TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Part One: The Decline of Faith
Introduction - Theodore Ziolkowski
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226983660.003.0001
[spiritual crisis, United States, fundamentalism, secularism, modes of faith, religious belief, Christianity, Western Europe, spirituality, religious attitudes]
The United States today is undergoing a spiritual crisis and transition similar to that of the 1920s. The growing interest in Islam, Buddhism, Zen, Kabbala, Gnosticism, Scientology, Wicca, and a well-nigh unsurveyable congeries of neopagan and New Age fads challenges traditional Christian beliefs and calls forth in response a new fundamentalism. The situation in the United States differs conspicuously from that in Western Europe. According to a Gallup survey of spirituality in the early twenty-first century, 96 percent of Americans believe in God or a universal spirit. Moreover, a Gallup Millennium Survey of religious attitudes around the world indicates that a growing secularism prevails among contemporary Europeans. As was the case in Greek antiquity, in early Christianity, in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Age of Enlightenment, the situation of decline and loss followed by the search for a new faith produced a wave of often outstanding and always revealing literary documents. Whether we look back as believers seeking to counter non-religious modes of faith or as skeptics considering alternatives to religious belief, the comparison can be illuminating. (pages 3 - 8)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The Melancholy, Long, Withdrawing Roar - Theodore Ziolkowski
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226983660.003.0002
[lost faith, reason, Matthew Arnold, James Thomson, novels, religion, nineteenth-century literature, deconversion, reconversion, Leo Tolstoy]
The intellectual history of the nineteenth century is in one sense a chronicle of the steadily intensifying contest of faith and reason—a process registered in such contemporary accounts as John W. Draper's The Conflict between Science and Religion (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's classic History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). As is often the case, the poets were among the first to sense the mood of the age. The nineteenth-century loss of faith finds its earliest literary expression, whether elegiacally or mordantly, in such poems of the late 1860s and 1870s as those by Matthew Arnold and James Thomson. This chapter examines religion in nineteenth-century literature, the conflict of faith and reason, and the extremes of absolute deconversion and of deconversion followed by reconversion, as represented in the contrasting autobiographical accounts of Philip Gosse and Leo Tolstoy. These extremes exemplify the principal patterns evident in several of the major novels of lost faith that begin to be written and published at the beginning of the twentieth century. (pages 9 - 26)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Theologians of the Profane - Theodore Ziolkowski
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226983660.003.0003
[novels, spiritual tensions, faith, reason, good, evil, The Way of All Flesh, Jean Barois, Demian, religious belief]
Skepticism did not come naturally to writers born into intensely religious families and often intended, like Philip Gosse, for religious careers. If we consider three representative English, French, and German novels—Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Roger Martin du Gard's Jean Barois, and Hermann Hesse's Demian—surprising parallels become evident despite significant differences of nationality, generation, and composition. None of the three men undertook their highly autobiographical novels until their maturity (in their thirties and forties), at a point in their lives when they were able to look back with critical detachment at their childhood and youth in deeply pious families during an era shaped by the spiritual tensions of the years following David Strauss's Life of Jesus, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, and the other works that shook the foundations of conventional religious belief. These tensions provide the themes of their respective novels: The Way of All Flesh, a tension between church and reality; Jean Barois, between faith and reason; and Demian, between the worlds of good and evil. (pages 27 - 50)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part Two: New Modes of Faith
The Religion of Art - Theodore Ziolkowski
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226983660.003.0004
[religion of art, religion, art, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, faith, poetry, Stefan George, order, Paul Valéry, James Joyce]
Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were not the first thinkers to proclaim that God was dead. In The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel built the death of God into his system as a necessary precondition for the final stage of human consciousness which he called “absolute knowing.” Of relevance here is the fact that the statement occurs in the penultimate chapter, “Revealed Religion,” which opens with the sentence: “Through the religion of art, Spirit has emerged from the form of substance into that of the subject”—at the point, in other words, when a belief accepted by the whole society was being displaced by a radical individualism. In many cases, the aestheticization of art was not accompanied by a pronounced crisis of faith. This chapter examines the religion of art, focusing on the conspicuous ritual and liturgical element in the poetry of Stefan George as well as order, attention, consciousness, and discipline in the poetry of Paul Valéry. It also looks at James Joyce and how he turned to art as an escape. (pages 53 - 82)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Pilgrimages to India - Theodore Ziolkowski
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226983660.003.0005
[cultural pilgrimages, India, lost faith, Melchior Lechter, travel journals, Anglo-Indian literature, England, novels, poems, Hermann Hesse]
