Religion and Literature

by Dr Vinod Sena

When dealing with so general a subject, we must be clear what the terms we are to use will mean for us. This is essential since the word ‘literature’ is used to describe such totally different productions as the plays of Shakespeare and the cheap political propaganda that is flooding us today. When we speak of ‘literature’ we will refer to the class of works to which Shakespearean drama belongs, the artistic and creative as distinguished from the merely propagandist or works of scientific exposition and when we talk of ‘Religion’ we shall exclude from our meaning of it, the black magic of the African witch doctor, the quackeries of priests and pandits, and the elaborate codes of ritual and ceremony, though these are often associated with the term ‘religion.’ We will ask ourselves the questions.

What is the essence of the experience embodied in all great religions? What is the essence of the experience embodied in all great literature?

And having found some crude answer to them go on to see if there can be the possibility of a relationship between the two.

Let us begin with religion. What is the core of the religious experience? We may take some well known definitions to help us arrive at an answer. There is Mathew Arnold’s description of it as morality touched with emotion, one which succeeds in defining not the subject whose definition is undertaken but the personal pre-occupations of its author. Morality is an important aspect of religion, but it is not the primary aspect. As a modern Indian mystic says, it is only a stepping stone to Spirituality. We may next take E.B. Tailor, for whom the minimum definition of religion (is) a belief in spiritual beings. If we accept his verdict as final then we must find another term to describe such faiths as Buddhism and Confucianism, which do not rely on a belief in spiritual beings.

Prof. J.E. McTaggart comes nearer the truth when he analyses the core of the religious experience as sense of harmony between oneself and the universe. But he fails to specify the transcendental nature of this sense of harmony, and according to him even such accepted materialists as Dr Julian Huxley or the Marxian thinkers may be described as religious, for they see in all existence a consistent evolution of certain natural principles, each object being causably related to its environment. Contemporary theologians come still nearer the truth. They see the essence of religion as a sense of awe and wonder at some unseen power which is somehow felt to be working towards righteousness. To sum up, we may describe the religious experience as an awareness of a mysterious order – be it the Christian or the Hindu Trinity, or the impersonal Buddhist wheel of karma – which underlies, contains and transcends the material world. A passage in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ memorably describes this experience.

[…] And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man, a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things […]

Now let us turn to literature. What is literature? Or rather, what is the essence of the experience embodied in literature? As to the first query there can be no adequate answer that can explain for all that has been ever written by man, except Hamlet’s reply to Polonius. ‘Words, words, words.’ And our second formulation of the question that we are to ask ourselves, does not make the answer any the easier. Ever since the end of the eighteenth century, so many schools of philosophy and criticism have arisen that controversy has become unavoidable. But let us see if we can extract something uncontroversial even out of these present day controversies. Let us see what we can make of two statements regarding the essential nature of art by two of the best known modern critics. Dr L.A. Richards and Mr T.S. Eliot. Dr Richards in his ‘The Principles of Literary Criticism’ quotes Coleridge on the Imagination:

That synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of Imagination […] reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities […] a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order, judgement ever awake and steady self possession.

And he goes on to observe in a more scientific manner:

It is in such reconciliation of a welter of disconnected impulses into a single ordered response that in all the arts imagination is most shown.

Mr Eliot in his 1919 essay of classic fame ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ expounding his ‘impersonal theory of poetry’ says:

The poet has not a ‘personality’ to express but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.

No two critics could be more opposed in their approach to literature, yet both are agreed that literature, whatever the process in which it is created, embodies a certain ordering of experience. To take a familiar example there is the popular love song of Robert Burns.

Oh my love’s like a red, red rose.

To begin with, the piece is built out of a series of syllables. These syllables are arranged in a certain order to form words. These words, in turn, are ordered on a dual pattern of sound and sense to form a series of measured lines falling into stanza form, and sentences that make certain statements. Each stanza is related to the next and together they form the structure of the poem. Each statement is linked with the next and together all the statements go to form the substance of the entire poem. Here is how the first stanza runs:

Oh my love’s like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June. Oh my love’s like the melody that’s sweetly played in tune.

