An Anthology of Neo-Christian Orthodoxy in the Criticism of Renaissance Literature

If the New Critics are right, and a critic must not be didactic, does the same not apply to a poet? Nabokov seems to affirm as much when a character in his "Spring in Fialta" says, "I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash." But he was speaking of the "Socialist Realism" of Communist writers and painters in the 1930's which was a special case. Clearly, in order for poetry to exist, the poet must assert his moral, ethical or religious values; Homer must be free to state that the gods go in disguise through the villages and cities of men, keeping watch over their good order and their hubris; Dante, that in God's will is our peace; Pope, that whatever is, is right; Steinbeck, that humanity's last best hope is in families like the Joads and in the red revolution they will make when they attain class consciousness. We, in order to read these poems with full literary appreciation, must perform a Coleridgean suspension of disbelief, where necessary, in the ideology; this engages us to nothing when the reading is over. As to the danger that the poem will "sink to the level of any ideological trash," Henry James explained long ago that that is really no danger. "The meaning or portee of a work of art is first of all dependent upon its being one," he said. First catch your poem; then, having demonstrated that it really is one, you can worry about its ideology (esthetically attractive, ugly? true, false? traditional, innovative?etc.) if you want to. Applying this principle to the Neo-Christian menace to which this website is dedicated, it must be clear that Christian critics must complete their work of proving that the given poem is a poem, and only then, if ever, make statements about the faith they share with the poet. It is worse if they imply that the poem will convert you, the reader, to this faith. It is worst of all if they imply that you must be of this faith in order to read the poem,or that God wrote the poem, or that the poem is a touchstone of faith, separating true believers from those who are not.

The following examples will show how licentious the Neo-Christians have become:

(1) Many of those who say that they dislike Milton's God only mean that they dislike God.

[Paradise Lost] has been compared to the Great Wall of China, and the comparison is good: both...divide the tilled fields and cities of an ancient culture from the barbarians. We have only to add that the wall is necessarily hated by those who see it from the wrong side, and the parallel is complete. --C.S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost, Oxford U.P., London, 1961, pp. 130, 135.

(2)[Grace] None doubted its existence, all lived it, for grace is an experience.--C.A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1966, p. 198.

(3)[The Protestant poet] seeks, strives, hopes to become a genuine correlative type with one of the Biblical poets-- as he may, if God so ordains.--Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics , Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1979,p. 245.

(4) Love God and obey his commands--this comprehends all.Indeed, the conjunction divides what is really a unity. Loving God implies obedience, obedience flows from a love of God; both are manifestations of an acceptance of God as the central fact of the universe...-- Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin, St Martin's Press, New York, 1967, p. 183.

(5) Let us search and try our ways, and turn again unto the Lord.--Epigraph to Surprised by Sin, printed on the title page.

(6)(Reading a self-consuming artifact) one moves, or is moved...to...the way of the good, the way of the inner light, the way of faith; but whatever the designation, the moment of its full emergence is marked by the transformation of the visible and segmented world into an emblem of its creator's indwelling presence... --Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts , Berkeley, Calif., 1972, p.3.

(7) [Donne's Death's Duel makes Christ's death] the central fact of our existence to which we can give no response but acceptance.--Self-Consuming Artifacts, pp.66-67.

(8) The imperative is "Read!"[Paradise Lost ] and by not giving up, by not closing the book, ...one learns how to read, and by extension how to live, and finally becomes the Christian hero who is, after all, the only fit reader.--Surprised by Sin, p. 207.

(9) Milton would have increased by one the number of the literalistic theologians whose corpses litter the highway of church history but for "the inspired gift of God rarely bestowed,"his abilities as a poet.--J.H. Adamson, W.B. Hunter, C.A. Patrides, Bright Essence, U. of Utah Press, 1971, p. 168.

(It may be necessary to explain the meaning:that the Christian theology of Paradise Lost is much closer to the truth [because it is divinely inspired] than that of De Doctrina, and for this reason, the poem, as a poem, is excellent.)

(10) One has followed the argument [of God's speeches in PL Book III], all right, but one cannot shake off the suspicion that God might simply be disguising a sinister plan to ensure mankind's humiliation. One is also conscious, perhaps, that such thoughts are not altogether compatible with the piety and reverence that one ought to exhibit in the divine presence.--Dennis Danielson, Milton's Good God, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, Eng., p. 107.

(11) By approaching us from a secular point of view, then, Democritus Junior takes us off guard and prepares us for the religious conversion that it is Burton's aim, as a Christian priest, to effect in us. --Eleanor Vicari, The View from Minerva's Tower, U. of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1989, p.187.

(12)...the insight to which a particular poem brings us is often inseparable from the realization that its source is not Herbert, but God.--Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, U. of Calif. Press, Berkeley, 1972, p. 190.

(13)There is an even severer judgment to be made: the critics who are busy debating the kinds of schematizations and formal organizations that we should keep in mind when reading Paradise Regained are, in effect, doing the devil's work.--Stanley Fish, How Milton Works, p. 381.

Here are statements that Paradise Lost should be used as the touchstone of faith (1), that Christians in a former age revelled (every one of them) in an experience called grace (2), that God picks out certain believers, all Protestants, to succeed as poets(3), that God exists and is the central fact of the universe(4), that we must repent (5),that by reading Bacon's essays, among other things, one can achieve salvation and discover that the whole universe is but an emblem of God (6), that Christ's death is the central fact of our existence (7), that only a Christian hero can read Paradise Lost (8), that Paradise Lost owes its excellence to the soundness of its theology (9), that to think God bears ill-will towards man is impious and irreverent (10), that The Anatomy of Melancholy is an attempt to make us undergo Christian conversion (11), that God wrote some of the poems commonly attributed to George Herbert (12),and that critics who fancy schemata and formal organizations in Paradise Regainedwill burn in hell for it along with their deluded readers(13).If the same books alluded to submissive women, happy-go-lucky negroes, asians (in the memorable phrase of the Prince Consort)all slitty-eyed, scheming and greedy Jews, and inept Poles, we would say, at the least, that such stuff was unfit to be published by a university press. But we readers of literary criticism are evidently still waiting for our consciousness to be raised to the point where we can say that this orgy of Christian piety is really worse--that it is more ignorant in forgetting 2000 years of Christian persecution and censorship (see the account of the Trinitarian wars in the late Roman empire in "Bright Essence"in this website), that it treats the reader with less respect, and that in maintaining the anachronism of Christian belief with the possibility of yet another mass-regression into orthodoxy, it is pregnant with greater evil.