cross, where is the divine to be found? In language that is reminiscent of Luther’s theology, Bonhoeffer suggests that God’s presence is now mediated always and only through the humanity of Jesus Christ. For Bonhoeffer, like Luther, there is no God who is not fully incarnate in Jesus Christ. There is no transcendent surd

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or remnant that remains unintegrated into the humanity of Jesus Christ. If this is so, Bonhoeffer muses, then perhaps the meaning of Jesus for our world today is that “Jesus is there only for others.” And if that is the meaning of Christ’s presence, then perhaps “His being there for others is the experience of transcendence.”84 Limits and Vulnerability Both Camus and Bonhoeffer use the early myths of Judaism to give mythical voice to the modern reality of the human denial of limits. For Camus, the denial of limits creates both metaphysical and historical rebellion, with all of their associated terrors. It is Cain’s murder of Abel that brings together the denial of limits with the willingness to murder. For Bonhoeffer it is Adam and Eve’s desire “to be like God knowing good and evil” that connects to the tumultuous events of the modern world. This rebellion against limits also has both intellectual and ethical consequences. Knowing good and evil becomes the touchstone for most philosophical and theological ethics in the modern world, insofar as the primacy of epistemology is established at the center of the enterprise. But in even more disastrous ways, the knowing of good and evil entices tyrants of all sorts to believe that they have indeed become like God and are thus able to act without limits to their own power. In contrast with this ethic of power and limitlessness, both Bonhoeffer and Camus propose an ethic in which vulnerability is the centerpiece of ethical action and reflection. For Bonhoeffer, this vulnerability reaches all the way to the heart of divine love, to the very being of God become Christ. For Camus the recognition of vulnerability urges an ethic of moderation insofar as the agent in solidarity with the humiliated cultivates the “strange” virtues of love, happiness, and hope. Responsibility The notion of responsibility serves as the centerpiece for both thinkers’ ethic. Camus’ conception of solidarity is virtually equivalent to his notion of responsibility. To belong to the human community is to be implicated in a wide range of relations to others for which



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we are ultimately responsible. While we have a special responsibility for those who suffer unjustly, our sense of responsibility extends toward all those with whom we find ourselves thrown into common situations or moments of decision. One of the key elements of Camus’ idea of responsibility is precisely the multiplicity of our moral relationships and the necessity to see how these differing and sometimes conflicting commitments relate to one another. Our ethical choices are not limited to simply choosing between binary opposites, but moreover involve sorting through our multiple responsibilities, “the infinite range of compromises and denials that constituted the business of survival.”85 Tony Judt further suggests that responsibility in Camus’ moral world looks a great deal like the classical notion of “prudent wisdom.”86 Responsibility is an equally important concept for Bonhoeffer’s ethic. Like Camus, Bonhoeffer believes that ethics begins in media res. We do not first “do” ethics when we take a step back and deliberate about some decision we need to make. We are acting out our ethics of responsibility in everything we do. Ethics is not an abstracted enterprise; it is inescapably social and concrete. But it must be practiced, disciplined, and repeated in order to become part of the fabric of our own lived experience. Only through a process of ritual repetition does ethical activity become a sort of “second nature.” The German word for responsibility (Verantwortung) carries multiple meanings including, “to answer,” “to answer for,” “responsibility,” and “to be accountable.”87 But responsibility is never a unidirectional matter. Every time we engage other human beings ethically we are caught up into a web of relations of mutuality as well as sociality. Bonhoeffer admits, as does Camus, that the ethics of responsibility is an arduous and complex task, as “doing the right thing” is never self-evident. The will of God may lie very deeply concealed beneath a great number of available possibilities. The will of God is not a system of rules which is established from the outset; it is something new and different in each different situation in life, and for this reason human beings must ever anew examine what the will of God may be. The heart, the understanding, observation, and experience must all collaborate in this task.88

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The Believer and the Unbeliever It should be clear now that the pragmatic sensibilities of our two thinkers resist defining the world through convenient binary categories. As we have seen, Camus firmly rejects any notion that he is an “atheist” and his deeply sympathetic interpretations of Christianity demonstrate an utter resolve not to divide the world into categories like belief and unbelief. Some of Camus’ most careful interpreters argue that there is something of a “religious sensibility” to be found in his work. According to Judt, François Mauriac once described Camus as having an anima naturaliter religiosa, and in the course of their public disagreement in 1945 over retribution for wartime collaborators he wrote of ‘the traces of suppressed Christianity in the young masters of Combat.’89

Even though these comments are part of the larger criticism of Camus’ “soft” social ethic, they are not altogether out of keeping with Camus’ own comments, such as the one with which I began this chapter. To have “Christian” concerns but to profess being a “pagan” does suggest a significant interest in the kinds of religious issues that were normally dismissed out of hand by the French intelligentsia. I have noted during my exposition of Camus that he is nearly God-obsessed in the way he passionately pursues certain religious and anti-religious polemics. Whatever our judgment about Camus’ own personal beliefs, it seems clear that the believer/unbeliever binary does very little analytical work for him. He is much more interested in notions like “transcendence” and its philosophical and political surrogates. The distinction between believer and unbeliever, like the larger distinction between sacred and secular, is of no real importance to Bonhoeffer as he thinks about the shape of Christianity following World War II. His clear rejection of two-spheres thinking is an indication that such dichotomous binaries have done great damage— theologically, ethically, and politically—throughout the history of Christianity. As I have already shown, he does not simply collapse the two spheres into one but is attentive to distinctions like ultimate and penultimate. Bonhoeffer has no interest in Christianizing the modern West, but he also wants to reform the kind of thinking that has led Christianity to revile all those things that do not march under the Christian banner. His own experience in the conspiracy to assassinate



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Hitler occasioned his observation that “reason, culture, humanity, tolerance, and self-determination”—precisely notions rejected by both Roman Catholics and Protestants during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich—are now notions that should be embraced by Christians; not only because they are important to the Christian cause, but because they are notions that provide hope for humanity during the reconstruction of a war-torn world. Camus and Bonhoeffer were both swept away before their thought could develop into full maturity; thus, we have no real notion of how they would have responded to the enormous changes that have occurred in our world over the past 60 years. What is clear is that neither man offered a fully developed proposal of how the virtues of the responsible life might be cultivated in the post-war era. The collapse in France and in England of a non-communist humanist socialism during the Cold War left humanists like Orwell and Camus bereft of the very kind of communities needed to cultivate the virtues of “rebellious humanism.” And Bonhoeffer, despite his gestures toward an “arcane discipline” that would guard the ancient mysteries of Christianity from “profanation,” did not live to propose an ecclesiology that might be relevant to succeeding generations. So perhaps it is appropriate to end this chapter with the prayerful hope expressed by Camus and Bonhoeffer in their deepest hours. And whether it is “God” or “Godot” for whom we wait, these “prayers” still seem appropriate, as they offer us the most eloquent account about the solidarity shared between these two thinkers. Dr. Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise. Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers. (Albert Camus)90

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Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its selfpreservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world. Our earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and cease, and our being Christians today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action […] All Christian thinking, speaking and organizing must be born anew out of this prayer and action […] It is not for us to prophesy the day (though the day will come) when [we] will once more be called so to utter the word of God that the world will be changed and renewed by it. It will be a new language, perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming – as was Jesus’ language; it will shock people and yet overcome them by its power; it will be the language of a new righteousness and truth, proclaiming God’s peace with [the world] and the coming of [the] kingdom […] Till then the Christian cause will be a silent and hidden affair, but there may be those who pray and do right and wait for God’s own time. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)91

CONCLUSION1 Mara Willard and Paul Dafydd Jones

“I didn’t realize I was crying until I tasted my tears in my mouth,” notes the narrator of one of Langston Hughes’ stories. He observes a body overcome with affect: some blend of holy desire, grief that he is situated outside the “revival tent,” joy of witness to the beauty of the sound, movement, and sight of his mother in rapt union with God. All this stands in poignant contrast with the narrator’s prior assertion that we “didn’t believe much in revivals” (p. 111). We may stand at a remove, or pronounce skepticism, and yet our bodies and tears speak for us. In these meditations the reader encounters testimonies of grief, gratitude, desire, bafflement, anger, and forsakenness. Thiemann’s meditations on a hidden or absent God distinguish a “melancholic spirituality” (p. 104) pervading this text.2 Amy Hollywood, historian and theorist of religion, as well as a once-student of Thiemann’s, writes that loss can become constitutive of the mourning subject. How so? Because “one way we deal with loss is through an internalization of the lost other, who then becomes part of what we are.”3 On this reckoning, The Humble Sublime is itself a mourning subject: a body in which lost others are internalized; a text that pays homage to various violent and untimely deaths. It resounds with cries of lamentation at Golgotha, with the image of the lynched black body, with the tragedy of a child whose small body writhes and contorts in “a grotesque parody of crucifixion” (p. 165). “Camus and Bonhoeffer were both swept away before their thought could develop into full maturity,” (p. 187) we are told. The influence of Thiemann’s beloved teacher, Hans Frei, who died unexpectedly and prematurely, is also felt. And the author himself, now, is gone—much too early, much too soon—in a way that is signaled and integrated into the text itself. The reader learns in medias res, “As I write the final chapter of this book manuscript I do so with a recent diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer” (p. 147). Those of us who knew Thiemann well thus find

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ourselves back amid the smells of a musty, incense-saturated old church described by Henri Lefebvre, catching dust motes in the drifting light, waiting for insight, but bereft of a cherished teacher and friend. “How absurd!” (p. 147) cries the author to the reader, upon hearing the startling news of his own impending suffering and death. However, and despite this heralding of the absurd, The Humble Sublime is also an extended critique of modern forms of nihilism. It rejects the idolatrous values of despair and suicide, even as it cautions us to be wary of false knowledge and crude treatments of providence. The book offers no glib “technique” for overturning affliction and loss; it provides no means by which to avoid the toocommon injunction, “My God, spare this child!” Rather, through its concatenation of literary witness, The Humble Sublime works upon its readers to establish solidarity with, and fierce respect for, those who suffer, and those who weep at the foot of the cross. Having encountered these literary texts, authored by “connected critics” through the prism of cruciform hope, the reader is herself changed, pressed toward new habits of solidarity, perception, meaning-making, and action.4 At the same time, these new habits are themselves offset by an awareness of the often-apparent absurdity of life, an acceptance of the limits to human insight, and a refusal of easy consolation.5 This combination of suggestiveness and paradox likewise characterizes these concluding remarks. The text itself lauds the “ambiguity, complexity, and human diversity” (p. 78) of realist literature, and in so doing provides an extended engagement with the paradox of Mark 9:24: “Lord, I believe; help Thou my unbelief.” It really is an exercise in faith seeking understanding, and it demands a conclusion that refuses closure. Thinking the Secular: Divine Hiddenness In many respects, The Humble Sublime is a work about secularity and the character of belief in the late modern age. Certainly the term “secular”—the multiple significances of its semantic and theological meaning—has been fertile ground for discussion in recent years.6 Aptly so, perhaps: “the secular” signifies an unfixed line in delineating the boundaries of “religiousness.” It is precisely these boundaries that



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Thiemann aims to explore and to inhabit. Against Charles Taylor, who believes the Reformation dispatched a transcendent orientation and subdued the theological imagination, Thiemann reads the Reformation as enabling and encouraging a new way of encountering the divine.7 Luther’s theology, in particular, is “secularizing” in a decidedly subversive way, since it enables Christians to engage their embodiment, vocation, and worldly activity differently. Calvary as an event of divine presence and absence—the pivot around which salvation turns and a horrifying manifestation of the depths of human sin—provides the theological legend needed to read the world that we inhabit. Christ is not absent; it is simply that his (hidden and fleeting) presence is now mediated in ways that we must train ourselves to recognize. A “humble sublime,” a sacramental realism that encompasses the everyday, awaits our apprehension. This concern to identify God or the sacred in the everyday undercuts, often quite dramatically, the tendency to reify the differences between believers and unbelievers. Thus, we find Thiemann claiming, for instance, that a careful reader might perceive “remarkable and surprising overlaps between Camus’ position on the ethic of responsibility and similar views found in some Christian theologians,” and we see him suggest that “the ethical proposals” of Bonhoeffer and Camus “provide a clear account of overlapping moral worlds that believer and unbeliever, agnostic and disciple, humanist intellectual and Christian theologian recommend to their readers” (p. 172). Certainly one cannot ignore some sharp differences here. Bonhoeffer favors an understanding of Christian discipleship that frames obedience to God’s revelation in the incarnate and worldly Christ; Camus, on the other hand, extols vigilance, healing, and action on behalf of those who suffer while eschewing religious faith. But the ethical overlap that Thiemann detects can be reinforced by other points of connection. Both authors shared a sense of the fragility of human understanding and the impossibility of taking possession of the ultimate truth of things. Further, and most importantly, it seems that the “reality of the divine absence/ hiddenness is a given for both Camus and Bonhoeffer,” such that both struggle to develop “the shape of a responsible life lived in the face of a hidden God” (p. 178). Odd bedfellows, but bedfellows indeed: both keenly feel the challenge of what we can and cannot know; both wrestle self-consciously with ethical conduct in “a world come of age”—a world in which experiences of divine absence,

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divine hiddenness, and fleeting moments of divine presence are hard to differentiate. The innovation in The Humble Sublime, then, is to show that cruciform perception can operate extra-ecclesially, and can prove illuminating when it comes to reading works by non-confessing literary artists. A deeply Lutheran sense of the hiddenness and presence of God, routed through a fascination with “the everyday,” serves to undo the binary of believer/unbeliever and discloses unexpected traces of the divine in the unlikeliest of places. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” ( John 1:5). This proposal, cast widely to theologians, lovers of literary arts, academics, and religious practitioners, will surely be received variously. Some may feel challenged to consider further how a sacramental sensibility, democratized and brought into the world, connects with Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Is it legitimate to say, with Bonhoeffer, that “Jesus gave his support to those who suffer for the sake of a just cause, even if this cause is not precisely the confession of his name”? Others will perhaps question the ambition of Thiemann’s analysis, and worry about the connections that he draws.8 Do we find here a creative style of exegesis, or is there, at least on some occasions, a drift toward eisegesis? Still others will wish the author had been rather more direct at points, and done a little more to clarify the conceptual apparatus deployed. Certainly many terms are definitionally under-determined, or given content rathertoo-passingly (“sacramental realism,” “faith,” and “ethics” being cases in point). Without wanting to provide anything of an answer, we would urge readers to embrace the suggestiveness of this text as both deliberate and valuable. Thiemann is perhaps encouraging readers not to put much stock in sharply delimited categories of analysis. He explicitly distances himself from objectionable categories of “covert believers” or “anonymous Christians.” At the same time— and it is at this point that the suggestive nature of the text connects, somewhat ironically, with an audacious but understated aspiration— Thiemann is clearly willing to risk the accusation that he is coopting non-Christian discourses. That, in fact, is precisely the risk he wants to run, in full view of Bonhoeffer’s claim that Christ can “be manifest in those who do not confess his name.”9 From his Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (1985) to



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Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (1991) and Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy (1996), Thiemann became increasingly dissatisfied with those who would frame theological reflection in restrictively ecclesial terms, and increasingly concerned with imagining Christian faith as it relates to a pluralistic and radically democratic public sphere. He sought a “revised Lutheran understanding of God’s sustaining presence in both church and world,” in other words, that sought to make plain “the public significance of theological discourse.”10 In one of his final essays, Thiemann gestured toward this point in a powerful way. I believe that the most important political task for the contemporary Christian community is to be a community of hope in a culture that is increasingly cynical about our common human future. Broadside attacks on liberalism or cultural despair about our de-Christianized society do not function to nurture a sense of hope about God’s reconciling action on behalf of the entire cosmos. Indeed, these approaches have the unintended but devastating consequences of discouraging Christians and other people of faith from engaging in positive political action in the public realm. But if persons formed in these communities in which the virtues of faith, hope, and love are nurtured fail to manifest those virtues in public life, then the polis will indeed be left to those with a shrunken and desiccated view of the possibilities of political community. My hope has been that a critical nonfoundational public theology might contribute not to the death of liberal theology but to its moral renewal.11

The Humble Sublime, then, adds a new dimension to what it means to do theology in public. Thiemann continues to demonstrate his love of the Gospels, the Christian message of faith, hope, and love, and investment in the cultivation of virtues of the life of discipleship. Now, addressing the perception of what Taylor terms “a secular age,” or Bonhoeffer a “world come of age,” Thiemann proposes that Christianity must learn from “culture”: from the arts, political theory, from philosophical pragmatism—and even from those who have lost faith in faith itself.

