"Why are we suddenly talking about God?" A spiritual turn in recent critical writing.

Dimitriu, Ileana

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? ... Why, just as we were confidently moving into a posttheological, postmetaphysical, even posthistorical era, has the God question suddenly broken out anew? (Eagleton 2009: 140)

We witness a resurgence of faith worldwide. On the one hand, there is urban revivalism including charismatic movements and prosperity theologies, or ancestralism and shamanism, or the globalisation of Far Eastern religions. On the other hand, we have various forms of New Age and self-affiliated religious practices, new paganism and goddess rituals. The literature on 'mind, body and spirit' is diverse, suggesting engagements with 'the neuropsychology of spiritual experience', 'spiritual aspects of pain', 'spirituality in the workplace', spirituality and the curriculum', 'gay and lesbian spirituality', to name but a few. Then again, there are perversions of faith, such as vulgar fundamentalisms and acts of terrorism masquerading as religion.

My aim is to consider current debates in the human sciences that--in looking beyond the well-worn 'trinity' of race, gender, class--seek to address 'the spiritual' as a legitimate category of investigation. I use the spiritual as a portmanteau term and, for reasons of space, will not engage with the debate on the relationship of institutionalised religion to spirituality. Rather, the spiritual as referred to here points to subjective expressions of faith-related identification and belief which--although not necessarily excluding religion--are not primarily linked to organised forms of faith as encapsulated in dogma and doctrine. After an overview of key contributions to this new debate, I shall ask: What of literary criticism? Is there a South or a South/ African perspective? In the second part of the article, therefore, I focus on how postcolonial studies has taken up the 'God debate' and, more specifically, how literary criticism may refract South/ African literary texts through the prism of the spiritual.

In his recent book, Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009), Eagleton--a materialist theorist and marxist-leaning critic seeks to disentangle questions about the paradoxical reinvigoration in the last decade of religious praxis and thought. He suggests that this resuscitation reflects a profound collective identity crisis: "the contradiction between the West's own need to believe and its chronic incapacity to do so [owing largely to] an unholy melange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism" (2009: 141). In other words, it is precisely the West's 'Lyotardian' abandonment of the grand narratives (including those of the religious) that has released a backlash: "When reason becomes too dominative ... faith lapses into irrationalism ... turning its back on reason altogether" (148). Forms of fundamentalism can be considered a barometer for the (unpredictable) effects of excessively bureaucratised secularism: "the West now stands eyeball-to-eyeball with a full-blooded 'metaphysical' foe for whom absolute truths and foundations pose no problems at all" (141).

Starting with After Theory (2003), Eagleton has been advocating a return to the 'God debate', in which he challenges simplistic understandings of spirituality and advocates a challenging coexistence of reason and belief. He begins by semantically demystifying the concept of God, which is but another word for unconditional potential. 'God' should not be perceived as "a mega-manufacturer or cosmic chief-executive officer" (2009: 7), as Richard Dawkins in his highly controversial The God Delusion (2006) would have it. Not "a celestial engineer ... but an artist and an aesthete to boot" (2009: 8).

Eagleton is at his 'irreverential' best when he juxtaposes stereotypical understandings of faith against reason. Following Badiou (2005), faith--for Eagleton--is "a commitment and allegiance--faith in something which might make a difference to the frightful situation you find yourself in, as is the case, say, with faith in feminism and anticolonialism" (2009: 37). Drawing on Kierkegaard and Pascal, he concludes that "all reasoning is conducted within the ambit of some sort of faith, attraction, inclination, orientation, predisposition or prior commitment" (120). Thus faith in the ideal of a non-racist society is a set of commitments to the idea that collective justice is possible. In his inimitable style Eagleton castigates those critics of religion who "buy their rejection on the cheap [thus producing] a worthless caricature of the real thing, rooted in a degree of ignorance and prejudice to match [fundamentalist] religion's own.... It is as though one were to dismiss feminism on the basis of Clint Eastwood's opinions of it " (xi). Certain academics and scientists (including Hitchens in God Is Not Great, 2007, and Lennox in God S Undertaker, 2007) could easily be found guilty of fundamentalist thinking because, as Zizek (2008) has it, they reduce belief to positive knowledge and demand evidence-based proof for beliefs. Fundamentalism--whether religious (Islamist or Christian) or scientific, or academic--is the enemy of contemporary life. The debate, therefore, should not be between Faith and Reason, but between faith-cum-reason and various forms of fundamentalism, both religious and scientific. If there is to be a profound revolution in the way people relate to fellow humans and the planet--Eagleton goes on to suggest--this would be to understand that 'scientific' attempts at repressing faith as 'the other of reason' have failed abysmally. It is time, therefore, to re-open the 'God Debate'.

The God Debate, in fact, has already opened in the human sciences. The last few years have seen a focus on spirituality and its role in 21st-century academia. An important contribution has come from the discipline of philosophy, via a major paradigm shift initiated by Bhaskar, the founder and figurehead of critical realist theory, who--like Eagleton--is well known for his erstwhile marxist thought. With the publication, in 2000, of From East to West, however, Bhaskar has distanced himself from orthodox critical realism (which has affinities with a realist philosophy of science and materialist dialectics). He has begun to advance the cause of a "transcendental dialectical critical realism"; in other words, "a realist theory of God" (Bhaskar 2000).

