James Wood and Biblical Fiction

I am reading a bookof essays right now by James Wood, the literary critic for the New Yorker. Wood's writing is downright beautiful and he is humane and generous while remaining knife-edge in his criticism. Too much criticism takes this sort of mathematical form: introduce the author and the book while making it quite clear that you are familiar with a larger body of the author's work, name one or two points of agreement with a quick quote, and then deconstruct all the reasons why you think the work ultimately fails. Criticism designed to praise a work inverts the last two steps. Then you end with some reasoned thought about how, were the author only as insightful as you, the work under consideration certainly would have been better. Not that there is anything wrong with this format, this very post will probably hew somewhere close to this model, but it gets that formulaic feeling. Wood avoids that in most of his writing. He is surprising, thoughtful, genuinely well read. The book of essays I hold in my hand ranges from Sir Thomas More to Flaubert to Gogol to Mann to Pynchon. I first read Wood when hewas reviewing Marilynne Robinson's work and it made my soul hurt. 

Wood is a writer who had faith and lost it. Yet he seems, at times, to deeply regret this fact. He participated in a forum a few years ago with fellow New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell and The Nation's Christine Smallwood, all of whom are onetime evangelicals who lost their faith or never really had it to begin with. For Gladwell and Wood, in particular, this loss wasn't an exuberant moment of freedom where they finally gained the wherewithal to live happy and fulfilled lives, but a moment of deep regret and longing. Gladwell, as I recall, it having been a number of years since I've watched the video, was the most pessimistic of the group, seeming to imagine himself some special article of Providence: the man who would believe if he only could. In other words, he longed to believe, wishing it were true, but couldn't find the faith. I remember listening and longing to comfort him with the words of another doubter: "Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief."

As sad as it can be to watch the growth of the sentimental and nostaglic atheist in our culture, the development is not entirely surprising. The Christian faith shaped more than doctrinal belief in the European West since our culture's dawn. Christianity also shaped our rituals and communal practices. As we have stripped away doctrine, ritual and community have gone with it. This absence leaves a yawning gap and one which culture free from religion has no way to bridge. And the rising emphasis on the individual (one of the aftereffects of the Reformation) will simply not do the trick. 

For Wood, this nostalgia for the lost cultural language of Christianity causes him to wish for the form of Christianity (community, shared practice, etc.) without the content. You can see this in his recent New Yorker article on the anniversary of The Book of Common Prayer. He treasures the beauty of Cranmer's collection, but dismisses the belief that fathered such beauty. But if you dismiss a house built on stone, as the wise Gospel Storyteller told it, you are left with nothing but sand to build on.

Which brings me to the book of essays I am reading now. The collection is called The Broken Estate and in the introduction Wood takes some time to explain the title. The old estate was the Christian understanding of truth, mediated through Scripture, and this estate was broken, as Wood explains, by the novel. He ends the introduction, thus: "For it was not just the ascent of science but perhaps the ascent of the novel that helped to kill off Jesus' divinity, when the novel gave us a new sense of the real, a new sense of how the real disposes itself in a narrative--and then in turn a new skepticism toward the real as we encounter it in narrative." I don't take Wood to be gloating in this passage, merely denoting what he sees to be a historical truth: Flaubert did as much to undo Christianity as Darwin.

According to Wood, it was in the nineteenth century when the "Gospel's began to be read, by both writers and theologians, as a set of fictional tales" that the authority of Scripture and the gospel narratives were undermined. The novel, which reached its Western apex in the nineteenth century, helped blur the lines between truth and reality. When the same principles of fiction reading were applied to the stories of Scripture that were applied to the stories of Jane Austen, the supernatural power of Scripture was replaced with a novelistic reading of Jesus of Nazareth and his zany Galilean adventures (sorry, I couldn't resist). 

In one sense, Wood's reading is indisputable, in that the rise of fiction did coincide with a downplaying of the inerrancy of Scripture and a reconsideration of the divinity of Christ in the popular consciousness. But was the relationship between the two causal? Religious belief has declined in our era corresponding to the rise of the internet. Are these two things related? Maybe. But there is no necessary causal relation between the two. And my feeling is that there is no necessary relationship between the rise of fiction and the decline of belief in inerrancy. Coleridge, whom Wood quotes, might have been interested in reading Scripture using the tools provided by other literary forms, but this does not mean that you necessarily deny the truth claims of those stories. Thinking that it does requires an almost willful blindness to the fact that for centuries before the estate-breaking nineteenth century people already knew to read the Bible largely as a story. Pedantic theologians aside, and there were many of those in the nineteenth century as well (see George Eliot's wonderfully awful Dr. Casaubon in Middlemarch), it would come as no surprise to a reader of the Bible that the book is comprised largely of stories. I would even go so far as to say that the Bible writers themselves were largely aware that they were writing stories. The epistles of the first Christ followers at the back of the book aside, pretty much everything in the Bible consists of stories. Jesus himself seems to have preferred to tell stories in his teaching, and it is not anachronistic to point out that people understood that these stories were fictional. No one was out trying to track down the prodigal son or find the guy who found the pearl of great price. It is our modern ignorance of the Bible that reduces it to a theological handbook. It is not for nothing that the reformers spoke of the arc of redemptive history. They understood the Christian faith was a part of the past, the present, and the future, and not only a set of received doctrine. The implication that the use of stories, true stories as the Bible claims to be, became discredited by an accumulation of fake stories is silly and frankly demeaning to the intelligence of the people who read the Bible for centuries before Austen and the Brontes and Dickens came onto the scene. 

Stories, whether fake or true, follow largely the same pattern. The goal, generally speaking, is twofold: to engage readers so that they continue to read, and to recount something memorable. A bullet point version of history would be intolerable, and a bullet point version of Sherlock Holmes impossible. We demand to be engaged. And the Bible writers knew this. So they wrote with poetry and grace and elegance as they told impossible truths of God and his dealings with mankind. And they wrote four histories of the man who was God; four histories wildly different in style, but brimming with life even at this distant remove as they worked to sharpen the curve on that arc of redemptive history.

In making this critique, I am not entirely sure if I am merely critiquing the way the period of the nineteenth century allowed questions of fiction to simplistically subvert the notion of Biblical truth or the way Wood seems to view this critique as valid on its face. In any event, neither Wood nor the nineteenth century show much historical charity, historical knowledge, or--and this might be the most egregious condemnation for when speaking of fiction--imagination.