From Transcendentalism to Naturalism: Images of Jesus in American Literature 1

Laura Barge

A poignant lament for what Andrew Delbanco sees as the diminishing soul of university literary studies is his November 1999 review of seven books that purport to describe—and Delbanco uses this phrase as the title of his review—“The Decline and Fall of Literature.” 2 What is in peril of being lost, according to Debanco, is the “core of a literary education.” This is an entity best connected with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who transforms himself from a minister into an inspirational teacher for the express mission to nineteenth-century America of getting “the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep” (34). The second spiritual guardian of literary studies named in the review is Matthew Arnold, whose crucial injunction is to “know the best which has been thought and said” in writings of the past and present so as to acquire, question, transform, and transmit a culture that enriches the future (34). 3 Delbanco claims a religious base for such awakening and learning, tracing his prescriptions back to Saint Augustine’s reading of the New Testament in response to the child’s voice in the garden and comparing that event with a present-day experience of studying literature:

Students who turn with real engagement to English do so almost always because they have had the mysterious and irreducibly private experience…of receiving from a work of literature “an untranslatable order of impressions” that has led to “consummate moments” in which thought and feeling are fused and lifted to a new intensity. (34)

Delbanco’s quotations in this paragraph are derived from Walter Pater writing at Oxford in the 1870s, the era designated by T. S. Eliot as the historical moment of “the repudiation of revealed religion by men of culture” (34). Delbanco reminds us that it is during this period that English as a discipline of formal study first enters the university. He agrees with the authors of the books he is reviewing that the content of this discipline justly assumes the role vacated by revealed religion. In this role, literary studies deserve the adjective “moral,” although not as denoting “moral certainty” so much as “moral conflict,” a self-questioning of the good that enriches both the individual and society (34). Delbanco warns his readers that if the present-day English department “becomes permanently marginal,” students will be impoverished and the “university left without a moral center” (35). He thus calls for a resurrection of academic literary studies in the humanistic tradition (with its strong echoes of romanticism) that he so ably describes. George Marsden, in the introduction to The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (1994), refers to this tradition as an “academic ideal” based on “Enlightenment assumptions” concerning the scientific base of the universe and upheld by “optimism concerning human nature’s ability to progress toward a universal moral ideal” (5).

Delivering the Presidential Address to the Modern Language Association (MLA) in December 2002, Stephen Greenblatt shares with Delbanco a concern with the “point of grave difficulty” at which university literary studies are presently situated (424). Because there is not enough of the “extraordinary privilege” of teaching language and literature “to go around,” a large number of persons qualified to teach writing and literature are without positions or are engaged in what might be called menial academic labor. And because university presses are “under intense financial pressure,” they are cutting back significantly on humanities publishing (424). Greenblatt pleads professors to begin writing more explicitly for each other, not for the general public, so that they may buy one another’s books and assign these books in their classes. All must gather round to share in the difficulties of the “ethos of the profession as a whole” (424-25).

For Greenblatt, unlike Delbanco, this ethos is not that of an Enlightenment humanism strongly influenced by romanticism that holds on without a specific rationale to some kind of transcendental and moral base. Instead, this ethos, or soul, is that of materialism or naturalism. Greenblatt’s example—and the subject of his presidential address—is the successful recovery of the epic poem of Lucretius entitled De rerum natura. The Roman poet Lucretius is a materialist who does not believe in a soul, or spirit, that can survive a person’s death. According to him, what people see when they think they see ghosts or resurrected persons is a leftover of the film of atoms that emanated from the body during its lifetime—an atomic film still “flitting about in the world” (418-19).

Although Greenblatt admits that as science Lucretius’ belief is “zany,” he offers it as a “brilliant image of the material presence of authors in the copies of their works that continue to circulate after their death.” Thus the recovery and circulation in literary studies of Lucretius’ “compelling” and “dangerous” poem is invaluable. Through it, the dead poet speaks of the absurdity of persons fearing some kind of consequences in an afterlife for “actions for good or ill” that cannot “extend beyond the ordinary world.” There are no gods interested in the lives of humans, and the “whole notion of the afterlife is a superstitious fantasy.” The so-called soul is only matter, which may be “redistributed in an endless play of…rootedness and mobility.” Therefore, Lucretius’ poem concludes with what is to Greenblatt the comforting thought—that “Death is nothing to us and no concern of ours.” Greenblatt assures his audience that this “poetic vision of ceaseless material creation and destruction is a very great thought”; in fact, it is “perhaps the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon” (422-23).

The foregoing descriptions give us, in a nutshell, the philosophical history and present condition of literary studies in a large majority of secular universities. Furthermore, there is probably no college or university so Christian that the metaphysical axis that orders the functioning of an English department is not in some fashion affected by this state of affairs. Delbanco and the authors whose books he is reviewing (all published by major university presses) share with Christian educators a concern regarding the discipline of English as it presently exists. They are alarmed that an academic discipline that in the past fostered noteworthy spiritual and moral ideals in the public square has become an enterprise that celebrates a supposed absence of any transcendence of physical existence or moral dimension to human experience. However, we Christians understand, as Delbanco seems unable to and as Emerson and Arnold themselves apparently did not realize, that the beliefs of these spiritual guardians contain in their inception a failure to establish any transcendent base or moral imperative for human life. As David Jeffrey concludes in remarking on the Arnoldian beginnings of the guild of academic English, the “present crisis for literary study…is the outworking…of a congenital defect” (241).

Inadequate Concepts of Christian Belief

What are the “congenital defect[s]” in Emerson’s and Arnold’s notions of the Christian faith, particularly regarding the person and work of Jesus, that have contributed to the loss of transcendence and morality that Delbanco is lamenting? Emerson assumes a transcendent dimension to human experience but relocates the basis of this dimension within human consciousness itself, thereby describing the human self or soul as potentially divine. Arnold describes God as “the Eternal not ourselves which makes for righteousness.” He prescribes an assimilation of what he sees as the universal values of Christianity without the dogma as the means by which the human self can realize its own transformation into the righteousness and power exemplified in the fully human man Jesus. Although Arnold’s descriptions separate God a bit more definitively from the human self than do Emerson’s, the result is the same: God (and Jesus) exists only as conceptualized in the human mind, whether of the individual or the collective consciousness of culture.