It takes two very disparate experiences: the experience of seeing a fresh red rose in the month of June, and the experience of hearing a well-played piece of music; and fuses them powerfully together by relating them to a third experience – namely the sense of beauty and the sense of harmony evoked in the lover by his beloved. This last in fact is the real subject of the poem, but it is communicated to the reader only through the evocation of the first two experiences. Having poetically realised and communicated this experience, the poet goes on inevitably to the next, namely his love for the woman who evokes in him this response, and he follows it up by affirming the undying nature of this devotion. Thus it is that we have that intricate pattern of correspondences known as Burns’ poem. And this creation of correspondences between different experiences carried on synthetically in a single process on various levels – verbal, rhythmic, emotive and intellectual – is fundamental in all literature.

If then the artistic process embodies an ordering of human experience, the question arises whether or not this has any relationship to the ordering of experience embodied in the beliefs of the author, or what we usually call his philosophy of life. And here we enter on critical quicksands, which have been the ruin of many before us. If we are to trust Dr Richards, no such relationship exists. For according to him a poet’s beliefs are irrelevant to his poetry; in fact they are at times a hindrance to its growth, the ordering of the experience being carried out purely on the unconscious level. Accepting the psycho-analytic formulations about the conscious and the unconscious, he sees the rational beliefs more often than not as an inhibiting and stilling force that prevents a fuller and a more satisfying organisation of man’s hidden impulses and appearances.

Mr T.S. Eliot, too, in the essay to which we have already referred, in spite of his basic differences with Dr Richards, says ultimately the same thing. For him too the writer’s beliefs are irrelevant.

The poet has not a personality, to express,

he says,

but a particular medium.

The artists’ mind is merely a ‘catalyst’ which does not itself have anything to do with the artistic fusion that takes place, but which by its mere presence enables ‘impressions and experiences’ to ‘combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.’

But can we accept either Dr Richard’s or Mr T.S. Eliot’s statements. Could lines like Shakespeare’s:

[…] Men must endure their goings hence even as their comings hither, ripeness is all.

or Milton’s:

Nor love thy life nor hate, but what thou lovest live well, how long or short permit to heaven.

or Wordsworth’s:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Some of the most celebrated lines by the three greatest English poets, have simply ‘happened’? Could they have been written without a certain faith on their author’s parts. The question raised is fundamental, namely it is the ordering embodied in art purely unconscious and accidental, or is it vitally related to a conscious ordering within the artist’s mind of human experience as he sees it? Dr Richard’s views are vitiated by his dependence on modern clinical psychology, which bases its analysis of the human psyche on an examination, not of healthy, normal men and women, but of neurotics and psychotics. By a study of such cases it comes to the conclusion that the conscious and the unconscious are always at war with each other and that it is the conscious that causes all the trouble by inhibiting the instinctive impulses and appearances.

But nothing could be less scientific. Our modern psycho analysts mistake the negative for the positive. They forget that what they are describing is true only of the abnormal, that may in fact be the very cause of the abnormality, and that the normal mind may be functioning for the greater part in the very opposite fashion. Is not the sense of well being that we in our better moments have, a sure indication of a perfect harmony between the conscious and the unconscious? And where else can we get this sense of well being as powerfully as in great art!

Then, may we not say, using Dr Richards own terms, that a great work of art embodies a profound harmony between the conscious and unconscious, a harmony in which if you abstract the one, you cannot have the other. Take away the conscious elements and the unconscious collapses; remove the unconscious and the conscious is left a lightening- blasted tree without sap and life, fit only for the woodcutter’s axe. Then how can we say that a writer’s beliefs are irrelevant to his work, when without them his work would not have been what it is.

