Adam's Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature. (Book Reviews).

Barth, J. Robert

Adam's Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature. By Denis Donoghue. Erasmus Institute Books. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. ISBN 0-268-02009-4. Pp. ix + 178. $24.95.

A phrase from a book review in, as I recall, the Times Literary Supplement has stayed in my mind for close to fifty years--"barracking and broken bones." The phrase was in praise of the seriousness of a book, whose title and author I've long since forgotten, and its willingness to engage energetically with differing points of view. Denis Donoghue's latest book, a series of seven lectures for the Erasmus Institute at Notre Dame, is that kind of book. It grapples vigorously with a wide range of poets, novelists, critics, philosophers, and theologians, and there is indeed "barracking and broken bones."

Donoghue takes his title from William Butler Yeats's poem "Adam's Curse," using it to enunciate his theme: "the conditions that make any achievement difficult," conditions flowing from the Fall--the "limitations inscribed so insistently in human life that they seem to be in the nature of things" (2). As a "motto" to suggest "the governing prejudice of the lectures," he takes a remarkable late comment of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "A Fall of some sort or other--the creation, as it were, of the non-absolute--is the fundamental postulate in the history of man. Without this postulate, man is unintelligible; with it, every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight" (2-3). Each lecture, then, is an exploration of one of the problematic human "conditions" that stand in the way of achievement, as well as--though admittedly in a more limited degree--"the possibility of putting up with the conditions and turning them to some account" (2).

The first problem, in a lecture called (from a book by John Crowe Ransom) "God without Thunder," is the very conception of God. Donoghue is largely in agreement with Ransom's criticism that Western Christianity has "ignored the God of the Old Testament in favor of Jesus" (14), with a consequent "softening" of Christianity, bypassing the fear of God in favor of love. "Maybe it is too late for thunder," he suggests, "but I think our priests would do well to elucidate the sacred texts for us and not to transcend the hard sayings" for "the New Testament is not all sweetness, light, and geniality" (28). In pleading for a sterner view of Christianity, Donoghue elucidates cogently and often brilliantly such writers as Herman Melville, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens, who portray a "God with thunder," and proposes that modern Christianity--particularly the Roman Catholic Church--falls short of these artists' awareness of the stern reality of God.

For all the brilliance of his analysis, however, Donoghue's reading of modern theology is too limited. Discussions of the role of the Cross in theology, in Scripture, and in the spiritual life have been many and varied in recent years. One need only think, for example, of liberation theology, which is founded precisely on the relationship of human oppression and human suffering to the divine plan for humankind. This is by no means "soft" theology. Nor does the rediscovery of the joy of the Resurrection in contemporary theology imply a denigration or diminishment of the Cross; the two have their fullest meaning only in terms of one another. Donoghue is wise to remind us that Christianity demands much from those Christ calls, but he is far from alone in his view.

The second lecture, "Church and World," which enunciates the problem of the role of the Church in the world, is somewhat thinner fare, though not without its interest. Donoghue disagrees with Henry Adams, who concluded that the Church gradually died after it turned from openness to authoritarianism beginning in the thirteenth century, and with German theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, for whom the Church is primarily a means of personal salvation, not of encounter with the world; he has lavish praise for the progressive papal social encyclicals of Leo XIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II; and, finally, he endorses the American constitutional solution of the separation of Church and State. Even as he expresses nostalgia for some of the earlier practices of Catholicism--Gregorian chant, the Latin Mass, "penance" instead of "reconciliation"--Donoghue expresses his acceptance of the accomplishments and reforms of Vatican II. In this light one could wish that he had engaged the work of John Courtney Murray, the great American theologian of Church and State and principal architect of Vatican II's decree on "The Church in the Modern World."

"Otherwise than Being" is one of the richest offerings in the series. Donoghue's theme is "the ethical turn in criticism and philosophy," following the "linguistic turn" of thirty years ago and the more recent "political turn," and his inspiration is Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas stands against such philosophers as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and indeed the whole "philosophic enterprise of the West" which has been "fixated on ontology and epistemology" (51). For Levinas "the primary act is the spontaneous one by which I address another person as `you'" (53). Donaghue applauds Levinas, along with Jtirgen Habermas and Richard Rorty, for attacking the philosophic tradition which insists that "the principal duty of human beings is to know" (60). However, he is less comfortable with Levinas' hostility to art and literature for standing between the individual and real life. Donoghue demonstrates beautifully, through discussion of a novel by J. M. Coetzee, the power that art can have by conveying "states of wonder, ambiguity, susceptibility to chance, the luck of being alive in our moment" (67).

