Exotic Misreadings

...Their political effectiveness is increasing, and Bloom expects them to take over in large areas of the country, if not, via the Presidency, the entire U.S...

...Bloom has chosen to describe in detail the Mormons, Christian Scientists, Ad-ventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Baptists, Pentacostals, and Fundamentalists...

...Of their several divisions, his favorites are the moderate Southern Baptists, engaged in what may be a fatal battle with Texas Fundamentalists...

...Against Jehovah's Witnesses Bloom shows real animus...

...He is fascinated, too, by such inventive Mormon ceremonies as Celestial Marriage and the baptism of the dead...

...The New Age or Orphic religions of California he dismisses as "lemon squash...

...The first describes Bloom's basic critical doctrine...

...But no longer...

...The successors, suffering from "anxiety of influence," pre-empt and transform what came before by a "strong," willful misreading...

...Hans Jonas taught him Gnosticism...

...not articles but books that he has written, contributed to, edited, or introduced...

...Although their most conspicuous preachers have been Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Bakker, Bloom treats the Pentacostalist Assemblies of God benignly...

...Smith, Bloom contends, was "an authentic religious genius, who surpassed all Americans before and since," even Emerson, in religious imagination...

...The Adventists produced an alternative scenario that kept them happy...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor Emeritus of English, Columbia University On the jacket of The Book of J, his 1990 venture into Biblical revisionism, Harold Bloom is described as "America's greatest literary critic...

...However, humankind, still containing a spark of the true God, can be saved by gnosis...

...In this new book, Bloom tells us he is "an unbelieving Jew of strong Gnostic tendencies...

...That accounts for the disproportions of his survey of American religion, in which Mormons and Southern Baptists hold center stage and Catholics and the branches of Judaism are hardly mentioned at all...

...Religions develop and change, he says, through heretical mis-readings of their sacred books...

...Higher and earlier than the angels, this true Adam is as old as God, older than the Bible, and is free of time, unstained by mortality...

...One of her early associates was Dr...

...If any superlatives are required, perhaps we should say that Bloom is the best-read teacher of the humanities in America...

...Mormon polygamy and its implications fascinate Bloom...

...Bloom does not think much of two religions started by women, Christian Science and Seventh-Day Adventism...

...rich, respectable and Republican...

...John Harvey Kellogg of corn-flake fame...

...Where the Witnesses reject the political system, the Fundamentalists want to control it...

...means being alone with God or with Jesus...

...Reviewing a book about Scholem, Bloom wrote that "In our post-Holocaust time, the unknown God of Scholem, contracted and withdrawn from our cosmos, seems more available than the normative God of Akiba and Mai-monides...

...Gnostics believe in a fallen world, not made by the true God but by a demiurge, sometimes identified with the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible...

...The first was founded by Mary Baker Eddy, a paranoiac terrified by Malicious Animal Magnetism...

...The book becomes more accessible as it becomes more specific about actual practices, and especially when Emerson and William James are quoted...

...It is not clear that Bloom, without the experience of religious faith, can judge religion, any more than a reader who is not responsive to the irreducible esthetic elements in poetry can be a critic of poetry...

...Thus, despite all the reading, wit and insight that have gone into this book, its purported subject, American post-Christian religion, remains as elusive on the last pages as the first...

...He begins: "Freedom...

...From its very first paragraph The American Religion seems more a projection of Bloom's own unbelief and exotic misreadings than anything most American churchgoers, especially Mormons and Southern Baptists, would recognize...

...He says he tries never to miss one of Swaggart's performances, and was listening on the dramatic occasion when Swaggart, after his relations with a prostitute were exposed, declared "I have sinned...

...What Whitman sang, Joseph Smith embodied...

...Relentlessly energetic, compulsive in everything he does, Bloom now serves simultaneously as Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale and Berg Professor of English at New York University...

...His productivity has been incredible...

...He does full justice to the black churches and the contributions they made both to the Southern Baptists and the Pentecostals...

