Modernism and Christianity

E. Tonning

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137319142
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria moderna

By theorising the idea of 'formative tensions' between cultural Modernism and Christianity, and by in-depth case studies of James Joyce, David Jones, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, the book argues that no coherent account of Modernism can ignore the continuing impact of Christianity.

1

RETHINKING ‘MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY’

This book is about the formative and continuing impact of Christianity upon the cultural movement known as Modernism. It defends the view that any theoretical, historical or critical discussion of Modernism that neglects or minimizes that impact is inevitably flawed. The whole field of Modernism studies should thus be rethought in accordance with the insight that the role of Christianity is intrinsic to any coherent account of Modernism.

The full extent of such a task is plainly beyond the scope of a short volume such as this, and indeed beyond the field of expertise of any individual scholar. A major purpose of this book therefore is to pave the way for future work, ideally across the range of academic disciplines through which Modernism in the arts, in culture and even in politics has been examined. The present chapter will develop a theoretical argument for the centrality of Christianity to Modernism; the following three chapters contain case studies of six Anglophone Modernist writers in historical context; and the book’s conclusion develops some implications for further study in the field of ‘Modernism and Christianity’.

The Modernist Crisis

Central to the conception of Modernism adopted in this book is the idea that by the late nineteenth century, large numbers of artists, thinkers, and cultural and political ideologues and activists had begun to experience the condition of Western modernity as a crisis: a seemingly unprecedented period of transition or epochal transformation pointing to an unknown, perhaps a revolutionized, future.¹ The response to that crisis generated a panoply of experimental forms in the arts, alongside radical experiments in thought, living and politics as well. A Modernist, on this reading, is thus both on some level a theorist or thinker of cultural crisis, as well as a practitioner of experimental responses to that perceived crisis. The fundamental reason why Christianity is intrinsic to any coherent account of Modernism is that the very idea of an epochal cultural transformation at this time would necessarily involve some confrontation with the still-dominant religion and cultural paradigm of the West. How was the Christian past to be assessed? Was it worth preserving, or should it be overcome once and for all? How to relate to Christianity’s present influence, both socially and individually? And did it have a future?² Whatever the answer, these questions could not be overlooked by Modernists. The overall strategy of this study is therefore to insert these questions into various existing accounts of Modernism and across the detailed case studies offered here, eschewing premature definitions but hoping to grasp some legs of the proverbial elephant by way of testing, probing and comparison.

A constant interlocutor in this book will be Roger Griffin’s synop-tic study Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (2007). At the heart of Griffin’s theory is the idea that Modernism arises out of a revolt against a late nineteenth-century modernity, increasingly constructed by artists and intellectuals – and after the First World War by much of the broader public radicalized by unprecedented carnage in Europe – as decadence. Modernity is of course itself a contested concept, but Griffin offers a suggestive list of criteria, citing

the spread of rationalism, liberalism, secularization, individualism, and capitalism, the cult of progress, expanding literacy rates and social mobility, urbanization and industrialization, the emergence of the urban middle (capitalist) and working (rural and proletarian) classes from a feudal structure of society, the growth of representative government and bureaucratization, revolutionary developments in communications and transport, geographical discoveries and imperial expansion, the advance of secular science and ever more powerful technology and technocracy.

(Griffin 2007: 46)

There is, Griffin points out, considerable scholarly consensus on the subjectively disorienting, destabilizing result of this historical process (47).³ Furthermore, several scholars of modernity have noted how heightened self-reflexivity concerning humans as ‘historical agents living within a unique constellation of historical forces’ (49) early led to a widespread sense of the future as ‘no longer a neutral temporal space for what destiny or providence will bring, but a site for realizing transformative cultural, social or political projects through human agency’ (50).⁴ This fuelled the Enlightenment and its revolutions, while also underpinning the more general nineteenth-century ideology of Progress. However, at some point a counter-reaction begins:

