God and the American Writer

...Alfred Kazin, who died last month, understood this, and his last book serves to remind us that our greatest writers are found slightly off center in American history, as bystanders and observers rather than representatives...

...Kazin knows his subject by heart, and he gives it to us through aphorism, anecdote, quotation, close reading, comparison, and broad insight...

...First, the Bible is "a fundamentally cryptic document": What it says and what it means may not always coincide, but what it says is always a pointer guiding the interpreter to what it means...

...The title of the book has the air of a working title, a couple of three-by-five cards stuck together with a piece of scotch tape...

...They cannot evade this by the kind of one-way assimilation which Wilson himself once rightly described as cannibalism...

...A little later he says, a trifle wistfully: "As things go nowadays, you might almost say that 'religion' as a subject of the most intense personal interest has replaced 'God,' which after all is or is not a matter of objective existence or truth--or so it used to be...

...From the start, interpretation was carried out by priests, prophets, and sages...

...When he tries to define religion, what he comes up w i t h - - ' t h e axis of reality that goes through personal existence"-is brittle and unconvincing...

...At the most superficial level, The Bible as It Was is an anthology of ancient interpretations of Torah--the first five books of the Bible--drawn from Jewish and Christian sources...

...Each map, each pattern, selects from the great welter of our experience the details needed for a certain aspect of our life...

...There are those, like the gay Episcopalian Bruce Bawer, who have gotten religion and in the same moment have become convinced that the rest of America has gotten religion all wrong...

...Of Melville, Kazin observes, "He retained faith even if he did not always know what and where and whom to believe," and adds laconically, "An agony in the nineteenth century, wistful confession in the twentieth...

...the writers who take care to distinguish between life as it is lived in the East Village and in the West Village, between eastern and western South Dakota, between the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish Publication Society edition of the Tanakh--those very writers will generalize blithely about the religious habits of the American people from olden times up to the present...

...Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' brings together earth, water, and sky into a wonder of space that alternates time now and time future like the tidal rise and fall of the East River...

...As the future awaits the present, so there is something in looking that enables us to recognize our own soul....This is what we can at last call proof of an American religion...

...No rough stuff or higher criticism, merely the joy of mucking about with the Masoretic text and trying to figure out how the Septuagint and Vulgate got from the Hebrew to their versions, which often looked more like interpretations than translations...

...indeed, many later compositions within the Bible represent interpretations of earlier texts through what has been termed "inner-biblical exegesis...

...AN INEXHAUSTIBLE TEXT Luke Timothy Johnson ome graduate students and I gathered once a week during the last academic year-just for fun--to read Genesis in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin...

...Eliot's grandfather was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the whaling town where Moby-Dick begins...

...Mary Midgley is the author of many books on philosophy, including Science and Salvation (Routledge, I992...

...and the third century A.D., interpreters in diverse geographical, social, and ideological locations sought to ground their identity and their practices by appeal to these texts...

...As such, it not only reminds us of a deeper and broader tradition of biblical study than the profoundly amnesiac version called the historical-critical, but provides a sense of what that older tradition might still offer...

...Of the many recent books that touch on the subject, Kazin's is the least conclusive, and the best...

...Religiously, however, there is no "we the people...

...It is his constant call to himself to 'merge and merge again'--by no means just as a lover--that has won me all my life to Whitman's rapture here," he explains...

...This living conversation with the text continued in the oral discussions and the literary compositions of Judaism and Christianity...

...Two of the...

...There are those, like the Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco, who read American literature as "a kind of national spiritual biography" and like to think of the great writers as our unelected representatives...

...As this citation illustrates, the premises articuCommonweal 2 6 July 17, 1998...

...The idea of supplementing this moderate, realistic kind of unity by finding a single basic formal pattern was, of course, a cherished project of seventeenth-century rationalists in the early days of modern science...

...u t t i n g these first t h r e e premises into operation means that biblical heroes, even when they seem to be doing something wicked, are really-when properly understood--doing something virtuous...

...In a lesser writer that would have been a slack and irresponsible position, but here Alfred Kazin, who not only knew American literature through and through but lived through it, makes literature, for the moment, something to believe in...

...and in the same way, Kazin is reduced by his own definition...

...He tells us that Edmund Wilson was descended from the Mathers, that nine generations of Emerson's ancestors were Congregational ministers, that T.S...

...His concern is not the process by which the biblical texts came into existence, but the process by which they entered into the lives of readers through interpretation...

...If the various provinces of our intellectual world are to work together usefully today--and by God they had better--they must do it by cooperating harmoniously, respecting each other's differences as separate enterprises...

...For Kazin, the great poet's address to his future reader is a line thrown across the generations with the force of a biblical promise...

...DIVINITY ON THE PAGE Paul Elie ~ hen it comes to God and literature, every critic is a cultural critic...

...Kugel notes how in spite of their many superficial disagreements, all ancient interpreters shared four basic premises...

...William James, we are told, saw "religion as therapy" and man as "a creature always in crisis," about which Kazin remarks: "Not 'ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set ye free,' but just give up your anxious self for a moment...

...Better and more representative are his remarks about Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry...

...We learn that Hawthorne's wife considered their sex life ample evidence of the divinity, and that Hawthorne himself thought Thoreau "ugly as sin...

...Yet there still remains a strange, unnecessary commitment to devices for unification which cannot work and which threaten that harmony...

