Theological Questions Prompted By Celebrated Works of Literature

By Julian Scutts

With the help of verbal analysis and the application of critical theories this book brings to light theological issues that underlie even such simple poems as William Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" or Robert Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365969294

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Theological Questions Prompted By Celebrated Works of Literature

Theological Questions Prompted by Celebrated Works of Literature

Spilled Religion vs. Spilled Theology

By Julian Scutts

ISBN  978-1-365-96029-4

Copyright Julian Scutts 2017

Is the Allegory an Antiquated and Artificial Form of Literary Device?

An affirmation of the relevance of Dante’s hermeneutic approach to the  reading of literary texts

When Israel went out from Egypt the house of Jacob from a people of strange language Judea was made his sanctuary and Israel his dominion." (King James Version). Psalm 114, 1-2

According to the hermeneutic principles laid down by Dante in his Letter to Can Grande della Scala  the text cited above  referring to the exodus from Egypt bears interpretation at four levels, the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the anagogical. These refer respectively to the plain story, the religious truth  underlying the plain story, the conversion of the believer and the parting of the body and soul at death. Dante’s mode of interpretation finds precedents in those of Aquinas and in rabbinic traditions. In effect he broadened the strict principles of scriptural exegesis so as to adapt them to the  interpretation of any text or piece of writing. Indeed, Northrop Frye, a leading theorist in literary criticism,  employed the term anagogical  as one of his mainstays in support of his arguments  throughout his seminal book Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, having borrowed the term from Dante in order to elucidate his contention that all works of literature and the words that compose them constitute an all-transcendent unity. Borrowing  a term from Dante, flattering as this may be to the great Italian,   is one thing; applying it in the sense specified by Dante is another, but let us leave this question in abeyance for a moment.

By and large modern criticism does not pay much regard to the allegory as a literary device or dwell on  its relevance to textual criticism. In close connection to this  low regard for the value of the allegory is a surprising  lack of interest in the word Wanderer and all forms derived from the common root of verbs to wander and wandern. Such words gained great prominence in Goethe’s literary works and  in those of German and English Romantic poets, a fact that  reflects the power of these words to evoke allegorical treatments of Cain, the Wandering Jew, the pilgrimage through life and the guidance of the Spirit. Nonetheless, sometimes one finds a grudging admission that the allegory is not dead in today’s world after all. Let us consider such a case.

John Frederick Nims, as the author of a student’s manual on the basics of poetics, implies that allegories arise spontaneously when  static symbols are joined together in a story, and stories arise as soon as a verb of motion has a role to play,  for he writes  in Western Wind, a handbook for students of poetry:

A mountain may be a symbol of salvation, a traveller may be a symbol of a human being in his life. But it the traveller takes as much as one step toward the mountain, it seems that the traveller and the mountain become allegorical figures, because a story has begun. [1]

From this statement we may derive two important conclusions.

First, a story, especially  one about an excursion or a journey, spontaneously generates an allegory irrespective of the author's purposes or power of prediction. Thus the resultant story cannot be  solely attributable to the powers of the conscious mind, even in the case of the most meticulous poet, who is sometimes likened to a craftsman. The element of spontaneity and unpredictability of the story belies the alleged artificiality imputed to allegories in general. What is this controlling or guiding influence that operates beyond the scope of deliberation and concentrated thought? For Aquinas and Dante it was the Holy Spirit, for John Milton the Holy Muse of Horeb, a conflation of biblical and classical traditions, and for Goethe, who pioneered exploration of the  unconscious, the libido ever seeking union with the anima, the Eternal-Feminine.

Second, a story that describes a journey makes this journey a sustained all-embracing metaphor that integrates all other symbols that find a place in the story. Evidently a poem is not a journey in any literal sense and yet the journey and the work share fundamental affinities, above all in the respective mentality of a poet, especially  at the outset of writing a long poem, and one about to begin a long and perhaps perilous journey. With this parallel in mind, John  Keats wrote of his uncertain path when faced with the prospect of composing Endymion. Furthermore, a journey referred to  in poetry, sermons and even common speech is a metaphor for the course of human life. Indeed, it is a special kind of metaphor, a synecdoche, a part of what it symbolizes, for a journey is a segment of life, often one of the greatest importance in determining  the path of an individual’s life history, the entire course of which is often likened to  a pilgrimage. As a natural consequence of these relationships  a work conceived as an allegory such as The Pilgrim's Progress incorporates  autobiographical elements through the intrusion of  many recollections of personal experience, leading some to identify Hill Difficulty with a very real place in Bunyan's home environment.