Disenchanted with the aridity of materialist dialectics, Bhaskar attempts an ambitious synthesis of philosophy and theology, in which he promotes a spiritualised humanism. He boldly advocates individual agency in the search for meaning that, without denying structural determinants, transcends the subject's positionality in terms of class, race and gender. Bhaskar affirms the need of de-alienation by virtue of the subject--via self-realisation taking responsibility for his/ her state of separation from the larger framework of non-duality. With God defined as "the ultimate ground" of reality (2000: 41), a full conception of humanity is achieved through "a continuum of consciousness" (31), a groundstate of interconnectedness with a meaningful totality. In subsequent works (e.g. Philosophy of Meta-Reality, 2002), Bhaskar refers to God as the "cosmic envelope" of a potential universal human solidarity.

In Transcendence: Critical Realism and God (2004), Bhaskar's adherents --Archer, Collier and Porpora--insist on the need to spiritualise ethical right-action in society, according to which individuals take responsibility for their beliefs rather than relying on the top-down solutions of social engineering. The authors hold that the 'spiritual turn' is compatible with critical realist philosophy: it is grounded in human experience, it is non-fundamentalist and philosophically defensible. Furthermore, as Porpora suggests in "The Spiritual Turn in Critical Realism" (2005), the new direction is meant to offer an alternative moral ontology designed to ground ethical commitments in a deeper reality ("the cosmic envelope") than is ordinarily available to instrumentalising social contingencies.

This spiritual turn has led to disquiet within critical-realist schools of thought. Creaven's Against the Spiritual Turn: Marxism, Realism and Critical Theory (2010), for example, claims that the new direction deflects attention from the structural configurations of oppressive social relations (7). In an aggressive tone--that echoes Marx's 'religion as opium for the people'--Creaven declares that Bhaskar's spiritual humanism threatens to discredit the ontological achievements of an earlier critical realism (as promoted by Bhaskar himself). Bhaskar's critics feel threatened by the depth of his argument in "subjecting the realist theory of God] to the rigours of the critical realist philosophy of science" (2010: 412). It is not that Bhaskar's theory of meta-reality is not well argued, but rather that it is too well argued, "the very reasonableness" (413) of his approach posing a threat to mainstream critical realism. But as Bhaskar (2000: 37), who remains a philosopher of the left, has it, the left can no longer ignore a metaphysical dimension, and must attempt to heal the traditional divide between progressives (whether believers or not) in their fight against economic utilitarianism and corporatist politics.

Similar debates are occurring in the social sciences. In Religion, Spirituality and the Social Sciences: Challenging Marginalisation (2008), Spalek and Imtoual investigate the causes for the continuing marginalisation of faith in academia, at a time, over the last decade, in which social scientists have been confronted with "a growing number of individuals reclaiming a religious or spiritual identity for themselves [which prompts them] to conduct ethical, respectful and accurate research" (203). The authors point out a glaring omission in research methodology: "While scholars have critiqued ... patriarchy, capitalism, hetero-normativity [as hegemonic frameworks of interpretation], secularism has been overlooked, despite also being a framework that imposes borders on knowledge and understanding about the social world" (1).

These insights have led to a gradual revision of the 'hard line' secularist thesis. Casanova (1994) and Fukuyama (1995)--contra Bruce (1995)--earlier on suggested that spirituality was undergoing a process of 'de-privatisation' in its re-entry to the public sphere of civil society. More recent research in the field--e.g. Martin's On Secularisation: Towards a Revised General Theory (2005)--scrutinises more malleable forms of the 'secular'. Echoing Eisentstadt's (2000) "multiple modernities", Martin introduces the notion of "multiple secularisations" (2005: 3), which evades the western dichotomy of reason and faith. Just as there may be multiple processes of secularisation, so there may be multiple processes of de-secularisation, as indicated by Bauman (1998) and Possamai (2007) in their analyses of interventions by faith groups in consumer and popular culture.

To continue to probe Eagleton's question ("Why are we suddenly talking about God?"), we can remain for a moment with the social sciences; processes of de-secularisation can also be seen as a response to the crisis of identity in the stream of rapid modernisation, or what Bauman recurrently refers to as "liquid modernity" (2000). The ambiguity of being simultaneously "embedded" and "disembedded" in an unsettled environment is found to lead to increased self-reflectivity (Giddens 1991); or, as Horton famously put it decades ago, to an increase in one's self-conscious "awareness of alternatives" in a mechanised world (1967). Closer to home, a recent study by Sitas (2008) has sought to link the increased tendency of self-reflectivity worldwide with a parallel drive towards an "ethic of reconciliation" (12). Of particular interest are his insights into how the neo-Gandhian philosophy of praxis--with its critique of instrumental rationality and its empathetic regard for people's spiritual needs--has influenced recent social movements around the world.