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Sacramental Realism: Inhabiting the Secular How is it that certain texts produce and confer “sacramental realism?” How do texts witness to and, through a mutually informing relationship with literary realism, produce attestations to sites where God reveals something of God’s own being and life? At issue here, once again, is not a “technique” that might be acquired and applied in a systematic way. Even the phrase “sacramental realism” is something of a placeholder: a way of pointing towards “God in those unlikely and unexpected places” (p. 69); an acclamation of the fact that God continues to lavish God’s love on the world, and that revelation, even after the cross, is typically latet sub contrario. Some concrete examples, however, point us toward something of an answer. “Akhmatova’s poetry,” Thiemann claims, supplies “a supreme example of ‘sacramental realism.’” In what sense? Well, in the sense that she attends constantly to “matters of the everyday, finding truth, beauty and even the divine presence in aspects of the mundane and ordinary” (p. 47). One reason for this, it seems, is Akhmatova’s delicate appropriation of Orthodox thinking about the icon. This, in fact, is a point of deep congruence with Thiemann’s Lutheran sensibilities, for the poet’s “language functions iconologically when it aims at both the disclosure and the concealment of the truth signified” (p. 46). Yet an “Eastern” appreciation for icons is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of sacramental realism. It emerges also in situations patterned, complexly, by the dynamics of race, gender, and religiosity in the United States. Thus Thiemann’s interest in Langston Hughes’ work. “Somehow the absent God is hidden there under the tent, if only we could find him” (p. 111). Again we find God hidden, but also disclosed sub contrario. The divine can be discerned—or, perhaps more accurately, passingly and tentatively glimpsed—“‘in, with, and under’ ordinary, everyday life” (p. 54). Practices and signs that fall under the ambit of “sacramental realism” do not just change the way that one looks at the world. They also change the way that one relates to, and acts in, the world. Just as “sacramental character” can be realized through proper practice of the ecclesial sacraments, so too can the sacramentally real be realized through proper encounter with the literary arts. Thus, to his interest in form, Thiemann adds a keen attention to textual performance. Just as sacraments do not merely depict the divine, but also invoke and mediate divine presence in ways that have affective consequences for



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those who worship, so too does a poetics of sacramental realism work upon the reader. Akhmatova’s writing, for instance, “shapes a moral life of ‘sacramental character’” (p. 54). Her readers receive this poetry as a witness to “unbearable, almost unspeakable, events” (p. 70). They read “Requiem” as a sacrament that “represents and re-presents the suffering of the Russian people,” for “the poem not only vividly depicts that suffering, it renders it palpably to the reader ‘in, with, and under’ its simple poetic words” (p. 58). The demand for embodied ethical practice follows directly. Incarnate acts of remembrance, integrated into the liturgical/national year, are required of those who read this work.12 Orwell’s realist novels, with their capacity to render a material world, also function in this way. Thiemann is particularly interested in the ethical effect of enriched moral perception of subjects on the margins of society. He writes of how Orwell’s texts have the “ability to see and depict the lives of ‘real persons,’ not just classes or categories or concepts, but real persons living lives both similar to and distinct from our own.” It is this artistic and ethical capacity, Thiemann continues, “that establishes him as a realist social critic with sacramental instincts […] [and] allowed him to see into the hidden depths of English culture and long for a better, more just, more humane, more spiritual future for the English people” (p. 146).

The Arts and Social Change

The ethical concerns that animate Thiemann’s analysis cannot, of course, be detached from a broad interest in social and political change. In line with feminist theorists who have also turned to storytelling and the power of affect as a vehicle for moral conversation—think, for instance, of Martha Nussbaum or María Pía Lara’s suggestion that literature can usefully render the “moral textures” of lived experience— Thiemann suggests that the realist art of the modern novel is a genre particularly suited to invigorate social critique and change. Of particular concern here are the skills of “verisimilitude” (something very different from naïve positivism, of course) that, while depicting everyday life, suggest particular social, cultural, and political ends. Recall the words of Camus: “Realist novels select their material, despite themselves, from reality, because the choice and the conquest of reality are absolute conditions of thought and expression. To write

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is already to choose” (p. 160). Orwell, one suspects, could have written similarly. Both are “connected critics,” who, by engaging “elements of everyday speech and conversation,” make visible what typically remains unseen: the suffering, labors, and torments of those who live with their backs permanently against the wall.13 Must we not act, in view of both authors’ witness? To discern God in unexpected places, to apprehend God sub contrario, is to urge the transformation of material conditions that threaten human dignity and thriving. Realist novels, on this reckoning, do not merely describe what is overlooked. They provide the starting point for people to “actively create and criticize the meanings, representations, and ideologies of their own changing cultures.”14 Stepping back a bit further, one finds here a development of John Dewey’s sense that the arts’ generation of an enlarged imaginative capacity encourages sympathy to multiple viewpoints and empathy for the disadvantaged. Jeffrey Stout engages this same point in Democracy and Tradition. The literary arts do not only “represent forms of moral inquiry,” but they foster democratic sympathies by retaining the “ambiguity, complexity, and human diversity” that characterizes human situatedness in the world, in a body, in a complex social network (p. 78). Indeed, the contention advanced by Kundera and Baldwin, magnified in the analyses of Stout and Thiemann, is that the genre of the novel is inherently anti-Fascist. Because the narrative arts must establish the textures of human difference, context, and the singularity of each human experience, they are irreducible to unidimensional “causes.” The witness of these literary artists compounds the value of solidarity with those who suffer and attunement to the particularity of those whom violence would efface. Like Bonhoeffer, who wrote upon his decision to leave the safety of Union Seminary in 1939, “I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany […] I cannot make that choice in security,” Akhmatova insisted upon remaining in her homeland, declaring in her poetry, “I am not one of those who left the land / to the mercy of its enemies.” The texts they produced, realist works of art that accommodate both hope and despair, remain as witness to those who suffer. We here encounter a powerful echo of the prior claim that “sacramental realism” can foster “sacramental character,” in a tone that



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is both ethical and theological. The witness offered by “connected critics” in the modern novel (or its poetic, dramatic, and expository cousins), writes Thiemann, provides vehicles of moral transformation. Thus, just as Camus claims in his philosophical writing that he seeks to “make justice imaginable again” (p. 156), he uses his novels to render a diagnosis (“We all have the plague”), and to nourish the moral imagination. Thiemann proposes that this ethically shaped power of social and political critique inheres within the poetry and prose that he engages. In Orwell’s work, for instance, “[t]he historical, political, and ethical meaning of his writing cannot be extracted from the narrative description itself. There is no extractable moral to these stories. The moral meaning is only found in, with, and under the narrative account” (p. 152). Ironically then, The Humble Sublime wields its most powerful effect to the extent that it can return the reader to realist literary works by connected critics, having provided such ethical instruction. It is within the encounter with such art that we find space for experimental, non-foundational ethics, as well as the demand that, without the false security of dogmas or moral absolutes, we risk action on behalf of the neighbor. Just as forms of art can be understood to allow transformative sacramental encounter, so too can our ethical characters be shaped through a practice of reading that encounters the text as ethical instruction. Thiemann’s analysis thus observes and theorizes the power of these texts and the affective dimensions of the practice of reading. In so doing, it points us back to the texts’ singular ability to cultivate moral and theological character, and the concomitant requirement that a reader must undertake this practice, rather than consider its theorization. As Thiemann writes, The reader is invited to dwell within the real-but-imagined world of the text in the hope that the reader’s own beliefs and behavior might be transformed […] Through this situation of address, realist literature renders the reader vulnerable to the claims and challenges of those characters who both engage and disrupt the reader’s subjectivity. In so doing, such realist texts seek to call the reader to an ethic of responsibility in and for the “neighbor,” an ethic in which the reader herself is put at risk by the claim of the neighbor in both text and world. Such an ethic engages oppressive conditions with critique, resistance, and transformative action. (p. 81)

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In providing both “truth-telling and ambiguity,” these texts thus establish a fine balance between description and prescription. Certainly, they encourage a more capacious sympathy and a greater drive for moral action, thus fostering the democratic sensibilities of citizens. Yet, at the same time, the realist novel must demur from programmatic or utopian content. It must be sufficiently underdetermined to allow sufficient space “for readers seeking to find their own moral orientation in a world of ambiguity and vulnerability” (p. 162). By providing a world “fraught with background,” the novel or poem requires the reader to become an agent engaged in moral discernment.15 Similarly, to compel the reader’s ongoing engagement, the success of such art relies upon a balance in depicting suffering with attention to joy, in furnishing injunction to action with the repose of nourishment. Artistic attention to love and pleasure is as crucial as the unflinching gaze upon the plague. In the “ethic of happiness that ‘forgets nothing, not even murder,’” writes Thiemann, “the burdens of the past are taken up into the shared experience of happiness and embraced within it”. The swim with a beloved friend, the beauty of the cherry blossom, the hours spent in the play of jazz—all these foster the “courage and persistence” that sustain the daily work of an ethical life (p. 168). This is, perhaps, another name for the cruciform hope known by Christians: an event of suffering and grace, devastation and joy, execution and rebirth. And, with that, we turn to our final section of the conclusion.

Christian Witness and Discipleship

To say that Christians have always undertaken practices—consciously and unconsciously, theorized and untheorized—with particular ends in sight is a relatively uncontroversial statement.16 These “ends,” for those situated in the Protestant tradition, are framed somewhat distinctively: there is a concern to balance the shaping of the self with a vivid awareness of divine provenience; a concern to order grace and works rightly. Are the conventions of ecclesial life sufficient for discipleship in a late modern age? Thiemann would not offer a bluntly negative answer to this question. He was, in many respects, a profoundly “churched”



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Christian; he was also someone who engaged the scriptural witness with startling intensity. Yet Thiemann did also seek to enlarge the Christian vision to the point at which “the world” could be engaged in novel ways. The Humble Sublime, in a very basic sense, aims to contribute to such an enlargement. Proceeding from the assumption that faith, as God’s gift, grants eyes that see and ears that hear—and therefore forestalls a despairing non-response to Jesus’ question (“Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear?” Mark 8:18), Thiemann hopes to illumine “what is hidden in the ordinary events of everyday life, even when that life is shot through with suffering, death, and destruction” (p. 38). Scriptural study and participation in Christian community is certainly not dispensable; it is the conditio sine qua non of faithful discipleship. But discipleship reaches outwards, and it allows one to discern—perhaps!—God in the most unlikely of places. After all, If God can bring life out of death, if God can turn an instrument of political execution into a means of salvation, if God can turn disciples’ sorrow to joy by becoming known “in the breaking of the bread,” then the believer can look into the face of evil and still see the redeeming grace of a merciful God. (p. 38)

Bonhoeffer’s interest in fostering a discerning, active, embodied Christian discipleship has obvious relevance here (and it is no coincidence that Thiemann’s interest in his Lutheran forebear increased in the last decade of his life). The centrality of Christ’s teachings, death, and work of salvation for Bonhoeffer is evident throughout this work. Thiemann particularly gives extended exploration of the ways in which Bonhoeffer’s understanding of Christ’s person and work serves ethical reflection that “confronts uncertainty, ambiguity, and vulnerability at every turn” (p. 180). Is a “religionless Christianity”—that tantalizing, underdeveloped musing of Bonhoeffer’s—what Thiemann sought to develop, in some small way, in this text? Perhaps. The “cruciform lens” outlined at the opening of this book is not an initial theological flourish, cast aside once the work engages the literary arts; rather, Thiemann is attempting to show what can be discerned once that lens is turned on a “world come of age.” For now this lens shows deftly that “the incarnate God has died but God is not dead; God now remains hidden under those things that are not God—flesh, water, bread, wine, and words of faith,

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hope, and love” (p. 181). Thiemann’s remarks about the poetry of his beloved Akhmatova make this point nicely: “[O]ne approaches these poems from the vantage point of ‘sacramental realism’ […] a deeply incarnational vision of human life – fallible, broken, yet beloved of God” (p. 57). Complementary to Thiemann’s love for Bonhoeffer was his affection for a well-known Reformed contemporary: Karl Barth. If Bonhoeffer is treated quietly in this text, how much more Barth! Yet appropriately so. While The Humble Sublime might be read in terms of Barth’s “secular parables of the kingdom” (see Church Dogmatics IV/3), Barth’s arguments about Christ as “the light of life” sit a little awkwardly with this text’s fascination with God’s hiddenness.17 Barth, moreover, was rarely patient with the kinds of ambiguity that Thiemann finds fascinating; the Swiss thinker’s confidence in God’s declarative and reconciliatory work is, at certain points, something close to overwhelming. And it is fair to say that Bonhoeffer was himself alert to one of this text’s unresolved ambiguities—the issue of how God’s hiddenness might go hand in hand with God’s absence—in ways that Barth did not seem able to manage. Is God really present, “in, with, and under,” the everyday? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Granted that “God hides from us under ‘masks’” (p. 34), there is no prospect of assurance. One must instead offer the prayer, and tarry with the hope that God can be found— or, more accurately—the hope that God might disclose Godself in ways that render the ambiguity of existence an occasion for reconciliation.18 But at the end of this work, sewn together out of the words of so many witnesses by a hand that is itself now absent, we find ourselves left ultimately with the pattern of a practice. Within this practice, the movements remain even as a practitioner passes on. To add a final note to the iterative shape of this book is, for us, a work of mourning. But we are reminded, not least by Thiemann and by the authors that he loved, that such mourning is not indicative of a mere loss or a mere absence. Rather, it retains the structure of a prayer (p. 114). It is a desire that constitutes the possibility of human responsibility informed by love, an account offered in hope rather than in certainty. It seems fitting, then, not to conclude with our own words, but rather to echo Thiemann’s own deferral to Bonhoeffer for the final words of his final work:



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It is not for us to prophesy the day (though the day will come) when [we] will once more be called so to utter the word of God that the world will be changed and renewed by it. It will be a new language, perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming – as was Jesus’ language; it will shock people and yet overcome them by its power […] Till then the Christian cause will be a silent and hidden affair, but there may be those who pray and do right and wait for God’s own time.

NOTES

Foreword 1 Martin Luther, “The Magnificat,” Luther’s Works, The Sermon on the Mount and the Magnificat, Vol. 21, pp. 297–355. Trans. Roland Bainton; published in Martin Luther Christmas Book (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1948), pp. 39–40. Introduction 1

For examples of such critiques, see the following: Peter Berger, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Jeffrey Stout, “Secularization and Resentment,” in Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18:2 (2006): 323–47; Jürgen Habermas, “What is Meant by a ‘Post-Secular Society’? A Discussion on Islam in Europe,” in Europe: The Faltering Project, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009). 2 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 3, 25. 3 Ibid., p. 61. 4 Martin Luther, Weimarer Ausgabe 26 (Cologne: Bohlau, 1984), p. 24. 5 Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 65. 6 Joseph Brodsky, “The Keening Muse,” in Less Than One: Selected Essays of Joseph Brodsky (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986), p. 42. 7 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, 1958), p. 18. 8 Albert Camus, The Plague (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 256. 9 See Life of George Eliot as Related in Her Letters and Journals, ed. J.W. Cross (New York: T.Y. Crowell & Co., 1884), pp. 305–6. Chapter 1: Sacramental Realism 1 Henri Lefebvre, “Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside,” in Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1: Introduction, trans. John Moore (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2008), p. 214. 2 The additional Lefebvre volumes are as follows: Vol. 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2008); Vol. 3: From Modernity to Modernism (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2008).