Dante referred the term allegory not only to the hidden sense of a story but to the aggregate of all three non-literal planes of significance.  These enfold the moral level of allegory that, in the original concept of Dante,  concerns the personal striving of the believer that follows conversion, as exemplified pre-eminently  by the content and substance of The Pilgrim's Progress. In the course of 18th century writers became less concerned with the specifically religious question of conversion and the contentions with the flesh than with the processes of poetic  and artistic creativity, which led to great  anguish and tension in the life and experience of creative artists and writers.

Daniel Defoe, had Crusoe, as the editor of own story, lend a new sense to  the term allegory, for Crusoe asserts that the allegorical and the historical aspects of this story are compatible and complimentary contributors to its essential unity. It follows that the ‘allegorical" import of the story is not conspicuous, much less thrust upon readers as a vehicle for a moral lecture. It is by inspecting the implications of verbal clues embedded within passages in the story’s text that we detect the allegorical paradigm that informs the novel, as I hope to demonstrate in a later section of this book.

Robinson Crusoe seems to display certain germinal Romantic features as one not only afflicted by solitude and estranged from  society but also as one prone to a deep sense of existential loneliness  more clearly revealed in the person of the Ancient Mariner, in whom the critic Bernard Blackstone perceived  a manifestation of the figure of the Prodigal Son, again evidence corroborating  an affinity shared by Robinson Crusoe and the Wanderer that appears in Romantic poetry. In a manner untypical of literary  critics, Bernard Blackstone as the author of The Lost Travellers: A Romantic Theme with Variations [2] separates  the Romantic poets into one of two camps according to whether they were Christians or not, making  Christians of those who in his view retained a sense of sinfulness and who felt a need for divinely wrought redemption. Wordsworth  did not count as a Christian, believing as he did like Jean-Jacques Rousseau  in humanity’s essential innocence while seeking a  remedy for all ills in measures to improve urban living conditions.  Coleridge qualified as a Christian in keeping with the fact that  the Ancient Mariner evinced an profound sense of guilt and found a remedy for this  in shriving and confession. Geoffrey H. Hartman on the other hand identifies the Mariner with the Wandering Jew as a fitting symbol with which to  typify the Romantic poets’ sense of being lost and adrift in an age that was inimical to poets and poetic language. We need not uncover a contradiction here if we allow that the inclusive figure of the pilgrim can subsume partial aspects of wandering.

In his essay  Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness [3] Hartman does not go to great  lengths to justify his assertion but there is textual and circumstantial evidence in support of his claim. The emphasis  on the seemingly accidental  cross element  in the crossbow  with which he commits the cardinal sin of slaying the albatross points to  parallel between the Mariner’s distain of an innocent creature and the Wandering Jew’s act of  taunting of  Jesus at the foot of the Cross.  Percy Bysshe  Shelley makes an explicit reference to the story of Ahasuerus and Crucifixion in Queen Mab  in line with the original narrative of the legend of the Wandering Jew. However, elsewhere he interprets the Wandering Jew as a phantasmal portraiture of wandering human thought. [4] Likewise, Wordsworth psychologizes the same figure when referring to the wanderer in my soul in his poem The Song of the Wandering Jew. Clearly neither  Shelley nor  Wordsworth adopted a doctrinally based hostile anti-Semitic attitude in this matter. Goethe had already  made use of symbols and motifs rooted in religion in the service of expressing his concerns with aesthetic and psychological issues and the Romantic poets continued down the same path.

An interesting variation of standpoint within the broad spectrum of objective criticism is to be found in the works of Northrop Frye, mentioned earlier. On one hand he doggedly affirms a belief in the radical separation of literature from all external factors in the domains of biography and history, etc. ; on the other, he sees all works of literature as part of a vast unity within which the genres of literature fall into categories that correspond to the four seasons of the annual cycle. Tragedy is a mythos of spring,  satire of winter, for example.  At the centre of this system we discover the ruling archetypes of classical symbolism and the high or low status of literary forms depends on their  distance from this centre. In such terms the novel is a low mimetic displacement of classical archetypes. We see little acceptance of what other critics discern as the positive and vital nature of novelistic fiction, its anti-hierarchal force and its power of innovation. Frye’s refusal to accept the existence of vital connections between literature and human experience, whether that of an individual or that of communities throughout history, leads him to adopt a patronizing or nanny-like like attitude to John Milton, a writer who held that literature had a lot to do with human behavior and revealed truth. This lack of sympathy and  empathy comes to light in passages that include references to acts of wandering. Indeed, Milton made ample use of the verb to wander in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and invested this with a positive meaning in line with biblical tradition, for in this the negative aspect  of wandering as sinning and falling into error is overridden by the curative and redeeming consequences of wandering through the wilderness of Sinai or even of the Fall, the Felix Culpa in Thomist theology. With wandering feet Adam and Eve leave Paradise into the wilderness of history and experience, where in due time Jesus will also wander and thwart the powers of evil. For Frye wandering is understood only in negative terms, as entrapment within the labyrinth of the Law, not even conceding, as the apostle Paul did, that the Law at least served as a schoolmaster in the dispensation of divine providence.

