Seeing “That of God” in Texts: Christian Practices for Training in Perception

The diversity of submissions for the seminar on the turn to religion in literary studies makes it clear that there are in fact many contemporary turns to religion. My article is concerned with the study of religious practice as part of that turn, a concern shared by the essays of Liam Corley and Karen Dieleman, which follow this one. Where their essays are chiefly concerned with the values of particular practices--devotional reading and liturgy, respectively--mine focuses more on the general value for Christian literary scholars of conscious reflection on the role of religious practice in their exercise of literary, professional interpretation and judgment, though I will turn to practices for cultivating sensibility--training one's faculties of perception to be more or less responsive to certain feelings or kinds of details--for examples to illustrate some of my general claims. That the study of religious practice has been a major element of the religious turn, especially as a starting point for secular scholarship on religion I take to be an obvious point. If, as Karen Dieleman points out, religion has re-entered the discourse of literary criticism largely through recognition of its status as "a component of individual and social formations" (this issue, 278), then practice will be the element of religion that this discourse will first explore. (1) It is perhaps not obvious that religious practice can also, therefore, be a valuable starting point for religious scholarship on literature. Our seminar's discussions have raised reasonable hopes that, given the religious turn in literary scholarship, Christian scholars might be able to enrich that turn by providing explications of faith and theology not accessible to secular scholars who lack intimate experience of the former or intimate knowledge of the latter. As Caleb Spencer put it, it can be argued that "literary texts, like other art forms and texts, can be revelatory and that the role of the Christian scholar is to mediate that revelation to those who don't have the eyes to see it" (this issue, 278). If the Christian scholar is to seek after truly revelatory insight into texts, then attention to ordinary religious practice might be too limited a scope. (2) Our discussions have also raised doubts, however, about the capacity of Christian literary criticism to make revelation available to readers who are not prepared to see it for themselves. Vincent Buckley, for instance, doubts that even if "a specifically Christian criticism" is possible, it will likely seem to the non-believer to be "a kind of aesthetic dogmatism making for its own powers of interpretation claims which derive from, and represent, the claims of Christianity itself," in other words, "a particularly demanding and even aggressive ideology thrusting out from the ruck of contemporary loyalties" (215-16). (3) If the revelatory insights of Christian literary critics run the risk of being dismissed as aesthetic dogmatism, then examination of religious practice might provide a way for the religious literary scholar to explain to secular scholars something of how religious scholars see, rather than more directly telling them what they cannot see but ought to. (4) Literary scholarship on religious practice might then prepare the way for literary scholarship that more directly addresses the foundations of religious meaning in experiences of faith and communion with the divine, as well as the systematic application of this experience to an understanding of God and creation in theology. This view of practice as the point of departure for growth in faith and knowledge is consistent with much recent work in Christian theological ethics. Stanley Hauerwas, for example, claims: We do not become free by conforming our actions to the categorical imperative but by being accepted as disciples and thus learning to imitate a master. Such discipleship can only appear heteronomous from the moral point of view, since the paradigm cannot be reduced to, or determined by, principles known prior to imitation. …