...There is much fascinating discussion of the arts and much lively speculation about human nature---a much misunderstood notion which Wilson quite rightly def e n d s - - a l l fueled by a real wish for intellectual harmony...

...Thus (in an example not included by Kugel but well known to Catholics), Augustine's cryptic comment on Jacob's deception of Isaac, "non est mendacium sed mysterium" ("It wasn't a lie but a mystery...

...His feeling for literature amounted to religious mysticism...

...That is about right for the book, and for its author...

...Between the third century B.C...

...Since this kind of mistake is still widespread, it is very much to be hoped that Wilson overcomes it and writes us another vigorous book which will make real reconciliation possible...

...Third, Scripture is "perfect and perfectly harmonious": Every part of the Bible can be read to understand every other part, for despite having many writers, it has a single voice...

...The frankly cannibalistic academic imperialism of Sociobiology is gone...

...It is simply their common context, the fact that life itself is a whole...

...the Bible is not a report from the past but a message to the present...

...strongest passages in the book are Kazin's imaginative, sympathetic brooding over Melville's journals of his visits to the Holy Land ("Desert more fearful to look at than the ocean," said the author of Moby-Dick) and a recollection of his own midnight walks with Robert Frost in Amherst in the 1950s: Kazin would walk Frost home and then Frost, "one acquainted with the night" but one terrified of being alone, would walk back with him again and again...

...Thereby they showed once and for all that this kind of formal unification is not workable and cannot, therefore, be demanded by reason...

...As such, it offers rich resources for the study of comparative scriptural interpretation...

...We could have used James Kugel's book, which engages the reader in just this sort of intellectual exercise, but does so without demanding knowledge of any ancient languages, and in a prose so sweetly reasonable that daunting scholarship gets spooned out as the delight of discovery...

...Really, Kazin is interested in the American writer and God, not the other way round...

...In his first chapter ("The World of Ancient Biblical Interpreters") Kugel establishes the framework for the materials he has collected...

...That is as good a description as any of the change in religious mores from that century to this, and the rest of the book can be read as a gloss on it...

...That's what Kazin did as a critic for fifty-five years, and that's what he does here...

...What did Kazin himself believe...

...Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz all worked on it with intense dedication and between them they exhausted its possibilities...

...Not American literature but American writers-the great American writers, such as Hawthorne and Melville, whom the latter called "God's spies...

...Kazin called his previous book Writing Was Everything, meaning that he and Commonweal 2 4 July 17, 1998 his contemporaries in the 1930s were obsessed with literature...

...In a sense, he believed all the things in this book--the best that has been thought and said about God by the great American writers...

...Kazin argues that the Civil War was the religious turning point in the history of the country and that Lincoln's "feeling for the Union amounted to 'religious mysticism," but he is more interesting on the ways in which nineteenth-century ardor gave way to twentieth-century hesitations...

...And there are those, like Gregory Wolfe, the editor of a magazine called Image and a miscellany called The New Religious Humanists (Free Press), who are desperate to find the "religious humanists" of today and who see "religious humanism" as the cure for what ails us...

...As for Thoreau, Kazin remarks, "He described Walden Pond as if he had baptized himself in its waters...

...Paul Elie is a frequent contributor to Commonweal...

...As Lincoln felt about America, so Kazin felt about American literature...

...And what holds the various aspects together is not any imposed formal structure...

...Interpretation of the Hebrew text was necessary from the first, not only because changing circumstances demanded adaptation, but also because the language of the Bible was itself so peculiarly susceptible of multiple readings...

...So is the distorted language of "selfishness...

...At a deeper level, this book invites readers into a world that is imaginatively shaped by the reading and study of the Bible as a source of wisdom and life...

...What did he believe...

...but the book itself was one more statement of his lifelong credo, that writing is "everything" in its appetite for the fullness of life as it is really lived, its response to all of experience, from the broadest social movements to the smallest particulars of our individual lives, and that because of this the literary critic has to be open to the writing as a whole person--has to bring a whole life to the page...

...Consilience is, on the whole, a much more charitable book and much better adapted to promote intellectual cooperation than Wilson's early work...

...Not religion, but God--whom Emily Dickinson, the heroine of the book, called the maker of "these strange minds that enamor us against thee...

...Because the interpreters were often disputants within the same symbolic world of Torah, their interpretations helped create a scriptural world that was larger than the texts themselves...

...Second, Scripture is a unified "Book of Instruction, and as such is a fundamentally relevant text": The point of interpretation is not antiquarian but existential...

...Kazin's complaint about Eliot's religiosity is that it Commonweal 2 5 July 17, 1998 led to a bookish narrowing of his sensibility, rather than an expansion of it...

...Kazin's object of concern is the writer as a whole person: the masterpieces and the lesser works, the journals and biographies, the recollections of others, and the impressions the writer left on later writers...

...Melville said he had written the novel "just to buy tobacco with," but he described it unforgettably as having "the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables & hawsers...

...The religious habits of the American people are "extremely fluid," as Flannery O'Connor once said of religion in the South, and so are the religious habits of American writers...

...In the years before his death, Kazin was honored as "our last great man of letters" (as he calls Edmund Wilson here), but in writing about God and American literature and the "shining points" where they intersect, he was refreshingly free of a great man's pomp and cant...

...if understanding fails, it is not the fault of the text but of the interpreter, who has not sufficiently inquired into every word and letter of this endlessly giving text...