RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Religion
Religion and Literature
dogmatizes; both intimate, suggest, and seek to interpret; neither holds definite and precise intellectual judgments regarding things eternal, universal, or divine, but each possesses general beliefs and assurances respecting the divine and the eternal. Neither has a system, a scheme, but each has an intellectual interpretativeness and emotional sympathy with the personal in life and in being.
Religion gives to literature, moreover, vast and rich materials. Its sacred books themselves constitute great literatures and also furnish materials for great literature. The translation of
4. Litera- the Bible into Gothic by Ulphilas not ture's In- only preserved the Bible, but also helped debtedness to create and to perpetuate literature.
to Religion. Luther's translation of the Bible and the King James' Version are not only themselves great literatures, but also have helped to form great literatures in modern life. German and English speech, as well as letters, have been made more pure, more intellectual, and more inspiring by these great translations. It may be also added that the sermons of Robert South and of Isaac Barrow (qq.v.) are themselves worthy pieces of literature and might be compared with Burke's Orations. It is also to be remembered that the institutions of religion, as the monasteries and cathedral chapterhouses, were, for a thousand years, the custodians of the most precious treasures of literature. The medieval period was dark and damaging to humanity's highest interests. In times of war not only are laws silent, but also literature. It was the monks who preserved the manuscripts of ancient Greece and of Rome, copying and re-copying and commenting from the year 500 till the invention of printing. As the priests were astronomers, not only in Europe, but also in India, in order to fix and to preserve the feast and other holy days, so the monks of the Middle Ages in Europe, if not literary men themselves, were the guardians of the holy lamp of letters.
The religion which has made the strongest appeal to English and German literature in the last two centuries has been of two types: first, the universal or natural, and, second, the distinctively Christian; and the poetry to which
5. Illustra- the appeal has been chiefly addressed tions; Pope, has given back a noble response. In
Goethe, illustration of the universal type, the religion which relates itself to literature, one selects three poets, Pope, Goethe, and Wordsworth. The " Universal Prayer " of Pope, a famous passage in " Faust," and the " Ode to Immortality " are the most representative of all passages of the three. Pope's " Universal Prayer," dedicated to Deo Optimo Maximo, declares in its first two verses:
" Thou Great First Cause, least understood! Who all my sense confined To know but this, that thou art good. And that myself am blind;
Yet gave me in this dark estate, To see the good from ill: And binding nature fast in fate Left free the human will."
And closes with the lines:
" To Thee, whose temple is all space, Whose altar, earth, sea, skies, One chorus let all being raise; All nature's incense rise I " ,
Between these two sets of verses are found petitions of a distinctive Christian character, as —
" Teach me to feel another's wo, To hide the fault I see; That mercy I to others show, That mercy show to me." *
The same type in essence, although still more general, is found in Faust. In a passage which is supposed, by some, to represent Goethe's own ideas of religion, Faust says:
" The All-enfolding, The All-upholding, Folds and upholds he not Thee, me, Himself? Arches not there the sky above us? Lies not beneath us, firm, the earth? And rise not, on us shining, Friendly, the everlasting stars? Look I not, eye to eye, on thee, And feel'st not, thronging To head and heart, the force. Still weaving its eternal secret, Invisible, visible, round thy life? Vast as it is, fill with that force thy heart, And when thou in the feeling wholly blessed art, Call it, then, what thou wilt, — Call it Bliss! Heart! Love! God! I have no name to give it! Feeling is all in all: The Name is sound and smoke, Obscuring Heaven's clear glow." t
With greater eloquence and definiteness, a similar lesson is taught by Wordsworth. The 6. Words- teaching has reference to the immaworth. nence of divinity and also to the pr existence of the soul.
" Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that riseth with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But training clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home : Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away. And fade into the light of common day."
" Those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing; Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal silence : truths that wake, To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor. Nor Man nor Boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
* Pope's Works, ii. 463-464.
t Taylor's translation of Goethe's "Faust," vol. i., scene XVI., pp. 221-222.
Religion and Literature Religion, Philosophy of