Such studies signal a new direction in sociology, in which societal changes are pursued in a de-secularised idiom that foregrounds the link between identity and ontological insecurity. In Religion, Identity and Change (2004), for example, Coleman and Collins find resonances between sociological approaches to identity and certain religious ideologies:

   It is worth studying religion and identity together ... because
   both can be seen as key sites of ambiguity and creativity.... In an
   increasingly globalised world, there is a heightening of
   civilizational, societal, ethnic, regional, and indeed individual
   self-consciousness. Such self-consciousness is evident in
   articulations of religiosity, as well as wider forms of identity.
   (2004: 14-15)

Finally, Castells (1997) assigns a significant role to religion as master signifier and source of communal identity--alongside various nationalisms, feminisms, environmentalisms and new social movements--or what he calls "project identities" aimed at social transformation. Religious project identity aims at a transformation of "the godless, anti-family, materialist societies , otherwise unable to fulfill human needs" (10).

Nowhere is the relevance of religion as master signifier more evident than in the postcolonies of the global South, where political and spiritual forms of authority often overlap. To the dismay of many postcolonial critics, such overlaps do not fit secularist sociological/ political grids of interpretation. This is perhaps why the spiritual element of the postcolonial condition has been either ignored or treated with contempt. Prevalent postcolonial theory, moreover, tends to diminish individualities within the neo-marxist binaries of coloniser/ colonised (and their binomial relatives: black/ white, male/ female, etc). While appropriate in certain contexts, such binaries inevitably diminish complex subjectivities and nuanced self-reflectivity. Young sums up the difficulty by attributing it to

   the absolute division between the material and the spiritual [that
   operates] within postcolonial studies, [its] unmediated secularism
   [for], postcolonial theory, despite its espousal of subaltern
   resistance, scarcely values subaltern resistance that does not
   operate according to its own secular terms. (2001:338)

It is a difficulty recognised by an increasing number of postcolonial critics. While Chakrabarty (2000) and Griffiths and Scott (2004) remind us that western utilitarianism has relegated the spiritual to concepts and practices of the 'pre-modern', Ashcroft baldly admits that "there has been a tendency in Euro-American thought to assume that the secular has replaced the sacral as the obvious and unchallengeable mode by which the world is best interpreted" (2006: 517). Not only the materialist, but also the poststructuralist direction in postcolonial studies has rejected the centred subject and hence its potential for human or, indeed, spiritual expansion. Celebrations of ambiguity, hybridity and liminality, for example--while intellectually stimulating for the 'haves'--may be insulting to those who have to scrounge for survival in the so-called 'liminal spaces' of the city-slums.

It is not surprising, therefore, that a recent 'turn' in postcolonial theory has been to the spiritual, that is, to Eagleton's 'God Debates'. What is beginning to command attention are the silenced alternative knowledge systems, including silenced spiritual knowledge. The authors of the revised second edition of the influential Post-Colonial Studies Reader (2006) suggest that "a new force has entered the arena of struggle, [a force drawing on] a renewed sense of the sacral as offering an alternative to European models of thought" (517). Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin are confident that, although having been "the most neglected" field of study, analyses of the sacred may, in future, become "one of the most rapidly expanding areas of post-colonial study" (8):

   [I]t is increasingly clear that the relationship between the sacral
   and the secular in the new century will be a complex one, and
   neither the simplistic [secularising] assertions of the European
   philosophe, nor the equally simplistic reassertions of religious
   fundamentalism is likely to be a sufficient means to confront the
   challenges ahead. (518)

As postcolonial studies incorporates spiritual interests, so religious/ theology studies, at least in the South, takes a turn to postcolonial and global issues. Eagleton has offered his thought-provoking interpretation of this turn in his reflection on the deep paradigmatic crisis of the left and the fact of "Marxism [having] suffered in our time a staggering political rebuff; and one of the places to which those radical impulses have migrated is, of all things, theology" (2009: 167-8). The highly bureaucratised secularism of modern societies--whether of the left (the former Soviet bloc) or of the right (conservatism)--has contributed to what Tillich calls "the lost dimension of depth" (quoted in Thomas 1988: 44), which in its turn has provoked an upsurge of spirituality worldwide. In The Spiritual Revolution (2005), Heelas and Woodhead have analysed the unprecedented rise of what they call "postmodern spirituality" or "subjective-life spirituality" (12), a recent phenomenon which is independent of organised religions and their institutions. As Kourie (2006: 80) puts it, postmodern spirituality in a secular society is sometimes also referred to as "'secular spirituality' [which] is to be distinguished from both a religious spirituality and a conception of secular life that is not spiritual". It is concerned with alternative thought-structures that underline self-understanding and self-realisation (all of which are perceived as a threat by the religious institutions): "Such spirituality clearly obviates any social and political quietism.... On the contrary, issues of social justice undergird secular spirituality and therefore active citizenship is essential" (2006: 82).

