A Declaration of Independence

If asked to describe my own religiosity, I would have to confess to being a border intellectual perched on the creative and often perilous edge of the Muslim religious imagination (see Richard Bulliet’s Islam: The View From the Edge). Like the Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1111) one meets in Ebrahim Moosa’s 2005 study Ghazali & the Poetics of Imagination, I espouse “a subjectivity that celebrates a threshold position, shares certain features with life in exile … neither insider nor outsider [I occupy] a permanent in between-ness” (275).

Tolstoyan by conviction, “Muhammadan” by literary immersion, devotional sympathy, and taste, I am what the sociologist Peter L. Berger calls an “ecstatic,” i.e., an individual “enabled to jump from world to world in his social existence” (Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 136). As such, I pose a threat to settled social and cultural expectations of religious identity. This is regrettable, but the alternative is to forfeit my own hard-won individuality—a concession I am unwilling to make. Consequently, I insist on the human right to exercise my freedom of self-determination, limited though it may be, in the face of those institutions, liberal and illiberal, that would alienate me from it for their own ends (ibid, 145).

Hedgehog and Fox

Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote a famous essay on Tolstoy's philosophy of history built around a metaphor from what was (before he published his essay) an obscure fragment (201) of the Greek lyric poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

Berlin argued that "Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog…" (Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 24). No one has ever improved upon this verdict; but I would suggest that, by limiting its application to Tolstoy's philosophy of history, Berlin unnecessarily circumscribed its reach.

The tension between "hedgehog" and "fox"--that is, between a tawhidic apprehension of reality (see post of April 16, below) and what the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin termed a "polyphonic" one--is present, often in latent form, throughout Tolstoy’s mature literary output. Beginning at least as early as The Cossacks (1863), his artistic achievement was always already a "religious" one: Olenin's experience of tawhid in the stag’s lair (see post of March 21, below) is emblematic of the Russian author's lifelong desire to return to the "source" of all things, a source that he interpreted as Divine.

Tolstoy's artistic genius resides in the manner in which he was able to dramatically depict the titanic struggle that took place within his psyche between his natural "foxiness" and his aspirational "hedgehog." This same struggle is played out upon the grand stage of the Islamic tradition and is central to Muslim pietism (familiar to most Americans as Sufism).

Martin Heidegger's Debt to Tolstoy

Due to a footnote that Heidegger appended to sec. 51 of Being and Time, "Being-toward-Death and the Everydayness of Da-Sein" (Joan Stambaugh translation), Heidegger scholars acknowledge his debt to Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. But a careful reading of Being and Time (Division Two in particular) reveals that many of Heidegger's most stimulating discussions in that work may be traced to Tolstoy's novella: Being-toward-Death, authenticity, everydayness, attunement, the character of conscience as a "call" and, indeed, the call of care, summons and guilt, even the notion of "idle talk."

This is not intended as a criticism of Heidegger; it is, however, intended as a criticism of Heidegger scholarship insofar as it cultivates the "mystique" of the philosopher's originality and genius in lieu of reading Being and Time as an extended commentary upon The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

When one considers the length of the shadow that Tolstoy's later writings cast directly over the thought of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Camus, and then indirectly over all of the so-called Existentialist thinkers of the 20th century--especially Sartre--the neglect of Tolstoy's writings by professional philosophers working on Continental thought (in particular) is nothing short of scandalous.

The Heretical Imperative

Sometime in the late 1990's--probably around 1998--I re-read (after two decades) Peter L. Berger's A Rumor of Angels, and found it as stimulating as when I had first read it as a college freshman. I was moved to write Professor Berger a brief note of appreciation. To my surprise, he wrote back: thanking me for my interest in the book and its subject (succinctly expressed by its subtitle: "Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural"). He confessed that he had always felt a personal affection for the book--despite its relative lack of success with the reading public. He added, significantly (I think), that the only book of his (on that topic) for which he had an even greater regard was The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (1979)--the book he had published in the year I first read Angels. This remark sent me out to the library in order to read and compare the two books. I found myself in agreement with the author and, of the two, it is HI to which I repeatedly return.

