Histories and Literature

Recently I have begun reading "Jesus and Marx" by Jacques Ellul. The book promises to be an interesting reading although this is completely in my own bias since Ellul is one of my favourite writers and has been for a few years.

The beginning of the book discusses four issues where marxism challenges the complacent situation of Christianity. Specifically what I picked up on was the Marxian (which he picked up from Hegel) emphasis on history. Not "the history of historians" but history as "we find it in the Bible: history filled with meaning, moving in a revealed direction, and culminating in a 'apotheosis' but with everything situated in history."

This intrigued me. Ellul continues,

"Christians had completely forgotten that the bible relates events, not reasoning; they had become immersed in metaphysics." Ellul expands on this by saying: "God enters the concrete life of his people and does not withdraw them from the world. He participates in history."

And again, this time more powerfully:

"Thus Christianity has utterly betrayed the very essence of revelation by transforming it into a religious spirituality."

Using Marxist theory he criticizes Christianity for loosing historical memory; for reducing the essence of faith and revelation to 'metaphysics' and 'religious spirituality'. The two things are connected: Christians loose a sense of history and thus become hyper-spiritualized (which makes them forget about real issues, how the real God lives and acts in history).

This is a forceful criticism and valuable insight; surely the neo-gnostic tendencies to make Christianity into a feeling and a knowing rather than a group of people called by God through Christ who act in real history has been influential. Ellul himself points to the marxist critique that "This unjust society results from twenty centuries of Christianity."

What does this have to do with literature?

Ellul shows that Marx (and Hegel) restored the idea of meaningful history, the type of history that the bible records and contrains, into popular consciousness. He further shows that it is this meaningful history that has been lost by Christianity and needs to be recovered.

What is this meaningful history?

Literary history. Or rather history written as literature, as a story. History that has a beginning and an ending, it has conflict and consummation, it has events and peoples that are meaningful to end result. It is not a chaotic dance of meaningless facts, records of horrific suffering and utterly pointless death. Rather it has a point.

This literary history has nothing essentially in common with "the history of historians". This history is a story. Up till now I have used arguments from Ellul to set up my introductory point: that Christianity is historical in nature, and that history is primarily literary.

BUT what does this mean for literature;what does this mean for the way we teach, learn, understand, use, theorize and speak about literature? Specifically how do we teach, learn, understand, use, theorize and speak as Christians who know about the history?

I have a few suggestions:

First it means that the we will be inevitable be reading the bible into whatever text we read. We can be reading Marquis de Sade (please do not, but that's my suggestion) and somehow read the Bible into it. It also means that unconsciously we will likely pick up on allegories and allusions within various texts, both classical and popular, that relate to Christianity. Whether this be Faust with the spectre of Solomon haunting your reading or R.A. Salvatore with possible memories of the more mythic-like Biblical stories.

I do not believe Christians can read a text without reading it WITH the bible. If they do not admit this, they must read both unconsciously.

Secondly, if we recover historical consciousness, we can begin seeing a literary text both within it's historical period as well as somehow being placed in the larger metanarrative of Christianity. Reading Tolkien for example one can (as the makers of the film series do) draws parrellels between Sarumans destructions and mechanization with the current ecological crisis as well as the effects of industrializations.

Primarily my thesis is this: Literature is not read alone. It is read with something. As Christians naturally we read it with the scriptures, and as theologically minded Christians (who know that God acts IN history) we can also see literature in the terms of a historical meaning.

The ideas in the post were various: I explored the Marxist critique of Christianity slightly, the importance of history in the sense of literary history, and the impact of being Christian readers: both in using the bible and and realizes that God is in history.

Some of the ideas I did not explore in this post were: the full extent history can play in literary studies, how the role of Scripture in reading literature can be inverted so that we read Scripture through other literature, how both of these things can lead to a fresher understanding of literary textuality.

My question to you would be: what ideas did you see in my post? What ideas do you want to explore through it?