The American Religion
Oakes, Edward T.
WITHOUT AMBASSADOR-OR DIPLOMACY THE AMERICAN RELIGION The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation Harold Bloom Simon and Schuster, $22, 247 pp. gions and worldviews. But what all the...
...What remains, for it, is solitude and the abyss...
...Now David O'Brien, professor of history at Holy Cross College, Worcester, MA, offers readers the first modern, comprehensive biography of this man of vision and substance...
...But so unsympathetic is he to this alternative that he cannot see the opportunities in America posed by the last representative of biblical Christianity that still has any institutional strength left: the Catholic church...
...As a critic, Bloom has always been intoxicated by the American Transcendentalists, Emerson and Whitman in particular...
...28:22 May 1992 Commonweal...
...Bloomsbury Review...
...A religion of the self burgeons, under many names, and seeks to know its own inwardness, in isolation...
...In my judgment, The American Religion is fundamentally a locale for a uniquely Bloomian theomachy, where the divine ghosts of Emerson and H.L...
...and this intense familiarity with their work has given him an astonishingly acute vision, enabling him to see the implicitly Gnostic motivation of so many of our home-grown religions, Christian Science, Mormonism, Southern Baptism, Pentecostalism and the New Age movement: In perfect solitude, the American spirit learns again its absolute iso lation as a spark of God floating in a sea of space...
...Claiming to be a "Gnostic without hope," Bloom insists throughout the book that he is not so much criticizing the American Religion as celebrating it...
...But what all the manifestations of Gnosticism have in common are two traits: a spirit-matter dualism, and a belief that the human spirit belongs by nature and right to the divine spirit...
...admiration for the brilliance of the author mixed with a sadness at his plight...
...Late in the book Bloom quotes Emerson's line that "it is by yourself without ambassador that God speaks to you...
...When he describes himself as "a Gnostic without hope," Bloom has said more than he can possibly imagine...
...Bloom does however note, most interestingly, that if the rule of celibacy were relaxed there would be nothing to stop the American Catholic church from being co-opted by American Gnosticism...
...This same eccentricity totally vitiated the thesis of his The Book of J (which claimed not only that parts of the Pentateuch were written by a woman but, more crucially, by a protonovelist whose God was little more than a literary trope...
...Henceforth, the burden of proof will lie with the opposition, with those who deny the Gnosticism of our home-grown religions or the inner pathos that has given them birth: Unlike most countries, we have no overt national religion...
...In this highly original and accessible book, one of our leading philosophers of religion seeks to answer this question by analyzing the several states of mystic union as they are described and explained in the classical primary literature of the Christian mystical tradition...
...excitement at the debate it will provoke mixed with dread at the course the debate will take...
...But this freedom is a very expensive torso, because of what it is obliged to leave out: society, temporality, the other...
...For the Gnostic, God and the human spirit are so ontically fused to one another that selfknowledge is, by definition, equivalent to a knowledge of God ("gnosis" in fact means knowledge in Greek...
...But Bloom is too shrewd to stop at these surfaces...
...Not since D.H...
...It is God in you that responds to God without...
...Indeed Bloom could well have gone on to quote the poem "Good-bye," which shows more clearly than any other work of Emerson's how Gnosticism's unmediated relation to God will inevitably lead to an alienation from matter and the world of creation as well: Good-bye, proud world...
...in every chapter Bloom proceeds to fillet one more branch of the American Religion-so severely, in fact, that they all begin to resemble merely different varieties of the fishmonger's salmon...
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...Now, "Gnosticism" is a notoriously protean term that covers a wide range of reli nu A bio9raP y o one o the most important pergong in u 194 century American Catho}icicm T Isaac Hecker-mystic, priest, journalist, missionary and founder of the Paulist order-was a fascinating figure who left his mark on a broad range of 19th century American life...
...Now at first blush nothing would seem to be more alien to the American ethos Edward T. Oakes Cardinal Newman once said, famously, that the church of the fourth century woke up one day and discovered it was Arian...
...Russell recreates the arcane images of good and evil we all once understood perfectly well as children...
...But this simply is not true...
...What the American self has found, since about 1800, is its own freedom-from the world, from time, from other selves...
...The Gnostics of the second century were fond of invoking a telling metaphor for this sense of entrapment: the soul is in the body, they said, as gold is embedded in the mud...
...Gnostics got their name from insisting that the connection between God and the soul was so direct that faith was superfluous, as there was no real gap to cross in the darkness of trust...
...The freedom assured by the American Religion is not what 26: 22 May 1992 Commonweal Protestants once called Christian Liberty, but is a solitude in which the inner loneliness is at home in an outer loneliness...