In more general terms Milton’s text implies that the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise entailed their wandering within the worlds of history and experience. With this in mind we will not find it so surprising that William Blake’s poem London begins with I wander, for this poem, apparently dismal and gloomy in its import, is a Song of Experience. To Hulme's allegation that Romantic poetry was spilt religion it is possible to retort that much carping in literary criticism comes over a spilt theology. By divorcing the anagogic level of interpretation from the allegorical and the moral levels, these forging a vital connection between the literary text and the life of its author, Frye deprives the anagogic level itself, as  understood by Dante at least, of any context, profile or basis for contrast.

It might appear at first sight  that the Romantic poets themselves held wandering in low regard. Blake, after all, referred to the Lakers (Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge) somewhat disparagingly as cold-earth wanderers in The Mental Traveller and Byron mockingly described the youthful Don Juan as one who wandered by glassy brooks thinking  unutterable thoughts before we encounter the name of Wordsworth a few lines later. [5] However, neither Blake nor Byron wished to scorn wandering per se, only manifestations of wandering they deemed inferior to  their own. Just as the Wanderer became a synonym for the modern poet, so the act of wandering became a synonym for the act of composing poetry. In Adonais Shelley lamented that Keats had ceased to wander, or, in plain speech, ceased to write poetry. Similarly, Goethe and the German Romantics were bitterly divided over the question as to the nature of the true Wanderer, even though the Romantics had accepted the term from Goethe and identified themselves as Wanderers.

The close association of the word Wanderer with poetic inspiration could well trace back its origin to the days before the Christianization of the Germanic tribes when Wotan or Odin the Wanderer  was feared and revered as the leading god of wisdom and poetic utterance. Tacitus recorded that the inhabitants of Germania worshipped Mercury, meaning Wotan most probably in view of the Germanization of dies Mercurii as Wednesday (the day of Wotan). Missionary influence saw to the substitution of  the day of Wotan by Mittwoch (the middle day of the week). Later the aura of the Wanderer  passed on to the power of the Holy Spirit, to  the Muses and even to  lesser spirits  like Puck, the merry wanderer of the night  in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Milton’s Paradise Lost Christian and classical notions of divine inspiration merge in the Holy Muse addressed by the speaker in the opening lines of the poem.  However, the same poet  betrays his fear of becoming unseated and falling from the back of winged Pegasus only to   wander erroneous and forlorn. The negative sense of wandering as losing  orientation contrasts ironically with its positive meaning of divine inspiration; here we might ponder  whether Milton already anticipated the crisis of confidence that would truly come the  fore in the age of Goethe and the Romantics. In his imagination Goethe also stalled in flight on his way to the summit of Parnassus and plunged into a muddy scree as decribed in the narrative in Wandrers Sturmlied,

According to Dante’s four-fold model of interpretation the term  anagogical referred to the entry of the soul into eternity at the death of the body.  Dante himself depicted  this transition in the symbol of the Dark Forest we find in the introductory lines of The Divine Comedy, as this marks the entry into the domain of the Afterlife.  The Divine Comedy has exercised the imagination of writers in succeeding generations, irrespective of their persuasion or attitude to the possibility of life after death, prompting them to explore in their mind putative realms beyond the pale of the known world. The contemplation of approaching death seems to be reflected in the last works of Rousseau, Sterne and Goethe by lending to these a certain quasi-musical rhapsodic quality producing a loosening of form and structure.

If life is a journey and if a literary work invokes the sustaining allegory of a process like a journey, the  end of any work, be this a novel, drama or poem,  reminds us of finality and death. Wandering in literature finds expression in the urge to stave off the inevitable in much the same way that Scheherazade kept telling stories to avoid execution or Penelope kept weaving. Contemplation of mortality need not evoke  gloom, maudlin and lugubrious obsessions or despair, as our culture like most cultures finds ways to invert negatives into positives, which in terms of religious beliefs and attitudes means resurrection, literal or figurative. To judge by its very title Wordsworth’s The Prelude might be taken to intimate that the writer’s uncertain path on his pilgrimage through life leads beyond death.