In the decades after the largely abortive 1848 revolutions, in marked contrast to the French Revolutionary period that had made them possible, the quintessentially modern experience of contemporary history as opening out into an as yet undefined future, as permanently pregnant with an ‘epochal new beginning’, began to run against the grain of actually existing modernity and the way post-Revolutionary society was visibly developing. In this profoundly uncoordinated, heterogeneous, polycentric countermovement the orthodoxy of political and technocratic progress came to be rejected as constituting in itself a superseded and moribund ‘tradition’ that urgently demanded to be transcended in order to find new sources of meaning, spirituality and communality. (52)

On one hand, then, according to Griffin, ‘actually existing modernity’ is increasingly construed as spiritually empty, threatened by nihilism and a subjective threat of dissolution and anomie;⁵ whereas on the other hand, the impulse to overcome this decadence is itself infused with ‘epochal’ thinking, wherein the future is seen as mouldable, and ripe for regeneration through ‘creative destruction’ (54). As this last term indicates, Modernism is complexly ‘Janus-headed’, expressing ‘both cultural pessimism and optimism, moods of despair and celebration’ (55): thus we find an ongoing ‘dialectics of chaos and (new) order, despair and hope, decadence and renewal’ (54). This then is the ‘sense of a beginning’ – or Aufbruch – alluded to in Griffin’s title. As Griffin notes, such a Modernist stress on transcendence, revitalization or redemptive regeneration has long been aligned with apocalyptic thought: where the collapse of the Old Order inaugurates the New (55).⁶

For Griffin, crucially, Modernism is not simply a movement within the arts: he distinguishes between ‘programmatic’ or political Modernism, which aims for a total renovation and reconstruction of whole societies to produce a regenerated New Man and a new overarching structure of meanings for such a society to live by; and ‘epiphanic’ Modernism, meaning radically experimental modes of artistic expression aiming to elicit (however momentarily) some form of intensified visionary experience, a glimpse of transcendence to set against a looming cultural breakdown and the threat of anomie. His definition of Modernism is geared towards the analysis of generic fascism⁷ as a form of Modernism. The ideology of fascism for Griffin is driven by palingenesis: ‘projects of national, social, racial or cultural cleansing or rebirth’ that were to be ‘engineered through the power of the modern state’ (8), while using myths and public ‘liturgies’ to present a semi-religious vision of the purified national community.

This book will touch on fascism in Chapters 2 and 3, but for present purposes, Griffin’s emphasis on Modernism as involving a pronounced religious impulse is of special concern. For Griffin, the Modernist crisis develops out of the erosion by the forces of Western modernity of a sheltering ‘sacred canopy’,⁸ meaning any stable system of collective meanings providing cultural value and some form of mythical significance to both individual and societal life. In its search for ‘new sources of meaning, spirituality and communality’, Modernism on this reading seeks to fill a need for religious significance: a drive towards ‘redemption’ or ‘transcendence’ viewed as intrinsic to humanity. While this characterization of Modernism as, in part, an alternative religious formation is useful and suggestive, the historical impact of Christianity upon Modernism is correspondingly overlooked because Christianity here becomes largely an inert thing of the past, simply that which can no longer provide a ‘sacred canopy’. But this obscures the continuing influence of Christianity as a cultural and political force throughout the Modernist period. Any effort to overcome Christianity, and to invent alternative forms of transcendence in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century West, would still be costly and challenging for the individuals and movements concerned. Thus, the ‘sense of a beginning’ described by Griffin necessarily involved as well some definite stance on the past, present and future of Christianity in Western culture. The very idea of epochal transformation, in fact, involves a specific imaginative construction of the Old Era in contradistinction from the New. A fundamental task for ‘Modernism and Christianity’ as a field of study, therefore, is to chart and document how this active, unavoidable, formative tension manifests itself from case to case. In order properly to register the sheer weight of contextual pressure from the various incarnations of Christianity upon individual Modernist movements, life-stories and oeuvres, it is imperative to ask for dense historical context, archival research and biographical and textual details. Carefully tracing individual patterns of resistance or appropriation brings out the way characteristic themes tend to shape themselves around that tension. With this information to hand, the wider task of comparison between the many modes of Modernist creative response to Christianity can begin.

