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.