The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature

Myth and Religion in Modernist Literature

Michael Bell

The grand cultural narratives often define modernity as the decay of religious belief, although the jury is likely to be out for a long time before there can be any final judgement on the ultimate fate of religion. Nonetheless, a widespread waning of belief is the inevitable context for considering it in the period generally thought of as modernist and the process is a complex one. In the lives of individuals, the shedding of religious faith can be experienced in a variety of ways, from painful and frightening loss to joyous liberation, with all of these perhaps occurring in stages to the same individual. Something analogous happens in the life of a culture, and early twentieth-century literature in the European and Anglophone worlds reflects a particular phase in the gradual displacement of religious belief by a secular world view. Moreover, cultural change is not only slow but uneven, and the tension between critical consciousness and institutional forms, for example, is caught in the fact that Sir James Frazer, whose monumental study The Golden Bough (1890–1915) effectively showed Christ to be only another seasonal god from the ages of superstition, was obliged in his capacity as university professor to subscribe to the Christian faith. At the same time, of course, religion, which has by no means died out, and may never do so, is internally affected by changing conditions, above all by its no longer being the assumed norm.

Myth and/or Religion

In so far as what is at stake in loss of faith are psychological shifts affecting a whole view of the world, these are perhaps most intimately articulated in works of imaginative literature. This significance is by no means confined to those self-consciously avant-garde writers we have come to call ‘modernist’, but these writers do collectively represent a range of classic responses inscribed within the intellectual landscape of the time, including such features as the rising prestige of science, the shock of the Great War, the questioning of empire and the emergence of modern anthropology. Most significantly, many of these writers shared, albeit in quite different ways, a very relevant interest in myth, and not just at the level of thematic content but as a structuring principle and a mode of response to the world.

Religion in the nineteenth century had undergone critique from the twin powers of scientific reason and historical scholarship, both of which were invincible within their own terms. But myth had emerged as a crucial category in which these terms were themselves thrown into question. Hence the ambivalent relation of religion and myth: although reduction to merely mythic status was religion’s most damaging possibility, it could nonetheless affirm against these corrosive critiques its intrinsic authority as myth. On the one hand, to be revealed as myth was a more essential threat to traditional religious belief than is posed by scientific reason because science is not ultimately addressed to religious questions. Yet on the other hand, myth was the category that could most effectively underwrite religion in the context of modernity. This can be seen by listing some of the important discursive texts which chart changing conceptions of religion in the period. These include Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872); Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma (1873); William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915); and Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927). James’s study catches a cultural moment in that it surveys the extreme forms of religious belief and conduct, such as self-punitive asceticism, and assumes that the reader, like him, will view these no longer as high points of spiritual attainment but as psychological curiosities. Yet James remains respectful of the religious impulse as such and in so far as he approaches the different kinds of faith as inarguable products of temperament and world view, it can be said that he, along with all of these other writers, considers religion as a form of myth, and all of them, apart from Freud, respect it as a fundamental motive in human existence. Only Freud treats it in a spirit of scientific positivism as an empty and damaging illusion to be overcome.

In the Anglophone tradition, Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma represented the important transition inherited by the modernist generation. He argued that the biblical story was to be understood not as revealed truth but as the epic record of the Jewish people’s profound exploration of the ethical impulse and with a significance, therefore, for humanity at large. Far from evacuating the truth value of Christianity, Arnold accorded it a newly intrinsic power, the power of the literary imagination. But this was also to enhance the significance of literature itself which was now understood not as simply reflecting truths available by other means but as in itself the primary producer of moral values and understanding. The best word for imaginative forms bearing such a burden of meaning is ‘myth’, and this was the force of the term as taken up by a number of early twentieth-century writers. The dominant spirit of Victorian anthropology, as in Edward B. Tylor and James Frazer, had been a demystifying explanation of primitive superstition but, as John B. Vickery (1973) has explicated at length, the modernist readers of The Golden Bough were entranced by the mythic wealth it had revealed. And this ironic turn on the value of myth may be applied more generally to the question of religion in modernity. For in the eyes of some of the more acute observers, the evident decline of religion threw its underlying cultural function and importance into relief, albeit under the sign of myth rather than that of metaphysical doctrine or historical belief.

