Missionary Criticism
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Missionary Criticism By Stanley Edgar Hyman I suppose that the modern revival of Christian literary criticism began with T. S. Eliot. He did not set its tone, however. Where...
...Brooks quotes Brett on her renunciation of Romero at the end of The Sun Also Rises: "You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch...
...Finally, Warren deals with "the problems of the human spirit to which Christianity . . . addresses itself...
...His title comes from Pascal: "Every religion that does not affirm that God is hidden is not true...
...Brooks' arguments in regard to Hemingway and Yeats are particularly unconvincing...
...now he is a moderate and temperate Christian critic, warning that Randall Stewart's characterization of Faulkner as "one of the most profoundly Christian writers of our time" is "incautious," noting regretfully that Virginia Moore's similar capture of Yeats is "strained and forced...
...Brooks simply makes it be God, in the clearest possible reversal of Hemingway's intention...
...The claim in The Hidden God for "the continuing importance of a substratum of Christianity" seems more like a failure of nerve...
...Princeton University Press has announced for September Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine, by Roland M. Frye of the Folger Library...
...he affirms "a kind of stoic endurance far on the other side of bravery" and makes "courage" so important "that it seems to underlie all the other virtues...
...Thus Hemingway "protests against the dehumanization of man and asserts almost desperately man's dignity as a being capable of moral choice...
...Brooks carefully does not quote the second song, which sees Christ's mission as occasioned by "pity for man's darkening thought," but as having the ironic effect of bringing only greater darkness: The Babylonian starlight brought A fabulous, formless darkness in...
...One poem constitutes "a critique of secularizing rationality...
...But Freud was more suspicious of utopianism than Warren is, Marx was more aware of industrial estrangement than Hemingway was, and Aeschylus felt more strongly about learning through suffering than Faulkner did...
...There are signs that the movement has run out of steam...
...Hemingway asserts "the dignity and power of human spirit...
...If Warren is "suspicious of the doctrine of progress and of the blandishments of utopianism," if Hemingway is aware of "dehumanization and estrangement" resulting from an industrial society, if Faulkner believes that "most men can learn the deepest truths about themselves and about reality only through suffering," they are Christian enough for Brooks' purposes...
...Although Eliot is a much-publicized communicant of the Church of England, Brooks claims that God is hidden in his work too...
...The distortion of Yeats' views is comparable...
...where Eliot had dismissed Lawrence as a heretic and "a very sick man indeed," later Christian Lawrentians found him to be a religious genius and saint...
...Hemingway also makes "the touching though finally desperate effort to secularize the conception of immortality...
...But no mention of it here...
...There is "indirection" even in "his avowedly Christian poetry," the "necessary indirection of poetry...
...the sheer heroism that the battered old champion displays" in "Fifty Grand...
...At the very least—since Unitarians call themselves Christians too—it would seem to require belief in God in some sense and a special commitment to the teachings attributed to Jesus...
...Brooks seems to mean something very different by the Christianity he finds in his subjects...
...Faulkner's books incorporate "a great deal of residual Christianity...
...In Literary Criticism in 1957, Wimsatt and Brooks stated their preference for literary theory "within the vision of suffering, the optimism, the mystery which are embraced in the religious dogma of the Incarnation...
...Some of Brooks' Christianity seems quite heretic...
...Dilsey's wholeness constitutes her holiness" in Faulkner...
...Eliot's words, like Sweeney's, are inadequate to express ultimate meanings, since "In this life we cannot see face to face but only as in a mirror darkly...
...The question underlying all this is what Brooks means by "Christian...
...Faulkner's characters "are finally to be understood only by reference to Christian premises...
...Is Brooks so unsure of the power of Christianity in the world today that he must perforce baptise non-Christians and anti-Christians...
...It is about time...
...At times he appears to be describing the good pagan...
...He was a late and eclectic New Critic in the '40s...
...Yeats makes efforts "to restore to Christianity its proper dimension of awe and dread...
...Brooks knows (I learned it from one of his books, in fact) that Yeats is quoting the fourth-century Roman philosopher Eunapius, who detested Christianity and called it a "fabulous and formless darkness mastering the loveliness of the world...
...Brooks quotes the first song of "Two Songs from a Play" and praises its vision of Mary as a "fierce virgin" challenging "the ordered power of the Roman Empire...
...Christian approximations in Hemingway's writing include: the "somber parody of the Lord's Prayer" at the end of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place...