In light of the world-wide revival in religiosity that occurred in the closing decades of the 20th century (and that has continued to show unabated vigor in the opening decades of the 21st century), one might consider Berger's Rumor and HI as quaint relics of a bygone era--of the two, Rumor is certainly dated. But the fever of religiosity that has burned in the hearts of men and women over the last forty years may not continue for many generations more. Personally, I find it difficult to imagine that the "post-modern" nostalgia for pre-modern modes of thought and feeling is sustainable over the long term. Platonic "verticality" (i.e., a metaphysical orientation) has indeed made an impressive come-back in our time, but it is unlikely ever to completely displace Peripatetic "horizontalism" (i.e., the pervading naturalism that Aristotle introduced as a counter-weight to his teacher's flights of ontological fancy). Versions of these two discursive vectors intersect whenever human beings attempt to negotiate their perceptions of "what is" in the light of their convictions of "what ought to be." This intersection is a source of that perennial conflict that is also the engine of the human drama of meaning-making. It is the festering wound of human being-in-the-world; it is, likewise, our salvation. The triumphal elimination of one vector would necessarily lead to the collapse of the other. Tolstoy never claimed that implementing the challenge of the Sermon on the Mount would be easy; indeed, he characterized the history and traditions of Christianity as elaborate evasions of Christ's teachings. In the same vein, Camus embraced the myth of Sisyphus: life is struggle--pointless, perhaps, if regarded sub specie aeternatis, but made individually meaningful whenever one chooses to light a candle instead of cursing the dark.

What Peter Berger termed the "heretical imperative" is, likewise, an articulation of our Sisyphusean task: to embrace the "edges" of human religiosity (in Richard Bulliet's sense--see previous post) in the knowledge that it is only in such locations that genuine movement is possible.

Bulliet's metaphor is not simply an accurate depiction of the mechanism of historical change in a religious tradition that has always favored the centrifugal over the centripetal; for it entails, oddly enough, a "mystical" apprehension of reality. In a deeply Tolstoyan revery, Wittgenstein wrote: "The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling" (Tractatus, 6.45). It is to such a feeling that Bulliet's metaphor appeals for its persuasive force. Absent such a feeling, "center" and "edge" lack sense. Bulliet's "mysticism," however, like Wittgenstein's (and Tolstoy's and Camus') is naturalistic--which is to say that it represents a metaphorical ratio that is aspirationally modern: horizontalism is the dominant figure.

This "natural mysticism" (which, in Camus, finds expression also as "nature mysticism") thoroughly informs what I referred to (somewhat mysteriously) in a previous post (April 5, 2012) as Tolstoy and Camus' "tawhidic folk orientation." In the Islamic tradition, tawhid is the assertion that, despite the appearance of multiplicity, Reality is One. I do not mean to suggest by this remark that Tolstoy and Camus necessarily affirmed traditional Muslim metaphysics; indeed, my use of the adjectival form "tawhidic" was intended to preserve a distinction between traditional Islamic thought and the thought of those two moderns. But I did intend to remark their location on the "edge" of Islam--intellectually and geo-culturally (Tolstoy's connection to the Caucasus, Camus' to Algeria).

In such locations, Bulliet's notion of "Islamo-Christian civilization" acquires an interesting salience.

In Islam, The Edge Is Where The Action Is

From its inception, The Mazeppist has been the blog of a "border intellectual" on the edge of Islam. It has featured (and will continue to feature) the thoughts of its author as well as those of others of a similar persuasion (e.g., Tolstoy, Camus).

The instant post features Columbia University Middle East historian Richard Bulliet's 2004 restatement of the argument he made in his 1994 book Islam: The View from the Edge. That book was a study of medieval Islam and focused on "situations where people were in the process of becoming Muslim through conversion, or of reconnecting to their religious roots through some sort of spiritual renewal" (Richard W. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 138).

