User:Sherrilledwards/sandbox: Difference between revisions
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Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism. | Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism. | ||
=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" === | === God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" === | ||
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A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity. | A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity. | ||
But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint. | |||
Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}} | |||
As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor. | |||
However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades. | |||
Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}} | |||
== BELOW NOT YET PASTED TO REAL PAGE, INCLUDING WORKS CITED == | |||
=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace === | |||
There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil. | |||
''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace. | |||
=== Notes === | === Notes === | ||
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{{Refbegin}} | {{Refbegin}} | ||
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* {{cite journal |last=Auden |first=W.H. |title=September 1, 1939. |journal=Selected Poems |date=1972 | location=Ed. Edward Mendelson. Expanded ed. New York |publisher=Princeton University Press |pages=95-97|ref=harv }} | * {{cite journal |last=Auden |first=W.H. |title=September 1, 1939. |journal=Selected Poems |date=1972 | location=Ed. Edward Mendelson. Expanded ed. New York |publisher=Princeton University Press |pages=95-97|ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite | * {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |location=4th ed. Princeton |publisher= Princeton University Press |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Bawer |first=Bruce |date=1998 |title=Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity |location=New York |publisher= Three Rivers |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite | * {{cite journal |last=Begiebing |first=Robert |title=Castle Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1.1 |date=2007 |pages=215-222 |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Berger |first=Peter L. |date=1969 |title=A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural |location=Garden City |publisher= Doubleday |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Berger |first=Peter L. |date=1969 |title=A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural |location=Garden City |publisher= Doubleday |ref=harv }} | ||
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* {{cite journal |last=Bernstein |first=Mashey |title=Jewish Values in the Fiction of Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=376-384 |ref=harv }} | * {{cite journal |last=Bernstein |first=Mashey |title=Jewish Values in the Fiction of Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=376-384 |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Born |first=Max |date=1951 |title=The Restless Universe |location=New York |publisher=Dover |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Brooks |first=Cleanth |date=1963 |title=The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren |location=New York |publisher=Yale University Press |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Brown |first=Colin |date=1969 |title=Philosophy and the Christian Faith |location=London |publisher=Tyndale Press |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Brown |first=Colin |date=1969 |title=Philosophy and the Christian Faith |location=London |publisher=Tyndale Press |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Buechner |first=Frederick |date=1983 |title=Now and Then |location=San Francisco |publisher=Harper |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Bultmann |first=Rudolf |date=1984 |title=New Testament & Mythology and Other Basic Writings |location= Ed. Schubert M. Ogden. Philadelphia |publisher=Fortress Press |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite journal |last=Buske |first=Morris |title=Hemingway Faces God |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=22.1 |issue= |date=2002 |pages=72-87 |ref=harv }} | * {{cite journal |last=Buske |first=Morris |title=Hemingway Faces God |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=22.1 |issue= |date=2002 |pages=72-87 |ref=harv }} | ||
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* {{cite book |last=Chadwick |first=Owen |date=1975 |title=The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century|location=Cambridge |publisher= Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Chadwick |first=Owen |date=1975 |title=The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century|location=Cambridge |publisher= Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Civello |first=Paul |date=1994 |title=American Literary Naturalism and its Twentieth-Century Transformation |location=Athens |publisher=University of | * {{cite book |last=Civello |first=Paul |date=1994 |title=American Literary Naturalism and its Twentieth-Century Transformation |location=Athens |publisher=University of Georgia Press |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |date=2008 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |location=Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |date=2008 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |location=Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Delbanco |first=Andrew |date=1995 |title=The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil |location=New York |publisher= Farrar, Stauss and Giroux |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Donne |first=John |date=2003 |title=John Donne's Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels |location=Ed. Evelyn M. Simpson. Berkeley |publisher= University of California Press |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Donne |first=John |date=2003 |title=John Donne's Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels |location=Ed. Evelyn M. Simpson. Berkeley |publisher= University of California Press |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Fussell |first=Paul |date= | * {{cite book |last=Fussell |first=Paul |date=1975 |title=The Great War and Modern Memory |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press, 2000|ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Gellner |first=Ernest |date=1975 |title=Legitimation of Belief |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Gellner |first=Ernest |date=1975 |title=Legitimation of Belief |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Gribbin |first=John |date=1995 |title=Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown & Co |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite journal |last=Hassan |first=Ihab |date=1987 |title=Hemingway: Valor against the Void |journal=American Fiction 1915-1945 |location=Ed. Harold Bloom. New York |publisher= Chelsea House |pages=285-299 |ref=harv }} | * {{cite journal |last=Hassan |first=Ihab |date=1987 |title=Hemingway: Valor against the Void |journal=American Fiction 1915-1945 |location=Ed. Harold Bloom. New York |publisher= Chelsea House |pages=285-299 |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite journal |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1991 |title=A Clean, Well-Lighted Place |journal=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages=29-33 |ref=harv }} | * {{cite journal |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1991 |title=A Clean, Well-Lighted Place |journal=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages=29-33 |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2003 |title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Finca Vigia ed. New York |publisher= Scribner |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1984 |title=Ernest Hemingway on Writing|location=Ed. Larry W. Phillips. New York |publisher= Touchstone |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }} | ||
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* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1986 |title=The Garden of Eden|location=New York |publisher= Scribner |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1986 |title=The Garden of Eden|location=New York |publisher= Scribner |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1925 |title=In Our Time|location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1995 |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1925 |title=In Our Time|location=New York |publisher=Scribner, | |||
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2009 |title=A Moveable Feast|location=Ed. Sean Hemingway. Restored ed. New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2009 |title=A Moveable Feast|location=Ed. Sean Hemingway. Restored ed. New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv }} | ||
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* {{cite journal |last=Kroupi |first=Agori |title=The Religious Implications of Fishing and Bullfighting in Hemingway's Work |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=28.1 |date=2008 |pages=107-121 |ref=harv }} | * {{cite journal |last=Kroupi |first=Agori |title=The Religious Implications of Fishing and Bullfighting in Hemingway's Work |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=28.1 |date=2008 |pages=107-121 |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite journal |last=Kucich |first=John |title=Intellectual Debate in the Victorian Novel: Religion, Science, and the Professional |journal=The Victorian Novel|date=2001| location=Ed. Deirdre David. Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=212-233 |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Küng |first=Hans |date=1980 |title=Does God Exist: An Answer for Today |location=Garden City |publisher=Doubleday |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Küng |first=Hans |date=1980 |title=Does God Exist: An Answer for Today |location=Garden City |publisher=Doubleday |ref=harv }} | ||
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* {{cite journal |last=Lewis |first=Pericles |title=Churchgoing in the Modern Novel |journal=Modernisn/mondernity |volume=11.4 |date=2004 |pages=669-694 |access-date= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite journal |last=Lewis |first=Pericles |title=Churchgoing in the Modern Novel |journal=Modernisn/mondernity |volume=11.4 |date=2004 |pages=669-694 |access-date= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Lucáks |first= | * {{cite book |last=Lucáks |first=Georg |date=1971 |title=The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature|location=Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge |publisher=MIT Press |pages= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }} | ||
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* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=2003 |title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman and Michael Lennon |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman and Michael Lennon |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }} | ||
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* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }} | ||
{{Refend}} | {{Refend}} | ||