But perhaps the most relevant contribution by religion/spirituality studies to contemporary progressive thought has been in postcolonial biblical studies. Books such as The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity by Jenkins (2002), for example, discuss the complex postcolonial influences on, and the shift in religious authority to, the poorer South. Projects such as Grandin's The Last Colonial Master: Latin America in the Cold War (2004) foreground the role of (Catholic) spirituality in identity and resistance politics. Another significant contribution is Sugirtharajah's landmark Postcolonial Biblical Reader (2006), the aim of which is "to situate colonialism at the centre of the Bible and biblical interpretation [so that we] can also explore plurality, hybridity, and postnationalism, the hallmarks of the postcolonial condition" (2006: 17).

By considering the reality of empires as an overdetermining factor of history, postcolonial biblical critics now challenge western claims of a universal theology that is "tacitly considered by nature superior to any theological production outside the West" (Segovia 2006: 35). The questions resonate with similar interests in postcolonial research: How do the (religious) margins look at the world, a world imprinted at the 'centre' with the reality of empire? How has the centre (e.g. Babylon, ancient Rome) regarded the margins throughout history? How have modern western readings (e.g. Catholic or Protestant) of ancient texts addressed imperial impositions, as well as 'other-worldly' representations? (Segovia 2006: 38-40). The social emancipation of religious institutions in the last quarter of a century has also seen the beginnings of feminist postcolonial theology--e.g. Dube (2000) and Kwok Pui-lan (2005). Locally, a special issue--entitled "Gender, Religion and Theology in Africa" (Nadar and Phiri 2009)--of a journal of contextual theology attempts to investigate the deployment of gender in the narration of religious and sexual identities under patriarchy, as well as the negotiation of power differentials.

Having placed within current debates Eagleton's question, "Why are we suddenly talking about God?", I wish to raise a related question: How should we talk about religion/ spirituality? The question echoes the title of a recent volume edited by Boyd White (2006), a project the aim of which was to reflect on "how we were talking about religion: about the assumptions we were making and about the terms in which we cast our thought" (2006: 7). Boyd White suggests the need for emancipation from the tyranny of discipline-specific discourses: "As intellectuals we belong on the margins of all religions, in the in-between, in the liminal, a marginal space that is somehow, paradoxically, also at the very centre of contemporary public culture" (298). The principal question is: "How adequate are our languages of description and analysis as ways of representing religion? This question is present in every effort to talk about the religions of others, including the word 'religion' itself" (2006: 3). It is also present in questions such as: Is what we call 'reason' sufficient for a full intellectual and practical life? If not sufficient, what else is needed, and what do we call it? Can our terminologies dojustice to the religious experiences of others? How are we to face the diversity of serious belief that characterises the human world? (3-5).

Similarly to Boyd White's intention, Brown's edited volume, Religion and Spirituality in South Africa (2009), represents a project aimed at facilitating inter-disciplinary conversations on matters spiritual; but, unlike Boyd White, Brown locates his project in a specific context. It is the South African milieu (and, more generally, the postcolonial condition) that in his book informs the animated cross-disciplinary debates. These range from matters of politics and the public sphere--e.g. constitutional matters on the freedom of religion, active citizenship in the form of faith-based organisations, the role of faith in post-liberation South Africa--to issues of identity and agency in science, literature and the media. Importantly, the volume offers a significant methodological reorientation:

   How do we develop a critical language and framework that avoid the
   dismissiveness of materialism in its approach to spirituality,
   while still undertaking studies that are rigorously analytical and
   critical, but receptive to other modes of identification, identity
   and belief? (2009: 9)

For my purpose here, Brown's book--in its avoidance of crude materialist simplifications, its nuanced receptivity to identity and belief--provides a valuable reader for the literary critic, particularly with regard to the question: How do (or should) we talk about spirituality in literary criticism? In this section of my article, I shall examine two recent critical studies on South/ African literary texts that draw on indigenous religious beliefs: Wenzel's book (2009) on the afterlives of prophecy and Mathuray's book (2009) on the ambivalence of the sacred, respectively. The two studies are paradigmatic of prevailing attitudes towards spirituality in the literary domain. At the one end are those critics (the majority) who secularise the spiritual; at the other end are those (a new tendency) who, to quote Brown, "'voice' belief, rather than report doctrine, allowing the explanatory power of belief, without necessarily endorsing it [while] narrating the belief from within, but retaining the critical distance" (2009: 18-19).

Wenzel's Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (2009) voices--what Boym (2001: XVIII) calls--"restorative nostalgia" for the unfulfilled potential of the Xhosa cattle-killing of 1857, that is, for the unfulfilled potential of what Wenzel sees as an expression of anticolonial nationalism. Aware that "modernization coexists uneasily with millennial visions and magical thinking" (11), she engages with religious phenomena as forms of 'magic': "an expansive term for the supernatural, mysterious, or wondrous that crosses temporal, colonial, and theological divides" (12). She refers to magic as an unproblematic, semi-fictional category, and is interested in prophecy not so much in its spiritual manifestation as in its social effects and consequences: its 'afterlives' as forms of anticolonial resistance.

