charity.
Elie has grasped a paradoxical truth about the “School of the Holy Ghost,” as one wag dubbed the group. They have caused many readers to want to change their lives: to convert to Christianity and/or Catholicism; to become politically active; to study and practice ancient forms of Eastern and Western spirituality.
Elie makes no attempt to solve the paradox, but his richly detailed narrative sheds a great deal of light on the ways these writers balanced art and morality, orthodoxy and openness, the skeptical subjectivism of modern man with the objective claims of church and dogma. Elie contends that what all four had in common was a vision of human life as pilgrimage. He writes: “A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in the light of a story. A great event has happened; the pilgrim hears the reports and goes in search of the evidence, aspiring to be an eyewitness. The pilgrim seeks not only to confirm the experience of others firsthand but to be changed by the experience.”
Percy, with his concern for the way language can become cheapened and emptied of meaning through overuse and trivialization, preferred the word wayfarer to pilgrim. His own understanding was informed by Søren Kierkegaard’s distinction between the genius and the apostle. The modern Romantic figure of the genius gave us a heroic figure who was capable of sudden epiphanies, personal revelations. But the apostle is someone who has “heard the news of something that has happened, and he has the authority to tell somebody who hasn’t heard the news what the news is.”
The writers covered in Elie’s book defined themselves to a great extent as apostles to a secularized culture that had either lost or rejected the news. What made them so effective was that their art dramatized a search—a pilgrimage—in which distant rumors are verified through hard-won personal experience. This also set them apart from so many overtly religious folk who seem to feel that no pilgrimage is necessary, since they have already attained the promised land. The School of the Holy Ghost was orthodox but never tame or complacent.
In the fifteen years since Image was founded, the more monolithic, militant secularism that dominated the last century has given way to greater openness to religious experience as a path toward truth. A host of gifted writers and artists have traced journeys similar to those undertaken by Elie’s quartet.
But here’s another paradox: as religion and spirituality have become more popular, so have the number of those who seem to prefer the model of genius to that of apostle. Under the influence of postmodernism and the therapeutic mentality, these artists seem less interested in listening for news than in making it. To paraphrase Luigi Giussani, the founder of the lay Catholic movement known as Communion and Liberation, the new religious geniuses confuse the religious sense that is planted so deeply in our hearts with faith itself. People like this are fond of saying that the search is more important than any possible goal.
There is a kernel of truth here, but there is also a critical difference. The pilgrim has heard a specific piece of news; she lives her life guided by the memory of an event. But her path also leads her toward a specific end. The pilgrim may spend her life on the road, striving toward a goal that is never fully reached in this life, but she sees it ahead of her. And while the pilgrim’s personal experience is central, a pilgrimage is never undertaken in solitude. Pilgrims travel in groups; their shared memory and end form a bond of friendship that tests and unfolds the meaning of the journey. One false alternative to pilgrimage is the arrogant belief that one has arrived. But the other is wandering alone.
Secular Scriptures
Any new book about the relationship between the Bible and literature enters a crowded field, one strewn with masterworks by the likes of Robert Alter, Frank Kermode, Northrop Frye, and Gabriel Josipovici. So the bar is set high. Nicholas Boyle’s Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature clears that bar with room to spare. While the subtitle might put some readers on guard, Boyle proves a hospitable and respectful writer; at points the Catholic tradition takes center stage, but much of the book speaks with equal power and resonance to Jewish and Protestant traditions.
There is no disguising the intellectual rigor of Sacred and Secular Scriptures, which contains a survey of modern biblical interpretation and close readings of several literary classics. Boyle is aware that some will be daunted by those sections of the book, so he makes the generous suggestion that readers pick and choose what to read. Impractical as that suggestion may be, I for one endorse it. The brief central section, “Sacred and Secular,” could stand alone as a major contribution to the fields of theology, literary criticism, and aesthetics.
Drawing on the thought of Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas, Boyle explores the ways in which both the Bible and secular literature might be understood as forms of revelation. Following Ricoeur, he defines revelation as “the manifestation to us of something that utilitarian reason could not possibly predict or infer or construct.” In saying this, Boyle neither seeks to collapse the Bible into poetry or to undermine the historicity of any part of the Scriptures. What he does assert is that the two forms of writing involve poetic language that is nonpurposive and noninstrumental, words that:
in different ways assert our freedom from the tyranny of functional, goal-directed thought and language: secular literature by using words to give pleasure and so enabling us to enjoy what is; sacred literature by using words to utter obligation, and so to give us our identity, not as beings who perform a function, but as creatures who know what ought to be.
Boyle is clear about what distinguishes the two forms of writing. The Bible reveals the fundamental moral obligation of the Law, the command that we love and care for the other. Secular literature, using the playful, entertaining forms of art, attempts to tell the truth about who we are and how we live. It cannot speak with the authority of divine revelation because it can be traced directly to individual authors, who are subject to historical and cultural contingencies in a manner that the Bible is not. Boyle relates the difference between sacred and secular literature to Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the moral: “the beautiful may be a symbol of morality, but the relation of symbolization implies difference and noncommensurability too.”
Alike and yet incommensurable. Where, then, is the overlap between these forms of revelation? If there is “no literary simulacrum of the Law,” as Boyle states, what relationship does secular literature have to divine truth?
To answer these questions, Boyle examines the nature of literary representation. The pleasure we take in literary mimesis, in the imitation of the world around us, lies in the public dimension of art. As Aristotle noted, the value of tragedy is the way it brings its viewers into a shared experience of grief and loss. In short, life matters. As Boyle puts it, “we are in it together.”
In this sense, literature becomes “the secular analogue of the Redemption.” Whether it is in the characters depicted in fiction and drama, or the persona of the speaker in poetry and creative nonfiction, literature tells the truth about both our noble origin and our fallenness. It represents a world worth loving and in need of forgiveness. Only in this way can literature be moral without being didactic.
Secular literature provides a commentary on the Bible. But here Boyle points out an interesting twist. It is in the nature of literary representation, he says, to strive for the appearance of the same authorlessness that characterizes sacred Scripture. “‘These words are not being spun out of a mind, they tell truth’ is the fiction, the lie, Plato would say, with which all fictions begin.”
The tension at the heart of literature is between that striving for authority and an awareness of the limitations of the individual writer. In the third part of his book, Boyle traces this tension in Pascal’s Pensées, Goethe’s Faust, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Austen’s Mansfield Park. Each of these works is modern, created at a time when the process of secularization in the West had begun. And so they serve as test cases for the existence of the secular as commentary on the sacred.