Bulliet termed such situations "edge" locations in order to (1) distinguish between those whose social locations did not match "what historians conventionally consider the political and religious core of Muslim history: the caliphate and its successor states; the post-Mongol empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals; the development of Islamic law; and the intellectual issues arising from the medieval confrontation with Aristotelian ideas" [139]; (2) "... avoid the words 'periphery' and 'margin' because readers often understand them in purely geographical terms and instinctively consider the 'center' more important" [ibid]; and (3) convey his belief that "the edge in Islam, rather than the center, has been where new things happen" [ibid].

The necessity to re-state the argument after ten years arose from the fact that many reviewers of the earlier book simply did not get it. They insisted that "edge" meant geographical periphery and, even, "provincial peculiarity" [ibid]. The Mazeppist admires Professor Bulliet's persistence in the face of collegial incomprehension and, moreover, is grateful for it. Here is what Bulliet wrote:

In the absence of an ecclesiastical hierarchy, narratives of Islamic history put political institutions at the center of the story: first the caliphate and then a plethora of successor states, each with its judges, jurisconsults, and market inspectors as prescribed by the shari'a. Nevertheless, these political institutions generally lacked an extensive capacity for religious guidance. From the death of the Prophet onward, Muslims who wanted to know what was expected of them religiously did not look to the government. They followed instead the practices of their local community, as transmitted from generation to generation in written or oral form. Alternatively, they sought pastoral instruction from religious scholars and saintly individuals. Sometimes these were government officials, but usually not. In most times and places, the prevailing political institutions had little interest in or control over these sources of guidance [139].

Like people of all faiths, Muslims find important elements of identity and solace in observing as adults the practices they first encounter as children. Local custom does not offer such clear guidance, however, for people who are considering a change in their religious identity either by embracing a different variant of their ancestral faith; or by converting to a different religion. Nor does customary practice help people who think their community is too little involved with religion and who seek a more intensive religious experience; or the other direction, people who desire a more or less nonreligious way of life. All of these manifestations of the edge raise questions about how to behave and what to believe [139-140].

Edge situations, which have parallels in other religions, have been unusually creative in the history of Islam because answering questions raised by prospective converts to Islam, and by Muslims in spiritual quandary, exposes underlying ambiguities about the sources of spiritual authority. Muslims committed to the beliefs and practices of the center have few uncertainties in this area. The Quran; the hadith, or collected accounts of the words and deeds of Muhammad; the shari'a; and the consensus of learned Muslims on spiritual matters make it clear to them what it means to be a Muslim. But Islam's edges have often lacked such clarity, sometimes because of confrontation with local non-Muslim traditions, and sometimes because of the preaching of assertive individuals whose views differ from those of the center [140].

Zones of intercultural confrontation and unconventional preaching by charismatic individuals pose problems for all religions, of course, but formalized ecclesiastical structures usually suffice to minimize them. Absent such ecclesiastical structures, problems arise. Who is authorized to answer the questions posed by believers? Does the notion of "authorized response" mean much in edge contexts? What determines the legitimacy of charismatic preachers? [140]

In drawing attention to the edge in Islam, I make no claim that the edge distinguishes Islam from other religions. I want, rather, to highlight the comparative potency of developments on the edge in conditions of weakly institutionalized religious authority. The center in Islam has a frequently expressed horror of innovation (bid'a) in matters of faith and practice. This position buttresses the widespread impression that Islam is an unchanging religion. The vitality of Islam's edge communities has developed in the face of this rhetorical abhorrence and given rise to remarkable diversity under the name of Islam. Confrontation between the conservative center and the creative edge will surely continue in the future as the current crisis of authority in Islam plays itself out [140-141].

Diversity exists in every religious tradition, but diversity has been particularly pronounced in Islam. This does not mean, however, that individual Muslims necessarily consider their faith to be marked by great diversity. To the contrary, uncertainty about what is authoritative can foster a tenacious adherence to practices and beliefs that specific communities consider to be the truest version of Islam. When there is no church acting as guardian of the faith, after all, the duty falls to the individual believer [141].