At the same time, modernist literary mythopoeia was typically different from the archaic forms examined by contemporary anthropologists because of its artistic self-consciousness. It is a truism that, in secularized modernity, art replaces religion and Arnold’s concern for the moral and civilizing impact of literature makes him a significant example of this claim. But the claim can be understood at varying levels of cultural generality or philosophical specificity. The German philosophical tradition, stemming from Immanuel Kant and passing through Friedrich Schiller, had long accorded a special significance not just to the moral impact of works of art, but more specifically to the domain of the aesthetic considered as a metaphysical definition. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy is the primary link between this tradition and modernist writers.

Nietzsche argued that ancient Greek tragedy evolved from Dionysian orgiastic festivals in which the community periodically underwent a necessary, life-affirming participation in the destructive, pre-civilized, pre-individualized, pre-moral realm of nature. Significantly, the mythic figure of Dionysos was not a moral idea, he had no allegorical equivalence, and he therefore presided over a complex psychological action whose meaning could remain largely unconscious or inarticulate. The wildness of the Dionysian revels was always controlled by their prescribed time and place but, in a crucial shift emphasized by Nietzsche, they acquired a more subtly internal form of control: they were gradually transposed by the Greeks from a literal activity into a mode of artistic representation. The community now participated in the psychological function of the festival through a structured dream enacted for them on the stage. Nietzsche’s name for this organized and impersonalized dream, designed to enact necessary processes forbidden in everyday life, was the aesthetic. Nietzsche might as well have entitled his book the birth of culture, or of the aesthetic, and in post-Nietzschean modernism the aesthetic proves to be the modern equivalent of archaic myth. That is to say, although the old relation to myth is not possible for a modern sensibility, the aesthetic provides a comparable function.1

The notion of art as a self-conscious equivalent for the psychological function performed by archaic myth also has a broader philosophical import. One definition of modernity might be the awareness that the world, as world, is a human creation. Human beings do not create world out of nothing and they are not responsible for existence, but world as the meaningful order they inhabit is a human creation – most notably by virtue of language. What is sometimes called ‘the linguistic turn’ is the modern recognition that, instead of a given world of objects named by Adam, it is language that creates the discrimination of objects by which a world is formed. Language precedes world. Hence, whereas archaic man is believed to have unwittingly projected his conceptions and emotions on to the world as magic and gods, and more developed Cartesian man came apparently to understand the demarcation of self and world, so modern post-Kantian man recognized his inescapable implication in the formation of world. What archaic man did unwittingly, modern man does self-consciously. Giambattista Vico’s The New Science (1744), one of James Joyce’s sacred books, came fully into its own with the recognition that poetic creation is the primordial act by which man creates culture, creates world, creates himself. In the beginning, indeed, was not the Word, but the word. In 1800, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich W. J. Schelling both independently desiderated a ‘new mythology’ on which to base a poetry to rival that of the classical world, but several of the modernist generation recognized that mythology does not need to precede poetry because poetry is itself mythopoeic, or world-creating. Yet there is a further aspect still in the philosophical turn to myth.

Part of the modern turn from Victorian anthropology lay in the question of what is meant by the primordial conditions of culture. The Victorian generation tended to suppose that the early stages of human evolution were, or should be, left in the past and were therefore of mainly historical interest. Or if they were still with us they should be extirpated. The moderns, by contrast, were likely to insist that they were a permanently necessary condition, beneath rather than behind us so to speak, and for that very reason largely unconscious. Like the ground we stand on, they are necessary but invisible or unregarded. It was in this spirit that Nietzsche had raised the question of value. The primary concern of Western philosophy had been epistemological: What do we know, how do we know it, and how do we know we know it? What value we put on what we know seemed a secondary question but Nietzsche argued that we only seek to know in the first place what it interests us to know. The question of value is unconsciously prior to the question of knowledge and this is a permanently necessary priority rather than a simply evolutionary one. In the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger sought to go a step further in the same spirit. He argued that prior to the question of value was the question of Being, which is even more unregarded.