James Kalb remarks on Emerson’s problem with transcendence: “A God who is everywhere equally and in oneself above all is nowhere that can make a difference.” And on Emerson’s appeal to a moral life: “The concrete implications of Emerson’s startling views are hard to distinguish from boldly doing what one wants” (23). Arnold consigns his notions of transcendence and morality to nonentity with his own definitions: We cannot know whether this “eternal tendency outside us” is a “person or a thing,” or whether it has “conscious intelligence” (God and the Bible 32, 34-35). Nonetheless, only by reverent obedience to this power is one enabled to “fulfill the true [morality] of…being” (Literature and Dogma 145).

Transcendence is defined in both philosophical and religious thought as a dimension of being beyond and independent of the material universe that is not accessible by natural means. Morality is human behavior that is righteous instead of evil—a deliberate choosing of virtue and justice as what is good. In historic Christian thought, both concepts are inseparable from the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and of his continuing presence in the world as Holy Spirit. Only if Jesus is the divine Son of the only God, who offered Him for the sins of the world and raised Him from the dead, can humans gain adequate insight into the transcendent realm and experience the moral life made possible by grace.

Because Emerson and Arnold have surrendered these historic definitions, their Jesus is unable to establish a base for transcendence or the moral in human experience. In his book Jesus through the Centuries (1985), Jaroslav Pelikan names Emerson’s Jesus as the “Poet of the Spirit” and explains the failure of Transcendentalism to bring together the True, the Good, and the Beautiful with its concept of the Jesus of the Gospels. Pelikan says that as Jesus becomes the Poet of the Spirit, the poet becomes the “new Second Person of the Trinity,” assuming responsibility for his own salvation (200).

As for Arnold, the historic belief in Jesus as the second Person of the Trinity and God’s only means of redemption is reduced to vague sentiment. “Winning Christ” or “knowing Christ” means “laying hold of the method and secret and temper of Jesus [his sweet reasonableness]” while never forgetting that any consideration of Jesus as a guide for human life is dependent on giving the word Deity the particular definitions Arnold prescribes. This prescription is that in order not to misrepresent describing the character of Jesus as having divine attributes, one must be careful not to use the word Deity for God without realizing that its etymology suggests that the best translation for “God” is simply “The Shining” (God and the Bible 28-29). Thus Jeffrey defines Arnold’s notion of any redemption or “salvation” that leads to “virtue” as a “never-to-be-ended quest for poetic, hence conveniently subjective, truth” (238).

In his award-winning “An Essay on the Christian Mission in Higher Education” (1994), Ron Highfield explains why the “Christology of the New Testament” cannot be described in subjective “terms that make no judgment about its [historical] truth.” 4 The New Testament does not contain “many mutually exclusive Christologies” but a coherently single one based on “differing but compatible Christological perspectives.” Highfield’s distinctions imply a choice that must be made between the “church’s faith-hypothesis that Jesus is the revelation of God” or “some other faith-hypothesis,” such as “Enlightenment humanism.” He insists that “supposed neutrality…about the identity of Jesus is an illusion” (109). N. T. Wright, the British New Testament scholar, focuses attention on the Person of Jesus as well in his address to the InterVarsity gathering Following Christ; Shaping our World Conference held in December of 1998. “I would go so far,” Wright says, “as to suggest that whenever the church forgets its call to engage in the task of understanding more and more fully who Jesus actually was, idolatry and ideology lie close at hand” (21).

Intrusion of Inadequate Concepts into Academia

How did these inadequate concepts of Christian belief, including the heretical notions of Jesus, come to be widely approved by and taught in the American university during the last decades of the nineteenth century? The Boston Unitarianism that nurtured Emerson, and to which he dedicated his life in ministry at the age of twenty-one, was strongly influenced by William Ellery Channing, who rejected both the doctrine of human depravity and the divinity of Jesus (Murphy 1070). Marsden, in The Soul of the American University, observes that the higher criticism of Scripture fully developed in Germany by the 1860s did not strongly influence American higher education until subsequent decades, but that Emerson (and other Transcendentalists) “eagerly accepted the new theories” somewhat earlier (206). In fact, “Emersonian ideals of self-reliance and spiritual inspiration” as expounded in his essay The American Scholar functioned as an “American version of the German idealist celebration of self and creativity” (187). Charlotte Allen, in her comprehensive study of the quest for the historical Jesus, agrees that sometime after 1850 Emerson was drawing on German studies, specifically “Kantian Idealism to formulate his own version of transcendentalism in America” (161).

The religious beliefs of Emerson and Arnold (who was influenced by and, in turn, influenced Emerson) serve well as prototypes of concepts of Christianity that greatly influenced the academic and literary in America toward the end of the nineteenth century. In his book The Death of Character (2000), James Davison Hunter identifies such concepts as the “legacy” of a “Romantic Modernism” that has “demythologized and reconceived” the “traditional Christian narrative” into an “agnostic and intuitive humanism” (217-18). Both the creative literature selected for teaching in English courses and the criticism by literary scholars published in response offer abundant evidence of a substitution of this legacy for doctrines of orthodox Christian belief.

Teaching Such Literature in the Secular Classroom

When a teacher who holds a Christian worldview is theologically and philosophically aware of this ideologically inadequate content, what options are available for her in the secular classroom? I have written elsewhere on this problem, concurring with Marsden that inappropriate appeals to “religious authority or to evidence not accessible to others” that rests on “preaching or proselytizing” are out of place in the secular college or university. 5 But all teachers hold some worldview from which their teaching of any content proceeds. While any teacher is honor-bound to explicate as fully and accurately as possible the worldview encased in whatever literature is being studied, she is not required to embrace personally the ideological thought forms of that literature. Instead, he is not only at liberty but also under professional mandate to critique, compare, and question the content so as to encourage the students to do the same. Emerson, Arnold, the Christian teacher, and even Greenblatt would supposedly all agree that a major purpose of studying literature is not only to analyze language symbols on a page but also to explore all philosophical avenues suggested by the thought content of the language. Thus the secular literary classroom abounds with worldview perspectives such as deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and other current theoretical approaches.