Another important focus for the study of ‘Modernism and Christianity’ that Griffin’s framework helps to illuminate is the distinct phenomenon of Christian Modernisms, often involving converts or returns to the faith. While Griffin keeps Christianity very much in the background of his argument and does not mention this group, his emphasis on the element of revolt against a ‘decadent’ modernity in need of spiritual ‘revitalization’ nonetheless offers a way to integrate the idea of ‘Christian Modernism’ into the field of Modernist studies. Very simply, for this group of Modernists, a revived Christianity was precisely the tonic needed to regenerate a spiritually empty modern civilization. Of course, other Modernists who happened to see Christianity as antithetical to the New Era as they understood it were bound to perceive this attitude as inherently retrogressive and incomprehensible, as in Virginia Woolf’s well-known outburst after a meeting with the recently converted T. S. Eliot:

I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.⁹

Equipped with Griffin’s framework, the scholar of Modernism can see that revitalization and transcendence¹⁰ is very much at stake for both Woolf and Eliot, despite their differing ideologies. In Chapter 3, we will see how Eliot’s attraction to Christian dogma was a direct response to a sense of profound cultural crisis and existential ennui; although he may have seemed corpse-like to Woolf, he too was seeking an access of New Life by using dogma to articulate the necessity for the intrusion of the otherness of God into history in order to save civilization.

In Woolf’s virulent response, one important role of Christianity in the genesis of some articulations of Modernism is evident: that of Grand Enemy. This then is one important kind of formative tension, and we shall see in Chapter 2 how resistance against the ‘anti-Modernist’ campaign of the Catholic Church could unite a broad range of mutually contradictory cultural ideologies under the counter-sign of pro-Modernism. Of the two case studies in that chapter, David Jones best fits the idea of a ‘Griffinite Christian Modernist’ as outlined in the previous paragraph, concerned as he is with cultural decadence and regeneration. Yet in contrast, the case of James Joyce presents a further complex conceptual challenge here. From one angle, it is not unreasonable to call him a ‘Catholic’ Modernist, in the sense of someone who (unlike, say, Woolf) was indelibly influenced in his work and thought by his encounter with the Catholic Church. On the other hand, he ‘left the Catholic Church, hating it most fervently’,¹¹ and it became for him a symbol of all that was deathly, stifling and unregenerate, not least in Irish society. But unlike Jones, Joyce did not construe modernity itself as the source of decadence: on the contrary, for him the church was at the root of society’s sickness, and it is, paradoxically, the modern ‘vivisective’¹² spirit that becomes associated with New Life in opposing that institution. Accordingly, while the broad ‘apocalyptic’ crisis pattern of decadence–revitalization identified by Griffin is arguably still at work here, Joyce’s case suggests that for some Modernists at least, the church and not modernity per se remained the principal adversary. Here, then, is another reason to insist that the role of Christianity is intrinsic to a coherent account of Modernism.

Modernism and Christianity: Some Formative Tensions

While the chapters to follow will explore the work of three ‘Christian Modernists’ (Jones, Eliot and W. H. Auden), the present discussion will try to articulate the notion of formative tensions between Modernism and Christianity in further detail. These do not necessarily involve aggressive confrontation, though that is often enough the case. This section thus identifies three broad ideological clusters that were clearly influential upon Modernism – vitalism, occultism and the theme of a ‘second Renaissance’ or modern rebirth of classical antiquity – where further study of the formative tensions with Christianity seems both fruitful and necessary.¹³

In the cultural movement of ‘vitalism’, which was extremely influential across Europe around the turn of the twentieth century, we find a distinctive articulation of the broader Modernist drive towards ‘revitalization’ examined above.¹⁴ Eirik Vassenden’s recent study of this area offers an incisive guide here. Vassenden defines vitalism as centred on the idea that ‘all life stems from a special Life Force, a creative impulse that is not explicable in terms of mechanical laws’; it further involves a tendency to ‘worship force and vitality [. . .] as manifested in and through nature’, and to value ‘the instincts, intuition and the irrational above rational thought and the social contract’ (Vassenden 2012: 13).¹⁵ Vitalism may make use of science in an attempt to prove or access the Life Force, or it may oppose scientific categories in order to grasp ‘life’ more authentically through intuition (14). Some vitalists displayed an aversion to modern civilization and technology, whereas others celebrated technology as a fresh expression of the Life Force. Politically, there were links to the extreme right, for instance via the nature mysticism of the German Blut und Boden movement that ultimately fed into National Socialism, yet one also finds strains of anti-establishment rhetoric, anti-bourgeois leftism, pacifism and even anarchism (14). Despite such variations, an important common feature is a fascination with all things forceful, rapturous and overwhelming (14), as well as with transformation, movement or dynamism (22). Another overall trend is a certain incipient antihumanism, in that life itself is given primacy over human life; that is, the drive towards ecstatic union with the Life Force or cosmos tends to diminish the importance of the individual (36–7).