In attempting to connect a spectacular past failure to its present significance, her 'restorative nostalgia' offers secularising explanations of the spiritual impulse: "metaphors for more mundane processes" (12). In this respect, she shows affinities with marxist approaches to religion (7; 12-13) as in the tradition of 'Africanist' scholars of the 1970s and 1980s for whom "religion began to be seen in terms of a politics of resistance" (Frahm-Arp 2008: 83). It is a politics of resistance infused with idealism, as in Wenzel's own brand of millenarianism: that is, in her efforts to "recover the negated possibilities of the past [and obtain] freedom from deterministic historical narratives" (Su 2005: 17). Wenzel re-thinks failure and argues for "renewed attention to the unrealized aspirations of anticolonialism ... the utopian potential of dreams of liberation" (9).

She does this by analysing a number of key literary texts in order to demonstrate how narrative form can accommodate both the haunting presence and the physical absence of the dead. She starts by scrutinising late 19th-century accounts of the cattle-killing by setting orality in contrast with literacy as mediated by mission presses (35). Issues of narrative authority amidst competing ideologies are also discussed in a comparative analysis of prophetic rhetoric and the "politics of intertextuality" (70-1), as illustrated in a play by H I E Dhlomo, The Girl Who Killed to Save (1936). The concept of "promise in failure" or "prophetic memory" (118) is elaborated in readings of Sol T Plaatje's political commentary, Native Life in South Africa (1916), and in a short story by Mtutuzeli Matshoba, "Three Days in the Land of a Dying Illusion" (1979). Then, Wenzel reflects on post-1994 narratives: Zakes Mda's Heart of Redness (2000) and Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother (1999). Finally, she looks at transnational networks of affiliation in John Edgar Wideman's novel, The Cattle Killing (1996), and Brett Bailey's play, The Prophet (2003), both of which stage cattle killing as an aspect of the global imaginary ("ancestors without border", 195). In all the works analysed, Wenzel suggests the need progressively to go beyond nostalgic retrospection and asks "what happens to time and history, memory and desire when visionary pasts erupt in disenchanted presents" (30). Why and how does the millennial imagination--the image of bullets turned to water--survive a spectacular failure of prophecy?

Her own brand of nostalgia examines--as Su (2005) would put it--how loss has helped "establish ethical ideals that can be shared by diverse groups who have in common only a longing for a past that never was" (3). She does this by analysing narratives produced in the prophecy's aftermath, the ways intertextual relations (between authors and readers) and transgenerational conversations (between prophets and their audiences) inform our understanding of a prophecy unfulfilled. By focusing on afterlives rather than on apparent failures, Wenzel invites us to think about time and narrative in new ways, so as to "to recover modes of dreaming difference that would transform remembered prophecies of a-colonial restoration into prophetic memories of post-colonial justice" (280). In her effort to confront what Bloch (1986) would call "utopian surplus", Wenzel's working tools are those of literary history. She reflects on how change is reimagined metaphorically, and reveals how authors manipulate recurring images of the cattle-killing prophecy and its aftermath, and do so as constrained/ enabled by their immediate historical contexts. Her examination of the way literary narrative production keeps prophecy-inspired visions alive is exemplary, her exegesis thorough.

Having said that, I believe the project could have offered a more nuanced, integrated view had the author probed her own question: "How can the dynamics of prophecy help us to understand literary questions?" (2). In other words, she could have taken the reader into the inner workings of prophecy-as-prophecy--not expediently relegated to the domain of unqualified "magic" or "wondrous mystery" (12), but--primarily as a spiritual phenomenon steeped (in the cases she studies) in both indigenous and Christian beliefs. Wenzel insists on prophecy's linear, teleological, Christian-inspired, nationalistic and anti-colonial consequences (a template of late modernity). She does not reflect on the indigenous significance of prophecy: on prophetic renewal as a collective rite of passage from a state of moral turpitude to cyclically repeated disaggregations aimed at a regeneration from within--ad infinitum, non-teleologically (Horton 1967: 176-80).

Another recent project on spiritual issues as represented in African literature is Mark Mathuray's On the Sacred in African Literature: Old Gods and New Worlds (2009). Although similar to Wenzel's concern in a thematic sense, the two projects could not be more different in their respective approaches to spirituality. While for Wenzel prophecy is an epiphenomenon, a pretext for an analysis of anti-colonial resistance literature, Mathuray holds the literary text to its spiritual account. While Wenzel's future scenario is shaped by a politics of power, Mathuray focuses on the ancient blueprints of indigenous knowledge systems that valorise the sacred. While Wenzel (like Appiah 1992) takes it as a given that African societies aspire to move beyond 'superstition' and to embrace the values of secularised late modernity, Mathuray is intrigued by the obstinate persistence of the spiritual impulse on the African continent. While Wenzel 'secularises' the spiritual impulse (relegating it to a subordinate role), Mathuray seeks to unearth the spiritual roots of African political life: "I resist an approach to the sacred that relates it exclusively to principles and conflicts of the socio-political order, and also explore the metaphysical implications of the idea of the sacred" (2009: 11). To his credit, he does this by paying due attention to context, whether social, cultural or political, and is fully aware of the pitfalls of essentialism.