In fact, a chief claim of Arnold in The Study of Poetry (1880) is that literature (“poetry”) will replace the role that religion has previously played in Western culture by offering a more genuine philosophy for living. He commends efforts to enact this substitution:

We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us…. [M]ost of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. (161-62)

Christian academics can use strategies similar to those practiced by St. Paul on Mars Hill, where he attempts a displacement of pagan idols with knowledge of the true God (in the New Testament book of Acts, chapter 17). Such strategies would enact a reversal of Arnold’s efforts toward refashioning biblical concepts of Jesus by engaging students in philosophical debate that compares the numerous and various Christ figures in the literature taught with the Jesus of historic Christianity. Requirements on the part of the teacher include not only adequate theological knowledge of the Jesus of the New Testament but also a scholarly familiarity with the various Jesus figures occurring in the literature. Competent differentiation can invite the following questions: What is the connection between a culture’s images of Jesus and its religious and philosophical beliefs? What is the biblical view of the historical person Jesus? How persuasively historical are the New Testament’s claims concerning the resurrection of Jesus? 6 Does any other first-century literature or informative source gainsay this view? For how many centuries was the Christian Church united in its Christological concepts? What developments produced changes in the long-standing understanding of Jesus as the divine Son of the only God? How can we learn from studying literature to better understand the implications of various answers to these questions?

As I have implied above, the second issue to be addressed in such a strategy is as follows: What do inadequate understandings of the divinity of Jesus have to do with definitions of morality? Does literature that entertains sub-biblical beliefs about the essential nature of Jesus also depart from generally held biblical standards concerning what does and what does not constitute moral behavior in human experience? Such a correspondence does not, of course, always hold. Furthermore, the question is complicated by differences in belief among Christians as to what biblical concepts of morality are.

Nonetheless, in the literary works I will describe below, beliefs that challenge traditionally Christian understandings of what is good or moral do accompany biblically inadequate concepts of the nature of Jesus. Hunter claims that the “legacy” of “Romantic Modernism,” his term for the philosophies of Emerson and Arnold, defines both individual and societal morality as the result of directing the “inborn dispositions and capabilities” of the inner self into an “ethic of self-actualization.” Such an actualized self, freed from the repression of “an oppressive social order” and outdated religious structures, can create its own ethical codes for both the individual and society (218-19). Perhaps what is in operation is a process that Glen Tinder describes as an adoption of the “image of the man-god.” The order of words in this phrase is “crucial” because it is a “reversal of the Christian concept of the God-man, Christ,” a concept that “indicates the source of Christ’s divinity as understood in Christian faith.” The result is that the “dignity bestowed on human beings by God…is now claimed as a quality that human beings can acquire” on their own (12-13). Tinder uses this language to refer to the beliefs of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, all of whom deny that any existence transcends the material or the natural. But it might refer as well to the ideas of transcendence of Emerson and Arnold, who describe divinity as a spirituality and nobility that can reside within the consciousness of the human person. In Tinder’s definitions, affirmation of the term “man-god” allows humans to “become divine on their own initiative” by “self-creating acts” (13). Thus the writers I am describing not only identify themselves with the divine but proceed to “self-create” their own moral worlds by redefining what is good. WhereasTinder’s historical world-changers, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, lose the moral by deserting the God-Man, these American writers begin a redefinition of the moral that accords with whatever “man-god” notions of divinity they fabricate.

Enervated Figures in the Literature

Although romanticized non-Christian representations of Jesus in literature do not begin with Emerson and Arnold (think of William Blake’s poem “The Everlasting Gospel,” published before 1800), they appear prominently after the late nineteenth century. Except for Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman is the disciple of Emerson closest to him in time. Whitman’s images of Jesus are scattered almost indiscriminately throughout the poems. The third soldier in the poem “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim” is “Christ himself, Dead and divine and brother of all” (219). In speaking to “Him That Was Crucified” (271-72), the poet identifies himself not only as brother but as sharing the same identity as Jesus. Another poem, “You Felons on Trial in Courts,” includes a unity with Jesus as well as all human persons indiscriminately—assassins, convicts, and prostitutes “obscene in your rooms” (272). That Whitman feels a sincere sympathy with all troubled persons is evidenced by identification (in the poem “Think of the Soul”) of “rejected persons… slaves… idiots… and insane and diseas’d persons” as “brother” of Jesus (394). Whitman is delineating his pantheistic conflux that pulls the lives of all persons, the processes of the natural earth, and the continuing travail of history into a unity of divinity yet to be fully realized.

Thus Whitman—unlike Emerson and Arnold, who, for the most part, continue to connect biblical concepts of morality with their human Jesus—loses any semblance of a biblical morality by radically redefining the good. No distinction is made between Jesus’ fused identity with the disadvantaged or the disabled and his oneness with those society would describe as offenders against established morals or breakers of just laws. Jesus as embodied in the Poet is as united with law-breakers as with law-keepers. Whatever seems separated or evil is temporary and shall be wiped out in a fused immortality of the natural, the human, and the divine:

All these separations and gaps shall be…link’d together,
The whole earth…shall be completely justified,
Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish’d and compacted . . .
Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more,
The true son of God shall absolutely fuse them. (“Passage to India,” 291)

The imperative to “Recall Christ” is to refrain from all discrimination as to what is and is not God, to pass beyond judgments and restrictions concerning what is good and evil (“Recall Christ,” 394) so as to realize that “[w]hat ever satisfies the soul is truth” (“Preface, 1855,” 417). Whitman’s mystical formulas, heavily influenced by the lack of a formal education, his sexual licentiousness, and his reading in Oriental and Hindu philosophies, say nothing definitive about the moral in human experience because they say everything. Wilfred M. McClay sees the poet’s formulas as a severe truncation and diminishment of earlier Protestant ideas that moved the responsibility for the moral life from the hierarchy of the church to the individual believer. Whitman’s formulas have become “little more than an unrestricted right of individual judgment, unbounded by any limiting principle or any source of authoritative moral rules or prescriptions” (20). And Jesus has become not only Emerson’s noble representative of genuine humanity but also any person situated in any circumstance, as long as this person does not judge or attempt to circumscribe the beliefs and behavior of others.

Nathaniel Hawthorne does not embrace the Transcendentalism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, but is nonetheless influenced by the period’s widespread rejection of orthodox Christian doctrine. Recognizing certain merits of the Puritanism of his ancestors and yet repelled by what he sees as its harshness, he remains precariously situated in Unitarianism. As Roger Lundin notes, Hawthorne’s remark about his writer friend Herman Melville applies to both of them: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other” (155). 7 Although Hawthorne’s concepts of Jesus may appear to assume a traditional shape, careful analysis reveals that they are enervated in regard to both the transcendent and the moral.