Heidegger saw the history of Western thought and culture, at least since the time of Socrates, as a progressive loss of Being. His translators capitalize Being to distinguish it from individual beings. The sense is that our habitual instrumental relations with the beings that surround us has led to a progressive incapacity to respond to the primary mystery of their presence as such, the Being of these beings. Like Nietzsche, then, he prized the mythopoeic sensibility he saw in the pre-Platonic world and also rejected the Christian tradition for its dualism, dogmatism and degeneracy, but he thought Nietzsche had neglected something more radical, attention to Being, the recognition of which was the true proprium of myth and of art. Heidegger’s more contemplative model suggests a quasi-religious piety towards the world and if the supersession of religion by art is part of the story of modern religious consciousness then the list of discursive texts outlined above should include Heidegger’s lectures ‘On the Origin of the Work of Art’ (1950). The non-instrumental concentration of the artwork, he argues, focuses a non-transcendental but reverential sense of Being. Once again, as in the earlier texts, religion is evacuated of its other-worldly significance and understood as a more profound mode of response to this world.

The thinkers enumerated so far provide an analytic frame through which to understand a range of mythopoeic and religious standpoints in modernist literature, with myth itself remaining an ambiguous category, either exploding religion or preserving it under another name. It would be impossible to survey all the possible figures encompassed by this theme, but what follows delineates an analytic spectrum by considering in turn a traditionally religious writer; a writer who explicitly replaces religion with a Nietzschean conception of the aesthetic; several writers for whom the loss of belief is a powerfully felt absence; and finally some writers who find their own forms of religious relation to the world.

Religion in Modernism

T. S. Eliot is a generally acknowledged modernist who reveals with special clarity the tension between myth and religion in the period. His well-known allusion to the Fisher King legend in The Waste Land (1922) has made him an apparently prime instance of modernist mythopoeia, although on closer inspection it shows the reverse. In a review of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), he praised its ‘use’ of the ‘mythic method’ which makes the ‘modern world’ with all its ‘futility and anarchy’ possible for ‘art’ (Eliot, 1923, 483). The formulation is actually ambiguous and the plangency of his description is truly appropriate not to Joyce but to Eliot’s own The Waste Land, where the fertility myth is a nostalgic and satiric background to the contemporary world rather than a mythopoeic transformation of it. Indeed, to put the point more critically and substantively, the fertility that is ostensibly celebrated in the myth is belied by the pervasive sexual distaste and snobbery in the poem. Actually, Eliot creates a compelling, but highly personal, vision of modernity which became for a large readership the classic definition of it. That was the truly mythopoeic power of the poem. Meanwhile, a properly mythopoeic writer, in the sense to which Eliot was gesturing, would not think of myth as a ‘method’ to be ‘used’. Myth does not serve a vision attained by other means; it is the vision.

Yet Eliot was right from his point of view to resist a truly mythopoeic posture in that sense because his underlying commitment was to religious belief, even if this was not fully available to him at the time of composing The Waste Land. In retrospect, his use of myth in that poem can be seen as a placeholder for the religious faith so memorably explored in Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1935–42). The Four Quartets are poems of spiritual struggle and quest rather than expressions of secure faith, and by the same token an appreciation of them is not contingent on the reader’s belief. They share the methods, and the great themes, of other modernist literature while giving them a religious inflection. As meditations on the overcoming of time, and the meaning of history, they invoke Augustinian intuitions of the eternal to define their version of the mythic spatializing of time explicated by Joseph Frank (1963) in a classic essay on spatial form as a defining feature of modernism. They also invoke artistic creation, and poetry in particular, for insight into spiritual transcendence. Eliot’s poems, in other words, share the imaginative means and preoccupations of his mythopoeic contemporaries, yet these are always in the service of keeping open the possibility of a religious vision, and there is a firm principle at stake, not merely a rhetorical extravagance, in the line from ‘East Coker’, ‘The poetry does not matter’ (Eliot, 1930, 125). Eliot always rejected the humanism and aestheticism from which, in complex transformations, the mythopoeia of other modernists, such as James Joyce, Thomas Mann or the later W. B. Yeats, was derived.