The impact of vitalism on natural philosophy and science at this time, and upon biology in particular, is sometimes neglected by cultural historians of this period. Yet in fact, as Peter J. Bowler has shown, the actual reception of Darwin both by scientists as well as in the broader culture tended to sideline the principle of natural selection (see Bowler 1988, ch. 4, on ‘the eclipse of Darwinism’ (92) by 1900). Instead, the emphasis fell upon a more teleological ‘evolutionism’, emphasizing morphological similarities across species as expressions of the very mould of Life, alongside a drive towards more complex, ‘higher’ species as pointing to an entelechy beyond the random selection of strict Darwinism. As both Bowler and Vassenden acknowledge, a key figure here is the German Zoologist Ernst Haeckel, whose widely popular books and lectures emphasized the aesthetic beauty of the fundamental forms and proportions of life (pre-eminently in Kunstformen der Natur (1899–1904)). He thus promoted monism as a ‘bond between religion and science’ or ‘unity between God and the world’ (in Die Welträthsel (1895–99) and Die Lebenswunder (1904)), albeit at a molecular and cellular level (Vassenden 2012: 23; see also Bowler 1988: 77–90). An emblem of the ‘replacement religion’ character of much vitalist evolutionism is the crowning of Haeckel as ‘anti-pope’ at the 1904 ‘Freethinker’s Convention’ in Rome.¹⁶

Moving from science to the arts, Vassenden identifies such typical vitalist motifs as the sun (with human bodies in free, natural activity in the sunlight), the blood and sexual play and reproduction – all signifying human immersion in the natural cycle (Vassenden 2012: 28). These joyous notes are counterpointed by motifs of violence, fighting, war, natural disaster, fire or lightning. Such extremes display the overpowering force and creative destruction inherent in Life, while also potentially cleansing and purifying the human world of all that is rigid, stale and over-civilized (29). In this way, vitalism in art connects with the more specific interests in primitivism, myth and the unconscious so prevalent at this time.

The two most influential philosophers of vitalism are Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, who of course on any reading are also pivotal figures in the development of Modernism.¹⁷ The Life Force in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885) is named the Will to Power, and the emphasis is on competition, hierarchy and command. Creation, action and will are opposed to science, reason and the stale traditions inherited from history. This fiercely apocalyptic and prophetic book famously recommends an ultimate overcoming of ‘man’ himself, who is but a temporary ‘bridge’ towards the future Übermensch. Nonetheless, this apocalyptic development does not finally instigate any new Kingdom, but is itself merely part of an unending cycle, the perpetual return of the same. As Vassenden points out, Bergson’s emphasis, by sharp contrast, is on the mutual sympathy or understanding between all living things; he also draws much more on orthodox science, and was a respected figure of the academic establishment. Bergson’s focus is on memory and the subjective experience of time: ‘La durée is the connection between that which has been and that which is, but it also connects that which is to that which will be. Time is creation – life – in this sense’ (Vassenden 2012: 77). Bergson thus distinguishes his philosophy from a mechanistic Darwinism on the one hand, and what he calls ‘finalism’ – meaning the creation-derived teleology of Christianity – on the other.

This dual distinction is an effective guide for further study of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Rethinking ‘Modernism and Christianity’
• 2. Catholic Modernisms: James Joyce and David Jones
• 3. Old Dogmas for a New Crisis? Hell, Usury and Incarnation in T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden
• 4. Samuel Beckett, Modernism and Christianity
• Conclusion: Modernism and Christianity as a Field of Study
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index