Denis Donoghue explores this weakened Jesus in Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter by examining the adultery of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. Neither repents, confesses, nor asks forgiveness because they see their adultery not as religious disobedience of the laws that deserves damnation by a holy God but as a “social transgression only” that causes turmoil in the conscience and alienation from kindred and community (218). For Hawthorne, the theology of a Jesus who dies for the sins of the world neither describes nor resolves the human dilemma. Original Sin is the condition that all persons share because humans are inevitably led astray by desires of the heart that result in social alienation and psychological damage, with the question being left open as to whether this condition is the fault of the transgressors or of the community (220-21). Salvation for the transgressors would be to turn from secrecy to an open acknowledgment of wrongdoing that restores them as erring persons to the community. Salvation for the community would be to recognize its own lack of innocence and restrain its verdict on and rejection of the transgressors (229-30). Since neither mode of salvation occurs in the novel, Hawthorne here seems bereft of a Jesus whose divine power revealed in his death and resurrection can forgive sin, restore the forgiven to Christian community, and heal the heart by changing its motives and direction through the power of the Spirit.

Donoghue’s analyses reveal Hawthorne’s redefinition of the moral. Sin is not the choice or act of an individual but instead a vague “force of evil” that appears in certain periods of history more pervasively than in others (217). Neither Hester nor Arthur believes that the passion they share is defined by the word “sin.” Their romantic bonding and the primeval forest where love is consummated have such lofty value that “morality has nothing to say to them” (217). Because Hawthorne conceives of sin as a “social transgression only,” the “community takes the place of God” (218-19). Thus Hawthorne has redefined sin as a failure to confess a breach with society’s expectations (221) and the misfortune of thereby suffering psychological damage (219).

If Hawthorne’s probing of Jesus regarding sin and salvation is social and psychological, that of Melville is personal and philosophical. Ahab, of Moby Dick, is not concerned with specific behavior that has alienated him from society but with questions about the state of the human soul after death and the nature of good and evil. Gordon V. Boudreau writes of Melville’s persistent attention to the Christian doctrines of “resurrection and charity, major articles of Pauline belief that [Melville] could neither fully embrace nor utterly dismiss” (352). The concern with immortality intrudes into Ahab’s quest for the whale in an encounter with another ship. This ship is the Delight, whose captain is conducting the burial of the single member of his crew whose body has been recovered after five of his men have died in a conflict with the whale. Ahab tries to avoid hearing the words of the Christian burial concerning Jesus as the Resurrection and the Life by directing his ship, the Pequod, out of sound of the burial proceedings. But those on the Pequod escape neither the words nor the “ghostly baptism” of a spray of waves on its hull as the dead sailor’s body is dropped into the sea from the other ship. Ahab’s musings on the question of whether human experience transcends earthly existence cannot be avoided (347).

In the exchange of the Pequod with a second ship, the Rachel, Ahab is confronted with the question of choosing or rejecting moral behavior. The captain of the Rachel begs Ahab to join his crew in searching for the captain’s young son, who has been lost at sea. Although the captain echoes Jesus’ words “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” in his plea, Ahab refuses as he orders his crew to continue their obsessive search for the whale. Boudreau concludes: “Just as Ahab’s faith in St. Paul’s preachments on resurrection is found wanting, so too is he found wanting in good works” (348). These encounters reveal Melville’s linking of the hope of life after death (based on the resurrection of Jesus) with the responsibility of charity. Only if the hope is real does the responsibility follow.

Melville’s best-known image of Jesus, and the one that most poignantly reflects the seriousness and ambiguity of Melville’s spiritual quest that never reaches a resolution, is the Christ figure Billy Budd of the novella Billy Budd, Foretopman. Billy Budd holds high place in American literature as a portrayal of an innocent and virtuous Jesus who is apparently abandoned by an indifferent or absent deity who is supposed to be his Father/God. Guilty of nothing more than becoming the victim of Claggart’s envious malice and disdainful scorn, and of Captain Vere’s rigid and uncharitable adherence to duty, Billy is hanged while voicing the benediction, “God bless Captain Vere!” (367). That Melville intends the personification is evident. The sky over Billy is like “the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision…. Billy ascended; and ascending, took the full rose of the dawn” (367). As he is buried, the sea-fowls form crosses with their bodies and wings and offer the “croaked requiem of their cries” (370). The spar from which Billy is hanged is cut into pieces that sailors keep as pieces “of the Cross” (374). Billy is humanity at its best, crucified without rhyme or reason by the cruelty of other humans and the injustice of their systems of law. But any God who is sovereign over affairs on the earth is hidden somewhere behind the events of Billy’s death. Melville’s question is the deep one about a God who kills his own Son for the supposed benefit of humans who nonetheless suffer life as an experience of pain and betrayal that seems to have no rationale.

Thus Melville confronts his readers not only with the unjust cruelty of Captain Vere but also with the indifference of the God who allows the hanging. The event enacts the basic problem of theodicy: how can an all-powerful God who is also wholly good be responsible for the violence of the natural world and the suffering of those, particularly humans, who inhabit it? This question haunted Melville, and he never resolved it. To his credit, he does not enact the solution of the romantic escape by reshaping the Father/God into the limitations of the human that divest him of omnipotence. He does, however, romanticize Jesus by separating Billy Budd as a Christ figure from oneness with the Father/God who is made responsible for Billy’s suffering. Thus, despite weightier metaphysics in his view of the Father/God, Melville creates a distorted and inadequate concept of Jesus. In biblical thought, the unity of the Father/God with the suffering of Jesus and Jesus’ unity with the purposes of God in the cross event define the essential being of Christ.

It is precisely at this point that Melville’s views of Jesus and his understanding of the moral or the good connect. Not understanding the depths of the human need for deliverance from sin, he is unable to comprehend the necessity of a holy God suffering with the sacrificial Jesus so that sinful humans can be made good or righteous, not only in relationship to the Father/God but in motivations of the heart and life as well. Disagreeing with the Puritan theology of the writers who precede him in American letters, he absolves human persons collectively of theological guilt, fashions a Jesus in their image, and stands locked in question before the God who seems responsible for the inexplicable suffering of life.