Modernism after Religion

As has already been suggested, Joyce’s Ulysses, perhaps the classic work of European modernism, did adopt, in as ostentatious a manner as could be imagined, a mythopoeic posture on the Nietzschean aesthetic model. Despite its rich elements of satire, and of sober realism, it is a secular celebration of man as the linguistic and cultural animal. In doing so, it sees the contemporary world through a lens of timelessly mythic values and concerns. The impact of the Homeric parallel, as a ghostly presence to the reader rather than a literal reality to the characters, is to focus, within the apparently random passage of their single modern day, a transhistorical pattern in their lives. Most importantly for the present theme, however, Joyce articulated his understanding of the aesthetic by using traditionally theological terms to which he gave newly secular meanings. Once again, while this might seem simply to downgrade the religious tradition, it also honours it in so far as theological tradition is recognized as the historical form in which spiritual experience has been most subtly and intimately mapped. And so the Joycean artist, as defined in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), is the ‘priest of the eternal imagination’ (Joyce, 1964, 221) who presents the world not sub specie aeternitatis (from the point of view of eternity) but from the standpoint temporis nostri (of our own time). Joyce makes very explicit the supersession of religion by art.

Yet the slow death of religion can take a variety of forms. It may be that the infrastructure of social and rhetorical conventions stays in place while the faith itself is almost unconsciously abandoned. Hence the predicament of the Anglican church in modern Britain as it maintains its established status in an increasingly secular, humanist, inclusive and quasi-democratic social order to which it has largely accommodated. More darkly, the ostensible belief may be a way of granting authority to social order so that religion is not only, as in Marx’s phrase, the ‘opiate of the people’ but also the alibi of the powerful.2 Nietzsche, again anticipating a central modernist theme, thought that power was a primary, if largely unacknowledged, motive of human action and that the central problem of modernity was its implicit and de facto nihilism. The mischief of this condition lay partly in its being so unconscious, or actively denied. He is famously associated with the declaration that ‘God is dead’ but in The Gay Science this statement is attributed to a madman who appears in the marketplace in the bright morning hours with a lantern (Nietzsche, 1974, 181). The image suggests a momentous recognition that cannot be communicated to those who cannot, or will not, hear. We cannot tell, moreover, whether the man is really mad or is only perceived as such by the incomprehending populace. And if he is mad, is this the result of being the solitary bearer of such a shattering truth, a truth which is deranging rather than deranged? The image renders at once a seismic shift in world view and the general unconsciousness with which ordinary life goes on.

The God-shaped Hole

A comparable duality can manifest itself as a temporal process in the lives of individuals. Loss of faith is often an immensely painful and anxious process, and especially so for those who have personal and spiritual gravitas, yet when it is finally over it may come to seem entirely inconsequential. The great metaphysical drama dwindles to a trite illusion. But this may take some time and the period from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century enacts this protracted process on a cultural, historical scale. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880) is a classic expression of the abyssal recognition faced by Nietzsche’s madman. For the profoundly thoughtful Ivan Karamazov it is horrifying to acknowledge that, without God, ‘All is permitted’, that there are no moral restraints, while his illegitimate, and intellectually trivial, half-brother enacts quite literally the nihilism which for Ivan would remain only in the realm of philosophical speculation. As in Nietzsche, the culture is practically infected by nihilism even though those who really recognize it are very few, and they are likely to be the least dangerous in themselves yet with incalculable effects on others. In that respect, Ivan’s influence is an image of the uses to which Nietzsche’s own thought was to be put in the twentieth century. The Brothers Karamazov is an epochal book, registering a shock which is hard to imagine occurring with the same force in the twentieth century. Individuals still lose their faith, but their stories are unlikely to have a comparably tragic and representative resonance for their readers. Twentieth-century writing is more typically the exploration of aftermath, whether by nostalgia for filling what Salman Rushdie has called the ‘god-shaped hole’ or by exploring the new moral landscape that is revealed.3