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3 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 4 Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 27–66. 5 Ibid., p. 36. 6 Ibid., pp. 37, 39. 7 Ibid., p. 40. 8 Ibid., p. 41. 9 In Mimesis, Auerbach shows how the humilis et sublimis motif structures the preaching and pastoral theology of Bernard of Clairvaux. See pp. 151ff. 10 Auerbach, Literary Language, pp. 50–1. 11 Ibid., p. 60. 12 Ibid., p. 65. 13 For a more philosophical account of my own use of realism, see chapter 3 of this book, “Realism as Resistance and Reversal: Langston Hughes.” 14 For discussions of the theological significance of figural realism, see Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975) and John David Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002). 15 See Dawson’s Christian Figural Reading for a critical discussion of the relation of figural interpretation to supercessionist understandings of the relation between Judaism and Christianity. Dawson argues that figural reading, in contrast to figurative reading, resists and critiques supercessionism because of its insistence that the earlier figure maintains its full particularity and historicity. Figurative readings, on the other hand, can dispense with the original figure once its fulfillment has been reached. 16 Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 197. 17 Ibid., p. 200. 18 Ibid., p. 202. 19 Auerbach develops his argument in exquisite detail in his Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1929). English translation: Dante, Poet of the Secular World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 20 The exception to this rule is the narrative art of nineteenth-century Russian writers. We will have occasion to refer to this observation in the second chapter’s treatment of the work of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. 21 Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 540. See the interesting commentary on this issue in Dawson, pp. 111ff. My reading of Auerbach’s treatment of Woolf is indebted to Dawson’s discussion. 22 Ibid., pp. 540–1, 551–2. 23 Ibid., p. 489. 24 Dawson, Christian Figural Reading, p. 111. 25 Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 552. 26 Lefebvre believed that Marxism would provide just such a fulfillment to human longings. He ends his essay with the following passage: “Human culture and consciousness incorporates every conquest, every past moment of history. In contrast, religion accumulates all man’s helplessness. It offers a critique of life; it is itself that critique: a reactionary, destructive critique. Marxism, the consciousness of the new man and the new consciousness of the world, offers an effective, constructive critique of life. And Marxism alone!” (Lefebvre, “Notes,”



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p. 227). Lefebvre wrote this passage in 1947. A long-time member of the French Communist Party (PCF) he was expelled from the party in 1958 for his antiStalinist views. 27 Auerbach’s reflections resonate powerfully with the works of Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler. In The Human Condition Arendt writes of “the revelatory quality of speech and action” that “comes to the fore where people are with others […] in sheer human togetherness.” Additionally, she notes that since we are living our own “stories” we cannot be the final authors of those stories. “What the storyteller narrates must necessarily be hidden from the actor himself, as long as he is in the act or caught in the consequences, because to him the meaningfulness of his act is not in the story that follows. Even though stories are the inevitable result of actions, it is not the actor but the storyteller who perceives and ‘makes’ the story” (The Human Condition [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958], pp. 180, 192). In like manner Judith Butler writes in Giving an Account of Oneself: “Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human” (Giving an Account of Oneself [New York: Fordham University Press, 2005], p. 136). 28 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 29 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). For three excellent critical discussions of Taylor’s work see Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); The Religious Secular Divide: The US Case, Social Research: An International Quarterly 76:4 (Winter, 2009); and Peter E. Gordon, “The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69:4 (2008): 647–73. 30 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 23. 31 Not long after the publication of A Secular Age the Social Science Research Council established a blog entitled The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/. This blog has created a forum for continuing discussion of the important issues raised by Taylor’s book. 32 Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 61. 33 Ibid., pp. 3, 25. 34 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 216. I will show later in this chapter how deeply wrong this observation is. 35 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958). 36 Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 37 Taylor, A Secular Age, pp. 77, 266. 38 Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 80. 39 Ibid., p. 154. 40 Max Weber, “Science as Vocation,” in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 155. My Harvard colleague Peter Gordon has rightly pointed out that Weber attributes disenchantment primarily to the Calvinist reforms and not to Luther or

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Lutheranism. “It’s true that Weber credits Luther for the Beruf idea, but Weber also explicitly denies that Lutheranism itself could perform the further work of disenchantment that emerged from this idea’s application to commercial life. This is because, in Weber’s view, Lutheranism proved unable to surmount its (Augustinian) inheritance of disdain for worldly commerce. This overcoming was only achieved in Calvinist preaching (not even in Jean Calvin’s own writing)” (Peter Gordon, private email [ January 10, 2011]; email: [email protected]. edu). I agree completely with Gordon’s comments about Weber. I would only mention that Taylor doesn’t make the distinction between Lutheranism and Calvinism with the same degree of precision. 41 These reforms are one of the central concerns of the Tridentine decree, “On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images.” 42 Ronald F. Thiemann, “Sacramental Realism: Relocating the Sacred,” in Reforming Reformation, ed. Thomas Mayer (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2012). 43 John O’Malley treats the Gregorian Reform as one of the two “great Reformations” within Roman Catholicism, the other being Luther’s Reformation. See John W. O’Malley, S.J., “Developments, Reforms, and Two Great Reformations: Towards an Historical Assessment of Vatican II,” Theological Studies 44:3 (1983): 373–406. 44 These centuries also witnessed the Crusades and the Inquisition. 45 For an excellent introduction to this important era see Brenda Bolton, The Medieval Reformation (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1983). 46 In addition to Bolton see C.H. Lawrence, The Friars: The Impact of the Early Mendicant Movement on Western Society (London: Longman, 1994). 47 “The negative factor that helped the spread of heresy was the failure of many of the orthodox clergy to meet the spiritual needs of the laity. Paradoxically, the Gregorian Reform had aggravated the problem. In their efforts to eradicate the abuses of lay patronage, to exalt the sacerdotal office and raise the standards of pastoral care, the reformers had drawn the attention of the laity to the shortcomings of the clergy. Gregory VII had, in fact, invoked the assistance of the lay people in opposing unworthy candidates for bishoprics and in bringing public opinion to bear upon priests who flouted the rule of celibacy. The Gregorian papacy thus helped to create a climate of opinion that stimulated spiritual aspiration and was critical of the failings of the secular clergy […] The rise of an articulate town-dwelling laity in search of personal religion and critical of the assumption of monastic spirituality presented the medieval church with a pastoral challenge it was ill-equipped to meet” (Lawrence, Friars, pp. 7, 18). 48 Bolton, Medieval Reformation, pp. 21, 25. 49 The mendicant friars were anticipated by two important lay movements, the Waldensians and the Humilitati, both of whom adopted forms of voluntary poverty. The Waldensians were suppressed as heretical, but the Humilitati, after a period of suppression, were offered papal privileges which allowed them to continue their ministry of preaching. See Bolton, Medieval Reformation, pp. 55–66. 50 Lawrence, Friars, 74–9. For a broader review of religious women during this time see Bolton, Medieval Reformation, pp. 80–93. 51 Ibid., pp. 225–6. 52 Ibid., p. 65. 53 Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 94. 54 Ibid., p. 91. 55 Ibid., p. 93.



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56 Ibid., pp. 93–4. Taylor also explicitly indicts Giotto’s realist painting as encouraging a disembedded form of naturalism. Ibid., pp. 90, 94, 144. 57 Richard Viladesau, The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 155, 157. 58 “By the end of the thirteenth century, devotion to the humanity of Christ was solidly established in Western spirituality, and its focus was fixed on the passion of Christ […] This devotion spearheaded a revolution in art, becoming the focus for the shift toward a realistic depiction of Christ’s humanity, leading to the great pieta of Michelangelo and the crucifixion scenes which dominated in late medieval and renaissance art” (Ewert Cousins, “The Humanity and the Passion of Christ,” in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation [New York: Crossroad, 1987], pp. 386–7). “Of paramount importance for its subsequent history was the famous late thirteenth-century sequence […] ‘Stabat Mater Dolorosa’ […] This poem quickly became widely known throughout the West, and inspired many (presumed) imitations as well as vernacular translations. In contrast to the laments that present a dialogue between Jesus and Mary, and which are aimed at teaching the need for the passion, it gives classic expression to the believer’s spiritual identification with Mary at the foot of the cross, suffering along with her son” (Viladesau, Beauty of the Cross, p. 133). 59 G. Gombrich, “Paintings on Walls: Means and Ends in the History of Fresco Painting,” in The Uses of Images (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), pp. 14–47. 60 Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 144. 61 Ibid., p. 145. 62 Ibid., p. 266. 63 “In all [movements of reform] there lurks a proto-totalitarian temptation. Luther and Calvin were surely right to condemn the theology of spiritual superiority which infected late-medieval monasticism, but they ended up discrediting celibate vocations as such, greatly reducing the range of Christian lives. And their Reformation has helped to produce, via another stage of ‘reform’, today’s secular world” (ibid., p. 772). 64 See Jared Wicks, “Brother Martin: Augustinian Friar,” Lutheran Forum (2008): 33–6. 65 Martin Luther, Weimarer Ausgabe 26 (Cologne: Bohlau, 1984), p. 333. 66 Ibid., pp. 322, 324ff. 67 Martin Luther, “Heidelberg Disputation 1518,” in Luther’s Works, Career of the Reformer I, Vol. 31 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1957), p. 52. 68 Martin Luther, “That These Words of Christ, ‘This is My Body,’ etc., Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics, 1527,” in Luther’s Works, Word and Sacrament III, Vol. 37 (Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Press, 1961), pp. 32ff. 69 Martin Luther, “The Magnificat,” Luther’s Works, The Sermon on the Mount and the Magnificat, Vol. 21, pp. 297–355. Translation by Roland Bainton, in Martin Luther Christmas Book, pp. 39–40. 70 Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 31, pp. 361, 365. 71 Luther, Weimarer Ausgabe 32, pp. 495–6 (The Sermon on the Mount). 72 Luther, “The Estate of Marriage,” Luther’s Works, Vol. 45 (Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Press, 1962), p. 47. 73 Luther, Weimarer Ausgabe 31, p. 436 (Exposition of Psalm 147, 1532), p. 138. Gustaf Wingren remarks, “Luther liked to think that the most commonplace matters in the world often contain just such invisible and hidden secrets, where

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man least expects it. God abides in the deep, and he makes his noblest jewels of ‘nothing’ of that which is poor and rejected” (Luther on Vocation [Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004], p. 183). 74 Writing more than four hundred years after Luther, the German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed similar sentiments in the context of Nazi Germany. “The will of God may lie very deeply concealed beneath a great number of available possibilities. The will of God is not a system of rules which is established from the outset; it is something new and different in each different situation in life, and for this reason [we] must ever anew examine what the will of God may be” (Ethics, trans. Neville Horton Smith [New York: Touchstone, 1995], p. 44). 75 Augustine, “In Johannem,” in Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments, ed. Robert W. Jenson (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1978), p. 3,1. Western Christians, beginning with Tertullian (c.160–c.220 ce), borrowed the term sacramentum from Roman antiquity where it referred to a publicly binding religious act. Eastern Christians did not adopt the term, preferring the more mystical Greek term mysterion or mystery. 76 Robert W. Jenson, Christian Dogmatics, Vol. II (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), p. 300,32. 77 One of the best accounts of the logic of sacraments is Jenson, “Sacraments of the Word,” in Christian Dogmatics, Vol. II, pp. 291–314. 78 The phrase “in, with, and under” appears in the Formula of Concord, Article VII, The Holy Supper of Christ. Cf. Martin Luther, The Large Catechism (1529): “It is the true body and blood of the Lord Christ in and under the bread and wine, which we Christians are commanded by Christ’s word to eat and drink.” The 1538 edition of the catechism uses the words “in and with.” 79 “To assert that the bread and the cup are in fact the body of Christ, and to assert that the Supper’s promises are true, are the same thing” ( Jenson, “Sacraments of the Word,” p. 355). 80 For a striking parallel within modern Catholicism to the argument I am making here, see Stephen Schloesser, “‘Not Behind But Within’: Sacramentum et Res,” Renascence 58:1 (Fall, 2005): 17–39. 81 “Heidelberg Disputation (1518),” Luther’s Works, Career of the Reformer I, Vol. 31 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1957), pp. 52–3. 82 Of the many volumes on Caravaggio, see especially John Varriano, Caravaggio: The Art of Realism (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). My account of these two paintings is indebted to Ingrid D. Rowland, “The Battle of Light with Darkness,” The New York Review of Books (May 12, 2005). 83 “The table at the inn in Emmaus is a triumphant exercise in the ‘imitation of nature,’ set with convincingly crunchy-crusted bread and a chicken whose curled feet are as startlingly real as the basket of fruit improbably cantilevered over the table’s edge” (ibid.). 84 “The beardless Christ has been taken straight from some early Christian image: a mosaic or a catacomb painting, a reminder […] that Caravaggio’s work is historically informed; if the disciples are dressed in contemporary dress, it is to indicate that Jesus is always there to be recognized, in the bread and wine of the Mass or in a burning heart” (ibid.). 85 “One disciple starts up from his chair; the man and his seat, like the fruit basket, both seem ready to tumble into the viewer’s own space. The other disciple spreads his hands wide in an arresting display of foreshortening” (ibid.).



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86 “Caravaggio’s earlier beardless Christ is here replaced by a more conventional image, a mature man whose weary expression suggests both the weight of his recent ordeal and of the endless mission to save humanity from its own folly” (ibid.). Some viewers of the painting might wonder how Rowland sees quite so much in Jesus’ visage. 87 Rowland’s account of the serving couple includes some, not entirely convincing, theological speculations. “The handsome young innkeeper has been replaced by an elderly couple: a perplexed husband and his wrinkled wife, who has already bowed her head in prayer, the first person in the room to understand who their mysterious guest must be” (ibid.). 88 “Significantly, she is about to serve the three travelers a rack of lamb, the sacrificial animal of Passover and Easter, and one of the most ancient of all Christian symbols” (ibid.). 89 “The disciples convey their reactions to his presence less by their gestures than by their facial expressions” (ibid.). 90 Lutherans and Roman Catholics both affirm the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, even though they disagree on the philosophical doctrine of transubstantiation. 91 The definitive account of this development is Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008): “The detailed rendering of material particulars, the representation of ‘ordinary’ people and events rather than heroic and mythical ones, the close attention to the rituals and habits of daily life, especially the domestic life of the middle classes: all these familiar characteristics of novelistic realism had their visual analogues in the so-called Golden Age of Dutch painting” (p. 7). 92 Gombrich, “Paintings on Walls,” p. 19. 93 Ibid., p. 30. 94 Ingrid Rowland, “The Battle of Light with Darkness.” This passage illustrates the effect Auerbach attributes to Dante, namely the ability to render realistic details depicted with such aesthetic power as to make them interesting in-and-for themselves without reference to their divine origin and ground. Taylor’s argument could be considerably strengthened by the employment of a similar argument regarding the effect of realist painting. 95 It seems we should forgo attempts to develop large-scale theories of secularization, at least until we have many more detailed studies of the spirituality and theology of late medieval and early modern religious communities. The sweeping judgments required of secularization theories simply cannot account for the rich diversity of both pre-modern and modern religious practices. Perhaps we should adopt a simpler notion of “secular” like the one Jeffrey Stout proposes in his important book Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 97: “What makes a form of discourse secularized, according to my account, is not the tendency of the people participating in it to relinquish their religious beliefs or to refrain from employing them as reasons. The mark of secularization, as I use the term, is rather the fact that participants in a given discursive practice are not in a position to take for granted that their interlocutors are making the same religious assumptions they are. This is the sense in which public discourse in modern democracies tends to be secularized.” Taylor seems to be reaching for some such reading of the secular in his notion of the “immanent frame,” but he overreaches himself in his historical account of the movements from premodernity to modernity.