Today there is a strong impetus in many parts of the Muslim world to suppress divergent local beliefs and win people to more conventional interpretations of Islam. Missionary (da'wa) efforts based in Saudi Arabia are particularly active. This does not mean, however, that unconventional practices and beliefs on the edge are necessarily doomed to be overwritten by stronger influences from the center. Several major developments that are now considered integral to the Islam of the center originally formed on the edge. Collecting the sayings of Muhammad, for example, flourished in Iran at a time when conversion to Islam was at a particularly dynamic point. All six of the collections that Sunni Muslims eventually canonized as the truest expressions of their prophet's faith and practice were compiled in Iran during the ninth century. A second example: Religious seminaries (madrasas) first appeared in the tenth century far to the northeast of the Arab heartland in the frontier zone that today separates Iran from Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. Some historians suspect a Buddhist institutional origin. Only after two centuries of local development on the edge did these institutions spread throughout much of the Muslim world and standardize both Sunni and Shi'ite education. Sufi brotherhoods afford a third example of creation on the edge feeding back into the center. Some of the most successful brotherhoods, such as the Mevleviya and the Bektashiya, originated in what is today Turkey during the period of religious ferment that followed the collapse of Byzantine Christian power there in 1071. Other popular brotherhoods that enjoyed widespread success arose in other edge situations, such as the mountains of central Afghanistan (the Chishtiya), among the mixed Arab-Berber populations of North Africa (the Tijaniya), and ... in northeast India (the Shattariya) [144-145].

Developments like these demonstrate that Muslim communities that are remote from what appears at any point in time to be Islam's center have shown remarkable dynamism, creativity, and adaptability. They further demonstrate that some of [sic] edge developments have subsequently become incorporated into the Islam of the center. A search for parallels in other religions would most likely lead to the history of sects and denominations. However, the flexibility that has characterized Islam historically discourages such an approach. Though divisions within Islam have from time to time acquired names and become formalized, the flow of ideas, practices, and beliefs within and among communities discourages efforts to discover precise and permanent intrafaith boundaries. The annual mingling of hundreds of thousands of Muslims of every variety of belief during the pilgrimage to Mecca symbolizes this fluidity [145].

Looking at contemporary circumstances, it is evident that Muslims are living in a time of many edges. Observers agree that Islam is growing rapidly through conversion, the most common locus of edge developments. This is occurring in interfaith frontier zones in the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and Europe rather than in the old geographical heartland of the faith. Just as importantly, Muslims in many regions are actively seeking to intensify their religious observances to a secular society. Edges of this sort exist in all parts of the Muslim world. In the old Muslim heartland, they are often accompanied by an attitude of self-help and social responsibility framed against the failure of nationalist anticlerical government. In the re-Islamizing post-Soviet republics, violence in the name of Islam garners the headlines while the quiet multiplication of mosques and schools begins to reverse two generations of official atheism. In European and American diaspora communities, Muslims discuss ways of coping with governments and societies that they increasingly see as unfriendly, if not actually hostile [145-146].

Given the history of edge phenomena in Islam, what should be expected today is the appearance of myriad diverse movements addressing the spiritual and social needs of specific groups of believers. What should further be expected is that conservative voices from the center--including both governments in majority Muslim countries and the marginalized traditional ulama--will weigh less in the future spiritual balance than some of the new expressions of Islam on the edge. Overviews of Muslim religious activity worldwide, whether by Muslims or non-Muslims (and among non-Muslims, whether by people gazing about in fear and hatred, or by others of more friendly disposition) support both of these expectations. Thus in all likelihood, tomorrow's center will develop on today's edge [146].

The Oxford World Classics Edition of Tolstoy's "A Confession, The Gospel In Brief, and What I Believe"

Translated by Tolstoy's biographer, the British Tolstoyan Aylmer Maude, this collection of three of Tolstoy's finest works of religious criticism (including his spiritual autobiography, which is itself a work of relentless critique of religion and self), has become, for me, a constant companion. And the more I read A Confession, the more it fascinates me.