The desire to fill the ‘god-shaped hole’ was evident in the immense late nineteenth-century interest in theosophical and hermetic tradition, and in the approach to the supernatural by extra-religious means such as séances, ghosts or automatic writing. W. B. Yeats, who came to maturity in this period, is a striking instance of a major modern poet deeply committed to all these interests. More particularly, as in the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, there was a desire to bring such putative experience of the supernatural within scientific protocols. Examining instances of mediumship or photographs of supernatural beings may have had the mixed motives of exposure and vindication, but both intentions acknowledged the authority of science. Conversely, August Comte, in promoting the secular and scientific social order of Positivism, thought it would need the ceremonial forms and imagery of religion to make it popularly acceptable. Meanwhile, the new products of scientific advance, such as the radio and the phonograph, had initially an aura of the supernatural about them in making it possible to hear the voices of the absent or the dead. Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘Wireless’ (1902) catches the spirit of this. But people adjust readily enough to new technologies and the dominant spirit of the modernist generation was an astringent critique of such religiose nostalgias. Joyce mocks the hermetic fashion of his elders in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of Ulysses, while Hans Castorp’s distaste for a séance in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) has a similarly epochal resonance. But while the late nineteenth century exemplifies a number of what may reasonably be interpreted as substitutions for religious beliefs or comforts, the twentieth century shows more subtle, or at least less obvious, modes of continuance. What this phase of modernity often struggles to maintain is not a religious content but the god-shaped hole itself.

For the serious believer, loss of faith is a great metaphysical drama in which eternity is at stake. Pascal’s wager and Dostoevsky’s anguished characters are notable instances. But when religious faith departs it eventually takes with it the sense of high tragic drama surrounding the question. That is another way of explaining the turn to myth at this time, as a dramatic necessity rather than a philosophical posture. In The Waste Land, as much as in Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, Yeats’s Irish legends or Marcel Proust’s lost paradise, the myth provides a context of cosmic drama within which the, often quite everyday, action is played out. Hence, in some highly secular writers, there is a nostalgia, not for religious belief, but for the order of significance that belief once enabled. The classic and influential example of this for the modernist generation was Gustave Flaubert.

Flaubert was a nihilist, but also a romantic imbued with immortal longings. In Augustinian tradition man was created with a desire for the infinite which could only be satisfied by God. Flaubert was the great exponent, and analyst, of that form of romanticism in which this psychological structure persists but without belief in the divine, the one object by which the desire for the infinite could be assuaged. At the same time, as a romantic, he saw that this longing, albeit illusory, gave dignity to a human existence. The saving feature of Emma Bovary, however deluded, is that, in contrast to almost everyone around her, she feels this longing. Moreover, Flaubert, like Joyce later, recognized that in European tradition this predicament of unassuageable desire found its most profound and lucid definition in religious terms. Like a number of subsequent writers in the twentieth century, or like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film of The Gospel of St Matthew (1964), his tale of ‘St Julien l’hospitalier’ (1877) tells the miraculous and redemptive story of the saint in a factual way that leads the reader to participate in the emotions of faith without subscribing to the faith itself. The modern reader enters the tale’s world of medieval belief through an evidently aesthetic suspension of disbelief, for Flaubert is a further example of art superseding religion except that in his case it is not redemptive. The extraordinary ending of the tale, in which the saint is gathered into eternity in Christ’s embrace, is so moving precisely because of the incredibility of the world view it invokes. Flaubert’s art constructs its complex and elegant structures of meaning only to define and intensify the nihilism of which they ultimately speak.

