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.