At the outset, Mathuray signals his awareness of prevalent literary-critical interpretations of religion, which tend to favour a secular over a mythical aesthetic. This dichotomy is partly understandable given that African literary criticism has always focused on issues of 'authenticity' defined primarily as subversion of European influences. The primacy granted to the political, secular pursuit--and the concomitant belief in the value of realism as the best vehicle for representing social concern--reflects a postcolonial cultural politics which, as has been suggested, has foregrounded processes of social confrontation, or decolonisation, and has regarded with suspicion forms of identification that fall outside the secularising impulse of national liberation movements. While acknowledging the value of such views, Mathuray is intrigued by the persistence of the spiritual in African thought and by literary criticism's equally persistent, yet puzzlingly unreflective, indifference to this phenomenon. What he sets out to achieve is not to negate social pursuit, but its simplistic application in the way in which African writers are categorised as either 'realist' or 'mytho-poetic'. (See also Gaylard 2005) What postcolonial critics tend to forget, however, is that African practical philosophy places power/ authority within a larger, metaphysical frame of reference; to deny this is to impose upon the text an alien--yes, Eurocentric, albeit marxist--grid that is unwilling to acknowledge significant links between myth and history, or between the sacred and the profane.

Mathuray opposes views that take the West as the exemplary historical model. He disapproves of Appiah's 'disenchantment' thesis (1992)--as hinted at in the subtitle of Mathuray's book--according to which it is desirable that Africa become 'disenchanted' with its own mythology ("the old gods") and embrace the West's "new worlds" of technical progress. Instead, Mathuray holds that it is possible for the spiritual and the secular to co-exist, and for myth and history to be co-incidental. As I have shown in the first part of this article, it is an assumption that has gained currency in the last decade or so: researchers have been intrigued to find that spiritual beliefs have not been erased by the progressive penetration of modernisation on the African continent. However, it is important to keep in mind that modernisation is not umbilically linked to secularisation, as in Martin's 'multiple secularisation/de-secularisation' thesis. (See my comments on Young 2001, Ashcroft 2006, Brown 2009, Martin 2005, above.)

Mathuray offers a new point of entry to debates on spirituality: his study seeks to introduce into the field of African literary criticism the concept of the 'sacred'. This is an innovative move, the aim of which is to offer alternative readings of the tired binaries of 'myth/history' and the accompanying literary dualism of 'realist/mythopoetic' fiction. Foregrounding 'the sacred' is useful particularly because of its intrinsic capacity to contain opposing worldviews: "theories of the ambivalence of the sacred have not been used in the elucidation of the [both/and] logic of African symbolic production" (11). Furthermore, by utilising the concept of the sacred as working tool, Mathuray finds intriguing similarities between authors such as Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Okri and Coetzee, authors who according to 'secular' literary criticism--do not have anything in common as regards representations of political power and authority.

Yet African forms of power, whether political or spiritual--Mathuray reminds us--are informed by the dual inscription of the sacred: power inspires respect (it 'sanctifies'), but it can also threaten ('pollute') the group's core values and boundaries. According to such interpretations, the spiritual and the political are not mutually exclusive: political figures often seek the support of those with access to supernatural powers and deploy spiritualising rhetoric to legitimise their authority. It is precisely this organic link that confounds Western analysts who, within binary models of thinking, tend to dismiss the non-secular (the sacred) as an irrelevant appendage.

The derogation of a mythical aesthetic--taken together with the related assumption that realism is the only legitimate form for representing political issues--is widespread in African literary criticism. For most African writers, however, a sense of the sacred is both real and rational. According to Soyinka, myth is the aesthetic concentration of a rational world-view--an encapsulation of "the reality of social and natural experience" (1976: 34) and the cyclical/ mythic method is considered to offer greater illumination of human experience than that of linear/ progressive narrative. Furthermore, even the realist form (as employed by Achebe or Ngugi, for example) is influenced by a metaphysical frame of reference.

Mathuray shows that the common denominator in 'realist' and 'mythopoetic' literary texts is an allegiance to the trope of liminality, which is "constitutive of the conceptual underpinning of the indigenous resource base through the idea of the sacred" (12). He fruitfully demonstrates how liminality can guide a complex reading of the sacred. By making extensive use of Turner's (1969) symbolic model of interpreting ritual, he draws attention to those aspects that generate change, and have the potential to influence history: "I also relate the sacred to arguments about the distribution of power in the socio-political structure of traditional society, and to the strategy of giving sense to the structure and functions of social organisation" (10). Throughout his book, Mathuray points to the benefits of drawing on the ambivalence of the sacred as interpretative and narratological tool. Each of the writers whose work he analyses relates the sacred to the socio-political domain, but in different ways. And each of these writers is read 'against the grain' of a secularising postcolonial criticism.