In the twentieth century, the atheistical invocation of cosmic drama is perhaps most striking in the existentialist writings of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus was a great admirer of Dostoevsky, and works such as The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Rebel (1951) turn on a sense of man as victim of injustice for which a divine perpetrator is required. He draws on classical and mythic figures such as Sisyphus but the underlying emotional structure is surely that of a reversed Christianity inherited through the medium of Dostoevsky. Camus’s cosmic revolt appealed especially to the young as it takes a while to notice how much it depends on what Raymond Williams would call a ‘structure of feeling’ ultimately derived from a religious loss. If in Camus these lines of inheritance are relatively clear, in Sartre they are more complexly involved with formal philosophical argument, but the essential structure of Flaubertian post-religious tradition can be seen in a novel such as Nausea (1938). The central character, Roquentin, contemplates a chestnut tree root which, unlike Yeats’s ‘great-rooted blossomer’, gives him a vision of complete absence of meaning and purpose until he is transformed in some measure, albeit a little unconvincingly perhaps, by listening to a black woman jazz singer. The book is powered by a mood and, along with the specific psychological condition of Roquentin and the general historical context of post-war France, the novel’s underlying world view surely reflects a phase in the loss of religious significance. Matthew Arnold in his poem ‘Dover Beach’ (1867) had predicted the slow ebbing of the tide of belief and in Roquentin that ebb can be felt in its horrified revelation of pure matter bereft of meaning.

But if the cosmic drama of the existentialist generation depends on the residual power of a religion which is ostensibly being denied, Samuel Beckett, particularly in the plays and novels which first made his name iconic of a presumed world view, offers a more self-conscious and ironic handling of the conflict between these two necessities: he keeps a sense of the cosmic drama associated with religious belief while undercutting the melodrama from which its loss is virtually inseparable. This has, however, made his tone or implication elusive and ambiguous. In Endgame (1957), Hamm says of God ‘The bastard! He does not exist’ (Beckett, 1958, 55). The remark is finely poised between invoking the cosmic significance invested in the notion of God, which is a necessity of the piece, while stripping His stated non-existence of its tragic overtones. The danger here is of reading such moments too much in the existentialist tragic mode of Camus, who maintains such a divine opponent for the purpose of his humane rebellion. When Beckett first became well known in the 1960s, and was given the Nobel Prize, there was a widespread tendency to read through the pessimistic foreground of his works and to praise the spirit of humane endurance in such formulations as ‘You must go on. I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (Beckett, 1959, 418). The urge to find a recuperative or redemptive reading is irrepressible. But in his case the underlying dynamic is perhaps the other way round. All the grand cosmic attitudes are parodied and rejected but they have to be invoked in order to achieve that purpose. The continuing artistic struggle, therefore, is rather for a mode of resistance to the redemptive sentiment for which he found himself being celebrated. He is a striking instance of the maintenance of the god-shaped hole for essentially dramatic purposes, almost as a stage property. There may be an inescapable double bind here, however, in that the affirmative reading can never be completely excluded. Maybe that is a contributory reason for his turn to increasingly abstract and minimalist forms in his later years.

Religion Rediscovered

Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1912–22), like Eliot’s Four Quartets, are an extraordinary expression of religious consciousness in modernity although, unlike Eliot, Rilke seeks only a this-worldly understanding. Hence, in his case, the poetry really does matter. For him, as for many modern writers, poetry is not, as Alexander Pope put it, merely the dress of thought but its body.4 That is to say, there is no pre-existing idea or reality that the language of poetry expresses and which could be encountered by other means; it is itself the process of exploration through concrete metaphors which is the nearest we can come to the kind of insight that is in question. Hence, for example, the knowledge of mortality and providing ways of facing it constitute a significant part of religion. Rilke’s tenth elegy speaks of a ‘City of Pain’ populated by those who have died. It has echoes of the classical Greek and Roman underworlds, which help to locate its significance while keeping it remote from Christian habits of thought and feeling. Yet neither does it quite fit the classical world view either for it is evidently focused on a modification of sensibility for living in this world rather than imagining another. Indeed, it is always the case, when a culture’s view of the afterlife is considered in an anthropological spirit, that it unconsciously reveals the values and assumptions of this-worldly life in the culture concerned. Rilke quite consciously uses the image of the afterlife in this spirit. Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978), itself a critique of modern secular attitudes to mortality, argues that all human beings carry two passports, one for the land of the well and the other for the land of the sick. She meant that even quite a short period of debilitating illness or pain places one as if in a different world in which the well are strangely defamiliarized precisely in their unconsciousness of being so. Likewise, Rilke’s ‘City of Pain’ is not a statement about the afterlife but, like a photographic negative, it sees the present world in an unfamiliar way, evacuated of its usual substance, and yet, as one begins to realize with a gradual adjustment of vision, it is in some sense an equally true record.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger sought contemporaneously to articulate a comparable sense of Being, and with a revealing sense of struggle. For his philosophical discourse is notoriously difficult and controversial, such that even sympathetic readers can flicker between acknowledging him as the major philosopher of the twentieth century and dismissing him as an unwitting charlatan buoyed up by his own obfuscatory jargon. In his later years he wrote remarkable essays on poetry, language and thought in which he drew on passages of poetry, most notably from Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Trakl, to instantiate his meditations on Being; and his own mode of thought in these essays was poetic as much as rational, drawing insight from the associations and derivations of words. He also drew on Rilke, whose poetry could well be adduced in forming a judgement about Heidegger’s own ultimate substance and significance.5 Heidegger and Rilke share a response to the world which is just as remote and incomprehensible from modern, secular, instrumental positivism as is the traditional religion it confidently rejects. Or otherwise expressed, the overlap between Rilke and Heidegger invokes a lengthy poetic and philosophical tradition which critiques the optimistic rationality of Enlightenment by reconstituting a form of religious consciousness.