Many European thinkers, writers, and artists crisscrossed India on cultural pilgrimages in search of the paradise they regarded as lost in Western civilization—in the days when a trip to India meant weeks at sea and not just hours in a jet. At the turn of the century, Pierre Loti embarked on his quest for Vedic wisdom on the subcontinent. Three years later, the young German adventurer Waldemar Bonsels spent five months on the Malabar coast. Other notable travelers to India during the twentieth century were Max Dauthendey, Stefan Zweig, Melchior Lechter, Hermann Hesse, and Hermann von Keyserlinga. For various reasons, India emerged as a favored goal for cultural pilgrimages among European seekers after a surrogate for their lost faith. The strength of the wave can be judged by the reaction of George, a vigorous opponent of all mysticism, to Lechter's travel journals. Ever since the late eighteenth century, the extended official presence of England had produced a voluminous Anglo-Indian literature comprising plays, poems, and hundreds of stories and novels. (pages 83 - 118)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The God that Failed - Theodore Ziolkowski
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226983660.003.0006
[socialism, communism, lost faith, Germany, Roger Martin du Gard, Alfred Döblin, Ignazio Silone, religious belief, Richard Crossman, Thomas Mann]
A free-floating “faith” longing for an object was, according to Thomas Mann in the chapter “On Faith” in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), the hallmark of the age at the end of World War I. Mann's analysis was describing the mythophilic German, but also applies equally well to the internationally minded socialists and communists who were emerging in Germany and other countries in opposition to the nationalists of Fascist and Nazi tendency. In both cases, the political faith was a surrogate for religious belief. Richard Crossman came up with the inspired title The God That Failed (1949) for his anthology of autobiographical essays by six writers who were initially attracted to and then turned away from communism. This chapter focuses on three writers who share with the contributors to Crossman's anthology and with other former Communists the understanding that socialism and communism constituted for many of its believers in the first half of the twentieth century a surrogate for lost faith. They are Roger Martin du Gard, Alfred Döblin, and Ignazio Silone. (pages 119 - 146)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The Hunger for Myth - Theodore Ziolkowski
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226983660.003.0007
[history, Friedrich Nietzsche, lost faith, fascism, socialism, myth, Germany, religion, religious associations]
The nineteenth century has rightfully been called historiography's “Golden Age.” During this period, history invaded every field of academic thought—philosophy, theology, law, and the natural sciences. The works of Thomas Macaulay and Theodor Mommsen enjoyed an unprecedented public success. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, this euphoria was beginning to wane. In 1872, Friedrich Nietzsche struck a blow against academic history in his “Untimely Thoughts” on “the use and disadvantage of history for life.” If history holds no lessons to replace religious faith, where are we to turn? Nietzsche hinted at one direction in his comments on “monumental” history. Findings of positivistic biblical history persuaded many theologians at the turn of the century to concede some of the power of religion to myth. In nineteenth-century Germany, an entirely different meaning emerged, known by the Greco-Latin vocables as Mythus or Mythos, which appears to have a unique connection with conservative political thought—in particular, Italian fascism and German national socialism—and explicitly played on religious associations, offering itself as a substitute for lost faith. (pages 147 - 173)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The Longing for Utopia - Theodore Ziolkowski
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226983660.003.0008
[utopia, space, time, H. G. Wells, Men Like Gods, Yevgeny Zamiatin, We, Gerhart Hauptmann, Island of the Great Mother, exploration]
If the inward turn to art had failed, along with the outward turn to political solutions, whether in community or myth, the obvious solution was Nowhere, the place called Nusquama, Erewhon, or—in the phrase coined by Thomas More—Utopia. But where is “Nowhere”? In space? in time? In another dimension altogether? The startling scientific advances at the turn of the twentieth century opened new dimensions for exploration and exposed unanticipated potentialities for the positing of utopian visions just when Newtonian time and Copernican space seemed to be exhausted. The early and still classic model of this new type of utopia is H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905). This chapter examines utopia in three works of fiction: H. G. Wells's Men Like Gods, Yevgeny Zamiatin's We, and Gerhart Hauptmann's Island of the Great Mother. (pages 174 - 210)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part Three: Conclusion
Renewals of Spirituality - Theodore Ziolkowski
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226983660.003.0009
[spirituality, Max Weber, science, rationalism, religion, mysticism, Europe, conversions, Gertrud von le Fort, Evelyn Waugh]
In a lecture called “Science as Vocation” delivered at the University of Munich in 1919, Max Weber observed that “liberation from the rationalism and intellectualism of science is the fundamental presupposition of life in community with the divine.” Weber realized that a new longing for release from the rationalism of science is “one of the fundamental watchwords to be gathered from reactions among those of our youth whose feelings are attuned to religion or who strive for religious experiences.” The novels of Aldous Huxley and W. Somerset Maugham reflect a pronounced obsession with religious mysticism in the 1920s and 1930s. When Weber, Paul Valéry, and others observed a turn to spirituality in response to the disorder of the war, what they had in mind was a genuine revival of the religious spirituality that was lost by many at the end of the nineteenth century. One of the conspicuous phenomena of the years surrounding World War I in Europe was the number of conversions among writers and intellectuals from all religious denominations, including Gertrud von le Fort and Evelyn Waugh. (pages 213 - 238)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Notes
Index