On the one hand, Tolstoy wanted a faith that did not require him to "believe the unbelievable" as Paul Tillich put it--and was continually frustrated by "learned believers" who insisted that "evident absurdities" (Tolstoy's phrase [74]) found in Christian dogma were somehow essential elements of the tradition.

On the other hand, he envied the simplicity of the illiterate Russian peasants who seemed (to him) to be capable of taking those absurdities in stride, without questioning them, and even derived profound truths from those very absurdities.

Tolstoy's inability to believe as the simple believe tormented him--and would continue to do so until he finally reached the conclusion (several years after he completed writing A Confession) that such faith was not his portion in life. His portion in life--his Tolstoyan call--was to give free reign to his intellect without regard to the toll it may take upon religious dogma. The liberating moment for Tolstoy came when he abandoned orthodoxy and embraced, instead, an orthopraxy. Righteous living--the outlines of which he found articulated in an interpretation of the teachings of Jesus (that he himself composed after close study of the canonical gospels, i.e., Tolstoy's own "Diatessaron" or The Gospel In Brief)--became the key to faith.

In his own inimitable fashion, Tolstoy found his way to a kind of Islamicized Christianity (or, perhaps, Christianized Islam); one that may well reflect in significant respects the basic thrust and tenets of the primitive community of Muhammad's followers: what Fred Donner has rightly called the "Believer's Movement" or (in Arabic) the mu'minun (see Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Some Excerpts from Walter Kaufmann's "Religion from Tolstoy to Camus"

From Walter Kaufmann, Religion From Tolstoy to Camus, New York: Harper Torchbooks (1964):

Page 1: "It is widely recognized that one can discuss religious ideas in connection with works of literature, but exceedingly few poets and novelists have been movers and shakers of religion. Leo Tolstoy, who was just that, has not been given the attention he deserves from students of religion ... To say that Tolstoy was a very great writer, or even that his stature surpassed that of any twentieth-century theologian, may be very safe and trite. But a much bolder claim is worth considering: perhaps he is more important for the history of religion during the [20th century] than any theologian; perhaps he has contributed more of real importance and originality and issues a greater challenge to us."

Pages 2-3: "Tolstoy's [post-Anna Karenina] work [i.e., his writings on religion] ... is ... patently designed to shock us, to dislodge our way of looking at the world, and to make us see ourselves and others in a new, glaring and uncomfortable light. Even if we confine ourselves to Anna Karenina, I know of no other great writer in the whole nineteenth century, perhaps even in the whole of world literature, to whom I respond with less happiness and with a more profound sens that I am on trial and found wanting, unless it were Soren Kierkegaard ... Tolstoy generally starts with characters toward whom we are inclined to be well disposed, and then, with ruthless honesty, brings out their hidden failings and their self-deceptions and often makes them look ridiculous. 'Why is it a great novel?' Not on account of this detail or that, but because Tolstoy's penetration and perception have never been excelled; because love and affection never blunt his honesty; and because in inviting us to sit in judgment, Tolstoy calls on us to judge ourselves."

Page 7: "The world has been exceedingly kind to the author of War and Peace, but it has not taken kindly to the later Tolstoy ... What is true of most reader [however] is not true of all. The exceptions include, above all Mahatma Gandhi, whose gospel of nonviolence was flatly opposed to the most sacred traditions of his own religion. The Bhagavadgita, often called the New Testament of India, consists of Krishna's admonition to Aryuna, who wants to forswear war when his army is ready for battle; and Krishna, a god incarnate, insists that Aryuna should join the battle, and that every man should do his duty, with his mind on Krishna and the transitoriness of all the things of the world and not on the consequences of his actions. The soldier should soldier, realizing that, ultimately, this world is illusory and he who thinks he slays does not really slay. It would be a gross understatement to say that Gandhi owed more to Tolstoy than he did to Hinduism."