Morbid and maudlin obsessions with death can interfere with the healthy pursuit of daily living as the story of Hamlet shows all too well. Even children’s fairy stories sublimate issues concerned with the two great taboos of death and sex. Sublimation involves hiding and covering over things felt to be menacing or unsettling, which brings us back to the subject of the allegory and the perception of what lies beneath the surface of plain statements and entertaining or fascinating stories such as that of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The poem’s subtitle reads: A Child’s Story. Indeed, children can and do follow and enjoy the poem  like an adult without the slightest knowledge of poetics, linguists and critical theories. . Its beguiling simplicity and appeal to popular taste seems to have set it aside in the view of scholars who regard that Browning’s poetic works in general are characterized by profundity and high seriousness. How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix  is another casualty of disregard and for much the same reason. If The Pied Piper of Hamelin and How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix are only enjoyed for their entertainment value we may well ask where the difference lies between the language of poetry and that of prose, which is also a vehicle for the recounting of entertaining and gripping stories. Let us pause to reflect on this difference   light on an article written by the Russian  Formalist scholar of linguistics and literature, Jurij Tynjanov.. The Formalists had a hard time under Stalin’s regime on account of  their lack of enthusiasm for social realism. Leon Trotsky even accused them for being followers of Saint John for holding that in the beginning was the Word.  A reading of Tynjanov’s essay entitled in English translation The Meaning of the Word in Verse supplies a clear reason for Trotsky’s opinion.  Tynjanov, like other Russian Formalists such as Roman Jacobson and Boris Eichenbaum based their theoretical propositions on the fundamental distinction between langue and parole; this it to say, on one side,  between the order of language as a system in which words are defined in dictionaries and syntax analyzed in grammar books. and, on the other, context-bound language in any statement or text. Any word participates in both categories, langue and parole. Notwithstanding the fact that the setting of a word within a poem restricts the bounds of its immediately recognizable meaning, it retains its connection with the ideal word unbounded by any context at all and is  therefore inexhaustible in its potential range of associations. All this sounds very grand, but at least Tynjanov’s theory  could explain why we read and discard newspaper articles but always return to a favourate poem and glean something new from its treasures.

The potentialities of words posited by Tynjanov can be viewed in the light of Dante’s distinction between the literal and allegorical senses of a portion from the Psalms. Only at the literal level can we make a one-word to one-sense correlation. At the allegorical level words are released from the constrictions placed on them at the literal level. As Jurij Tynjanov argued in The Word in Verse,  [6] words in a poem are subject to the warping effect of  associations that belie their  function as subservient parts of a  narrative, a fact that often gives rise to apparent oddities of style, verbal juxtapositions and what in prose could come across as  stylistic lapses, repetitions and deviations from common usage. Thus the line He never can cross that mighty top in The Pied Piper of Hamelin seems an odd way of stating that the Piper will never be able to surmount the peak of a high mountain. In Browning’s poem By the Fire-Side we come across a truly glaring departure from good style according to the criteria governing  prose in the line  We crossed the bridge that we crossed before, especially in view of the occurrence of the words crossed and the Cross in the immediately preceding lines. We note here a conflation of the word cross as a verb of motion and a religious symbol so central to the Christian faith.

Other biblical echoes are to be heard. The surviving lame child speaks of the land entry to which the Piper also promised him. His idyllic vision of the land he may not reach finds a parallel in  the poems Pisgah Sights I and II by Browning, in which  the speaker empathizes with Moses, who  at the point of death yearningly surveys the Promised Land, which he also may not enter.   Milton Millhauser  sees in the word pottage a reference to the story of Esau and Jacob in the Book of Genesis with regard to its judgment  on Esau’s readiness to sacrifice a spiritual benefit for the sake of immediate physical gratification.[7] There are quite explicit citations of words in the New Testament, the parable of the camel’s eye, the trump of doom’s tone and a conspicuous number of words that evoke biblical themes, the image of the children rising from a dark cavern, water symbolism and the plagues of Egypt.  With all this in mind, can we dismiss the implied association of the words cross and passion and the Mayor’s Sadducean  denial that the dead can ever be revived as purely coincidental? A close regard for individual words allows us to place a Freudian or Jungian construction on the story of the Pied Piper. The red and yellow colours of the Piper’s coat, the course of his movements from south to west and references to the sun could lead us to construe the Piper, despised as a wandering fellow in his coat of red and yellow, as a solar symbol that represents the quest of the libido to achieve union with the anima. Goethe and Guillaume Apollinaire present the Piper as one who exerted an irresistible power over girls and women.

Does the interpretation I suggest accord with Browning’s life story and with the history of Pied Piper  legend since its origin? To find connections between poetry and life accords fully with Dante’s assertion that at the moral level the exodus story treats the conversion of the believer and hence the experience of real living people, a contention some schools of critical opinion firmly deny. Browning composed The Pied Piper of Hamelin at the age of thirty at a decisive juncture in his life. It had not been easy for him to find his feet as a poet. He destroyed his early verses and only chance would have it that  his poem The First-Born of Egypt  survived to  reveal a morbid obsession with the theme of the death of the young, and the story of Pied Piper is probably the result of the sublimation of the theme of death. The