A more recent rendering of the experience of life as some kind of crucifixion is Hemingway’s picturing of Santiago as a Christ figure in the novella The Old Man and the Sea. Santiago’s idea of formal religion is in line with such ideas throughout Hemingway’s canon. Because Hemingway presents religious activity at face value rather than ironically, critics have sometimes failed to notice that religion in his writings is indeed only a type of superstition. Santiago keeps pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin of Cobre on the walls of his shack (15-16). Also, he repeats “ten Our Father’s and ten Hail Mary’s” along with a vow to go on pilgrimage to the Virgin of Cobre if only he will be allowed to catch the marlin. But the expressions are voiced “mechanically” and “automatically” and avail nothing—afterward he is “suffering exactly as much, and perhaps a little more” than before, and the fish has still not been caught (64-65). Santiago wishes he knew some place to go and buy luck (116).

For Hemingway, the idea of God separates itself from this superstitious religion. God is the cosmic dilemma, the order of things in human experience. Throughout the canon, the hero encounters in life certain traumatic experiences—such as loss, fear, bewilderment, futility, betrayal, wounding, and death—that convince him that to live is to make oneself vulnerable to certain suffering and final defeat. So, as in existentialist thought, the hero’s response to God becomes the reaction to the absurd and unexplained discrepancy between life as one intuitively senses it should be and life as it actually is. Because of the economic structure of the village, Santiago is deprived of Manolin as a fishing companion. Knowing the danger of going so far out to sea, he must nonetheless go where the fish is, even though the sharks are there and strip the flesh from the giant marlin (112-14).

Instead of God, the object of worship for Hemingway’s characters is life itself. For Santiago, despite negating forces or principles, despite suffering and ironic defeat, life defined as natural experience in a physical world is worth living. This life can be described as encounters with nature for pure enjoyment or for psychical healing, sensual gratification or excitement, heterosexual love, and the practice of the work or vocation to which one is called. These good experiences of life also define morality for Hemingway: “moral is what you feel good after” (Death in the Afternoon, 278). Also, moral is the stoical and ritualistically sacramental manner in which the hero encounters death. Hemingway is not saying that life acquires meaning only by such a confrontation with death. He is saying that, because life possesses the meaning it does, the resolute and defiant ritual against death must be enacted. Santiago’s suffering is a precise correlation of his courage. Had he not gone out so far, he would not have suffered so much. The prolonged crucifixion of the old man is a direct result of his stoical determination to defy the loss of the marlin by completing the deed for which he has been born.

Hemingway’s picture of Santiago as a Christ figure, like Melville’s Billy Budd and certain similar figures of Dostoevsky and Samuel Beckett, is of a Jesus not divine but all too human. This Jesus is explained well by Camus as he describes the understanding of Kirilov, the engineer in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed: “Solely in this sense Jesus indeed personifies the whole human drama. He is the complete man, being the one who realized the most absurd condition. He is not the God-man but man-god. And, like him, each of us can be crucified and victimized—and is to a certain degree” (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, 107).

The positive qualities of Hemingway’s worldview, an existentialism strongly influenced by his postwar years in Paris in the company of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, and his pervasive use of Christian symbolism have led scholars such as Nathan A. Scott, Jr. to find a transcendent and moral dimension in the canon. Scott defines the writings as “essentially religious” because the “drama being enacted just beneath the clenched surfaces of his fiction is that of the soul’s journey in search of God.” Thus Hemingway has a “distinct moral attitude” that convinces his readers of the blessedness of the world and the “possibility of transcendence” if humans resolutely continue life’s journey with courageous intention (11, 40).

But an analysis of Santiago as a Christ figure calls for a more careful look at Hemingway’s spiritual verities. Any romantic concepts of a spiritual realm that transcends the boundaries of the natural world or of moral codes somehow linked to such transcendence prove to be either ironic or irrelevant in the work of this writer. Because there is no transcendent existence beyond the event of death, Hemingway’s crucified man-god is a victimized scapegoat whose only destiny is cessation of being. Nor can this destiny be changed by achieving a moral stoicism in the experiences of life or engaging in symbolic rituals in the encounter with death. Is Hemingway, then, not similar to the poet Lucretius whom Greenblatt admires in his MLA address in describing a universe without known origin where human behavior has no significance beyond the natural in this present world? And do both writers not say that the fullest revelation available to humans is that death need be nothing to us because life as physical existence is all?

A closer look at the poet Lucretius can underscore the distance we have traveled from the romantic humanism of Emerson and Arnold to the naturalistic materialism of Greenblatt and Hemingway. Jaroslav Pelikan, in his award-winning book What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem? (1997) explicates Lucretius’ poem De rerum natura as a prelude to his extended study of the cosmogony of the Genesis of Moses and the Timaeus of Plato. 8 Lucretius’ earth is a “mortal body” that has been “born.” Thus it has had a point of beginning and will have a point of ending. The “when” and “how” of these processes are “unanswerable questions” (4-5). As with all other matter, the poet insists, there is nothing separate from this corporeal substance of the earth. Whatever mind or soul seems suggested to humans by imagining such an entity is obviously nothing more than an extension of the imagining body. Thus Lucretius’ “materialism went hand in hand with the denial of the immortality of the soul” (10-11). The poet attributes Greek ideas of “everlasting life and eternal beatitude” to the realm of dreams and fantastic longings (5). Throughout the poem, he asserts his claim that by no means has the earth been created by any “divine agency” (6).

To move beyond Hemingway to Edward Albee’s absurdist drama The Zoo Story is to understand more fully the implications of a worldview based on naturalistic materialism. As the actors impersonating the two male characters meet on the park bench, the givens of Albee’s worldview are easily identified in the unfolding of this one-act drama. Jerry’s sixties-era scorn and questioning of Peter’s respectable, economically secure place in family and society reveal Albee’s own alienation from and rebellion against what he sees as the common traditions and values of American life.

But beneath the surface of Jerry’s verbal and physical manipulation of Peter are other issues. Psychological need that reaches the measure of pathological is evident in Jerry’s deprivation of human contact so desperate that he has attempted through violence to establish some kind of relationship with the landlady and her vicious dog. Nor is the urgent human need limited to the derelict Jerry. Although Peter is encased in the cellulose of his respectable assumptions about his position in life and thus unaware of his need, he too is a lonely human animal. Deprived of any meaningful contact with a fellow human, the violence forced upon him by Jerry becomes the only recourse available. John Ditsky explains the message that Albee is communicating to his audience. Jerry “feels the burden of being human all around him,” whereas Peter “is a character untouched by the claims of others upon his emotions.” Thus Jerry has overcome his initial abhorrence of the “lust and murderous rage” of the pitiful landlady and her vicious dog. He has interacted with both of them by realizing that he himself, as a fellow animal, shares a nature that is compounded of the same emotions and desires. The interplay of violence and sexual stimulation that results from Jerry’s interactions with the two is evidence that he has moved from individual withdrawal to an acceptance of their common nature (151-52). Jerry’s deliberate participation in the animalistic emotions and behavior of the landlady and the dog are thereby defined as a “strenuous and extreme effort to effect a noble aim” (149). Peter, on the other hand, seems incapable of recognizing the great need of humans to “keep [the] animal within us alive” so as to bond with each other by expressing our propensity for violence and lust (155).