On the other hand, the early Mr Eliot is vitiated by the belief that art is only art and unlike anything else, a belief which, in the fina1 analyses, links him with the pre-Raphaelites whom he so violently attached. Here is what he says in an essay published in 1927 – Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca)

The poet makes poetry,. the meta-physician makes metaphysics. the bee makes honey, the spider secretes the filament; you can hardly say that any of these agents believes: he merely does

and a little earlier in the some article

In truth neither Shakespeare nor Dante did any real thinking: that was not their job.

Such fallacious reasoning is unforgivable. especially when it comes from such a responsible critic who had, only a decade earlier. emphatically declared that ‘Every creator is also a critic’ (Ben Jonson 1919) or would Mr Eliot say that criticism too is a process as automatic as the spider’s secretion of his filament, a process that does not involve serious thinking: a process independent of thought. The blunder becomes even more unforgivable when we remember that Eliot is himself perhaps the most important poet of our century, and one who is, like Dante and Wordsworth, essentially philosophic. Could ‘the Four Quartets,’ or even ‘The Wasteland’ – despite the borrowings from thirty-five writers, and despite the poet’s attempt to keep the intellectual to construction outside the body of the poem, his refusal to commit himself – have been produced without serious thinking on their author’s part. It seems that Mr Eliot in his eagerness to give poetry an impersonal significance and his desire to extricate it from the tangle of philosophy and theology where Arnold and Middleton Murry had landed it, overshot himself and only succeeded in making the confusion worse confounded. However, he has grown wiser with time and has tried to make amends for his old mistakes. Thus in his 1933 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, he not only accepts the importance of the writer’s beliefs to his work, but also the reader’s need to keep these beliefs in mind for a fuller enjoyment of the writer’s work. Talking of Wordsworth, he says:

If we dismiss Wordsworth’s interests and beliefs, just how much, I wonder, remains. To retain them or to keep them in mind, instead of deliberately extruding them in preparation for enjoying his poetry, is that not necessary to appreciate how great a poet Wordsworth really is.

The writer’s beliefs are vital to his work. You simply cannot hope to have a major poem, novel or drama without some intellectual construction; for if what Dr Richards says is true, then, since our emotions are always in flux, no work written at more than a single sitting can have an inner unity. His theory may explain a lyric or two perhaps, but not a ‘Paradise Lost’ which took Milton eight years to complete. If art embodies order, order implies consistency, and consistency must imply a certain intellectual element. Again, Dr Richards would agree with his disciple Mr William Empson, when he tells us that the ‘Emotive meaning’ of words is very largely determined by their ‘cognitive meaning.’ But then he forgets to see that what is true of language is also true, in a wider sense, of literature and of life. Our emotions and impulses are not just hanging loose in the air ready to fall into line at the slightest provocation. They are very largely determined by the cognitive or rational meaning that an experience has for us. How different is our response when we see a tiger in the zoo than when we see him in the open jungle. Some rational ordering of experience on the writer’s part is inevitable and is a necessity – even nihilism or refusal to believe in anything, is after all all intellectual attitude – but we must insist that it be a harmonious part of the whole experience bodied forth in a work of art, not something superimposed, or contradictory to the rest of the piece. It must not be like Voltaire’s Dr Panglors who continues to declare that all is for the best even when he is being guillotined. It must not be, if we may use an image from the realm of botany, the wrong graft planted on the wrong tree which can only wither and destroy. But rather it must be the right graft fixed on to the right tree, which, when they fuse and become one, will make all the difference.

Now to return to our problem of the relationship between religion and literature. If religion be the perception of an unseen righteous order which underlies, contains and transcends the material world, and if literature be an embodiment of a rational and intuitive ordering of human experience, the possibility of a connection between the two becomes obvious. We may now hazard the statement that there is a basic similarity between the processes of the artistic and the religious experiences. Mathew Arnold perceived this intuitively when he said that the core of all great religions was poetic, and all great poetry was religious in spirit. But here let us draw a useful distinction between religion and literature. Both embody a certain ordering of experience, but in the case of literature this ordering is realised and expressed in term of the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty, a ‘probable impossibility’ being preferred to an ‘improbable possibility,’ whereas in religion the ordering is absolute and not subject to the laws of art.

