Literature and Religion

If you take an English Lit course in a modern university, you will spend your time, guided by professors, painstakingly trying to find a way to interpret the masterpieces of English literature to be secretly talking about homosexual desires, or expressing some truth about Marxist class war, or demonstrating Western oppression of darker-skinned people, or supposed male oppression of women. Failing that, you must find them reflecting some psychological or anthropological theory, most often those of Freud or Jung. When I went through, it was Jung and Levi-Strauss.

This is a perfect illustration of G.K. Chesterton's comment that, when people stop believing in God, they will believe in anything. It also illustrates, I think, that higher studies require a unifying vision of the universe, and a unifying mission. Strip them of their original religious mission—for all our major universities were founded as theological colleges--and they are open to any kind of stuff and nonsense.

Yet the intellectual key to English literature is all perfectly clear. There is no mystery to it at all. Indeed, it is the key to all art, in all cultures, at all times. Art is a religious expression; in most cultures there is no such thing as art outside of expressly religious art. This is obviously true of the great writing of the Ancient world: the Iliad, the Oddyssey, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns—it is directly from them that we derive the “official” versions of the Greek myths. It is equally true of the Ramayana and Mahabharata of Medieval India—it is from the latter we derive the de facto essential expression of the Hindu religion, the Bhagavad Gita.

English literature, therefore, is more or less always an exposition and meditation on the truths of Christianity. If you are to look for symbols, look for symbols of Christ. Although studiously ignored in the Literature classroom, this is ridiculously obvious. What is the great English poetic epic? Milton's Paradise Lost, written “to justify the ways of God to man.” Is it possible to read Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in anything but a religious sense? T.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday? Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe? John Dryden's Religio Laici? One fellow student was aghast when I pointed out to him that Coleridge's Ryme of the Ancient Mariner was obviously Christian. Yet Coleridge himself thought it was.

One odd artefact of this manful attempt by the modern academy to study and analyse English literature while avoiding at all costs noticing what it is plainly saying is the tendency to ignore the later works of most authors. Why? Because in their later works, authors tend to become more explicitly religious—as do the rest of us, as they grow in wisdom. People therefore suppose poetry and literature are a young man's game, that there is little there for us old farts. Donne's later poetry, Blake's later poetry, Shakespeare's later Romances, Eliot's later poetry—all too dangerous to mention. The older Yeats survives the cut; I suspect, because he remained, almost uniquely, staunchly non-Christian. The fact that he remained vaguely Fascist in politics—this is much less worrying. Not that his religious beliefs, fascinating though they are, are ever really examined in the literature class. But at least the issue is not so obvious and threatening. Best, on the whole, to focus on authors who died young.

But our best and greatest minds are perfectly right in what they consider the most important things to talk about; and most likely generally right in the Christian solutions they find. In place of this, we place the perfectly trivial: sex, power, politics, economics.

We are not teaching our young; we are trying to prevent them from learning.