Page 8: Anna Karenina is sometimes referred to as a "Christian tragedy." This is misleading, to say the least. " ... it is rather odd to hold up as an example of what is possible within Christianity a man [i.e., Tolstoy himself] formally excommunicated, a writer whose views have not been accepted by any Christian denomination--a heretic ... Tolstoy drew his inspiration in large measure from the Gospels. His intelligence and sensitivity were of the highest order. And whether we classify him as a Christian or a heretic, his late writings remain to challenge every reader who is honestly concerned with the New Testament or, generally, with religion ... Other writers one can take or leave, read and forget. To ignore Tolstoy means impoverishing one's own mind; and to read and forget him is hardly possible."

Page 39: "What is so remarkable about Camus is, as much as anything, that he had the courage to accept the heritage of Tolstoy, when no one else dared to stand before the world as Tolstoy's heir."

Page 40: "Camus lacked Tolstoy's almost superhuman gifts: that makes it doubly appropriate to speak of courage. He was not one of the world's great writers, nor even one of the most talented of the past hundred years. But he attempted great things and was motivated by a sense of obligation to humanity. His inspiration was moral, not the wish to entertain or to achieve fame. Camus' The Plague is the posthumous child of The Death of Ivan Ilyitch. The theme is the same: the confrontation with death. Camus, like Tolstoy, attempts a parable about the human condition, an attack on the unthinking inauthenticity of most men's lives, and an appeal to conscience."

This is an insightful reading, in my opinion, and I would add only that Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus is, likewise, the "posthumous child" of Tolstoy's Confession.

Page 40: "Camus' debt to Tolstoy is great. In Tarrou's long narration (The Plague, 222-228), there are important echoes of Tolstoy's Resurrection: 'The great change of heart about which I want to tell you' came about when 'my father asked me to come to hear him speak in court,' and Tarrou discovered that the criminal 'was a living human being.' His father's mouth, however, 'spewed out long, turgid phrases like an endless stream of snakes. I realized he was clamoring for the prisoner's death'; indeed, he demanded 'that the man should have his head cut off.'"

Pages 40-41: Camus and Tolstoy share an obsession with the theme of "man's attitude toward the death of his fellow men. If there is one phrase in The Plague that crystallizes this common concern pre-eminently, it is probably the suggestion that 'the most incorrigible vice' is 'that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.' (120 f.). The way Camus leads up to this thought is profoundly Tolstoyan: 'The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.'"

Kaufmann also remarks Camus' atheistic-humanist critique of Christianity ("He finds humanism more humane than theism"), a critique that bears interesting similarities to Tolstoy's theistic-humanist criticisms of Christianity. Indeed, it is the common humanism of the two writers that grounds their approach to religious questions in general and to the disappointments of Christianity in particular.

Alea Iacta Est

Camus and Tolstoy: Border Intellectuals Avant La Lettre.

Tolstoy in the Caucasus, Camus in Algiers. Both men breathed the atmosphere of Islamic intellectual and pietistic traditions and, as evidenced by their writings, absorbed the tawhidic "folk orientation" that characterizes them.

This is how Islamicate civilization spreads its tendrils: not overtly, by the "sword," but subtly, through linguistic practice, through audition, and, ultimately, through the nervous system.

The Islamic "conquest" of America began in earnest with the military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Welcome, America, to Mazeppa's wild ride!

The Detours of Art

Matthew Arnold famously defined poetry as the "criticism of life." For those of us willing to acknowledge religion as "spilled poetry," religious criticism is a meta-critique of life. But it is also, as Harold Bloom argues, the means by which the critic acknowledges the degree to which she has been "contaminated" by the subject of her study. Consequently, claims made by religious critics to "objectivity" are not false, necessarily, but relative to a variety of subjectivities.