In "Christ and Apollo" Donoghue pays tribute to the Jesuit critic and philosopher William Lynch, to whose book of that title he was introduced by Allen Tate. It is a pleasure to see Lynch's important book recognized in this way, and Donoghue finds much in it to admire, especially in its evocation of the "analogical imagination." Donoghue agrees with Lynch that analogy may be a useful tool in the discussion and analysis of literary texts. He faults Lynch, however, and I believe rightly, for not attending sufficiently to literary forms, suggesting that Lynch runs the risk of putting in place an "Act of Uniformity" upon writers (73). At the same time, it seems to me that Donoghue himself comes up short in his discussion of analogy. "Until better instructed," he writes, "I hold that analogy is an experimental or heuristic rather than a cognitive act: it seems to be a play of similitudes, not of identities" (77). What is missing, I suggest, is a realization that analogy by itself is not enough; for its full meaning it needs to be undergirded by the philosophical notion of "participation," by which all created beings share, albeit analogously, in the uncreated Being of God. Participation is mentioned in two quotations from John Milbank (90-91), but Donoghue seems uninterested in it. By itself analogy is simply a mode of attribution, but linked with the idea of participation it expresses a profound reality. Donoghue makes the requisite nod to Aquinas but fails to mention that for Aquinas analogy is inextricably bound up with participation. Donoghue may also be faulted, I believe, for a thinness in his discussion of analogy and metaphor. The idea of "symbol," as expounded most notably by Coleridge, could have helped bring greater clarity and depth to his argument.

The next "condition" Donoghue enunciates is the problem of false religions, and in "Beyond Belief" he highlights two of them: the "aesthetic" religion of poet Wallace Stevens and the "civil" religion of sociologist Robert Bellah. Stevens writes: "The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." To which Donoghue replies: "If I invent a fiction, I may take pleasure in it, but I can hardly believe in it" (98). Donoghue is equally stern with Bellah, whose civil religion is "an organized sentiment devoid of doctrine or other force," with "an aura not of sacredness but of utility"; it is "as if religion existed only to turn people into good middleclass bourgeois liberal Americans" (102). Of both these false religions Donogue would say: "The purpose of these secular or humanistic reductions is to disable religious belief while preserving its aura" (99).

"After Virtue" ponders a problem posed by philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, from whom the lecture title is taken. "In the absence of an agreed moral vocabulary, MacIntyre argues, we are left with what he calls `emotivism'"--that is, in MacIntyre's words, "the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling" (112). Donoghue then levels this charge at two distinguished poets, Czeslaw Milosz and Seamus Heaney, in their discussions of Philip Larkin's "Aubade." Both Milosz and Heaney find Larkin's poem lacking in a vision that celebrates life, and to that extent a failure. For Milosz, the poem is not "on the side of life" (115); for Heaney (in Donoghue's summary), "Larkin's poetic inventiveness is put to the service of a bad attitude that disavows exultation" (120). Both these views, Donoghue believes, amount to "telling a poet what he must say, what he must do, what attitude to life and death he will take, what intonations he will avoid, which of his moods he will turn into a conviction." Both Milosz and Heaney are "emotivists," because "they assert their merely personal preferences while trying to present them as objective and impersonal" (122). Curiously, Donoghue turns instead to F. R. Leavis as one who can be objective in his analysis of literature. In his analysis of a poem by William Wordsworth, Leavis uses words like "life" and "faith," but they are "justified by his sense of particular lives, their differences and similarities" (127). Not all readers will be convinced that Leavis is any less emotive, or any more or less illuminating, than Milosz and Heaney.

The final lecture, "The Death of Satan," considers the age-old problem of evil. Not surprisingly, Donoghue finds not clarity but a multiplicity of views about the reality and place of evil in the world, from the figure of Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost--a wonderfully suggestive reading--to Ralph Waldo Emerson to Charles Baudelaire and once again to Stevens. Baudelaire is seen as taking sin and redemption seriously, and evil as a powerful reality (139), while Stevens' "Esthetique du mal" is "a distinctively American response" to Baudelaire, in which evil is "every obstacle that life and nature put up to thwart the individual imagination. Evil becomes internal only because the imagination takes over the monster and incorporates it in itself" (142-43). Donoghue is nowhere more subtle and suggestive than here. After briefly considering the differing views of Andrew Delbanco, Andre Gide, Hannah Arendt, and Jean Baudrillard, Donoghue wisely concludes that "there is no reason to capitulate to what we are told is the Zeitgeist, secular through and through," for we still have to "think the compounded good-and-evil" and "there is nothing to prevent our doing so, using religious terms or terms from religious myths" (152). Again wisely, Donoghue concludes with the idea of tragedy, which can "lead the mind beyond evil appearances toward a principle of value and order. We are justified in feeling, at the end of King Lear, that there are operative values which may not be entirely defeated by evil otherwise regnant" (153).

This book will challenge the most sophisticated reader--and there is much to quarrel with--but the rewards are likely to be many. Denis Donoghue's learning is broad and deep, and walking this journey in his company can only enrich us. J. Robert Barth, S.J. Boston College