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96 The ability to see and experience the divine “in, with, and under” the earthly elements requires the cultivation of certain spiritual disciplines, and it is certainly the case that the failure of Protestantism to institutionalize those disciplines of seeing, feeling, tasting, and believing the divine undoubtedly contributed to the diminishment of these skills in the modern world. But the aesthetic of “sacramental realism” survived nonetheless not only in certain ecclesial practices but also in a literary tradition which, in the context of the horrors of the twentieth century, provided means of resistance, wonder, and hope in the most desperate of circumstances. 97 For a discussion of the controversy over the name of the painting, see Yeazell, Art of the Everyday, pp. 18–22. 98 See Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 99 I am aware of only one other use of this term to analyze literary art and that is Helena M. Tomko’s Sacramental Realism: Gertrud von le Fort and German Catholic Literature in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich (1924–46) (London: Maney Publishing, 2007). Tomko derives her use of the term from Colmar R. O’Neill, Sacramental Realism: A General Theory of the Sacraments, Theology, and Life (Wilmington, DE: Glazier, 1981). Drawing on traditional Roman Catholic notions of sacrament, Tomko uses the idea of “sacramental realism” to good effect in her analysis of the German Catholic novelist, Gertrud von le Fort. But she does not extend the use of the term to authors with no connection to the Catholic tradition. Chapter 2: Sacramental Poetry as Memory and Witness 1 This earliest Russian kingdom is referred to as “Kievan Rus.” 2 Quoted in James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), pp. 6–7. 3 Ibid., p. 18. 4 Pierre Pascal, The Religion of the Russian People, trans. Rowan Williams (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), p. 10: “Where there is no priest available—as often happens in the North or in Siberia—the Orthodox believer makes his confession directly to the earth.” 5 James H. Billington, The Face of Russia (New York: TV Books, 1998), p. 32. 6 Billington, The Icon and the Axe, pp. 32ff. 7 My discussion of icons is indebted to a number of sources: Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995); Archimandrite Vasileios, Hymn of Entry (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998); Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987); Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973); and Nicholas Constas, “Icons and the Imagination,” Logos 1:1 (Spring, 1997): 114–27. Nick Constas first introduced me to the thought of Pavel Florensky, a contemporary of Akhmatova, in his 2001 doctoral colloquium on Florensky at Harvard Divinity School. We had hoped to teach a seminar together on Florensky and Karl Barth but that plan was interrupted by Nick’s decision to enter the monastery at St. Athos where he now lives and works as Father Maximos. 8 The Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God was brought from Constantinople to Kiev in the 1130s and then to Vladimir in 1155.



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9 Florensky, Iconostasis, p. 69. 10 Schmemann, The Eucharist, p. 20. Orthodoxy thus shares a theology of radical incarnation with Luther and some of the Catholic reformers. Though Orthodox theologians are often at pains to contrast themselves to “protestants” they are often full of praise for Luther himself. We find remarkably powerful words about the divine-humanity of the Word in Luther: “Gott ist Mensch, Mensch ist Gott in einer Person, Gottes Kind und Menschen Kind ist eins” (God is man and man is God in one person; God’s only child and man’s child in one) (Sergius Bulgakov, Lamb of God [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008], p. 232. 11 Schmemann, For the Life of the World, pp. 138–9. 12 Ibid., p. 141. 13 “[I]n the Orthodox experience a sacrament is primarily a revelation of the sacramentality of creation itself ” (Schmemann, Eucharist, p. 33). 14 Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007), p. 195. My thanks to my colleague Kimberley Patton for bringing Yannaras’ work to my attention. 15 “It seems that the Russians were naturally endowed [sic] with the possibility of conceiving of everyday things in a serious vein, that a classicistic aesthetics which excludes a literary category of ‘the low’ from serious treatment could never gain a firm foothold in Russia. Then too, as we think of Russian realism, remembering that it came into its own only during the nineteenth century and indeed only in the second half of it, we cannot escape the observation that it is based on a Christian […] concept of the creatural dignity of every human individual regardless of social rank and position” (Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 521). 16 The English-language literature on Akhmatova is relatively sparse but has increased substantially since the centennial observation of her birth in 1989. Among the best biographical treatments of her life written in English are Nancy K. Anderson, The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat: Poems of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Elaine Feinstein, Anna of All the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005); Roberta Reeder, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet (New York: Picador Press, 1994); Amanda Haight, Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Sam Driver, Anna Akhmatova (New York: Twayne, 1972). The Akhmatova Journals (two volumes) written by her close friend Lydia Chukovskaya have been translated into English (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994) as has Akhmatova’s own unfinished autobiography, My Half-Century: Selected Prose (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992). The definitive Englishlanguage edition of Akhmatova’s poetry is The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, ed. Roberta Reeder, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (Boston, MA: Zephyr Press, 1997). The task of translating Akhmatova, who employed a classic rhyming pattern in her poetry, is extremely difficult. While Hemschemeyer’s translations are accurate and competent, I prefer the lyrical beauty of the translations of Amanda Haight as well as the following: Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward (trans.), The Poems of Akhmatova (Toronto: Little, Brown, and Company, 1973); Lyn Coffin (trans.), Anna Akhmatova: Poems (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974); and D.M. Thomas (trans.), Akhmatova (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). 17 For studies of Akhmatova’s poetry in English, see David N. Wells, Anna Akhmatova: Her Poetry (Oxford: Berg, 1996); Susan Amert, In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Wendy Rosslyn, The Prince, the Fool, and the Nunnery: Religion and Love

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in the Early Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (Amersham, England: Avebury, 1985); Alexandra Harrington, The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova: Living in Different Mirrors (London: Anthem Press, 2006); see also, Lydia Chukovskaya, The Akhmatova Journals (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994). Three important Russian essays available in English translation are P. Gurev, “Summing Up Russian Symbolist Poetry,” in The Noise of Change: Russian Literature and the Critics (1891–1917), ed. and trans. Stanley Rabinowitz (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1986), pp. 101–21; Viktor Zhirmunsky, “Symbolism’s Successors,” in ibid., pp. 217–46; Korney Chukovsky, “Akhmatova and Mayakovsky,” in Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, ed. Edward J. Brown (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973). Two collections of essays appeared on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Akhmatova’s birth: Anna Akhmatova 1889–1989: Papers from the Akhmatova Centennial Conference, Bellagio Study and Conference Center, June 1989, ed. Sonia I. Ketchian (Oakland, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1989) and The Speech of Unknown Eyes: Akhmatova’s Readers on Her Poetry (Nottingham, UK: Astra Press, 1990). In my judgment, the best interpreter of Akhmatova’s work is Joseph Brodsky, especially his essay, “The Keening Muse,” in Less Than One: Selected Essays of Joseph Brodsky (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986), pp. 34–52. 18 The definitive English-language study of Acmeism is Justin Doherty, The Acmeist Movement in Russian Poetry: Culture and the Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 19 Quoted in Doherty, ibid., p. 47. 20 The origin, meaning, and scope of this designation is highly contested among scholars of Russian culture. Variously attributed to Akhmatova, Berdyaev, and Makovsky, the term was commonly used retrospectively to distinguish early twentieth-century art and poetry from the forms of social realism demanded by the Soviet regime from the 1920s on. For a discussion of meaning and contestation of the term see Galina Rylkova, The Archeology of Anxiety: The Russian Silver Age and Its Legacy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007); Michael Basker, “The Silver Age,” The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 136–50; Omry Ronen, The Fallacy of the Silver Age in Twentieth-Century Literature (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997); Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism, ed. Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes, and Irina Paperno (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). 21 See Solomon Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1995). 22 V. Veidle, quoted in Ronen, Fallacy of the Silver Age, p. 21. 23 See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 24 Poems of Akhmatova, trans. Kunitz, p. 75. 25 Doherty, Acmeist Movement, p. 9. 26 Some of Symbolists’ theoretical reflections are strikingly reminiscent of the arguments Friedrich Schleiermacher makes in On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For an excellent review of the epistemological commitments of late Romanticism see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 419–93. Cf. Azade Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992) and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988). 27 Doherty, Acmeist Movement, p. 13.



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28 This view of the relation of realis to realiora is that of the Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov. 29 Doherty, Acmeist Movement, p. 15. Viktor Zhirmunsky characterized this aspect of Symbolism as follows: “Instead of representing logical and clearly delineated concepts, words must now function as hints, half-tones, and half-shades in order to suggest moods which are logically vague but musically significant. Just as earthly life disclosed its divine meaning for the poet’s mystical contemplation, so poetic images became symbols, the living flesh of more penetrating revelations. They alluded to the ultimate depth of the human soul which could not be relayed distinctly and rationally, but which could be felt only in allegory and song” (“Predolevshie simvolizm” [“Symbolism’s Successors”] in Russkaya mysl 11 (1916): 25–56; English translation in The Noise of Change, p. 219). 30 Bryusov, “O ‘rechi rabskoy,’ v zashchitu poemzii” (“On ‘Slavish Speech,’ in Defense of Poetry”) Apoloon 9 (1920): 31–4. Quoted in Doherty, Acmeist Movement, pp. 16–17. 31 Doherty, Acmeist Movement, p. 21. Note the similarity between the Symbolists’ position and the Augustinian dualist metaphysic described earlier in this chapter. 32 “Symbolist poetry was preoccupied with ‘strangeness’: with the exotic, the original, the enigmatic and inexplicable, Briusov’s unusual ‘moment’ (nig), of heightened intensity, however, achieved anything that promised a departure from the deadening ordinariness of everyday reality, the grotesque flatness and pallid vacuity of which also became a recurrent topic” (Michael Basker, “The Silver Age,” in The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature, p. 139). 33 V. la. Briusov, “To a Young Poet.” Available at http://web.mmlc.northwestern. edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/young_poet.html (accessed March 6, 2013). 34 Blok, “O naznachenii poeta” (“On the Poet’s Calling”). Quoted in Doherty, Acmeist Movement, p. 21. Despite the rather hyperbolic sentiments expressed here, Blok later became an internal critic of the Symbolist movement, expressing reservations about its hyper-individualism, its subjectivism, and its elevation of the poetic persona to a place of semi-divine status. See ibid., pp. 26ff. 35 Bely, Lug zelenyy (The Green Meadow) (New York, 1967) (reprint of Moscow 1910 edition). Quoted in Doherty, Acmeist Movement, p. 34. 36 “I.F. Annenskiy, Pis’ma k. M.A. Voloshinu” (“I.F. Annensky, Letters to M.A. Vokoshin”), Ezhegodnik rukopisdnogo otdela Pushkinskogo domo, 1976 (Leningrad, 1978), p. 137. Quoted in Doherty, Acmeist Movement, p. 49. 37 In his 1913 manifesto “Acmeism and the Legacy of Symbolism” Gumilev sought to explain the movement’s name. “To replace Symbolism there is a new movement, which, whatever it is called – Acmeism (from the word ακμή, the highest degree of anything, flower, florescence) or Adamism (a manfully firm, clear view of life), – demands, in any case, greater balance of powers and more exact knowledge of the relationships between subjects and objects than there was in Symbolism” (Nikolai Gumilev, “Acmeism and the Legacy of Symbolism,” in On Russian Poetry, trans. David Lapeza [Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1977], p. 21). 38 “The small Acmeist group included three major poets: Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandel’shtam […] Acmeism […] occupied itself with definition of the immediate […] [F]or Akhmatova in particular this meant an emphasis on human psychology, on the subtly detailed nuances of acutely observed, fundamentally ‘ordinary’ emotion, in the immensely popular poems of frustrated love with which she began her career” (Basker, “The Silver Age,” p. 145). 39 Viktor Zhirmunsky, “Predolevshie simvolizm” (Symbolism’s Successors”), Russkaya mysl 11 (1916): 25–56. English translation in The Noise of Change, p. 220.

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40 Apollon ( January, 1910). 41 Zhirmunsky, The Noise of Change, p. 221. 42 Ibid., p. 222. 43 Ibid., p. 225. 44 Ibid., p. 231. 45 Ibid. This poem continues with just the kind of erotic verse that confused and infuriated Akhmatova’s critics. And near the window, a white lace frame … Your profile is sharp and drawn And under your handkerchief you conceal with disgust fingers that have just been kissed.

And the heart that began to pound, How much anguish it holds now … And in the disheveled braids lurks The smell of tobacco smoke. (Hemschemeyer [trans.], Complete Poems, p. 65)

46 Ibid., pp. 232–3. 47 Ibid., pp. 243, 246. 48 Carolyn Forche includes Akhmatova in her important volume Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993). In the Introduction, she writes: “Poetry of witness presents the reader with an interesting interpretive problem. We are accustomed to rather easy categories: we distinguish between ‘personal’ and ‘political’ poems – the former calling to mind lyrics of love and emotional loss, the latter indicating a public partisanship that is considered divisive, even when necessary. The distinction between the personal and the political gives the political realm too much and too little at the same time; it renders the personal too important and not important enough. If we give up the dimension of the personal, we risk relinquishing one of the powerful sites of resistance. We need a third term, one that can describe the space between the state and the supposedly safe havens of the personal. Let us call this space ‘the social’ […] the social is a place of resistance and struggle, where books are published, poems read, and protest disseminated. It is the sphere in which claims against the political order are made in the name of justice. By situating poetry in the social sphere, we can avoid some of our residual prejudices […] The poetry of witness reclaims the social from the political and in so doing defends the individual against illegitimate forms of coercion” (p. 31). 49 Nonetheless, it is important to stress that Akhmatova stands in a tradition of Russian female writers that stretches from the nineteenth century to the present. See Catriona Kelly, “Women’s Writing in Russia,” in The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature, pp. 150–62. 50 That Akhmatova’s poetic voice is female is of enormous significance for the development of Russian poetry. Nikolai Gumilev, in an early article, emphasized the importance of Akhmatova’s female poetic personae. “In [Akhmatova] a whole series of existences which have been silent until now have found a voice – women in love, devious, dreaming, and empowered, speak, at last, in their own authentic and at the same time artistically convincing voice” (Gumilev, “Acmeism,” pp. iv, 337); quoted in Doherty, Acmeist Movement, p. 149. At the same time we should remember Akhmatova’s own wry comment about her pioneering efforts: “I taught our women how to speak but don’t know how to make them silent.”



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51 Both Annensky and Gumilev employ the notion of poetic self-invention. See Doherty, Acmeist Movement, pp. 173ff. 52 Gumilev, “Acmeism,” pp. iv, 228; quoted in Doherty, Acmeist Movement, p. 183. 53 “Her lyrics often resemble short stories […] She often raises the reader’s interest in the plot, at the same time withholding information, requiring the reader to speculate and to posit motives and identities for the characters. As Brodsky observes, Akhmatova’s early poems have a ‘terrific novelistic quality’ and readers could have ‘a wonderful time explicating the various tribulations and trials of their heroine’” (Harrington, Poetry, p. 44). 54 Eykhenbaum, “Anna Akhmatova, Opyt analiza,” in O Poezii, O Poeze, p. 430. Quoted in Doherty, Acmeist Movement, p. 198. 55 Eykhenbaum, “Anna Akhmatova, Opyt analiza,” in O Poezii, O Proze, p. 430. Quoted in Haight, Anna Akhmatova, p. 72. It is, of course, true that in the same volume in which Akhmatova wrote about unrequited love and the longing of faith she could also write poems like this one: We’re all drunkards here, and harlots: how wretched we are together! On the walls, flowers and birds wait for the clouds to gather. You puff on your burnished pipe, strange shapes above you swim. I have put on a narrow skirt to show my lines are trim. The windows are tightly sealed. What brews? Thunder or sleet? How well I know your look, your eyes like a cautious cat.

O heavy heart, how long before the tolling bell? But that one dancing there, will surely rot in hell! (Poems of Akhmatova, p. 51)

56 Yuri Aykenval’d, “Anna Akhmatova,” Siluety russikikh pisateley III (Moscow, 1923): 279–93. Quoted in Wendy Rosslyn, The Prince, The Fool, and the Nunnery: Religion and Love in the Early Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (Brookfield, VT: Avebury, 1984), p. 9. 57 Leon Trotsky, Literatura i revolyutsiya (Moscow, 1923), pp. 30–1. Quoted in Rosslyn, The Prince, p. 10. 58 Rosslyn, The Prince, p. 57. 59 See p. 36, fn. 60, and, more generally, Yannaras, Person and Eros. 60 Hemschemeyer, Complete Poems, p. 41. 61 Original translation by Inna Zolotarevskaya Hardison. 62 Haight, Anna Akhmatova, p. 21. 63 Quoted in Anderson, The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat, p. 18. 64 The following poems are selected from those Wendy Rosslyn uses to support her conclusion that Akhmatova’s heroine “is by no means a believing Christian” (Rosslyn, The Prince, p. 72). 65 Ibid., p. 36.

