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.