D. H. Lawrence shared much of the sense of Being exemplified in Rilke or articulated in Heidegger but was more explicit in defining his outlook as religious. Having been quite pious in his boyhood and youth, he grew out of his Christian faith but continued to see himself as ‘a passionately religious man’ (Lawrence, 1981, 165). The Rainbow (1915) was the first novel to express his fully mature world view and, not incidentally perhaps, it encompasses a philosophical and psychological analysis of the place of religion in modern life. As a family saga covering more than three generations of the Brangwens, its narrative extends from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. But it also invokes a much longer span of time with a continuing impact within this historical period. With its central image of the rainbow and its setting in Marsh farm, the novel places its history within two rival myths of origin, the biblical and the Darwinian. The story of the fall and loss of Eden is in tension with the progressive vision commonly associated with Darwinian evolution. The blend of biblical and evolutionary discourse throughout the novel corresponds for Lawrence to the two major psychological impulses felt, in varying proportions, by all his characters. In the opening movement of the novel, the Brangwen men are exhausted but largely fulfilled by the daily and seasonal round of farming life, while the women look to a larger world of education and culture. It soon becomes clear, however, that this apparently gendered contrast points to the double motive in all the characters as they struggle to develop as individuals without losing a sense of rootedness and relatedness. In the final generation, the central character, Ursula Brangwen, who has been deeply affected by her pious father from whom she has gradually distanced herself, has a vision of the rainbow. She is now completely secular but retains the religious impulse of her ancestors as an intuitive trust in life.6

In this respect, The Rainbow is an instructive contrast to Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, also published in 1915. As the title suggests, Durkheim, a French social anthropologist, was likewise concerned to penetrate beneath the complex cultural forms of religion to discern its essential nature and concluded that it is the symbolic expression of the social instinct. The etymological derivation of the word ‘religion’ suggests a binding or linking and for Durkheim it is what binds human beings together; it is the ligaments, so to speak, of the social body. In Lawrence, the primary connection is of the individual to the natural world and the cosmos, with the social dimension accorded a secondary and problematic status in the order of human values. For Lawrence, to experience ‘true relatedness’ was the supreme goal of a human life, and it included relation to other human beings, but only as part of a relation to the world and to the myriad other beings with which we share it. Relationship, for him, was not closeness, but respect for difference, which was why he invoked the imagined lives of animals and even plants. It was not because he thought he could understand these other beings but precisely to experience their irreducible strangeness. Yet they are our fellow creatures, for difference can only be experienced in relationship just as meaningful relationship is founded on difference. It was such a sense of difference that he thought lacking in contemporary human relations and it was likely to be achieved only as part of a proper relation to the world and its creatures. Like Ursula’s father, Will Brangwen, the inherited religion projects a mystery on to the supernatural, while for Lawrence there is mystery enough in every creature encountered on the earth. Religion for him is the mystery of Being which he called ‘the fourth dimension’ (Lawrence, 1988, 361).

