Originally presented by PhD candidate Sean Dempsey
at the September 2003 R&L Graduate Symposium
Obviously, there has been a long and complicated entanglement between religion and the arts. Stemming from the earliest days of mankind it is hard to imagine either art or religion existing before the other. They have always been, in some way, hand in hand.
Religion and Literature, or more broadly Religion and the Arts, has been a “field”- in the sense that one can study it in graduate school and find positions teaching it in colleges- only since the 1950's.
During the “first wave” of interest in Religion and Literature in the 50's, the loci of scholarly activity were in the Divinity Schools. The biggest name at that time was probably Amos Wilder, who taught at Harvard (and whom the Luce Program has a lecture named after), others included Stanley Romaine Hopper, and David Roberts. During this stage, the “Religion” in Religion and Literature tended to dominate, and literature was usually used as a pedagogic tool or example to make theological points. Much of the work accomplished followed in the wake of Paul Tillich, who thought that both art and religion are rooted in the Logos, and the language of both is symbolic. Potent symbols, whether religious or aesthetic, open up levels of reality that are otherwise closed to us and unlock dimensions of our soul that correspond to these deeper realities.
The modern roots of this vein of R&L are traceable to the end of the 19th century when influential cultural critics- Matthew Arnold chief among them- drew critical attention to deep concordances between religion and art with their predictions that, in Arnold's famous phrase, “most of what now passes with us for religion will be replaced by poetry.” Arnold thought that only art could address his society's widespread loss of confidence in religion, fostered by the rise of modern science. Humankind needed art and especially poetry “to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.”
If for Arnold art was canonized, then from another perspective religion could be aestheticized. This was the view of George Santayana who said, “the whole of Christian doctrine is religious and efficacious only when it becomes poetry.”
This tendency to stress the literature side of the equation became more evident in the “second wave” of R&L that culminated in the late 60's and early 70's. The major critics of this period: (Nathan Scott, Giles Gunn, Hillis Miller, Robert Detweiller, and David Miller) tended to have one foot, if not both feet, in English departments, and utilized the literary criticism approaches of New Criticism, Structuralism, and Phenomenology in addition to the ideas of Tillich and the hermeneutics of thinkers like Heidegger, Gadamer, and Paul Ricouer.
The “second wave” crested in the early 70's and began to dissipate in the new climate of deconstructions, post-structuralists, and identity–politicians ushered in by Derrida and other “radical” thinkers. Questions of religion and belief became somewhat embarrassing within the new “hermeneutics of suspicion” that began to dominate the Academy.
In 1990, the American Academy of Religion, citing various tensions and disagreements that purportedly surfaced during the regularly scheduled review of the section, suspended its Arts, Literature, and Religion panel in order to conduct a period of reflection on its future. Before this suspension, the panel had functioned continuously since 1964.
Although the ALR section would be reinstated shortly thereafter, the fact that there was a crisis within the field was obvious. Individual critics were still publishing books on the subject- Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, and Frank Kermode, for example, all made important contributions, and Robert Alter and the “Bible as Literature” movement in general was flourishing- but R&L as a field in itself had more or less vanished.
However, during the early 90's one sign of the still untapped potential for the field was the publication of Mark C. Taylor's book Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, and Religion in 1992. Taylor's work in general has been suggestive and attempts to incorporate the terms and ideas of deconstructionism and post-structuralism into conversations about religion, while at that same time highlighting the religious roots that modern and postmodern discourse has grown out of. His edited volume, Critical Terms for Religious Studies, is a particularly useful reference tool for the student of Religious Studies and attempts to define “a shared analytic vocabulary that enables interpreters to discern commonalities” between academic disciplines and their objects of inquiry, but “without erasing difference.”
Within this interdisciplinary climate, a “third wave” of R&L has begun to materialize. In addition to the institution of our own program, there have been an increasing number of publications and conferences devoted to the subject. Interdisciplinary work in general is on the rise as many in the Academy attempt to find something “After Theory.” What this “third wave” will eventually accomplish is, of course, still up in the air, but we can venture some remarks about what its territory should be.
Our interest is in writing. Writing performs rather than receives its meaning, and a scholar of Religion & Literature investigates scriptural and non-scriptural writing that perpetuates the performance of religious meaning for a community of believers. This interest in the active, performative, and participatory kinds of writing around which communities organize, regulate, and extend themselves, allows the scholar to examine how the principal ideas of a culture or a religion are expressed in the materiality of the media used to transmit these ideas. The historian of religion Lawrence Sullivan has suggested that, “the capacities to conceptualize and to be reflective are deeply influenced by the particular matter given primacy by a culture.” The medium is, in part, the message. The representation of the principle ideas or concepts of a particular religious culture “is more accurately described as a presentation or a rendering present of the ideas in and through a particular form of materiality,” and these material forms include writing, film, and art as well as ritual performance, manual labor, and the body.
Individual texts can be read analogically and used as instruments that explore the morphological “shape” of those unseen supra-personal and historical forces whose pressures are traced in textual surfaces. By analyzing changes in style, concepts, symbols, vocabulary, genre, and theme as they are deposited across the strata of literary landscapes, a scholar can explore the larger historical, geographical, political, cultural, and religious realities that influenced these transformations. The pressures placed on words by a writer are often indicative of the overall topography of his or her thought. By observing the morphology of these pressure points the scholar can make comparisons between one worldview and another.
The strength of R&L lies in its position as an interdisciplinary field that not only looks at thematic connections between Religion and Literature (or between an author and his or her beliefs), but situates these connections within the framework and methodologies of Religious Studies, Literary Theory, Cultural Studies, Historicism, Anthropology, and/ or Biblical Hermeneutics. Susan Mizruchi, a professor of English at BU, has argued that although “the current tendency of scholars to pursue interdisciplinary connections has been seen as a betrayal” of the century-long struggle to differentiate one discipline from its neighbors (i.e. anthropology, as against psychology and sociology), in fact, the interdisciplinary impulse “confirms the vitality of the humanities and social sciences in our time. [Interdisciplinary] connections extend rather than subvert the separateness of disciplines, for true exchange among disciplines depends on the integrity of disciplines. Indeed, hybridity is a characteristic of disciplinary practices.” In light of these comments, the potential health and growth of our hybrid discipline of Religion and Literature seems vital and wide-ranging.