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66 Ibid., p. 39. 67 Ibid., p. 58. 68 Ibid., p. 72. 69 Brodsky, “The Keening Muse,” pp. 44–5. The connection between prayer and desire, understood as divine eros, is a common feature of Orthodox theology. “Eros is an impulse and presupposition of life, the fundamental presupposition for the realization and manifestation of the personal hypostasis of life […] The connection of sexual distinction with the creation of man ‘in the image of God’ is not, then, by chance or simply metaphorical or by analogy […] Therefore it is not chance either that God’s relationship with man […] is always portrayed by the erotic relationship […] In the patristic tradition, God himself in his internal triadic life will be defined as ‘the whole of eros,’ the fullness of continuous erotic unity” (Christos Yannaras, Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991], pp. 69–70). Cf. Yannaras, Person and Eros. 70 Haight, Anna Akhmatova, p. 33. 71 Ibid., p. 34. 72 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 2. 73 Haight, Anna Akhmatova, p. 48. 74 This poem is a perfect example of Auerbach’s notion of “figural realism” in which the particularity of each of the figures remains undiminished as they encircle and mutually inform one another. 75 The Complete Poems, pp. 180–1. 76 These are, of course, apocalyptic signs of the end of days as recorded in the Gospels and the Book of Revelation. 77 Akhmatova uses the image of Mary’s mantle in many of her poems, both as a protective shield and as a burial cloth. 78 Ibid., pp. 200–1. Remarkably this poem received widespread circulation on the internet immediately after the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. 79 Ibid., p. 203. Akhmatova dates this poem using the liturgical calendar, “May 1915 Day of the Holy Ghost, Petersburg.” 80 Ibid., pp. 58–9. 81 Ibid., p. 74. 82 Haight, Anna Akhmatova, p. 83. 83 Ibid., p. 86. 84 The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (Zephyr Press, 2000), p. 111. 85 Haight, Anna Akhmatova, p. 88. 86 Poems of Akhmatova, trans. Kunitz, p. 99. These lines, of course, become the section “Instead of a Preface” of her great poem “Requiem.” 87 This structure is similar to that of “May Snow” in which the sign refers simultaneously to the frozen buds, the dying soldiers, and King David’s grief. 88 “One reason Requiem affects the reader so powerfully is that Akhmatova is able to express intense and almost overwhelming emotion within a precisely designed artistic structure, giving her words the force that confinement within a narrow channel gives the flood waters” (Anderson, The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat, p. 183).



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89 (1961), Poems of Akhmatova, trans. Kunitz, p. 99. 90 “Anna Andreevna, when visiting me, recited parts of ‘Requiem’ also in a whisper, but at home in Fontanny House did not even dare to whisper it; suddenly, in midconversation, she would fall silent and, signaling to me with her eyes at the ceiling and the walls, she would get a scrap of paper and a pencil; then she would loudly say something very mundane: ‘Would you like some tea?’ or ‘You’re very tanned,’ then she would cover the scrap in hurried handwriting and pass it to me. I would read the poems and, having memorized them, would hand them back to her in silence. ‘How early autumn came this year,’ Anna Andreevna would say loudly and, striking a match, would burn the paper over an ashtray.” Chukovskaya, The Akhmatova Journals, p. 7. 91 Quoted in Anderson, The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat, p. 83. 92 Ibid., p. 101. 93 This reference is to the wives of the streltsy, the “shooters” whom Peter the Great had tortured, executed, and hung from the Kremlin battlements in 1698. 94 (1935), Poems of Akhmatova, trans. Kunitz, p. 103. 95 “[Akhmatova] has gained the stature necessary for the role of witness. It is this type of witnessing and enduring that is at the heart of poem 10, ‘Crucifixion.’ Here Akhmatova invokes the figure of Mary, mother of Jesus, as she stands at the foot of the cross, as the supreme example of the anguish and courage of the mother/witness. The identification of Mary with the mothers whose sons died in the Terror is strengthened by the epigraph, a slight misquotation of the Russian Orthodox service for Easter Saturday. The correct text would read, ‘Weep not for Me, Mother, when you see Me in the grave.’ But the families of those who died in the Gulag would never know where their sons were buried, never be able to lament at the grave as Mary had done; and Akhmatova accordingly deletes that image from the epigraph.” Anderson, Death’s Defeat, p. 191. 96 (1940–3), Poems of Akhmatova, trans. Kunitz, p. 113. 97 For the rest of her life Akhmatova was convinced that Stalin reinstituted the ban because of her “secret” meeting with Russian émigré and Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin in November 1945 in Leningrad. This meeting, which lasted through the night and into the early morning, was Akhmatova’s first contact with anyone outside of Russia since 1921. In her Poem Without a Hero Akhmatova called Berlin “The guest from the future.” Akhmatova was convinced that she had prophesied this visit with her reference to her “awaited guest” in the poem “The Year, 1913.” She also believed that one of the consequences of the meeting was the beginning of the Cold War. She chronicled the meeting and its aftermath in her love poem cycle Cinque. For an account of this meeting with Berlin see Anderson, Death’s Defeat, pp. 105–9; Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), pp. 148–69; György Dalos, The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998). 98 Ibid., p. 129. 99 Poems of Akhmatova, trans. Kunitz, p. 127. 100 I gratefully borrow this term from my colleague Mark Jordan. See his “Sacramental Characters,” Studies in Christian Ethics 19:3 (2006): 323–38. “The pedagogy of the sacraments is itself […] an incomplete, anticipatory performance. The sacraments reach forward with fumbling confidence through a capacity for inhabitation to a future that is ardently desired and presently unreached […] Careful sacramental pedagogy requires dialectical negation, the affirmation of character, then the denial of its completeness; the claim of vicarious inhabitation,

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then the insistence that any series of them is no more than a collage” ( Jordan, p. 338). 101 Akhmatova was, of course, haunted by the poem she had written in 1915, which seemed to her prescient of all that was to come (see above). Around the same time she wrote a heart-wrenching poem about the son whom she rarely saw during his infancy and early childhood. “Tall woman, where is your little gypsy, The one who cried under your black shawl? Where is your first little child, What do you know of him, what do you recall?” “A mother’s fate—glorious anguish, I was not worthy of it. The gates of white Paradise opened, And the Magdalene took my little son.

My every day—is cheerful and fine, I’m wandering through a long springtime, But my hands long for their burden, But I hear him crying in my sleep.

My heart becomes anxious and weary, And I remember nothing at all, I keep wandering through these dark rooms, I keep looking for his cradle.” Chapter 3: Realism as Resistance and Reversal 1 In my judgment, the best introduction to literary realism is Pam Morris, Realism, The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2003). Also useful is Daniel Pizer, The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995). I will be using the term broadly in the sense employed by Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953) and Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974). 2 Social practice theory derives from two main intellectual streams. The first, the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, was developed further by Wilfred Sellers, J.L. Austin, and John Searle. Contemporary social practice theorists influenced by Wittgenstein include Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, and Jeffrey Stout. The other intellectual stream stems from the later work of Michel Foucault and has been developed further by Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler. For a general overview of social practice theory see Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing,” European Journal of Social Theory 5:2 (May, 2002): 243–63. Other articles of interest include Amy Hollywood, “Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization,” History of Religions 42:2 (November, 2002): 93–115, and Jason Springs, “What Cultural Theorists Have to Learn from Wittgenstein; Or, How to Read Geertz as a Practice Theorist,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76:4 (September, 2009): 419–48. In the even deeper background loom the figures of G.W.F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger.



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3 Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 7. 4 Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the AngloAmerican World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 36. 5 James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 15. 6 Writing on Emile Zola’s novel Germinal, Pam Morris notes, “We can recognise in the characters of this novel the culminating point of the democratic impulse of realism. The people who constitute Zola’s fictional world come largely from the lowest social levels and earn their living by the most gruelling and poorly paid forms of labour […] It is surely undeniable that much of human existence consists of such vulnerability and powerlessness […] Zola transformed the newly won authority based on artistic disinterestedness into a moral imperative to speak out for those without a public voice: the responsibility to bear witness” (Morris, Realism, p. 73). 7 Milan Kundera, “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes,” in The Art of the Novel (New York: Perennial, 2003), p. 14. 8 Morris, Realism, p. 93. 9 Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957) has shown that the realistic novel arises at the same time that empiricist epistemology dominates the philosophy of both Europe and the United States, but this does not suggest an inherent substantive connection between realist epistemology and literary realism. The best discussion of the relation between social practices and assertions of the “real” is Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). See especially chapters 3, 11, and 12. 10 “There is one more feature of the novel-reading that needs recognition at the outset: the novel’s interest in the ordinary […] We embrace the ordinary. It is made an object of our keenest interest and sympathy. We visit these places as involved friends, concerned about what is happening to them” (Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice [Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995], p. 9). 11 Kaplan, Social Construction, p. 9. 12 Charles Johnson, “A Chapel Talk to the Students of Fisk University,” quoted in George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 177. Italics added. 13 The genre was especially appealing to female writers. Amanda Claybaugh writes: “The predominance of the novel of purpose [in the mid-nineteenth century] meant that the subject of reform offered easy access to the center of the literary field. This was particularly important because the increasing rigidity of gender roles in the nineteenth century made it more and more difficult for women – and, paradoxically, for some men as well – to write. Female novels struggled with the presumption that the novel was a public genre and thus the proper domain of men. Reform, however, provided a plausible justification for a woman’s entrance into print […] For male novelists, particularly those in the United States, the problem was the reverse: the conviction that the novel was a private genre and thus the proper domain of women. Here, too, the claims of purpose redefined novel writing as a proper civic act […] and thus made it possible for men to write as well” (Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose, p. 48). 14 Zora Neale Hurston, “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing … And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive

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(New York: Feminist Press, 1979), p. 171. Similar sentiments were expressed many decades later by Lorraine Hansberry: “I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from the truthful identity of what is” (To Be Young, Gifted, and Black [New York: Signet, 1970]). 15 Langston Hughes received similar responses from black critics who reviewed his Fine Clothes to the Jew with outrage: “SEWER DWELLER […] about 100 pages of trash […] it reeks of the gutter and sewer […] piffling trash […] a literary gutter-rat […] these poems are unsanitary, insipid, and repulsing […] a study in the perversions of the Negro” (Arnold Rampersad, “Langston Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew,” in Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah [New York: Amistad Press, 1993], pp. 60–1). 16 This is, of course, the more general worry that some Marxist critics direct toward realist literature in late capitalist culture, namely, that realism functions to naturalize the everyday, to turn human pathos into a spectacle for the enjoyment of the alienated neutral observer. See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997). For a contemporary restatement of this position, one that also draws on the work of Walter Benjamin, see Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985). 17 George Eliot, in a letter to a friend, quoted in Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose, p. 40. 18 “Many writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance, both black and white, believed that realist fiction, poetry, and drama would bring greater interracial understanding by exploring the psychology of racism as well as opening a space for the re-creation and expression of diversely ‘American’ selves […] Harlem Renaissance writers depended far more than the high modernists upon realist discourse because their objective social position vis-à-vis the dominant language differed from the modernists” (Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance, pp. 42, 199). 19 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Knopf, 1940). 20 Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume 1: 1902–1941: I, Too, Sing America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 3–4. “Hughes knew everybody, although almost no one knew him, or was able to penetrate the veils and masks that the truly vulnerable fabricate to present public personae to the world” (“Preface: Langston Hughes [1902–1967],” in Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, p. ix). 21 Quoted in Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, p. 4. 22 See the interesting chapter on Langston Hughes in Herb Boyd’s Baldwin’s Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin (New York: Atria Books, 2008). Hughes and Baldwin had a cool, and somewhat critical, relationship to one another. Compare their respective reviews of each other’s work in the New York Times in the late 1950s. Baldwin opens his March 29, 1959 review of Hughes’ “Sermons and Blues” with the line, “Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts—and depressed that he has done so little with them.” Hughes for his part suggests that Baldwin “over-writes and over-poeticizes in images way over the heads of the folks supposedly thinking them.” In his February 26, 1958 review of Baldwin’s early works he writes, “As an essayist he is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing. And he uses words as the sea uses



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waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing.” This exchange illustrates my earlier point that Baldwin dives deeply into the inner lives of his characters while Hughes prefers to remain on the fascinating surfaces of his. Virtually none of the secondary literature on the two writers delves into their quite different religious sentiments or conversion experiences. 23 See especially, David Hempton, “James Baldwin—Preacher and Prophet,” in Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 163–86. 24 The definitive account of religious themes in Hughes’ work will be Wallace Best, Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem (forthcoming). 25 “Song for a Dark Girl,” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 104. 26 Ibid., p. 80. 27 Ibid., p. 37. 28 Ibid., p. 50. 29 “Trumpet Player,” ibid., p. 338. 30 “When Sue Wears Red,” ibid., p. 30. 31 “The theme of bodily liberation, moreover, Whitman inevitably linked with a political as well as religious assault on America slavery, in passages famous to Harlem Renaissance authors. There were connections to which Langston Hughes, in particular, intensely responded” (Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance, p. 100). See, also, Hughes’ essay, “Walt Whitman and the Negro,” Nocturne 7 (Spring, 1955): 9. 32 Wallace Best writes: “In reality Whitman was very much a man of his times, having grown up in a racist environment in Long Island, New York, with slaveowning ancestors. He espoused views on race and slavery that were unstable, inconsistent, paradoxical, and contradictory” (Chapter 2, “A Note on Poetry,” Langston’s Salvation). 33 The best account of these complex relationships is Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance. 34 Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation 122 ( June 23, 1926): 694. In 1927, Hughes responded to his critics in an article entitled “These Bad New Negroes: A Critique on Critics,” in which he characterized himself as “the ‘baddest’ of the bad New Negroes” (LHP 3773 [March 22, 1927]). 35 The most thorough account of the religious themes in Hughes’ poetry is chapter 3, “Poems of a Religious Nature,” of Best, Langston’s Salvation. 36 “Drama for Winter Night (Fifth Avenue),” Collected Poems, p. 47. 37 “A Christian Country,” ibid., p. 136. 38 “Christ in Alabama,” ibid., p. 143. 39 “On the Road,” in Langston Hughes: Short Stories (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996), pp. 90–4. The use of dreams and hallucinations is common in realist literature. “Realism is capacious enough to recognize that social realities are multiple and constructed; it is formally adventurous enough to incorporate non-realist genres like fairy tale, romanticism and melodrama, and appropriate their qualities to realist ends” (Morris, Realism, pp. 93–4). 40 The phrase is Foucault’s. 41 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 7. 42 Ibid., p. 19. 43 See Amy Hollywood, “Performativity,” pp. 93–115.

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44 “In Foucault’s account of self-constitution […] a regime of truth offers the terms that make self-recognition possible. These terms are outside the subject to some degree, but they are also presented as the available norms through which self-recognition takes place […] Although the regime of truth decides in advance what form recognition can take, it does not fully constrain this form” (Butler, Giving an Account, p. 22). “Like other discursive formations generative of subjectivity, ritual is productive of the subject and marks the possibility of that subject’s resistance to the very norms and rituals through which it is constituted” (Hollywood, “Performativity,” p. 114). 45 “Thus if I question the regime of truth, I question, too, the regime through which being, and my own ontological status, is allocated” (Butler, Giving an Account, p. 23). 46 Sherwood Anderson, a white reviewer, wrote in The Nation, July 11, 1934: “The Negro people in these stories of his are so alive, warm, and real and the whites are all caricatures, life, love, laughter, old wisdom all to the Negroes and silly pretense, fakiness, pretty much all to the whites.” One is tempted to say – but, of course, that’s the point! 47 “Slave on the Block,” The Ways of White Folks (New York: Vintage Book, 1933), p. 19. 48 Ibid., pp. 19–20. Subsequent page numbers will appear in the text. 49 “The Blues I’m Playing,” Ways of White Folks, pp. 99–124. Pages cited in text. 50 “Cora Unshamed,” Ways of White Folks, pp. 3–18. 51 “Poor Little Black Fellow,” Ways of White Folks, pp. 133–60. 52 “Home,” Ways of White Folks, pp. 33–50. 53 “Rejuvenation Through Joy,” Ways of White Folks, p. 69. 54 Butler, Giving an Account, p. 136. 55 See especially, Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance. 56 See especially Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1989), and Eddie Glaude, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 57 Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance, p. 59. 58 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 1934), p. 5. 59 Glaude, Shade of Blue, p. x. 60 Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance, p. 124. 61 See Cornel West’s classic article “Race and Modernity,” in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 55–86. 62 “Horace Pippin’s Challenge to Art Criticism,” The Cornel West Reader, pp. 452–3. 63 The ironic use of the terms “niggerati” and “Negrotarians” by Hurston and Wallace Thurman to describe the Harlem Renaissance writers shows a healthy degree of skepticism about the pretensions of the leaders of the movement. I am not convinced that West’s sharp criticisms apply to Hughes, Hurston, and Thurman. See the strong criticisms made of Hughes’ depiction of urban black life by African American reviewers (ibid., p. 7, fn. 15). 64 “Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic,” The Cornel West Reader, p. 178. 65 Ibid., p. 179. 66 Words like “tragic” and “tragedy” are capable of widely diverse meanings, and so one must specify fairly clearly the use and meaning of these words in order to discover whether an author has a sufficient sense for “the tragic.” For a brilliant analysis of these issues see Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).