During his last five years, Lawrence was terminally ill and, despite his refusal to acknowledge this in his daily life, his poetry records a preparation for death which can be placed alongside the Four Quartets and the Duino Elegies as a supreme instance of modern religious expression. He visited the Etruscan tombs and was deeply impressed by an early form of life very different from the ancient Mexican religion he had imagined being revived in The Plumed Serpent (1926). Having returned to Europe, and specifically to Italy, he was horrified by its turn to fascism. Lawrence, the greatest modern primitivist in the sense of drawing from archaic and tribal cultures, gestures in his writing towards what is still primordial and necessary in human life. For the same reason, however, he was the most significant critic of modern primitivism as a sentimental indulgence. Fascism was such an ersatz primitivist religion, invoking the ancient Roman state which, as Lawrence pointed out, had wiped out the Etruscan civilization which was its superior in living responsiveness. If the vision of the afterlife is most truly a revelation of this-worldly values in a culture, then the tombs of the Etruscans showed their instinct for a delicately vital relation to the world and to each other.

Lawrence drew on his encounter with the Etruscan tombs in poems contemplating his own death which he approached as the last great experience, and responsibility, of life. In the ages of faith a good death was the culmination of a good life and it could acquire the value of a willed act by the dying person’s spiritual preparation. In ‘Bavarian Gentians’ and ‘Ship of Death’, composed shortly before his death in 1930, Lawrence imagined actively descending into the darkness or being carried away on a vessel of his own construction. As in Rilke, there is no transcendence into a supernatural domain, only a set of images irradiated by an intense psychological quest and the acceptance of imminent dissolution within a reverential trust in life.

Conclusion?

As might already be deduced from Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, the perdurance of religion in modernity, at least for non-believers who do not accept the simpler explanations, is a mystery in itself. It may be that religion is destined slowly to disappear. But it may also be that modernity will come to recognize the religious deficit hinted at by some of the great early twentieth-century writers. The contemporary problem of environmental damage and climate change, for example, can be approached in purely technical terms or it can be seen as the symptom of a radically unhealthy mode of being in the world. Heidegger and Lawrence would say that, even if the effects could be moderated to a point of sustainability, the most essential damage is already done by having an attitude of instrumental rapacity towards the world.

Likewise, if art has in some sense moved into the place of religion this is by creating an especially intense and privileged interpersonal arena for the realization and critique of fundamental values. But the extent to which it can create such values is open to question and the relatively increased prestige of art may have served to obfuscate the underlying religious deficit. Hence, while the Punch and Judy show of atheists versus bishops will doubtless continue its long and popular run in public life, the true action is likely to be elsewhere. It may become apparent, for example, that some sense of reverence is a moral necessity for individual and collective human life; and atheists should after all treat the Deity with some respect since the invention of God is an important step towards the invention of the human. In Goethe’s late novel Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Travel (1829), a work that was already modernist before its time, Wilhelm’s son attends a Pedagogical Province in which the pupils make not the sign of the cross, but a three-stage gesture indicating in turn reverence for what is above them, for the earth beneath them and for the social realm before them. Each boy acknowledges, as Lawrence said of the early Brangwen farmer, ‘something standing above him and beyond him in the distance’ (Lawrence, 1989, 9). The religious gesture is at once centrally important and yet deliberately indeterminate with respect to any particular belief. So too, just as literary modernism took a while to catch up formally with Goethe’s novel, it may be that modernity will eventually come to acknowledge a mode of being that accommodates the religious impulse, not just as a tolerated anachronism but as a living necessity.

Notes

1 This complex subject is treated at length in Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (1997).

2 The phrase is used in Marx’s Introduction to his Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843).

3 The meaning of this expression is developed in the opening chapter of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1982, 10–23), although the actual phrase is not used on this occasion.

4 ‘True Wit is Nature, to Advantage drest, / What oft was Thought but ne’er so well Exprest’. Essay in Criticism (1714), ll. 297–8 (Pope, 1961, 272–3).

5 See especially Heidegger’s ‘What Are Poets For?’ (1971).

6 For a fuller treatment of this aspect of The Rainbow, see Bell (1992, 51–96).

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