We will now go on to make a still more hazardous statement, namely, that the art which embodies the profoundest ordering of human experience, the art which most awakens, exalts and satisfies, must be religious in spirit. And here let us anticipate an objection. When we use the term ‘religious,’ we do not mean that a work of art must be built on a system of accepted dogmas and codes, but that it must embody an awareness of an inner mysterious order within and beyond the material world we see. In our sense the early Wordsworth, the poet of ‘The Prelude’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’ is more ‘religious’ in spirit than the later and more orthodox Wordsworth, for his early poems embody a profounder awareness of that ‘something far more deeply interfused’ than do his later Ecclesiastical Sonnets.

But the criticisim may be raised that all good literature is not ‘religious,’ that, in fact, only a negligible part of it is, really speaking, religious in character. And this is perfectly true … We may take Mr Eliot’s division of modern artists into three categories as a convenient classification. First, we have those who are wholly ‘secular,’ for whom Spiritual Values and Spiritual Benefits are an unthinkable absurdity. Next, we have those who are in a state of indecision, the Arnolds and Hardys who would like to preserve Spiritual Values without recourse to Spiritual Beliefs. And lastly, of course, we have those for whom Spiritual Values are inseparable from Spiritual Beliefs. Of these three types only the last is, in our sense, ‘religious.’ And this class was never in a greater minority than today. In fact, it almost seems negligible, at least it did a decade or two ago. But are we therefore to judge by numbers? Determine quality by quantity? Are not the critics complaining of a qualitative decline in contemporary literature in spite of the modern artist’s greater mastery of technique?

The literature pouring in from the Communist countries which may be said to represent the first of our three categories, somehow leaves one dissatisfied. And one cannot help tracing the cause of this unsatisfactoriness to a weakness inherent in the Marxian system itself. Our objection to it is twofold. First, that though it opposes and attacks Hedonism, its fundamental premise is the same. Honesty, goodwill and co-operation are not good in themselves. They are not to be pursued for their own sake. but because they are the best means by which an individual can serve his own needs or the needs of his children. In short, the Marxian supports the right values, but he does so, for the wrong reasons, and a non-Marxian starting from the same reasons might, with equal logic, arrive at values quite the opposite. Our second objection is, that you cannot explain life just in terms of material needs. No doubt we must make the world a better, and a financially easier place to live in: but is that all we want? Is that our highest goal? If it is, then to our view, the Marxian ideal stands reasonably achieved in most well off American and New Zealand homes. The Communist writer, in the last analyses displays a surprising lack of profundity, the profundity so characteristic of the nineteenth century Russian novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. This temptingly displayed communal myth is built on a false over-simplification of life to which the only fitting answer is the query in the Bible, –

Is not flesh more than the raiment and life more than the mast, –

a query whose deadly intuitive logic is irresistible; a logic which makes our so-called ‘scientific’ formulae – preconceptions picked up in the laboratory, clinic or class-room – look mean and shabby.

Writers belonging to the second of Mr Eliot’s categories. present a more difficult problem, namely, can one preserve Spiritual Values, can one be really profound, without arriving at some explicit or implicit Spiritual Beliefs? We may take Virginia Woolf and Thomas Hardy – two writers sufficiently unlike to be fully representative – as suitable examples. Mrs Woolf weaves out of sordid, everyday, urban life a surprisingly charming world of sunshine and romance. She creates highly refined characters, people like Clarissa Dalloway. Mr Ramsay or Lily Briscoe, who are incessantly concerned about the meaning of life and about Spiritual Values. Mrs Woolf displays a violent antipathy towards reiigious belief, and yet seem to suggest Spiritual Profundity. We use the worlds ‘seems’ and ‘suggest’ for we doubt whether she or her work, really shows that highest- of-all quality. Here is a characteristic passage, dramatising at an important juncture in ‘To the Lighthouse’ the consciousness of Mrs Ramsay, the mother of eight children, one of the ‘refined’ types of Mrs Woolf.