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67 Glaude, Shade of Blue, p. 32. 68 Ibid., p. 39. 69 Ibid., p. 41. 70 Ibid., p. 44. 71 Glaude’s own ethical analysis of Beloved is far richer and more complex than the simple notion of “choice” might suggest. It seems to me that Morrison’s work is equally useful as a critique of pragmatism as it is a defense of that American philosophical tradition. 72 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 11. 73 Stout, Democracy and Tradition, pp. 270–86. 74 Judith Butler, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 136. 75 “The subject of Foucault’s analysis is not a voluntaristic, autonomous subject who fashions herself in a protean manner. Rather, the subject is formed within the limits of a historically specific set of formative practices and moral injunctions that are delimited in advance – what Foucault characterizes as ‘modes of subjectivation’” (Mahmood, Politics of Piety, p. 28). 76 “Resistance occurs in the space and time interval demanded by repetition” (Hollywood, “Performativity,” p. 97). 77 Hughes was raised by his grandmother. His father abandoned wife and son when Hughes was a young boy, and his mother was away from home for long periods of time seeking to earn a living for the family. 78 One can argue that this peculiar form of “doubleness” gets played out most clearly in the Simple stories, in which Hughes is both the educated, cultured narrator and interlocutor and the wise, simple, insightful Jesse B. Simple. “Although Simple sometimes edges toward despair, he is always saved in the end by his passion for life, laughter, and language. This conquest of loneliness and the dehumanization of racism is only frugally shared by the narrator.” See Arnold Rampersad, “Introduction” to Langston Hughes, The Return of Simple (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994), p. xix. 79 Quoted in Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, p. 14. 80 Ibid., p. 16. 81 James Cone, The Spiritual and the Blues: An Interpretation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1972), pp. 98–9. 82 Ibid., pp. 99, 113. 83 See Wallace Best’s definitive account of this poem in its social and political setting in Langston’s Salvation. 84 Collected Poems, p. 307. 85 Ibid., p. 339. 86 “Big Meeting,” Langston Hughes: Short Stories, p. 108. 87 Ibid., p. 110. 88 Ibid., p. 109. 89 Ibid., p. 111. 90 Ibid., p. 112. 91 Ibid., p. 114. 92 Ibid., p. 119. 93 For a brilliant analysis of melancholia as a religious phenomenon see Amy Hollywood, “Acute Melancholia,” Harvard Theological Review 99:4 (2006): 381– 406. See also David Kim, Melancholic Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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94 Regina Mara Schwartz has argued that the phenomenon of what we might call “sacramental traces” in modern literature is common within Western “secular” writing. “My contention is that instead of God leaving the world without a trace, the very sacramental character of religion lent itself copiously to developing the socalled secular forms of culture and that these are often thinly disguised sacramental cultural expressions” (Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008], p. 14). 95 I will show this at much greater length in the next chapter. 96 “The desire of God, God as the other name of desire, deals in the desert with radical atheism […] The most consequent forms of declared atheism will have always testified to the most intense desire for God […] Like mysticism, apophatic discourse has always been suspected of atheism […] If atheism, like apophatic theology, testifies to the desire of God […] in the presence of whom does it do this?” ( Jacques Derrida, On the Name [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995], pp. 35ff.; quoted in Richard Kearney “Sacramental Imagination: Eucharists of the Ordinary Universe,” Analecta Hermeneutica 1 [2009]: 240–88). 97 Mother Teresa, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light—The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta (New York: Doubleday Religion, 2007), p. 288. 98 Ibid., p. 193. 99 Ibid., e.g., pp. 165, 182. 100 Best defends Hughes against the charge of atheism in “Concerning Goodbye Christ,” chapter 4 of Langston’s Salvation. Chapter 4: Humanity Without God 1 Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion. 2 Jacques Derrida, Body of Prayer (New York: The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 2001), p. 63. 3 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2008). 4 Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2009). 5 Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 6 Charles Matthewes, A Theology of Public Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 53, 56. 7 Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. xi. 8 Among Asad’s many writings on this topic, his chapter, “What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?’ remains his classic contribution (Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003], pp. 21–66). 9 Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 17. 10 Ibid., p. 27. 11 “Apophaticism means our refusal to exhaust knowledge of the truth in its formulation […] the formulation neither replaces nor exhausts the knowledge of the truth, which remains experiential and practical, a way of life and not a



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theoretical construction” (Christos Yannaras, Elements of Faith [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991], p. 17). 12 Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 95. 13 Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (London: SCM Press, 1960). 14 “While faith is certainly profoundly personal, it is not properly identified as private. ‘Faith’ identifies the fundamental convictions that guide and direct the belief and practices of religious believers […] The convictions of faith may, therefore, call forth from the religious person a distinctive level of commitment and devotion, but the fact and function of such basic orienting convictions is common to every human life. Thus, religious convictions, though they are directed toward a distinctive ‘object’ or ‘horizon of meaning,’ do not differ in kind or in function from the fundamental commitments that orient the lives of nonreligious persons” (Ronald F. Thiemann, Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy [Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996], p. 155). 15 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 2000). 16 María Pía Lara, Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). 17 Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995). 18 Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 19 Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002). 20 Arthur Kleinman, What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life Amidst Uncertainty and Danger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 21 Veena Das, Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). 22 Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 23 Ibid., p. 171. 24 Ibid., p. 174. Stout is here engaging the work of Seyla Benhabib, especially her Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992) and her Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 25 James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 15. Baldwin’s words are similar to the thoughts of the conservative critic Paul Johnson, who writes, “Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotism is the heartless tyranny of ideas” (Paul Johnson, Intellectuals [New York: Harper & Row, 1988], p. 342). 26 George Orwell, “Arthur Koestler,” in George Orwell: As I Please, 1943–45: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 3 (Boston, MA: David R. Godine Publishing, 2000), p. 244. 27 George Orwell, “Notes on the Way,” in The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 12, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), p. 126. 28 He made similar critiques of the Roman Catholic Church. In an otherwise quite respectful review of F.J. Sheed’s Communism and Man, he makes this telling point: “[F]or some time past the Church has been in an anomalous position, symbolized by the fact that the Pope almost simultaneously denounces the Capitalist system and confers decorations on General Franco.” See The Complete

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Works of George Orwell, Vol. 11, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), p. 323. 29 The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 10, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), p. 485. 30 In this regard Orwell’s reflections bear a striking similarity to the musings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on “religionless Christianity” in his Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Touchstone, 1997). This will be discussed in the final chapter. 31 Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Penguin Books, 1980), p. 214. 32 This is reported by Crick, ibid., pp. 226–7. 33 Ibid., p. 226. 34 Ibid., p. 227. 35 The Complete Works, Vol. 10, p. 249. 36 Ibid. 37 Note the similarity to a line uttered by Mr. Warburton in A Clergyman’s Daughter (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1936), p. 298: “Is it the hypocrisy that’s worrying you? Afraid that the consecrated bread might stick in your throat, and so forth?” 38 The Complete Works, Vol. 10, p. 247. 39 Ibid., pp. 251, 252. 40 Ibid., p. 253. I can find no evidence that the two men ever met, although I have discovered in the Orwell archive an unpublished letter Martindale wrote in April, 1939 in response to a letter from Orwell. It appears that Martindale wrote a favorable review of The Road to Wigan Pier and that Orwell responded with a rather lengthy reply of his own. Their discussion seems to revolve around the question of whether Orwell’s assertions concerning justice in his vivid descriptions of the horrible conditions of poverty in the north of England can be thematized into a more philosophical discourse. You will understand why I like all this part of your book which describes facts, because it is “first hand” and because it makes my own desire for justice, understanding and kindness more active, and also your “de-bunking” of jargon wherever it is heard […] I thought that one might get further than you did in this crystalizing “liberty” and “justice.” It would be from this end that the Catholic philosopher would like to be of service.

This exchange suggests a serious and mutually respectful discussion on the topic of social ethics between Orwell and this prominent Christian socialist. Unfortunately, Orwell’s own letter has disappeared and neither the Orwell archive nor the Martindale archive has any record of it. Thomas McCoog, S.J., the current archivist of the British Province of the Jesuits, surmises that the letter might have been lost during the war, since Martindale’s residence was destroyed during the Battle of Britain. Thus the one substantial positive engagement Orwell had with Christian ethics has tragically vanished. 41 Ibid., p. 306. 42 Other self-deprecating comments include the following: “I am so miserable, struggling with the entrails of that dreadful book and never getting any further, and loathing the sight of what I have done. Never start writing novels, if you wish to preserve your happiness” (The Complete Works, Vol. 10, p. 344). “That book is bollox, but I made some experiments in it that were useful to me” (ibid., p. 382). 43 Ibid., p. 351.



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44 Jenni Calder, Chronicles of Conscience (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968). 45 Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 182. 46 The phrase is Jenni Calder’s. Calder, Chronicles, p. 87. 47 Orwell and his critics agree that the most successful literary section of the book comes in chapter III with the vivid depiction of London’s homeless trying to sleep on the cold benches in Trafalgar Square. In a letter to Brenda Salkeld, Orwell wrote, “As you will see, it is tripe, except for Chapter 3, part 1, which I am pleased with.” 48 A Clergyman’s Daughter, pp. 12–13. 49 Ibid., pp. 14–15. 50 Ibid., pp. 296, 298, 299. 51 Ibid., pp. 296–7, 298. 52 Ibid., pp. 308, 315–16. 53 Orwell, “Arthur Koestler,” p. 244; “Notes on the Way,” p. 126. 54 See David James, Tony Jowitt, and Keith Laybourn, The Centennial History of the ILP (Krumlin, Halifax: Ryburn Academic Publishing, 1992). 55 Crick, George Orwell, pp. 252–3. At the Orwell centennial conference Ian Williams quipped that the ILP was “more Methodist than Marxist” (George Orwell Centenary Conference, Wellesley College, May 1–3, 2003). 56 Leonard Smith, “Religion and the ILP,” in The Centennial History. 57 Crick, George Orwell, p. 273. 58 Since the ILP no longer exists, its tradition within British politics has virtually disappeared, and thus the peculiar brand of socialist humanism that Orwell represented cannot easily be captured by the liberal/conservative divide that structures both English and American politics. American democratic socialism associated with the journal Dissent probably provides the best contemporary analogy for Orwell’s preferred brand of socialist politics. It thus comes as no surprise that Michael Walzer and Michael Harrington, two of America’s most well-known democratic socialists, were both admirers of Orwell. Indeed, Harrington’s The Other America bears a striking resemblance to Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. 59 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, 1958). 60 The title of the book is actually a joke about Wigan that Orwell heard from music hall comedians. The phrase “Wigan Pier” refers to a ramshackle coal-loading jetty jutting out into the polluted Leeds–Liverpool canal, a darkly humorous comparison to the bright recreational piers of Brighton and Bournemouth on the south coast of England. See Margery Sabin, “Outside/Inside: Searching for Wigan Pier,” in George Orwell: Into the Twenty-First Century (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishing, 2004), pp. 243–51. 61 Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 5. 62 Ibid., p. 15. 63 Ibid., p. 17. Orwell, of course, received strong criticism for his reference to the smell of the working classes in the second part of Wigan Pier. The entire passage reads, “Here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the West […] It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell. That was what we were taught—the lower classes smell” (pp. 127–8). Orwell is clearly describing a prejudice, and one with which he strongly disagrees even though he acknowledges that he was taught the prejudice as a boy.

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Thus it is quite unfair for Victor Gollancz to say in the Foreword, “I have in mind in particular a lengthy passage in which Mr. Orwell embroiders the theme that, in the opinion of the middle class in general, the working class smells!” (p. xiii). Orwell’s embroidery, if one can even call it that, is designed to show how deeply this class prejudice in engrained within British culture. 64 Ibid., p. 18. 65 “And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passage, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives, and humbug generally” (George Orwell, “Why I Write,” A Collection of Essays [New York: Harcourt, 1946], p. 316. 66 Orwell’s account has been both praised and criticized for its literary creativity. While many have praised this narrative for its powerful depiction of the human face of poverty, others have criticized Orwell for taking liberties with his observations and descriptions. It is clear from the diary that Orwell kept during this time that the description of the young woman at the drain-pipe is in fact a composite drawn from a number of different observations Orwell made while in the north of England. I have defended Orwell against his positivist historical critics in an essay entitled, “On Giraffes and Bank Accounts: Rethinking Discovery, Creation, and Literary Imagination,” in Leadership and Discovery (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 171–88. This essay was delivered at the University of Richmond on the occasion of the quadricentennial of the founding of the Jamestown Colony. 67 Orwell, Wigan Pier, pp. 87–8. 68 Ibid., p. 35. 69 Orwell’s left-wing critics thought that non-ideological socialism was pure fantasy. See Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with the New Left Review (New York: Verso, 1981), pp. 384–92. 70 Raymond Williams, Orwell (London: Fontana, 1991), p. 3. 71 George Orwell, “Notes on the Way,” in Critical Essays (London: Harvill Secker, 2009), p. 146. 72 Orwell, Wigan Pier, p. 176. 73 Ibid., p. 172. 74 The term was coined by Michael Walzer in his Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) and employed again in The Company of Critics (New York: Basic Books, 2002), a work in which he treats Orwell under the category of “connected critic.” I have employed the term to describe the forms of citizenship Christian discipleship might take in democratic polities in Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy. 75 Orwell, Wigan Pier, p. 121. 76 Ibid., p. 162. In no way does Orwell exempt his own kind of socialist from this dilemma. “The middle-class I.L.P.’er and the bearded fruit-juice drinker are all for a classless society so long as they see the proletariat through the wrong end of the telescope; force them into any real contract with a proletarian […] and they are capable of swinging back to the most ordinary middle-class snobbishness” (ibid., p. 163). 77 Ibid., pp. 187, 214. 78 Ibid., p. 214. 79 Ibid., p. 216. 80 In the months after the death of his wife Eileen in March 1944, Orwell in failing health himself began a series of liaisons with younger women, openly offering



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them proposals of marriage. In a letter to Anne Popham (April 18, 1944) Orwell writes, “What I am really asking you is whether you would like to be the widow of a literary man. If things remain more or less as they are, there is a certain amount of fun in this, as you would probably get royalties coming in and you might find it interesting to edit unpublished stuff.” 81 Richard Rorty, “The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on Cruelty,” in Contigency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 169–88. 82 “The book appalls us because its terror, far from being inherent in the ‘human condition,’ is particular to our century; what haunts us is the sickening awareness that in 1984 Orwell has seized upon those elements of our public life that, given courage and intelligence, were avoidable” (Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel [Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1957], p. 236). 83 Jeffrey Meyers, Orwell: Life and Art (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2010), p. 159. 84 James Oliver, Britain’s Propaganda War, quoted in Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters, pp. 155–6. 85 Quoted in Meyers, Orwell, p. 296. 86 Ibid. 87 Timothy Garton Ash, “Orwell’s List,” The New York Review of Books (September 25, 2003). 88 John Rodden, Scenes from an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003), p. 175. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 It is important to remember that even those whom we most readily identify as saints are plagued by flaws and defects. Mother Teresa suffered devastating bouts of spiritual doubting; Martin Luther King committed marital infidelities, and even Gandhi himself exemplified vices in the midst of his great virtues. Andrew Roberts’ review of Joseph Lelyveld’s biography Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India begins: “Joseph Lelyveld has written a generally admiring book about Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet ‘Great Soul’ also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent, and a fanatical faddist – one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal twentiethcentury progressive intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept, while actually despising people as individuals” (“Among the Hagiographers,” The Wall Street Journal [March 26–7, 2011]: C5–C6). One can imagine Orwell smiling knowingly. 92 Daphne Patai has been our most important teacher on Orwell and gender. See her recent “Third Thoughts About Orwell,” in George Orwell: Into the Twenty-First Century, pp. 200–14, and her earlier, The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984). 93 Richard Reese, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), pp. 49–50. 94 Dan Jacobson, “Along the Road to Wigan Pier,” The World of George Orwell, ed. Miriam Gross (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), p. 61. 95 Robert Pearce, “Revisiting Orwell’s Wigan Pier,” History 82:267 ( July, 1997): 410– 28. This quotation is found on p. 414 of the text. Subsequent page citations will be made in the main text of the chapter.