Albee’s depiction of a Jesus figure here rests on the biblical echoes of the parody of Jerry’s dying by impaling himself on the knife held by Peter while calling Peter by name three times. After his resurrection, Jesus reveals himself to his disciples by the sea of Tiberias, where he questions and admonishes Peter three times in response to Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus in the court of the high priest during Jesus’ trials before the crucifixion (John 18: 15-27). Jerry then proceeds to thank Peter because coming “unto you” has resulted in being “comforted” by Peter. The obtuseness and brevity of this language as it occurs at the climax of the drama has not prevented critics from seizing on the Jesus imagery. Two distinct but related interpretations have resulted. In the first, Jerry is the Jesus figure, who, like Christ, dies for his fellow(s). Thus “Jerry–like Christ–succeeds at the cost of his life in arousing the human soul out of its deep modern lethargy to an awareness of its animal self” (Hewes 502).

The second interpretation also sees Jerry as Christ. Here Peter becomes a complimentary Jesus figure because he is forced to share in the death event with Jerry. This interpretation is based on the Christian tradition that Peter in late life is crucified as a martyr, thus joining mystically in Christ’s death (Levy 547). Both of these interpretations rest on a reading of the drama that describes Jerry and Peter as needing to escape “the illusion of self-sufficiency and the smugness of moral rectitude and materialism,” a false grounding of the self that Jerry is acutely aware of but unable to resolve as an isolated person. Although Peter seems unaware of the shaky ground on which his life is situated, he also can escape only by a violent and thus genuine connection of his true self with another (Hewes 502).

Whether Jerry or Peter (or both) becomes the Jesus image, Albee’s intended meaning is the same. Humans trapped in what this dramatist sees as the deadly pretentiousness of so-called respectable life patterns must escape such illusions, even if such escape is possible only by a violently radical repudiation of and liberation from such imposed value systems. What Jerry and Peter realize in their joint convulsion of a shared death is that anything is preferable to remaining a vegetable, with the word serving as Albee’s metaphor for an existence that is a repression of instinctual—and thus normal—desires. Whatever the effort, the human person must realize and act out the implications of Albee’s truth that he is an animal who finds the vitality of life only in being true to the instincts of his animal nature. 9 Jerry’s dying words to Peter make Albee’s meaning clear: “Peter…you’ve defended your honor…you’re not really a vegetable…you’re an animal too” (558).

The progression from Emerson’s essays to Albee’s drama is obvious. Efforts to import into human experience—and into the literature describing this experience—a transcendence and morality generally described by, but not grounded in, the verities of historic Christian truth has moved from Transcendentalism to naturalism. Thus we are left with an existence of the human person limited to the confines of the material world, a world from which God has completed his exit. 10

Biblical Figures in the Literature

Of course, not all images of Christ in American literature after the onset of Transcendentalism distort a historically Christian understanding of Jesus. There are deliberately traditional renderings, but these images are the exception and stand in bold relief against those described above. Shelby Foote presents a traditional Christ-figured protagonist in the short story “The Sacred Mound” from his collection of related short stories titled Jordan County (1954). 11 The Jesus figure in this story is a Native American named Chisahahoma situated in his tribal land in 1797 near what is now the city of Natchez in the state of Mississippi. Chisahahoma and his people are desperate to take any measures that can halt their steady expulsion from their ancestral forests. The leaders of the tribe orchestrate the seizing of two American trappers from their canoe on the Mississippi River. Imprisoning the trappers in a pit, the Indians soon kill them in hideous fashion as sacrifices to their tribal god, hoping thus to gain the god’s favor in their struggle with the white men for their land (676-79). When very soon a plague of smallpox begins to ravage the Indians, they assume that a war is being enacted between their god and the God of the white men. Ready to capitulate to allay the plague, they cast lots for a counter sacrificial victim to send to the white men’s God (679-80).

Chisahahoma is the victim chosen; he is instructed to travel to the nearest white settlement where a church is located to offer himself as a sacrificial victim to appease the wrath of the white men’s God and so end the plague on the Indians. Rather than a sacrificial death, however, Chisahahoma, on reaching the Catholic Church in the nearest white settlement, is shown acceptance and merciful treatment (681). He is eventually converted, shriven, and christened with a new name: “[H]e understood: Christ Jesus had reached him, Whose strength was in His gentleness, whose beginning was in His end…. His name was John; John Postoak, for Postoak was the translation of his [Indian] name” (681). After testifying about the gruesome murders of the trappers to the proper authorities, Chisahahoma confesses his sin, which is also the sin of his people. Accepting the punishment of being imprisoned for a period of time himself, he is then absolved of all civil guilt and set free. Purified in soul and at peace, he chooses to return home as a missionary to his own people (682).

Although the Christian content in Foote’s story of Chisahahoma rings true, the writer’s primary purpose in this work as a whole is a recounting of the cycles of violence by all groups of people moving through the history of the South. But, as in Faulkner’s southern landscape, the setting is one where moral changes occurring in an individual’s life can be attributed to the intervention of God Christianly defined, and such change in Chisahahoma transforms him into a Christianly defined figure of Christ. Converted and forgiven, the Indian is freed from sin, chooses to identify with and suffer for the sins of his people, and enacts a journey into dangerous territory to bring recognition of and reconciliation with the true God through the merits of Jesus Christ, God’s Son.

Flannery O’Connor is a Catholic writer who holds to a worldview as orthodox as that of any other noteworthy American writer past the Puritan era. Almost every central character in the two novels and thirty-one short stories she produced during her short life is confronted in some fashion with what could be called the claims of Christ as the Son of God upon a human life that God created for his own glory. Such needy characters appear as damned because of their own sinful choices of pride, lust, or greed, blinded to God’s truth, and bent in the similitude of Adam and Eve upon making themselves their own gods. And only the prevenient, abounding, unmerited reaching from heaven to hell by a determined Savior (O’Connor takes away the soft tones that accompany that title in common Christian discourse) can effect, or even attempt, a rescue. Rather than comfortable or recognizably rational, however, such rescues, or efforts at rescue, are desperate strategies involving shattering experiences that attempt to force characters into confrontation with the demonic forces that rule their lives.