There were the eternal problems: suffering, death, the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, you shall go through it all. For this reason, knowing what was before them – love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places – she had often the feeling, why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life. Nonsense! They shall be perfectly happy.

It raises questions and then evades them. And as with Mrs Ramsay, so too with her creator Mrs Woolf. Her Novels raise questions which they cannot answer. The final moments of so-called ‘illumination’ in the minds of say a Mrs Dalloway or a Lily Briscoe for all their apparent comprehensiveness have nothing substantial in them. Mrs Woolf’s world is in short a flood of moonshine with the moon missing, and one can easily detect a note of naustalgic pessimism underlying her whole work.

With Thomas Hardy, though he is a very different kind of writer in temperament and technique; the case is basically the same. There is, however, one significant difference. This is that whereas Mrs Woolf sees life as secular and yet pretends it can be beautiful and significant; Hardy, accepting the same premise, makes no such pretensions. As a result his novels, for all their technical crudity. their failure to create a single sophisticated character like Mrs Dalloway or Mrs Ramsay, affect us more profoundly than any of Mrs Woolf’s, there is a tragic dignity and an integrity, a sense of ‘character’ and genius which overcomes everything, even the limitations of bad art. But when all is said in praise of his works, a basic unsatisfactoriness still remains. The world is seen wholly in Darwinian terms; as a vast interplay of blind natural forces. The human consciousness is a torture inflicted upon us by an accident in the process of evolution. Life cannot be anything but miserable. Yet says Hardy, we must not run away from it; we must face it bravely; that is the only significance it can have. But can stoicism have any meaning in a meaningless world? Can you glorify the crucifixion without the resurrection? Can you say ‘The meeting it is all,’ without saying ‘The Gods are just!’ This contradiction is basic in Hardy’s novels. The values that he creates are ideal, but they are incongruous in a meaningless world. It is this lack of a centre in his vision, this inability to correlate the spiritual with the material, that gives his work its pervading sense of futility a sense which we never get from witnessing a tragedy of Shakespeare or reading Wordsworth’s ‘Michael,’ a poem built incidentally, out of the same tragic emotions and scenic materials that are employed in the Wessex novels.

Indeed pessimism is inevitable in any penetrating secular attitude. Secular literature must either be purile or despairing. It will either over-simplify life into a set of economic formulae like the Marxists, or into a set of psychological complexes like the Freudians, or it will, like Virginia Woolf and Hardy, reduce it to a circle without a centre, a structure without a foundation, a word without a meaning. It will make life into something lesser than it really is, something from which, like Hamlet, we intuitively recoil.

[…] What is a man if the chief good and market of his time. Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to first in us unused.

Having seen the fundamental limitations of secular literature, our statement that the greatest kind of art must embody a religious apprehension of experience, will now appear less rash and more meaningful. So far we have tried to justify our proposition in a negative fashion. We may now adopt a more positive approach.

The religious attitude when fully developed offers the profoundest ordering of experiences as yet known to the human mind. In no other attitude is there, to use Coleridge’s words, a fuller ‘balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordent qualities.’ With it such otherwise unresolvable paradoxes as life and death, good and evil, love and terror, joy and pain, past and future are finally resolved. It is no more accident that both in the East and in the West this apprehension has expressed itself in similar and somewhat paradoxical terms. Here is an English rendering of Lord Krishna’s words from the seventh chapter of the Gita.

Know this my Prakriti united with me: the womb of all beings. I am the birth of all cosmos: its dissolution also. I am he who causes: no other beside me; upon me these worlds are held like pearls strung on a thread. 1 am the essence of the waters. The shining of the sun and the moon: Om in all the Vedas. The Word that is God. It is I who resound in the ether And I who am potent in man. I am the sacred smell of the earth. The light of the fire. Life of all lives. Austerity of ascetics. Know me the eternal seed of everything that grows.