Yes, even objectivity is relative. In light of this series of observations, then, let me invoke the 1958 Preface to Albert Camus's collection of essays, The Wrong Side and the Right Side:

"... I know this, with sure and certain knowledge: a man's work is nothing but [a] slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened" [Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, New York: Knopf (1968), 16-17].

I would add that, if this labor is not a labor of love, it is not worth pursuing.

Harold Bloom On Religious Criticism: Further Considerations

"Religious criticism can begin ... by disposing with any ambition to dismiss illusions or delusions" [Harold Bloom, The American Religion, 2nd edition, New York: Chu Hartley Publishers (2006), 19]. Yes, that is where it can begin; indeed, it must begin there if it aspires to any semblance of objectivity. But, as we have seen with Tolstoy, religious criticism's beginnings are not necessarily its end.

"Its function, like that of all criticism, is to build bridges across gaps, to explain in particular the very curious relations that generally prevail between theology and actual religious experience, in whatever faith" [ibid]. This function of "bridge building" (as opposed to demolition (deconstruction?!)) is, perhaps, the one aspect of Bloom's critical practice that, in my eyes, has consistently legitimated it to me--how he ever became associated with the practitioners of deconstruction remains a mystery, but that is another matter for another time.

Bridge building is the creative exercise of the critical faculty; it is a hopeful gesture in what may otherwise prove a rather grim business. It also roots literary criticism in midrashic activity and so does honor to those roots in the acknowledgment.

"Where threads move across denominational lines, as in the American Religion, then the function of religious criticism becomes more complex. Theologies will fall away, and the varieties of religious experience will begin to suggest subtler demarcations, keener sounds than earlier could have been apprehended" [ibid]. When tracing the roots of particular religiosities, "denominational lines" prove, more often than not, to be far more porous than dogmatic bluster allows. Bloom's so-called "American Religion" is far less exceptional than Americans are willing to admit about their communal obsessions.

After reiterating his call to embark upon the quest for the "holy grail" of an "irreducibly spiritual element in religion," Bloom (begrudgingly) allows that historians and social scientists may be of some secondary use in the study of religion, analogous to what use they may be in the study of poetry [ibid., 20-21].

He then makes the following curious remark: "I begin to understand that only religion can study religion" [ibid]. He elaborates:

Poetic criticism, the study of the hidden roads that lead from poem to poem, has its analogue in religious criticism, which uncovers the winding paths that link together faiths as antithetical to one another as the Mormons and the Southern Baptists. Like poetry, religion is a culmination of the growing inner self, but religion is the poetry, not the opiate, of the masses. The inner structures of the imagination prevail in religion as they do in poetry, but they are harder to trace, because religion builds its temples in the outward world [ibid].

The final sentence seeks to walk a tightrope between the profound, on one hand, and the incoherent, on the other. One would think that the "inner structures of the imagination" (whatever they might be) would be easier to trace insofar as religion "builds its temples in the outward world." But, perhaps, not. Sphinx-like as ever, Bloom does not elaborate his point any further; instead, he returns to the delineation of the "American Religion."

On pages 22-23, however, he returns to his theme of religious criticism:

Criticism, whether it be of belief or poetry, necessarily must share in the nature of what is being studied, if only because the proper work of criticism is contamination. Criticism contaminates, but itself has begun in a state of contamination [i.e., critics do not operate from an Archimedean standpoint outside of the cultural products that they endeavor to criticize--a notion that J. Z. Smith has tirelessly promoted, despite (or because of) his own evident contaminations] ... Religious criticism, like literary criticism, is a mode of interpretation, but unlike the critic of imaginative literature, the critic of religion ... is not primarily an interpreter of texts. A critic's function is to compare and judge perceptions and sensations, the perceptions and sensations not only represented by imaginative literature or by religion, but themselves the product of poetry or of belief.

I take Bloom's reduction of religion to "belief" here to be a product of his own contamination by American Protestant culture. As a Jew, he knows better, but seems unable to check himself. We will forgive him this slip and even support him with the acknowledgment that "belief," properly understood in a religious context, encompasses more than mere assent to specific doctrines.