...Brooks says that Yeats takes "the Christian symbols seriously" by "using them for his own purposes," "restoring them to urgency of meaning" in such poems as "The Second Coming" (in which a sphinxlike monster "Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born...
...When Nathan A. Scott Jr...
...What has become of Christianity's proud claim (borrowed from Judaism) to exclusiveness, to being the one true faith...
...This is "a first step in moving back toward the Christian virtues," if still "short of the domain of Christianity proper...
...Are they Christian too...
...He exhibits a "mind constantly engaged by the historical and doctrinal problems of Christianity...
...The heresy to which Brooks cannot accommodate is Pelagianism, the belief in human perfectibility, and he seems willing to accept as Christian whatever is antiPelagian...
...There is little literary analysis in The Hidden God...
...Odour of blood when Christ was slain Made all Platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline...
...How characteristic of Cleanth Brooks to choose this moment to publish The Hidden God (Yale, 136 pp...
...4.75), a rewriting of a series of lectures he delivered at the Conference in Theology at Trinity College in 1955, and has since read everywhere...
...Traditionally, a Christian is one who can affirm the Nicene Creed, the Apostles' Creed, or even the minimal creed that one sometimes sees on rural churches: "I believe in Jesus Christ crucified, risen, and to come again...
...Brett said that she and Jake have a moral code instead of God...
...It's sort of what we have instead of God...
...This is described as "a refutation of the theory that Shakespeare's plays are essentially expressions of Christian theology," a demonstration "that Shakespeare's works are essentially secular...
...Nor in fact does Brooks refer to the Crazy Jane poems...
...Brooks comments: "The Christian will do well to recognize his God though hidden by the incognito which He sometimes assumes...
...Surely the view that one takes Christian symbols seriously by defiling them is Satanist, the stuff of Black Masses and the James Joyce Society...
...The horrified discovery in Faulkner "that evil is rooted in the very nature of things" is nothing if not Manichaean...
...He neglects to say that this is Crazy Jane's doctrine, argued against the Bishop's puritan Christian dualism...
...the assertion of "the dignity of man" in The Old Man and the Sea...
...These days Christianity is again becoming relevant to American life as Christians participate in, and sometimes lead, the fight for Negro rights...
...she believes in God...
...Yeats too has "positive Christian elements...
...He chronicles a world "in which evil has an immediacy and reality that cannot be evaded or explained away...
...Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury is "a profoundly religious person" who "does not believe in man...
...another poses themes of "conversion" and "redemption," although "in non-Christian terms...
...Incidentally, Brooks does not mention Hemingway's one direct confrontation of Christian material, the indescribably awful "Today is Friday," in which the Passion is reduced to: "I'll tell you he looked pretty good to me in there today...
...writes in Modern Literature and the Religious Frontier that Martin Buber's philosophy is "proximately Christian," we can put it down to an excess of missionary zeal, but when Brooks makes the ultimate test of his writers' Christian identification their efforts "to make some kind of synthesis of history and nature," he really does seem to identify ail metaphysical thought as Christian...
...then he became a historian of criticism in the '50s...
...Where Eliot had rejected Shakespeare as expressing an inferior philosophy, later Christian Shakespeareans found the plays to be Gospel parables...
...Francis Macomber's "conversion" to bravery in "The Short Happy Life...
...That has at least the virtue of aggressiveness...
...Brooks devotes himself to identifying "Christian components" concealed in the work of Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot and Warren...
...His poetry uses "the great Christian symbols," "the great Christian doctrines," "the great Christian themes," as well as "a great deal of Nietzsche," who in turn is some sort of Christian...
...It has always been Brooks' game to pick out the wave just as it begins to recede, and to drift scrupulously out to sea with it...
...He expresses "an orthodox view of man and reality...
...The game is to pick out which is really the mounting wave of the future and then to ride it triumphantly onto the beach," Brooks writes scornfully of "the believers in progress...
...In short, blasphemous parody, bravery in shooting animals, crookedness unaffected by a punch in the groin, and resolute tuna-fishing are godly acts...
...his poems "embody truth even as the saint embodies truth...
...If Christian history, for Yeats, is the stink of blood, the Church, in his imagery, is the Bishop in the Crazy Jane poems, a denier of life...
...Yeats refuses as poet to deal with the soul apart from the concreteness of the body," Brooks writes...
...Brooks' faith is better served by a clergyman jailed in Mississippi than by these retroactive conversions of the godless dead...
Vol. 46 • July 1963 • No. 14