We would expect within such plots issuing from such an authorial worldview to find numerous examples of a saintly, and thus easily recognized, representative of Jesus. Instead, the opposite is the case: such saintly figures are seldom to be found in her oeuvre. Rather, the emissaries of Christ who reach for the lost ones are persons who are generally unaware of and unsuited for any such mission. Furthermore, the divine intervention which they initiate is most often of some ironic or ridiculous nature. These caricatures of Jesus figures are located with the sinners with whom they interact in a Southern Gothic terrain replete with ignorance (or simple-mindedness), superstition, an appearance of grotesquery, ineptitude, and even more gross traits or deficiencies in character. Why then can we define these caricatures as traditional images of the historical Jesus? It is because, whatever their traits as characters, their role in the narrative is always to attempt the salvation of a sinner. And this salvation, in O’Connor’s literary world, is always biblically defined—the journey of a lost person toward a redemption made possible only by the unmerited grace of the historical Jesus as Savior.

Needless to say, O’Connor does not attempt to engage her readers in catharsis with such characters. Since empathy by readers with the ones needing redemption is also uncommon—the sinners share the same characteristics as the rescuers—we can conclude that O’Connor intends to cause readers to think analytically about the lives she portrays rather than to experience artistic participation in such a life. Perhaps the actual rescuer is the behind-the-scenes God, and the reader’s empathetic focusing of thought is directed toward him. Whatever O’Connor’s strategy is, the persons playing the role of a Christ figure can claim such an epithet solely by virtue of their part in awakening the sinner to his perilous state and jolting him or her toward repentance.

“The Life You Save May be Your Own” is O’Connor’s short story replete with a cast of similar caricatures of saviors. The plot sketches an itinerant, one-armed Mr. Shiftlet, who exists by visits to rural homesteads where he offers work in exchange for food and shelter. The Carter farm—with its anxious mother devoted to her adult retarded daughter and its shed housing a used car in which Mr. Shiflet is allowed to sleep—becomes, after several adroit maneuvers on the traveler’s part, a scene of conquest. Shiftlet and the daughter are married and begin a journey, in the car newly repaired with Mrs. Carter’s money, toward the city of Mobile, Alabama, for a brief honeymoon before he is expected to return and remain on the farm with the bride and her mother. With the car safely his, he leaves the bride at a truck-stop, picks up a hitch-hiking youth leaving home with a suitcase, and continues through a raging thunderstorm toward Mobile (154-55). His only religious sensation is a feeling that “the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him,” and his single prayer is “Oh Lord! Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!”(156). Mr. Shiflet has not been converted, but somewhere in his thoughts is a beginning awareness that he is the slime and that he may very well be in a process of being washed from the earth. The story ends in a tenuous balance between judgment and the possibility of mercy with the resolution unknown.

The agents bringing about the new awareness are O’Connor’s unlikely types of Jesus figures as potential saviors unaware. There are three such persons packed within the confines of the narrative. The mother, “ravenous for a son-in-law,” who would stay on the farm and care for her and her unfortunate daughter, is the first. As Shiflet leaves the yard with his new bride, he notices the mother’s clenched fingers on the pane of the car and her tears at being parted from the daughter for the first time (154). The waiter in the truck-stop where Shiflet leaves his bride is the second. Touching his finger to a strand of the bride’s blonde hair, the waiter murmurs, “She looks like an angel of Gawd” (154-55). The hitch-hiker becomes the third unaware savior figure as Shiflet, realizing that the boy is fleeing from home, gives him a long glance and intones, “It’s nothing so sweet…as a boy’s mother” (155). Continuing the angel/mother motif, Shiflet, with sudden tears in his eyes, remembers aloud, “My mother was a angel of Gawd…. He took her from heaven and giver to me and I left her” (156). The boy leaving his home jumps from the car in disgust, but not before the reader recognizes an encirclement of divine if unaware and grotesquely functioning savior figures about the fleeing sinner, who, to the best of our knowledge, resists all the reaches of grace and proceeds in his hurtle toward hell.

Some of O’Connor’s sinners do find redemption. One such character is the self-righteous, hypocritically religious Ruby Turpin of the story “Revelation,” who offers thanks each day to Jesus that he has not made her poor, ugly, vulgar, or of a despised race. Voicing her prideful platitudes of smug complacency to whoever will listen in a doctor’s office where she and her husband are waiting to have his injured leg examined, Ruby is assaulted by a psychologically unstable, unattractive, but intelligent student who is home from Wellesley College, a girl who can no longer tolerate Ruby’s pious flow of dialogue. Hit above the eye by a book hurled at her by the student, Ruby is treated by the doctor and instructed to return with her husband to their farm to rest and recuperate (498-99). But Ruby’s planned rest is invaded by the student’s parting words to her, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog” (500, 502).

Beneath the anger and insult of the language, the wounded woman intuitively senses that the student has seen into her soul “beyond time and place and condition” so as to uncover unacknowledged depths of pride and contempt for other persons (502-03). O’Connor underscores Ruby’s new awareness with a biblical allusion to King Belshazzar’s seeing the handwriting of God on the wall accusing the king of his sinful pride on the day of his assassination (Dan. 5: 1-31). Profoundly disturbed at such a message from God, Ruby retreats in trauma to argue with God at the well-kept pen that houses the hogs on the farm (506). Fury gives way to humility as the woman stumbles toward an improbable repentance. The brilliantly setting sun provides a visionary scene of a “vast horde of souls…rumbling toward heaven,” a horde of all the kinds of people Ruby has previously scorned, transformed by the heavenly light. She and her husband are there also, “shocked…that even their virtues” are being “burned away.” The vision fades, but Ruby hears still with the cricket choruses in the woods around her the sound of voices “shouting hallelujah” (508-09).