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Notes to Pages 141–146

96 Pearce argues that a manuscript containing so much “extraneous information,” such as pencil drawings of coal cutting and recipes for a fruit loaf and a sponge cake, could hardly be a first draft of a book. “Presumably Orwell, who was interested in traditional English cooking, wanted the recipes for his personal use, and therefore was treating the diary very much as a personal record not intended for publication – in short as a real diary” (“Revisiting Orwell’s Wigan Pier,” p. 414). Moreover, the fact that Orwell includes notes for future research as part of the “diary” is definitive evidence that this is no first manuscript of a book. “Might Orwell have included such informal notes to add spurious authenticity to an account he intended to publish? Surely not” (p. 414). Finally, Pearce argues that Orwell’s footnotes—something not usually found in diaries (thus counterevidence to his argument)—actually support his contention that the manuscript is not a first book draft. “For instance, in the entry for 18 March he estimated that there were about fifty tubs in Barnsley public baths; later he learned that there were in fact only nineteen, and so he inserted this number, in ink, at the foot of the relevant typed page. And he would have been far more likely to learn the true figure in Barnsley than in the rural peace of Wallington!” (p. 415). These arguments appear on the surface to be highly speculative and even spurious. For example, I am currently typing a first draft of this essay which will ultimately appear in published form. But I am genuinely uncertain whether to include this footnote in the main text or to relegate it to this small type. Therefore I am making a note to myself to ask other participants in our conference their opinion on where this material should appear. The fact that I am making this note in no way supports a contention that this is not a first draft of my essay. On the issue of drawings and recipes, Orwell often included such things in the drafts of his writing, especially when he felt they offered insights into the cultures he was describing. Thus I find Pearce’s analysis of the status of the “Wigan Diary” to be quite unconvincing, and I cast my lot with Crick’s contention that it was in fact the first draft of The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell used a similar process in writing Down and Out in Paris and London, a point that I find utterly more convincing that any of the arguments Pearce offers. 97 George Orwell, “The Road to Wigan Pier Diary,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 203. 98 Sabin, “Outside/Inside,” p. 247. 99 “[E]vents must be not only registered within the chronological framework of their original occurrence but narrated as well, that is to say, revealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, that they do not possess as mere sequence” (Hayden White, “Narrative in the Representation of Reality,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1987], p. 5). The most thorough discussion of the process of narrative creation and interpretation is Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983). I treat Ricoeur’s views more fully in chapter 5. For a similar discussion within the analytical philosophical tradition see John R. Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” New Literary History 6:2 (1975): 319–32. 100 White, “Narrative,” p. 10. 101 Ibid., p. 11. 102 Ibid., p. 14.



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103 Ibid., pp. 21, 24. 104 “Jesus gives his support to those who suffer for the sake of a just cause, even if this cause is not precisely the confession of his name” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics [New York: Touchstone, 1995], p. 62). “Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us […] [Christians] must share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world […] It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life […] Jesus calls [us], not to a new religion, but to life” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison [London: Macmillan, 1971], pp. 360–1). More discussion on Bonhoeffer will follow in chapter 5. Chapter 5: A Strange Form of Love 1 Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 5. 2 Ibid., p. 225. 3 Ibid., p. 6. 4 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 37. 5 Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de Silentio, trans. Alistair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 60. 6 Ibid., p. 62. 7 Ibid., pp. 65, 75. 8 Ibid., pp. 68, 70. 9 Camus, The Rebel, p. 283. 10 Albert Camus, “The Almond Trees,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 135. 11 Camus, The Rebel, p. 13. 12 Ibid., p. 13. 13 Ibid., p. 23. 14 John Foley, Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), p. 57. 15 See Mara Willard, “‘Recasting the Old Questions’: Theological Reliance and Renunciation in the Political Thought of Hannah Arendt” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2011). 16 Camus, The Rebel¸ p. 105. 17 Ibid., p. 22. 18 Albert Camus, “Defense of The Rebel,” in Sartre and Camus: A Historic Confrontation, ed. and trans. David A. Sprintzen and Adrian van den Hoven (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004), p. 217. 19 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who I will treat later in this chapter, also asserts that the only genuine ethics is a “costly” one. See Discipleship, Vol. 4 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, trans. Green and Krauss (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), pp. 43ff.; also numerous references in Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Touchstone, 1997). 20 Camus, The Rebel, pp. 287–8. 21 Camus, “Defense,” p. 213.

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22 Camus, The Rebel, pp. 273, 304, italics added. 23 Camus, “The Almond Trees,” p. 135. 24 See Camus’ extended essay, Neither Victims nor Executioners, trans. Dwight MacDonald (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008). 25 It is worth noting the striking similarities between Camus’ argument and more recent arguments in the discourse on universal human rights. For example, in The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Michael Perry seeks to identify some notion of basic human “inviolability” and inquires into whether or not such a notion can be arrived at without being implicated in religious notions of “the sacred.” Perry concludes that such remnants invariably remain, pushing us (like Camus) to further question the actual and livable boundaries between such commonly opposed notions as “the secular” and “the sacred” or “the religious”—particularly when considering the role of the aesthetic in ethics. See also David Little’s work on the relation between religious commitments and notions of the sacred in constituting the limits that undergird notions of human inviolability. For example: “Religion and Human Rights: A Personal Testament,” Journal of Law and Religion 18:1 (2002–3): 57–77; “Religion— Catalyst or Impediment to International Law? The Case of Hugo Grotius,” in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law), Vol. 87 (1993), pp. 322–7. 26 See part four of The Rebel, “Rebellion and Art.” 27 Camus, The Rebel, p. 258. 28 Quoted in Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, trans. Benjamin Ivry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 168. 29 Albert Camus, The Plague (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), pp. 6–7. 30 Camus, The Rebel, pp. 269–70. 31 Tony Judt, “On The Plague,” The New York Review of Books (November 29, 2001). Available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2001/nov/29/on-the-plague (accessed September 3, 2012). 32 Camus, The Plague, p. 117. 33 Ibid., p. 104. 34 Laura Thiemann Scales, “Narrative Revolutions in Nat Turner and Joseph Smith,” American Literary History 24:2 (2012): 205–33. 35 See John Cruickshank, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt (London: Oxford University Press, 1959). 36 Cruickshank, Albert Camus, pp. 170–1. 37 Judt, “On The Plague.” 38 Camus, The Plague, pp. 252–3. 39 Ibid., p. 215. 40 Ibid., p. 216. 41 Ibid., p. 218. 42 Ibid., p. 219. 43 Ibid., p. 248. 44 Ibid., p. 250. 45 Ibid., p. 253. 46 Ibid., pp. 255–6. 47 Ibid., p. 256. 48 Ibid., p. 257. 49 Ibid.



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50 Judt, “On The Plague.” 51 Ibid., p. 308. It should be noted that this passage bears striking similarities to Anna Akhmatova’s descriptions of the “witness” (see chapter 2) as well as to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s discussions of the role of “representative.” 52 Camus, The Rebel, pp. 304, 306. Recall Eagleton’s discussion of divine love, quoted earlier in this chapter: “It was because his death seemed to him a cul-de-sac, as his despairing scriptural quotation on the cross would suggest, that it could be fruitful […] Only by accepting the worst for what it is, not as a convenient springboard for leaping beyond it, can one hope to surpass it. Only by accepting this as the last word about the human condition can it cease to be the last word” (Sweet Violence, p. 37). 53 See Todd, Albert Camus, p. 410. 54 Albert Camus, “The Unbeliever and the Christian,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 71. 55 Albert Camus, Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, trans. Ronald D. Srigley (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007), p. 44. 56 See Todd, Albert Camus, p. 245. 57 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 1997, p. 297. 58 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “To Reinhold Niebuhr, New York, End of June, 1939,” in Theological Education Underground: 1937–1940, Vol. 15 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), p. 210. 59 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 346. 60 Ibid., pp. 360–1. 61 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. Neville Horton Smith (New York: Touchstone, 1995), pp. 21, 87. 62 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, Vol. 6 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, trans. Ilse Tödt, et al. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), p. 300. 63 This position bears a striking resemblance to Camus’ dialectic of limitation, discussed earlier. 64 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 1995, p. 193. 65 Ibid., p. 197. 66 Ibid., p. 57. 67 Ibid., p. 62. 68 Ibid., p. 61. 69 Recall the discussion of Martin Luther in chapter 1. As quoted there, Luther writes: “As works do not make a man a believer, so also they do not make him righteous. But as faith makes a man a believer and righteous, so faith does good works” (Luther’s Works, Vol. 31 [Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Press, 1957], p. 361). 70 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 2005, p. 148. 71 Ibid., p. 164. 72 Sociality has been a central category in Bonhoeffer’s thought since his first doctoral thesis, Sanctorum Communio, Vol. 1 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009). See also Clifford Green, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Theology of Sociality (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999). 73 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 2005, p. 254. 74 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 1995, p. 89. 75 Ibid., pp. 234–5. 76 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 2005, p. 270.

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Notes to Pages 182–190

77 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 1995, p. 41. 78 See, for example, Bonhoeffer’s April 30, 1944 letter to Eberhard Bethge: Letters and Papers, 1997, pp. 278ff. 79 Ibid., pp. 326–7. 80 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 1971, pp. 360–1. 81 Camus, The Rebel, p. 258, italics added. 82 Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in Entre Nous (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 79. 83 See Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 1997, pp. 280ff. 84 Ibid., p. 381. 85 Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 106. 86 Ibid., p. 123. 87 See Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 2005, p. 255. Judith Butler offers a strikingly similar analysis of responsibility in Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 88 Bonhoeffer, Ethics 1995, p. 41. 89 Judt, The Burden, p. 93. 90 Camus, The Plague, p. 308. 91 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 1997, p. 300. Conclusion 1

This conclusion is indebted to the insights and wisdom of other graduate students of Ron Thiemann, particularly Michelle Sanchez and Matthew Potts. We also thank Ron’s close colleagues, particularly Kimberley Patton and Jeffrey Stout, and the Thiemann family. 2 Thiemann was influenced by and admired the appreciation of the tragic in the African American tradition, the discussion of which he followed closely in the work of colleagues and friends including Cornel West, Eddie Glaude, Wallace Best, and Jonathan Walton. 3 Amy Hollywood, “Acute Melancholia,” HTR 99:4 (2006): 383. See chapter 3, footnote 93, in which Thiemann describes this paper as “a brilliant analysis of melancholia as a religious phenomenon.” 4 One can even describe the whole book as a pastoral intervention; an identification of “powerful resources for religious life and practice” (p. 2). And it is, of course, a Lutheran intervention. “Christ took on our humanity that he should console and confirm […] the only god we can truly love and trust is a God clothed in the familiar, ordinary, and everyday” (p. 49). 5 None of Ron’s students will forget how our teacher inevitably choked back tears reading his favorite passage from Toni Morrison’s Sula (New York: Penguin Books: 1982). “There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tiny bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice” (p. 123).

6

Notes to Pages 191–198

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As Taylor himself explains, the term itself serves multiple overlapping functions: referring alternately to formal political/legal arrangements, the worldly, or the absence and/or stripping of divine presence (Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava [Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1998]). 7 While Taylor would rebut aspects of Thiemann’s theological claims, he would likely not contest his historical narrative. The two share a topography of the emergence and ecclesial fostering of lay spirituality, mendicant friars, and the rise of realist art (pp. 38–9). In both A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) and Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), Taylor describes a rising “affirmation of ordinary life” (see, for example, Sources, pp. 14, 211ff.; A Secular Age, pp. 144, 628). 8 In a Harvard Divinity School workshop on this project, for instance, a nonbelieving student objected, “Camus is ours. We get to claim him, and his commitment to living ethically together with his refusal to affirm God.” 9 The ecumenicism that marked Bonhoeffer’s intellectual and theological era, conspicuous especially in Bonhoeffer’s relationship with Gandhi, has since been criticized as too normatively Christian. As noted above, Thiemann anticipates and repudiates charges of the “secret Christian.” It was evident from Thiemann’s personal biography and call to service as the North American representative to the Lutheran Roman Catholic International Commission on Christian Unity by the Lutheran World Federation and the Vatican that he was committed to greater cross-denominational integration. 10 Ronald F. Thiemann, “Faith Seeking Understanding,” in Theologians in Their Own Words, ed. Derek R. Nelson, Joshua M. Moritz, and Ted Peters (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 2013), p. 287. 11 Ibid., p. 286. 12 This theorizing is indebted to Mark Jordan’s reading of a Roman Catholic understanding of the transformations that occur through encounter with the sacraments. “The pedagogy of the sacraments is itself […] an incomplete, anticipatory performance. The sacraments reach forward with fumbling confidence through a capacity for inhabitation to a future that is ardently desired and presently unreached […] Careful sacramental pedagogy requires dialectical negation, the affirmation of character, then the denial of its completeness; the claim of vicarious inhabitation, then the insistence that any series of them is no more than a collage” (Mark Jordan, “Sacramental Characters,” Studies in Christian Ethics 19:3 (2006): 338. 13 See Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1976), p. 11. 14 Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 7. Cited above by Thiemann, p. 78. 15 The very underdetermined nature of art can engage readers in life-denying, as much as liberatory, hermeneutical circles. Further discussion may be warranted on when and how the depiction of a world in its verisimilitude risks complicity with that world’s oppressive practices (e.g. racism, sexism, homophobia). See, for example, discussions of Camus and Orwell in Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), Daphne Patai, The Orwell Critique: A Study in Male Ideology (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), and Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

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Notes to Pages 198–201

16 Thiemann draws here on anthropological insights into the role of community and ritual formation in shaping the subject. Christianity has long been aware of the power of not only reading and contemplation, but pilgrimage, fasting and feasting, and acts of mercy and charity as means of shaping the self, and thus religious studies has eagerly embraced this literature. For some of the leading applications of these insights to the study of religion, see writings by Mark Jordan on sacramental character proposed by Aquinas (“Sacramental Characters”), Amy Hollywood on bodily identification with the crucified Christ of medieval mystics described (“Acute Melancholia”), and Robert Orsi on the devotional and materially structured practice of American Catholics before Vatican II (Between Heaven and Earth [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005]). 17 See George Hunsinger’s epilogue in How to Read Karl Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 18 See, for example, Steve Paulson, “Luther on the Hidden God,” Word & World 19 (1999). There, Paulson claims that “it is not so much that God can’t be seen that concerns Luther, but that God actually and actively hides […] God does not want to be found and quite literally hides from would-be seekers” (p. 363).

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Christian Discipleship Barth, Karl, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1963). ——— and Maxwell E. Johnson (ed.), Sacraments and Worship: The Sources of Christian Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012). Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Lamott, Anne, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Anchor Books, 2000). Metaxas, Eric, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2011). Smith, James K.A., Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works and Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013). Volf, Miroslav, A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2011). Williams, Rowan, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002). Wright, Alex, Why Bother with Theology? (London: Darton Longman and Todd Ltd., 2002). Theology and the Arts Alter, Robert, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981). Axel, Gabriel, Babette’s Feast (film, 1987). Dewey, John, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 1934). Eagleton, Terry, The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Frei, Hans, Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Jasper, David, The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art and Culture (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004). Kermode, Frank, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Koerner, Joseph Leo, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Matheson, Peter, The Imaginative World of the Reformation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press 2001).

238

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Osborne, Joan, “What if God Was One of Us?” Relish (CD, 1995). Morris, Pam, Realism (New York: Routledge, 2003). Pasolini, Pier Paolo, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (film, 1964). Robinson, Marilynne, When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (New York: Picador, 2012). Viladeseau, Richard, The Beauty of the Cross (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). ———, The Triumph of the Cross (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). The Politics of Resistance Forché, Carolyn (ed.), Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (New York: Norton, 1993). Jackson, Michael, The Politics of Storytelling (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002). Judt, Tony, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Lara, María Pía, Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). McKanan, Dan, Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2011). Smith, Christian, Disruptive Religion: The Force of Faith in Social Movement Activism (New York: Routledge, 1996). Stout, Jeffrey, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). Taylor, Mark Lewis, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Philadelphia, PA: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2001). Walzer, Michael, Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2008). Young, Iris Marion, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford Political Theory, 2002). Modernity and the “Secular” Berman, Marshall, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988). Calhoun, Craig, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds.), Rethinking Secularism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005). Anna Akhmatova Anonymous, Sergey Rachmaninov, Dimitry Bortnyansky, and Nikolai Sr Kedrov, Sacred Treasures: Choral Works from Russia (CD, 1998). Brodsky, Joseph, “The Keening Muse,” in Less than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986). Dalos, György and Antony Wood (trans.), The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000).