...The major-ity of his fellow critics, one suspects, would cry out at the superlative "greatest," yet they would probably agree that Yale's English Department during his years as a teacher there has been the most brilliant in the country, and that he has had a lot to do with its blossoming...

...Bloom considers the Witnesses pathological disaster-mongers...

...Both religion and poetry are acts of imagination...

...they unite souls on earth with souls in Heaven...

...Gnosticism has a long history in Bloom's work...

...Southern Baptists were in effect the Established Church of the Old Confederacy...

...The Witnesses remained "fiercely expectant of the imminent End Time," and increased their membership to 3 million...

...The defeat of the Confederacy kept them united for over a hundred years...

...As with the Advent-ists, their originators went through the Millerite Great Disappointment of 1844, when the world was expected to end, but did not...

...Northrop Frye inspired Bloom's enthusiasm for William Blake, the most original of misreaders...

...The second was established by Ellen White, who for a third of a century had visions at the rate of half adozen a year, complete with attendant angel...

...In Bloom's view America's largest denomination, the Baptists, who descended from Inner-Light Puritans, seem the most experiential American Christians...

...In Kab-balah and Criticism, a short, very personal treatment covering Gnosticism as well, Bloom explains and defends his role as religious critic...

...He shudders at the religion of "flag and fetus," seized on by opportunists like George Bush...

...They imagine a largely unseen universe of aeons, ar-chons, emanations, planetary influences, good and bad angels, and of the powerful Sophia, also fallen...

...Like some Fundamentalists, their imaginations are dominated by Revelation, the most malign and bloody book of the New Testament, and "they propose a theocratic Fascism that is not mitigated by assigning the dictatorship to a tyrant they call Jehovah...

...Poetic criticism," Bloom writes, "the study of the hidden roads that lead from poet 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...

...In 1975 he published two books, A Map of Misreading and Kabbalah and Criticism...

...Bloom exaltedly admires the 19th-century Mormonism of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, but regrets the present-day Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints...

...For mainstream Christianity and what he calls "normative" Judaism, Bloom has little regard...

...The computerized catalogue of the Harvard libraries spills out 375 items under his name...

...Gershom Scho-lem, the chief authority on Jewish mysticism, guided him through the Kabbalah...

...As an unbeliever, Bloom is happiest with religions that have no clear creeds, and where his own imagination can play freely...

...The American self is not the Adam of Genesis but is a more primordial Adam, a Man before there were men or women...

...Our distinctive religions, Bloom maintains, are Gnostic without knowing it, like America itself...

...The Fundamentalists, more dangerous than the Witnesses, make a fetish of an inerrant Bible that interprets itself...

...The soul stands apart, and something deeper than the soul, the Real Me or self or spark, thus is made free to be utterly alone with a God who is also separate or solitary...

...Brigham Young, the American Moses leading the Exodus of Mormons through the Wilderness, was " Smith's finest creation," an even wilder imaginer than Smith himself...

...An early Mormon "had speculated that Jesus hadmar-ried Mary, Martha, and the other Mary, which is only a step short of speculating about the plural marriages of God...

...To write this book," he declares, "I have read and reread everything that remotely could be considered to be an American religious text, and I have read also every historical and interpretative study of religion that I could find...

...Pentacostals go in for the phenomena that have always distinguished religion: "trances, spirit voices, healings through exorcism, manifestations of light or fire, and above all, visionary transport or 'prophecy.'" Bloom found his one experience of a Hispanic Assemblies of God service "humbling and informative...

...Bloom favors the moderates because their doctrine of the "competency" of the individual soul in its relation to God makes them the sect freest from creed, sacraments, good works, tradition, hierarchal control...

...He contends that primary literature results from an Oedipal son-father struggle of poets with their precursors...

...Both women were concerned with health, Eddy to bad effect, because she denied modern medicine to her followers, Ellen White to good effect...

...Though Bloom derives his doctrine from Nietzsche by way of Freud, both of them atheists, he applies it even more confidently to religious texts than to secular poetry...