And here is what Mr T.S. Eliot an Anglo-Catholic, more than two thousand years later, has to say on the same subject:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; neither from nor towards: at the still point, there the dance is, but neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity: where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor there. Neither ascent nor descent. Except for the point, the still point. There would be no dance. and there is only the dance.

Burnt Norton

Now the writer who perceives such a pattern behind all existence – and this perception, if it is to have any value, must be rational as well as imaginative, conscious as well as intuitive – has access to the profoundest organisation of human experience. Not only can he include more experience into his pattern than any of his secular colleagues: he can also order it more coherently. His imagination, like that of Milton and Dante, can range from Inferno, through Purgatory to Paradise. He alone can touch the highest arid the lowest. He alone can create within a single piece a Goneril and a Cordelia. He alone can: –

[…] see the world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower

and

... hold infinity in the palm of your hand and Eternity in an hour.

Blake

He alone can pierce ‘beneath both beauty and ugliness’ and see not only ‘the boredom and the horror’ but also ‘the glory’ which as Eliot puts it, is ‘the essential advantage of the poet.’

Literature built on a religious apprehension will be more human, more healthy and more acceptable than that built upon a secular attitude. It will avoid the communal myth and simplification of the Marxist, and the isolationism and despair of the romantic aesthetics it will always have standard for judging any human action, a standard at once absolute and humane. It will tell us not only what life is, but also what it can be. It will never fail to give life some significance, treating with equal respect an ignorant peasant and the most refined intellectual, something that a Virginia Woolf seem to be incapable of doing. Nor will it lose its head and descend to morbid obscenity, even when dealing with pornography, as may be seen by contracting the relevant tales of Boccacio, Chaucer or Jeande la Fontaigne with some of those produced in our own times.

Again, the religious awareness offers a pattern that corresponds closely to the human situation with its mysterious complex of rational and intuitive forces. There is a powerful intellectual element involved, but the centre of the vision what the Gita calls as Brahman or Eliot as the still point remains a profound mystery. This mystery, ‘the religious artist sees at the core of every object around him, and this, if he be a great master, he can infuse into every part of his work. Like Shakespeare he can create characters and poetry which will elude all final analysis. He can give the experience embodied in his work a fourth dimension’ unknown to other men.

If the religious writer conforms to an accepted creed, he can avail himself of yet another great advantage. By accepting an old established tradition he can, like Dante, exploit a complex symbolism with different levels of meaning without running the risk of obscurity. Like Bunyan and unlike James Joyce, he can be enjoyed alike by peasant and academician.

We have, so far, talked exclusively of the general advantages enjoyed by the writer with the religious apprehension. It is time we made some useful distinctions in the field of religious literature itself. The first is that, broadly speaking, there may be two types of such literature: one in which the religious apprehension is a glass through which the human drama, the world outside, is viewed; the other in which the religious apprehension itself becomes the object of the writer’s contemplation. The first kind is best represented by the works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Henry Fielding, and by the Hindi and Urdu novels of Munshi Premchand or the poetry of Ghalib and the early Iqbal. The second kind is exampled by the poetry of Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, or the later Eliot. But these two types may coalesce especially in a major work, as in Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ or in the Ramayana and Mahabharata. A second distinction that we would like to make is that there may be two ways in which one may approach the supernatural order, either as a part of the material world and yet transcending it or as a pattern that exits apart from it and is reachable only through the denial of the sensory world, and of these two, it seems to us, the second attitude is the weaker especially for the winter. His chief concern, if he wishes to be read, must be human life. He must not turn his back upon it. Besides a belief in an order that does not rise out of life itself must of necessity be intellectual rather than intuitive for in the case of such a believer intellectual faith and physical experience cannot be at one: instead they are always at war with each other. This is a weakness that disconcerts one in most modern religious poets. Eliot is not quite free from it. His ‘The Waste Land’ represents the failure of the modern artist to abstract a meaning out of the chaos around him, a meaning which Dante on ‘The Divine Comedy’ Shakespeare in ‘King Lear’ and Milton in ‘Samson Agonistes’ succeeded in rescuing despite the distractions and social turmoil around them. In Ash Wednesday and the Four Quartets he does succeed in finding possible significance: but at what expense? He has to turn his back upon the outside world. He has to

[…] renounce the blessed face and renounce the voice.