What happens next, however, is most interesting. Without warning, Bloom veers off in an ethical direction:

The function of criticism is to purge us not of selfhood ... but of self-righteousness, of all the deadly moral virtues, of what William Blake called "the selfish virtues of the natural heart" ... [T]his interpretative mode, in its later phases, has been practiced by prophetic figures: Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud [and, we should add, Tolstoy]. Religious criticism and prophecy are two names for the same activity of the spirit.

And with these words, our hero retires to his study. In his wake enter the likes of Tolstoy, Norman O. Brown (no doubt to Bloom's dismay), and Bloom's old friend, Kenneth Burke.

Harold Bloom and Religious Criticism: Preliminaries

The opening chapter of Harold Bloom's The American Religion (1992) is entitled: "What Is Religious Criticism?" Throughout the chapter, Professor Bloom struggles to come up with a consistent definition:

Page 3: "... a mode of description, analysis, and judgment that seeks to bring us closer to the workings of the religious imagination." Rather vague but--so far, so good.

"Literary criticism, as I have learned to practice it, relies finally upon an irreducibly aesthetic dimension in plays, poems, and narratives. Analogously, religious criticism must seek for the irreducibly spiritual dimension in religious matters or phenomena of any kind." This is problematic on its face, insofar as the hunt for the "irreducibly spiritual" has been about as successful as the quest for the holy grail. But let us not dismiss our hero out of hand, for one dares to underestimate Bloom only at his peril.

Pages 3-11: Bloom acknowledges precursors in his study of what he calls "the American religion": Tolstoy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (and, to a lesser degree, Carlyle and Matthew Arnold). For Bloom, the "American Religion" is the peculiarly American manifestation of the "irreducibly spiritual dimension" in "phenomena of any kind." This set of identifications allows him to meander (delightfully) among his own ruminations about the neo-Orphic folk orientation that seems to undergird and inform much American religiosity ("If we are Americans, then to some degree we share in the American Religion, however unknowingly or unwillingly" [p. 11]). But where he finally appears to end up is with William James and the varieties of religious experience.

On its face, this constitutes minor progress, for at least we now know where Bloom expects to find the "irreducibly spiritual dimension" that makes religion religion--not, as he had said above, in "phenomena of any kind," but rather, in reported experiences. But what sort of experiences? Bloom cannot say "religious" experiences because "religion" is the term in question. On page 12, he finally takes a stand:

"Religion, whether it be shamanism or Protestantism, rises from our apprehension of death. To give a meaning to meaninglessness is the endless quest of religion ... When death becomes the center, then religion begins."

Certainly it was his contemplation of death, of extinction, that drove Tolstoy to religious criticism--and, eventually, to his own midrash upon the canonical gospels. But Tolstoy himself denied that he had invented a new religion (despite his desire, in 1855, to do just that), and I think he was correct in his denial. Tolstoyanism is not itself a religion, but a way to align oneself, critically, with an "enabling tradition" (see Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press [1989], 233). Bloom's idea of such a tradition is one that "obscure[s] the truth of our perishing" (p. 12)--but that tells us more about Harold Bloom than it does about the "nature" or "essence" (Bloom's word, ibid) of religion.

Nevertheless, let us not weary Professor Bloom's text any further, for his statement that "to give a meaning to meaninglessness" echoes Jonathan Z. Smith's notion of human religiosity as an activity of meaning-making: "Religion is the quest, within the bounds of the human, historical condition, for the power to manipulate and negotiate one's 'situation' so as to have 'space' in which to meaningfully dwell. It is the power to relate ones domain to the plurality of environmental and social spheres in such a way as to guarantee the conviction that ones existence 'matters'" [J. Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1978), 291]. Whether it is death that triggers this quest, or an abundant gusto for life, matters not. Because "Whirl is King," meaning-making is all.

After some initial wandering, Bloom arrives where he needs to be: in the same room with Jonathan Z. Smith. We shall visit with him again to discover where else he may take us.