Suggestions for Further Reading

239

Feinstein, Elaine, Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova (New York: Knopf, 2006). Figes, Orlando, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002). Janows, Jill, “Anna Akhmatova: Fear and the Muse,” Mystic Fire Video (DVD, 2000). Langston Hughes Best, Wallace, Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem (forthcoming). Hughes, Langston, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993). ———, The Voice of Langston Hughes (CD, Smithsonian Folkways, 1995). ——— and Charles Mingus, The Weary Blues (CD, 1997). Lewis, David Levering, When Harlem was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997). Rampersad, Arnold, The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902–1941: I, Too, Sing America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). ———, The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II: 1914–1967: I Dream a World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). George Orwell Hitchens, Christopher, Why Orwell Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2003). Meyers, Jeffrey, Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001). Shelden, Michael, Orwell: The Authorized Biography (New York: Perennial, 1992). Albert Camus Foley, John, Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2008). Mumma, Howard, Albert Camus and the Minister (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2000). Todd, Olivier and Benjamin Ivry (trans.), Albert Camus: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997). Akhmatova, Anna, Poems of Akhmatova, trans. Stanley Kuntz and Max Hayward (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1967). ———, The Poems of Akhmatova, trans. Stanley Kunitz (Toronto: Little, Brown, and Company, 1973). ———, Anna Akhmatova: Poems, trans. Lyn Coffin (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974). ———, My Half-Century: Selected Prose, trans. Ronald Meyer (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992). ———, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (Boston, MA: Zephyr Press, 1997). ———, Akhmatova, trans. D.M. Thomas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). Amert, Susan, In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). Anderson, Nancy K., The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat: Poems of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). Anderson, Sherwood, “Paying for Old Sins,” The Nation, July 11, 1934. Annensky, I.F., “Pis’ma k. M.A. Voloshinu,” Ezhegodnik rukopisdnogo otdela Pushkinskogo domo, 1976 (Leningrad, 1978). Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion. Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). Ash, Timothy Garton, “Orwell’s List,” The New York Review of Books (September 25, 2003). Auerbach, Erich, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1929). ———, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). ———, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Augustine, In Johannem, in Robert W. Johnson (ed.), Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1978). Aykenval’d, Yuri, “Anna Akhmatova,” Siluety russikikh pisateley III (Moscow, 1923). Baldwin, James, Notes of a Native Son (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984). Barth, Karl, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (London: SCM Press, 1960). Basker, Michael, “The Silver Age,” The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature (London: Routledge, 2001). Bely, Andrey, Lug zelenyy (Moscow, 1910). Benhabib, Seyla, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

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INDEX

Abraham 150–1 absence see divine, the: absence of absolutism 155–6, 169, 172, 197 see also relativism absurdity/absurdism 147, 149, 151, 170, 190 Acmeism see Russian literary styles agency 18, 91–2, 95, 100, 103, 134 Akhmatova, Anna 6, 43–76, 194, 196 Alighieri, Dante 14–5 Anselm of Canterbury 113–15, 117 apophasis 117, 224n.11 Arendt, Hannah 205n.27 Asad, Talal 116 atheism/atheist see unbelief/unbeliever Auerbach, Erich 4–5, 10, 13, 162 Augustine 10, 12, 35 Baldwin, James 78, 83, 119, 196 baptism 35 Barth, Karl 117–18, 200 beauty 15, 43–4, 47, 52, 84, 100, 106, 109, 112, 158, 167, 181, belief/believer 1, 3, 18–19, 32–3, 61, 81, 105, 114–18, 146, 186–8, 190–1 binary thinking 2–3, 36, 41, 46, 56, 107, 115–16, 176, 186–7, 192 Blair, Eric see Orwell, George blues, the 85, 97, 104, 105, 111 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 172–88, 196, 199, 200 see also ethics Butler, Judith 157, 205n.27 Calvin, Jean 205n.40 Camus, Albert 7, 79, 147–72, 180–8, 195 concept of humanist rebellion or rebellious humanism 152–4, 156, 170, 172, 180

concept of moderation, la mesure 155–6 concept of the “strange” 170, 182, 184 see also humanism (ethical); rebellion censorship 71 certainty 8, 65, 72, 78, 114–15, 163, 180, 199, 200 Cervantes, Miguel de 78 Christianity African American 104 ethics of 11, 32, 33, 170–1, 176–80, 198–9 religionless 183, 199 traditions of writing 11–13 Christology 29, 31, 36, 181 Cicero 10 class, social or economic 11–12, 88, 91, 120, 129–31, 134–6, 145, 146 Claybaugh, Amanda 77, 78, 219n.13 comedy/the comic 81, 91, 105, 112 communism 66–7, 73, 120, 130, 154 Cone, James 105 Crick, Sir Bernard 122, 141 criticism, connected 135, 137, 190, 195–7 critique, social, ethical and political 5, 7, 81, 92, 119, 133, 176 crucifixion 26, 73, 110, 149–50, 165, 189 Da Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi 38–40 Da Vinci, Leonardo 40 darkness 39, 112 democracy 7, 78, 118, 119, 196, 198 Derrida, Jacques 114–15, 157, 224n.96 desire 56, 104, 114–15, 144, 200, 216n.69, 217n.100, 224n.96 Dewey, John 87, 99, 101, 196 dichotomy see binary thinking

252

The Humble Sublime

dignity 7, 80, 91, 95, 103, 112, 119, 134, 157 discourse/discursive practice 77, 79, 144 divine, the absence of 36, 104–5, 111–12, 113–15, 174, 180, 181, 191, 200 grace of 3, 19, 32, 35–8, 112, 177, 198 hiddenness of 28, 34, 37, 41, 61, 112, 175, 180, 191–2, 200 love of 57, 151, 184 see also God, death of Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 148, 165, 172 dualism see binary thinking DuBois, W.E.B. 99 Durkheim, Emile 116 Eagleton, Terry 115, 150, Eliot, George 7, 77, 80 Eliot, T.S. 121 Emmaus, road to 38–9, 174 ethics and agency 91, 102–3 of responsibility 3, 7, 81, 99, 149, 165, 169, 172, 175, 178, 180, 184–5 and theology 3, 32–4, 175–80, 191 and writing 5, 7, 77–8, 158, 168, 195 see also Bonhoeffer, Dietrich; Christianity: ethics of; humanism (ethical); practice: ethical; reform/reformations (sixteenth century): ethics of Eucharist, the 29–30, 35–6, 40, 107 everyday, the see ordinary, the evil 37, 158 faith 3, 32–3, 41, 112, 117–18, 146, 150–1, 177, 190, 225n.14 Fascism 120, 130, 136, 152, 160, 173, 196 figural writing 16–17, 162, 204n.15 Foley, John 152 Fourth Lateran Council 19 freedom 32, 91, 92, 103, 129, 152, 153, 178–9 Frei, Hans 189 French Revolution 154

Gauchet, Marcel 19 gender 56–7, 66, 80, 91, 92, 214n.50 Giotto 25, 40 Glaude, Eddie 100, 101–2 God, death of 148, 174–5, 180, 182 see also divine, the: absence of Gollancz, Victor 130–1, 135 Gombrich, G. 26 Gordon, Peter E. 205n.40 grace see divine, the: grace of Gregorian Reforms 22, 206n.47 Gregory of Nyssa 30, 117 grief see mourning Gumilev, Nikolai 52, 55, 65 Haight, Amanda 54, 69 Harlem Renaissance 80, 87, 100–1 Hegel, G.W.F. 152–3 hidden/hiddenness 28, 34, 37, 41, 61, 63, 79 see also divine, the: hiddenness of historiography 143–4 Hollywood, Amy 189, 223n.93 Hughes, Langston 7, 77–112, 194 human rights 157, 232n.25 humanism (ethical) 7, 120, 121, 146, 153–4, 157, 187 see also Camus, Albert: concept of humanist rebellion or rebellious humanism; rebellion humor see comedy/the comic Hurston, Zora Neale 80–1, 87, 100, 101 Hutchinson, George 99 icon 44–6, 194 imagination/imaginary 9, 18, 26, 79, 81, 158, 197 incarnation 3, 4, 11, 29, 32, 37, 41, 65, 146, 183, 191, 199 James, William 87 Jesus of Nazareth/Jesus Christ 3, 29–30, 38–9, 82–3, 104, 111–12, 149– 50, 174, 177 Jim Crow Laws 98 Johnson, Charles S. 80, 99 Jordan, Mark D. 217n.100, 235n.12 Judaism/Jewish experience 114, 171, 176, 204n.15 Judt, Tony 185



Index

Kaplan, Amy 78 Karamazov, Ivan 152 Kierkegaard, Soren 149–51, 172 knowledge certainty see certainty divine 117 ethical 175–6, 184 Kundera, Milan 78, 196 Lara, María Pía 118, 195 lay spirituality 22, 24, 206n.47 Lefebvre, Henri 9, 168, 190, 204n.26 Lelevich, G. 66 Levinas, Emmanuel 157, 182 liberalism/liberal 92–3, 115–16, 130 limit/limitation 152, 155, 157, 184, 190 love 165, 177, 198 see also divine, the: love of Luther, Martin Christology of 30–1 sacramental theology 28–32, 37, 194 simul iustus et peccator 107, 117 sub contrario 4, 30, 34, 37, 194, 196 theology of the cross 4, 30, 34, 174 on vocation 20, 32–4, 191 lynching 98, 189 Martindale, C.C. 124 Marxism 121, 130 Matthewes, Charles 115–16 melancholy/melancholia 20, 40, 104, 111 memory see witness mendicant orders 23–4, 29, 32, 206n.47 Meyers, Jeffrey 138 moral persuasion 7, 81, 118, 144–5, 162, 169, 195–6 Morris, Pam 79 Morrison, Toni 102–3 Mother Teresa 112 mourning 189, 200 murder 148–51, 153, 159, 164, 166–7 music 50, 85, 95–7, 104 Musil, Robert 119 mystery 9, 13, 16, 28–9, 42, 46, 117, 181 narrative 7, 13, 16, 81, 118–19, 133, 144, 159–62, 197, 230n.99 Nazism/National Socialism 152, 156, 159, 160, 173, 176–7 Nietzsche, Friedrich 152, 172

253

nihilism 149, 153, 157, 181, 190 nominalism 19, 77 norms/normativity 20, 91–2, 97, 99, 100, 103 Nussbaum, Martha 118, 195 ordinary, the 4, 12, 31, 33–5, 37, 41, 79–81, 194, 220n.16 Orwell, George 6, 79, 113–46, 156, 171, 187, 195 criticism of 138–46 Pearce, Robert 141–2 politics see practice: social/political power 22, 63, 80, 103, 110 practice artistic or literary 4, 5, 7, 16, 25–6, 52, 77, 79, 81, 146, 194, 197 ethical 3, 5, 92, 103, 121, 134–5, 149, 179, 183, 185, 197 sacramental or Eucharistic 3, 40, 194, 210n.96 social/political 7, 81, 103, 121, 129, 135, 137 spiritual 26, 44, 112, 121, 129, 137 pragmatism aesthetic 99, 103 philosophical 87, 99–101, 103 political 8 prayer 45, 65, 74, 76, 82, 110, 114–15, 165 Protestantism see reform/reformations (sixteenth century) race 80, 88, 91, 92, 104 racism 81, 88, 100, 106, 140 Rampersad, Arnold 83, 104 realism American 82 art/aesthetic 7, 14–15, 26, 38, 41–2, 81, 105, 111 and constructivism 77, 79 epistemological 79, 219n.9 literary 4–8, 9–42, 46, 77–9, 81, 144–6, 158, 160–1, 168, 196, 220n.16 sacramental 6, 9–42, 46, 54, 57, 63, 75, 174, 194–5, 196 symbolic 162, 168

254

The Humble Sublime

rebellion 152–4, 156, 158, 181, 182 see also Camus, Albert: concept of humanist rebellion or rebellious humanism; humanism (ethical) recognition 39, 45, 92, 112 reform/reformations (sixteenth century) effects of 28, 191 ethics of 3, 20, 32, 191 history of 2, 17, 21 sacramental aesthetic sensibility of 20–1, 29–31, 41, 191, 210n.96 relativism 160, 179–80 religion/religious 116, 129, 186, 190 Rembrandt 41 representation 10, 27, 34, 36–7, 50–1, 77, 79, 119, 143–4 resistance 7, 62, 76, 81, 92, 100, 103, 112, 153 responsibility see ethics: of responsibility risk see vulnerability Rorty, Richard 118 Rosslyn, Wendy 57, 61 Rublev, Andre 44–5 Russian literary styles Acmeism 47, 52, 55 Symbolism 6, 47–51 Russian Orthodoxy 43–4, 57, 194, 211n.10 Sabin, Margery 143 sacraments signification of 6, 30, 35–6, 46, 70, 194 theology of 6, 194, 209n.90 see also Luther, Martin: sacramental theology; practice: sacramental or Eucharistic; realism: sacramental sacred 2, 3, 19, 27, 41, 116–17, 176 salvation 3, 4, 19, 31–2, 37, 104, 107, 112, 165 Scales, Laura Thiemann 160 Schwartz, Regina Mara 223n.94 secular 2, 4, 5, 16, 17, 41, 116, 176, 190, 209n.95 secularization characteristics of 18, 20, 28, 34, 129 relation to movements of reform 3, 20, 27, 28, 41, 191

theories of 1–3, 17–21, 209n.95 self, the see subjectivity sentimentality 81 sexuality 56–7, 59, 61, 68, 69, 75, 83, 91, 92, 95, 104 signification see sacraments: signification of Smith, Jonathan Z. 116 socialism 121, 129–30, 134–7 society forces or structures of 2, 8, 18, 21, 77–80, 81, 91, 134, 178 practice theory of 218n.2 see also critique, social, ethical and political; norms/normativity; practice: social/political solidarity 151, 154, 157, 158, 165–6, 171, 175, 179, 182–3 spirituality dimension of 129, 136 melancholic and blues 104–5, 111 reform, lay, and mendicant 21–3, 26, 27, 29 sacramental and realist 111 see also practice: spiritual Stalin terror 72 stereotype 66, 80, 81, 93 Stout, Jeffrey 119, 196 subjectivity 7, 81, 91, 92, 103, 183 suffering 8, 81, 146, 155, 170, 175, 177, 180, 182–3, 190 suicide 149, 190 Taves, Ann 116 Taylor, Charles 1–3, 18–21, 24, 26, 41, 191, 235n.7 theodicy 149 Thiemann, Ronald F. 189, 192–3, Thomas Aquinas/Thomism 24–5 totalitarianism/anti-totalitarianism 8, 78, 120, 130, 174 tragedy/the tragic 51, 62, 100–3, 112 Trotsky, Leon 56 unbelief/unbeliever 4, 18, 105, 112–13, 114–18, 129, 146, 171, 186–8, 190–1 verisimilitude 80, 81, 82, 145, 161–2, 195, 235n.15



Index

Viladesau, Richard 25 Vladimir, Prince of Kiev 43 vulnerability 8, 81, 92, 160, 162, 169, 172–5, 183, 184, 197, 205n.27

Whitman, Walt 86, 100 witness 7, 46, 47, 59, 70, 166, 196, 217n.95 Woolf, Virginia 5, 16–17, 80

Weber, Max 19, 205n.40 West, Cornel 99–102 White, Hayden 144–5

Zhirmunsky, Viktor 52–4 Zwingli, Ulrich 6

255

Figure 1.1: The Supper at Emmaus, 1601, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

Figure 1.2: The Supper at Emmaus, 1606, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

Figure 1.3: The Holy Family, also known as The Household of the Carpenter, 1640, Rembrandt van Rijn

Figure 2.1: The Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God, twelfth century