It is because of this that his religious poetry fails to convey that sense of unity between the outer and the inner, the material and the spiritual, the intellectual and the emotive, which is the greatest achievement of Wordsworth when he is inspired:

And giddy prospect of the raving stream, the unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens. Tumult and peace, and darkness and the light, where all like workings of one mind, the features, of the same face, blossoms upon one tree, characters of the great Apocalypse, the types and symbols of Eternity, of first and last, and midst, and without end.

The Prelude VI 560-67

Lastly, we would like to say that the religious attitude, though it represents the finest and toughets ordering of human experience when fully developed, may, with weaker minds, become a sentimental means of escape. In such cases, it treats our life as a mere illusion, and takes refuge from its miseries, by dreaming of an imaginary Paradise of ease and pleasure to be entered into after death. No attitude could be more contemptible and more subject to the attacks of irony. If religion were only this, then it were better to be non-believer than a believer. Such an escapist mentality is the most easy to come by; and most professed believers – ever intending many priests and pandits – have never stepped beyond. It was the general prevalence of this pseudo-religion, one feels, which invited Carl Marx’s sweeping condemnation of religion as the opium of the masses. The true religious faith is, in fact, a totally different affairs, and it seems to us, the hardest to come by. It does not try to escape from the world: nor does it seek to evade the problem of suffering. In fact, as with Edgar in ‘Lear’ and Harry in ‘The Family Reunion’ it is often born out of tragic and harrowing personal experience. In some of the greatest tragedies, as in the Oedipus plays of sophoeles, or the Orestia of Eurepides. or even the ‘King Lear’ of Shakespeare, we begin with cynicism and disbelief and arrive finally at belief after witnessing life at its most terrible. The true religious faith does not seek to console by turning to imaginary heavens, but draws its strength by the direct contemplation of the chaos and tragedy of human existence itself. No two attitudes could be more different; yet no two attitudes are so often confused. Both in literature and in life, we must be even wary against the weakness of pseudo-religious belief. Michael’s words to Adam before he and Eve are turned out of Eden, at the close of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost.’

[…] only add deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add faith, add virtue, patience, temperance, add Love, by name to come called Charity, the soul, of all the rest: Then shalt thou not be loath to leave this Paradise, but shalt possess, a paradise within thee richer far.

Have a genuine ring very different from the week sentimentalism of William Culin Bryant’s poem, one of which closes with words:

For God has marked each sorrowing day and numbered every secret tear, and heaven’s long age of bliss shall pay, for all his children suffer here.

One can never hope to do justice to such a vast and intricate problem; much less so in such a limited space. The most one may do is to suggest and stimulate, and we hope that we have, if nothing more, at least made it clear that religion and religious literature deserve more respect and attention than they are getting today. We must not presuppose that they embody a defeatist, outmoded view of life. Nor must we presume as most of our scientists and psychologists do, that life is no more than the sum of the parts we have analysed. Dr Jung in his explanation of the unconscious, has shown how mysterious and complex, how elusive life really is. Science is certainly one of our greatest means for arriving at knowledge: but it is not the only means, and we must guard against its simplifications. Religious belief is essentially transcendental and subjective in character. Science. on the other hand, is essentially materialist and objective in nature. And a denial of a super-natural order because there is no scientific proof of its existence, has no more validity than the blind man’s denial of the existence of light because he cannot feel, taste, hear or smell it.