Soyinka, for example, is generally considered to be a 'mytho-poetic' novelist, who has even been accused of escapism into highly subjective symbols of alienation. Some African critics have been suspicious of his 'obscure' relationship with revolutionary change (Jeyifo 1985, Appiah 1992). Based on a fresh reading of the playscript Kongi's Harvest (1967), Mathuray shows that Soyinka disavows the traditional logic of sacrificial rituals, producing his own theory of social renewal and revolutionary humanism. While it acknowledges the ambivalence of the sacred, Soyinka's theory of tragedy is profoundly aesthetic and metaphysical, but "this deliberate aestheticisation cradles a specific polemic position: one that contests the European ethnographer's relegation of African ritual practices to the inartistic, the merely religious.... Soyinka's strategies represent a search for secular equivalents for the religiously-inscribed narratives" (51). This is a form of well-concealed "political ideology" (48). Here, Mathuray attempts to liberate Soyinka from accusations of being apolitical; rather, the playwright is shown to promote political agency--"alternative nuclei of authoritative values" (78)--by endowing his victims with subjectivity and will-power. Both Segi and Daodu, for example, challenge the new, tyrannical leader, Kongi. The tragic climax of the play lies within the sphere of the sacred: the characters courageously contest the powers that would restrict their freedom by re-enacting two archetypal moments in the narrative of Ogun (the deity of warfare) as recuperating "the effect of the sacred" (80). Briefly, Mathuray sees in Soyinka's connection between myth and history an example of "combative, revolutionary humanism" (85); the 'new worlds' being shown as capable of co-existing with the 'old gods'.

In contrast to Soyinka, Achebe and Ngugi are generally considered to be 'realist' novelists. An alternative, spiritualising reading ofthe two, therefore, is a welcome catalyst to current debates regarding political power and authority. A prevalent response to Achebe--e.g. Gikandi (1987) subordinates the mythopoetic dimension of traditional African life to the theme of colonial intrusion. Such interpretations reduce tensions between the 'old gods' and the 'new worlds' to ideological clashes (Obiechina 1975). By taking issue with such readings, Mathuray (2009: 43)--in analsying Achebe's Arrow of God(1964)--makes use again of Turner's interpretations of sacrificial rituals. He shows that while the hero (the Chief Priest, Ezeulu) creates order through rituals, he is also expected to provide expiation/ renewal for the clan by offering himself up for the supreme sacrifice of life. What is foregrounded is the double articulation of the sacred, in which Ezeulu is simultaneously glorified (as hero) and accursed (as victim). Achebe thus privileges the outcome of the sacrificial ritual in terms of bringing about ritual/narrative closure, and heralding the dawn of a new socio-political order (Mathuray 2009: 165). Political power-tensions, it is suggested, cannot be simply divorced from the overarching presence of the sacred.

Turning to Ngugi, who is usually situated within a colonial/anti-colonial frame of reference, Mathuray gives force to the religious syncreticism, Gikuyu and Christian, which is evident in the work. Whereas normative readings of Ngugi (e.g. Gikandi 2000, Ogude 1999) interpret the religious allusions to Christianity as another form of colonisation, Mathuray--in his analysis of The River Between (1965)--seeks to go beyond Christian influence to 'the old gods' of indigenous belief within Gikuyu nationalist struggle discourse. As identified also by Mbembe (2001), Ngugi finds that cyclic-indigenous and linear-Christian forms of prophecy interact, producing complex, sometimes ambivalent human imaginings. Ngugi's protagonists, Waiyaki and Nyambura, for example, are presented as caught between the need to uphold tradition and the need to promote the institutions of modernity; the political is interwoven with sacred intimations of power, while the ambivalence of the sacred expresses itself in political terms. Once again, Mathuray goes beyond a sacred/profane dualism, as he identifies "simultaneously secularising and sacralising perspectives: the double binds of the emergent postcolony, the subject of an uneven and conflicted modernity" (89; my emphasis). In short, Mathuray suggests that Ngugi's work cannot be reduced to reaction against either colonialism or Christianity. His interpretation of prophecy is in marked contrast to that of Wenzel (2009), as analysed above.

Another binary that requires rethinking is 'magic'/'realism'. Understandings of 'magical realism' are usually derived from Weberian and marxist rationalisation--e.g. Jameson (1986), Zamora and Faris (1995)--and implicitly contrast 'science' and 'magic' as modern versus traditional categories. There is a growing tendency in literary criticism, however, that challenges such logocentric bias. Chanady (1995), Chakrabarty (2000) and Gaylard (2005), for example, all offer a more integrative reading ofthe 'magic/ realist' dynamic: as a singular (not dual) worldview, able to accommodate alternative modernities and temporalities. It is in this vein that Mathuray interrogates conventional readings of magical realism, and uses Okri's The Famished Road (1991) to illustrate the "intricate network of relations between the material and the spiritual" (123). Okri's narrator, an 'abiku' or aborted spirit-child who keeps haunting the realm of the living, is perceived to be both natural/ human and supernatural. On the human level, the child-spirit's adventures serve as political allegory (Nigeria's unreadiness to enter the modern world). Echoing indigenous understandings of the ambivalence of the sacred, Okri's abiku-child is both holy and accursed. The text's intrinsic ambivalence--including juxtapositions of timelessness and change--motivates Mathuray's interpretation of it as "sacred realism" (127). Through his spirit-child's travels across worlds, both natural and supernatural, Okri shows that repetition can also accommodate change, for it "suggests a non-teleological theory of change, of repetition with variation and a sacred reality that accommodates change and diversity, progressing as it moves from one cycle to another" (135). Okri thus manages to incorporate history into the sacred: as 'sacred realism' (rather than as 'magical realism'), a unified worldview capable of embracing history's contradictions.