Only a single Jesus figure, unaware and without saintliness, has functioned in this start at redemption. She is the troubled, angry, young woman from Wellesley College, a woman whose name is Mary Grace (498). Ruby Turpin is not yet prepared to repeat with the angel Gabriel in Luke’s gospel (Luke 1:28) the Catholic invocation “Hail, Mary, Full of Grace.” But she has experienced grace through the actions of a woman named Grace. In his insightful analysis of this story, Ralph C. Wood notes that Ruby’s seeing herself included, even if only at the end of the procession, brings awareness of “God’s burning mercy” and the possibility of a new and “gracious” life (264). Like Jesus himself, O’Connor’s instruments of grace are encased in flesh, but in these cases, in the grotesque and broken flesh of the writer’s southern Gothic landscape.

The survey given above offers evidence that the enervated concepts of Jesus espoused by thinkers such as Emerson and Arnold do not for long retain their transcendental spirituality after separation from the historically orthodox doctrine of the Person of Christ. When divorced from the Godhead, the man Jesus becomes all too human. In addition, the literary worlds containing him eventually lose any grounding in transcendence as well, of any dimension not limited to the natural or material. And, as Greenblatt explains in his MLA address, in such a universe there is no divine arbiter to define good and evil. Such definitions are abrogated to the individual self, a self now exposed as Edward Albee’s human animal and thus robbed of Emersonian or Arnoldian notions of divinity. 12

Notes

1 A shorter version of this article was presented at the conference “Christianity and the Soul of the University: Faith as a Foundation for Intellectual Community” held by the council of Christian Scholarly Societies at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, March 24-27, 2004.

2 The seven books reviewed by Delbanco are In Plato’s Cave (Yale UP), The Death of Literature (Yale UP), and What’s Happened to the Humanities ( Princeton UP) by Alvin Kernan; Literature: An Embattled Profession (Columbia UP) by Carl Woodring; The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline (Yale UP) by Robert Scholes, The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (New York UP) by Michael Brub; and Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (Yale UP) by John M. Ellis.

3 That Delbanco pairs Emerson and Arnold as twin guardians of the early stages of English as a discipline in the university does not imply that he is unaware of differences between them, differences well expressed by the common connection of the term romanticism with Emerson and that of humanism with Arnold. Not concerned with exploring the two thinkers’ epistemology or hermeneutics, Delbanco focuses on how both men influenced in very similar ways the ethos of the beginning and earlier years of university literary study. Both Emerson and Arnold were conscious of a mission to educate the general populace, with their view of education being that of “illumination and deliverance.” This dual effect would come from knowing the great thought of the past so as to examine, assimilate, and pass through the judgment of one’s own mind the previous knowledge and beliefs of history, with the result of breaking through present intellectual horizons to acquire new knowledge and increased levels of truth. Both men believed that attention paid to their counsels would greatly benefit present and future generations in regard to both spiritual awareness and moral behavior (34).

4 Ron Highfield’s article “An Essay on the Christian Mission in Higher Education” was named as the First Place recipient of the 1994 Ted Ward Writing Award established by the journal Faculty Dialogue.

5 See Marsden (1996), 306-07, and my article “Exploring the Numinous in Literature: Learning from Paul on Mars Hill,” 38.

6 The argument can be made that one of the most important contributions written in this century on the historicity and significance of the resurrection of Jesus is N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. Deconstructing notions such as the belief that Jesus simply went to heaven when he died or remains merely as a spiritual presence in human experience, this New Testament scholar demonstrates that the bodily resurrection of Jesus as it occurred in history, in earthly time and space, is the essential foundation of the Christian faith.

7 Roger Lundin is quoting from an excerpt taken from Hawthorne’s The American Notebooks entitled “‘Something of the Hawk-eye’: A Gallery of Hawthorne’s Word-Portraits” that appears in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1314.

8 In 1998 Jaroslav Pelikan’s book What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem?: Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint received the Annual Book of the Year Award given by the Conference on Christianity and Literature.

9 Albee’s understanding of what is meant by humans being true to the instincts of their animal nature enlarges as his canon of plays increases. The drama entitled The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? (2000) describes a domestic crisis in which the wife discovers that her husband is having sex with a goat that he keeps in a pasture outside the town. Outraged, she goes to the pasture, kills the goat, and drags the bloody carcass into the living room of their home. Meanwhile, the young adult son, who is openly a homosexual, overcomes his distressed squeamishness about his father’s new attachment by reconciling with him by means of a long kiss that is openly sexual. The father joins in the reconciliation by remembering that, while caressing his son as a baby, he had often become sexually aroused. The only mention of Jesus in this drama is the word used as an expletive that appears twelve times.

10 Greenblatt is famous (or infamous) for a philosophy of naturalism widely held in academia that not only disposes of any spiritual dimension to human existence but also fiercely denigrates the religious. In an influential chapter titled “Invisible Bullets” in a book of his own collected essays Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988), the critic defines devotion to and the practice of any and all religions as the use of power to crush the masses of oppressed peoples thereby controlled by such authority (21-65).

11 For an explanation of how this story by Foote fits into the categories of appearances of the scapegoat figure as exhaustively described by the literary critic/anthropologist René Girard, see my article “René Girard’s Categories of Scapegoats and Literature of the South.”

12 A note of hope for a rejuvenation of literary studies in the academy is the appointment of Dana Gioia as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Gioia has published three fine collections of poetry, The Gods of Winter, Daily Horoscope, and Interrogations at Noon. His essays equal the poetry in significance and excellence, two examples being the May 1991 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, “Can Poetry Matter?” and the longer essay, “Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture,” in the Spring 2003 issue of the Hudson Review. In an interview published in the Seattle Pacific University Response, Gioia sees literary art at the end of the twentieth century as exhibiting, in general, a “shallow nihilism and cynical elitism.” Thus, for “writers of faith, reconciling the artistic and the spiritual is the great work of the new century” (qtd. in Overstreet 29). A Catholic in religion, Gioia’s understanding of the Person and Work of Jesus allows for no ambiguity. Writing on the New Testament book of Philippians in a collection of essays by various literary figures, Gioia insists that Paul’s missionary work and letters result from the encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus (181). He claims that the presence or absence of Christian faith depends on what one believes concerning the divinity of Jesus, a choice of belief that, in turn, “changes every assumption about the purpose of human existence” (181-82).

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LAURA BARGE <lbarge@ebicom.net> is Lecturer in English at Mississippi State University on the Meridian campus. Before filling this position, she was chair of the English Department at Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi. Presently Dr. Barge is national secretary for the Conference on Christianity and Literature. She has published a book on the British novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett, God, the Quest, the Hero: Thematic Structures in Beckett's Fiction (University of North Carolina Press, 1988) as well as more than twenty articles on Beckett and other writers.