...For him the essential trait of the Gnostic motif is not matter-spirit dualism but the assertion of the direct and essential connection between the human and divine spirits...
...Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine...
...And if Bloom's readers were in any doubt about his real Mystic Union An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism NELSON PIKE What is it to experience union with God...
...Russell presents story after story, using them like a descending staircase, drawing us down into archetypal memories of unending battles with the Evil One...
...10.95 Commonweal 22 May 1992: 27 attitude toward our home-grown religions, they need merely consult the last chapter, "So Great a Cloud of Witnesses," where the author examines the tacit political alliance that binds all of the adherents of the American Religion together (however divergent their theologies might seem) into the Republican party: "President Bush waves the flag and the fetus, and we are returned to some of the darker consequences of the Gnostic stance of the religion of our climate...
...The more the book progresses, the more obvious becomes the sneer for the "booboisie," and for any variety of politics that does not pass muster with the Mandarinate of the liberal elites...
...Here we see the essentially Gnostic moment in the American ethos...
...From the moment the cover is lifted on this beautifully produced book, the world darkens...
...I'm going home...
...Cornell Studies in the Philosophy of Religion...
...Not only is there no essential connection between soul and body, but the former is precious beyond compare while the latter is vile and dirty...
...But nothing daunted, Bloom has emerged from the attacks on J with the same sensibility intact...
...Something in the American self is persuaded that it also preceded the created world...
...but a partly concealed one has been developing among us for some two centuries now...
...It is almost purely experiential, and despite its insistences, it is scarcely Christian in any traditional way...
...Mencken can be glimpsed fighting it out while the author tries to make up his mind between them-and by the end of the book Mencken has clearly won the palm of victory...
...One is therefore left with an odd mixture of feelings upon completing this fascinating book: exhilaration at its insights mixed with regret for its missed opportunities...
...He still insists that Gnosticism is, if not true, at least a much more plausible alternative for us than the classical Judaism or Christianity of the canonical Bible...
...Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature have I read a work on American civilization so penetrating and so exciting...
...Despite the undoubted brilliance of this book, however, the reader should be warned that an eccentricity runs through Bloom's entire analysis, one that threatens to undermine what he has tried so effectively to demonstrate...
...But I cite Bloom's severity for wider reasons: his treatment of Fox is but the most devastating example of his general method, for all the other "founders" of American religions such as Mary Baker Eddy or Joseph Smith come under a similar indictment, if rarely so scathingly put...
...Harold Bloom, Yale's renowned literary critic, claims in his latest book that Americans too will wake up one day and discover, not that they are Arians, but Gnostics...
...What is around it has been created by God, but the spirit is as old as God is, and so is no part of God's creation...
...Indeed for Gnosticism the human spirit has always been an essential aspect of the Godhead that somehow fell into the world of matter, there to remain alienated from its true home until death brings release...
...Cloth $25.00 all ,voiIa6Ie from your local bookstore or ® PAULIST PRESS Q97 Maca4ur f31 J. Maha-L NJ 07430 201-825-7300 11V 'MM& HECKER AMERICAN CATHOLIC DAVID J. O'BRIEN Foreword by Martin E. Marty than such a repugnance to the body, especially after forty years of Hugh Hefner and the cult of the young body...
...As perhaps these citations already indicate, I found this an amazing book: dazzling in its insights, provocative in its thesis, and often very, very funny in its observations...
...His dissection of Matthew Fox's creation spirituality is particularly withering (so much so that Cardinal Ratzinger could certainly afford to lift the Vatican penalties against him, as there will be little left of Fox's reputation after the appearance of this book...
...Occasionally, but only occasionally, Bloom will admit that the academic pooh-bahs in our university humanities departments are as Gnostic as the religions he puts under his critical microscope ("Networking in our America, these days, takes place either among the politically correct cranks of the high camp of resentment, or among the dank cranks of the belated Aquarian conspiracy, trying to float our planet off into cosmic consciousness"), but this insight gets him nowhere because of his deep ambivalence toward Gnosticism to begin with...
...It is this ambivalence that brings the book to the very cliff's edge of failure (only its brilliant perspicuity saves it from falling right over into the abyss it so well depicts...
...The reader simply cannot take these frequent protestations seriously, ("this may seem like an unsympathetic account, but that is certainly not my intention...
...He also explores in depth Hecker s political and social ideas, and his original and highly American spirituality...
...By conviction and sensibility, Bloom cannot appreciate, but only note, the Barthian and Augustinian alternative that classical Christianity can pose to American Gnosticism...
...he author covers significant aspects of Hecker's life such as his journey among the New England transcendentalists, his conversion to Catholicism, and his founding of the first American religious community for men, the Paulists...
Vol. 119 • May 1992 • No. 10