While it often seems more apt to talk about black African writers' fictional representations of the sacred, it is important to extend the discussion beyond racial typecasting (Africa as less 'modern' than the West). If J M Coetzee is an 'African' writer, he is also a 'Western' writer (as are, of course, Soyinka, Achebe, Ngugi and Okri); and in turning to Coetzee's fiction, Mathuray offers for consideration the concept of Kant's aesthetic of the sublime; this points to the encounter of the imagination with awe-/abjection-inspiring phenomena. Mathuray is intrigued, accordingly, by Coetzee's suspension of consciousness before an invisible 'abyss'. Like the sacred, the sublime has liminal qualities: "An aesthetic of the sublime operates on the border of literary realism and magic/sacred realism"(139); Coetzee, however, is shown as unable to go beyond the 'limits of the sublime' into 'sacred liminality'. In their relationship to the Other's silenced body/life, Coetzee's protagonists become spiritually impotent; this is what Mathuray calls "the stalled sublime" (137), and what Kristeva (1982) repeatedly calls "abjection"/"the powers of horror". The stalled sublime encapsulates an irretrievable breakdown in meaning, an incapacity to make sense of one's identity. Stripped of their social roles, Coetzee's characters exist in the 'liminal' space between two systems of reference, where they are stranded in a paralysis of the will, mind and spirit. Coetzee denies them the redemption of a 'post-liminal' re-aggregation (Turner's third stage of rites-of-passage), but abandons them in an incomprehensible universe. As Mathuray reminds us, Coetzee's novels seem to be "haunted by a metaphysical absence, an obsessive preoccupation with the absence of god" (168). This is in sharp contrast to writers like Achebe, Ngugi, Okri or Soyinka, for whom the individual character's alienation is relativised by a deep understanding of the 'ambivalence of the sacred'. In Coetzee's case, "alienation, loss of intersubjective community and a withdrawal from history seem to be the affective and material repercussions of the refusal of transcendence" (168).

One is reminded here of Coetzee's own speculation as to why the sublime did not flourish in the poetry of landscape--indeed, in artistic expression, generally--in South Africa: "Behind these questions lies a historical insecurity regarding the place of the artist of European heritage in the African landscape ... an insecurity not without a cause" (1988: 62). This insight may be applied to Coetzee himself. But what then of African writers from South Africa? It is worth noting that Mathuray finds his 'old gods' not in the south of the continent. Perhaps Mphahlele's early doubts about an ur-entity of "African Personality" (1962: 19-25), or spirit of the race, is relevant in this context. Dismissing Negritude as a romantic essentialism that ignored "the problems facing culture in multi-racial communities like the ones in South Africa" (1962: 28), Mphahlele pointed to the widespread establishment of Christian missions (much earlier and more widespread than in both East and West Africa), and to a relentless, and, from the 1860s, relatively early settler process of industrialisation. Taken together, these factors have overshadowed any pantheon of gods that, in the south of Africa, might have existed before colonisation. The situation to which Mphahlele refers is one in which black South Africans, for well over a century, have been located firmly within a heterogeneous, multi-racial and urbanised culture.

What I have wished to suggest in my focus on a spiritual turn in recent critical writing is what--I think--Eagleton, Bhaskar, Ashcroft, Boyd White, Brown and Mathuray suggest: that we take stock of our own reading practices which may be stuck in the grids of various orthodoxies, old and new. In "talking about God" we might revisit our understandings of reason and faith, and scrutinise secularism as the predominant interpretative frame of reference in the human sciences. It is the path opened in the recently published book by Ashcroft, Devlin-Glass and McCredden, Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature (2009), in which

   the sacred is imagined as earthed, embodied, local, demotic,
   ordinary and proximate. It is also the sacred of interrelationship
   --an ethic which is open not just to the agency of human ego but
   also to the other, to the land, and to that which is not human.
   (2-3)

Such an understanding of existential "presence" (16-21) focuses on the value of the sacred as a form of awareness: "a region of difference, inner transformation and empowerment" (2). Part of the purpose of Intimate Horizons is to inform the language of the 'posts' (postcolonialism, postmodernism) with a spiritual dimension as embodied in demotic human experience. Not only the language of the 'posts', but in South Africa also the language of our so-called ongoing 'national democratic revolution'--a language that is becoming wooden--might benefit from a spiritual turn. So might the landscape of our literary criticism. As Law professor Smiljanic says in "Reading Spiritually: Transforming Knowledge in a New Era":

Perhaps it is time we accepted reading spiritually--or, to use a metaphor, reading 'shamanically'--to access other states of consciousness, to see the world in different ways ... I use the metaphor 'reading shamanically' as a description of being and doing our work differently in the academy.... My call is to encourage an opening up of academic discourses, to break out of their controlled consensus reality of thinking, and to create with the awareness that we are spiritual beings involved with things deeper than we have been allowed to express. To fear not the rigidity of directed thinking, but to be the emissaries of new ways of thinking and feeling, and ultimately, to set ourselves and the world free. (In Spalek 2008: 143-5)

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