Early-20th-century experimental literature has often been framed in terms of a turn from outer realities to interior worlds, occurring in tandem with an experiential turn in the study of religion. Once a background assumption of modernist studies, scholars over the past decade have placed this account under significant scrutiny amid an explosion of interest in religion and secularity in modernist writing.
Focusing on three poets—David Jones, T.S. Eliot, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)—Jamie Callison’s Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy is a significant contribution to this burgeoning subfield. Much previous criticism has construed modernism as a kind of spiritual margarine: an aesthetic substitute for religious experience. For Callison, these three poets—neither collapsing the sacred into the aesthetic, nor writing to narrowly defined religious audiences—afford a very different view into 20th-century religious change. Throughout his book, Callison moves nimbly from broad intellectual and social histories, to particular theological and scientific source-texts, to finely grained close readings of these three poets: demonstrating how they critiqued individualistic notions of religious experience and leveraged their respective religious traditions to speak to wider public concerns.
According to Callison, Jones’ poetry exemplifies how early-20th-century Christian orthodoxy was “endlessly reimagined by its practitioners”; Jones, while consistently committed to Roman Catholic orthodoxy, radically re-envisions the nature of that orthodoxy by fusing sacramental theology with contemporary issues in aesthetics and politics (36). Callison first shows how Jones read Jacques Maritain’s theology of “real presence” in the Eucharist together with post-Impressionist painter Roger Fry’s aesthetic theory of “significant form.” For Jones, both the sacrament and the artwork hinge on the co-extension of matter and form: the physical presence of the object and the spiritual presence of an underlying order made equally visible. In a skillful analysis of In Parenthesis (1939), Callison shores up how Jones does not simply unite the arcane concerns of liturgists and artists, but seeks to illuminate human nature in general, at a time when empire and militarism seemed to be actively eroding that humanity. Reading The Anathemata (1952) alongside theologian Friedrich von Hügel, Callison shows how, for Jones, the underlying unity of lived religion can only be understood through the incongruities between reason, tradition, and experience. This perspective feeds into Jones’ political critique in his posthumously published The Grail Mass. Contrasting the organic cultural bricolage of Anglesey Island with Roman imperial syncretism, The Grail Mass by implication attacks the British empire’s false universalism, which strips subjects of their creative and religious inheritances. In a distinctly modernist fashion, Callison argues, Jones’s poetry combines sacramental aesthetics with Catholic theories of human dignity that emerged during the Cold War.
Callison’s rich account of T.S. Eliot’s readings in the psychology of religion provides a particularly valuable case study in the history of this field. Under the shadow of Jean-Martin Charcot, Callison argues, Eliot interrogates the relationship between religion and hysteria, as his early lyrics seek “transformative revelation in unusual places,” yet “betray a simultaneous willingness to pathologise the search” (84). Charcot’s sharp “diagnostic attitude” later informed Eliot’s concept of “the dissociation of sensibility,” which pathologized romantic “mysticism” and secular rationalism alike (85-87). Critically engaging William James, Frederick Myers, and Evelyn Underhill’s theories of a spiritually porous subliminal mind, Eliot insisted that while visionary experiences can facilitate religious reflection, they are not themselves windows into the divine. For Eliot, only by holding apart the aesthetic and the “mystical” can poetry truly “allow for an intermingling of the sacred and the secular” in the public sphere (96). Informed by these contexts, Callison provides a provocative rejoinder to readings of Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943) as a visionary, mystical text. Here, Eliot’s response to wartime devastation is understood neither as an aesthetic surrogate for religion, nor as a coercive demand for orthodox renewal—but invokes the English mystical tradition as a common inheritance which tentatively gestures towards a shared future (114).
While H.D.—raised Moravian, yet drawn to an eclectic array of religious and esoteric ideas—might here seem a strange bedfellow of two committed Catholics, these very differences allow Callison to bring out striking parallels in their respective responses to religious change. While scholars have long recognized H.D.’s interest in Moravianism and the “personalist” philosophy of Denis de Rougemont, Callison sheds important new light on these contexts. Matte Robinson has argued that H.D.’s late writings abandon trying to “save the world through writing,” turning instead to quests of occult self-transformation (“Introduction”, Hirslanden Notebooks. ELS Editions, 2015.) Even Helen in Egypt (1961) is typically understood to filter its antimilitarism through interior spiritual visions. Against such readings, Callison shows how de Rougemont’s notion of “agapic” love—which would form the basis for a wholesale transformation of social life, bringing an end to war—shapes Helen in Egypt’s form and style (156). This complex poem, Callison contends, does not seek a “withdrawn spiritual practice,” but “a way of re-envisioning society” (162). Reading the experimental memoir The Gift, the supernatural conspiracy novel The Mystery, and the Blitz poem Trilogy, Callison finds that where H.D.’s sparce 1910s lyrics evince an intuitive, perennialist spirituality, these post-war religious bricolages interrogate that mysticism, through a “stylised uncertainty” which “speak[s] to the present moment” (162). This account of her artistic trajectory is a major contribution to H.D. studies—and, like much of Callison’s book, to our wider understanding of modernist religion. Some brief consideration of how H.D.’s final works, such as Vale Ave (2013) or Hermetic Definition (1971), might fit into this narrative—given how they explore the same spiritualised death-longing which Callison finds H.D. critiquing—might have been useful here.
Callison’s book offers significant original insights into the contested status of both orthodox and mystical religion in the early 20th century. That very historical slipperiness of the term mysticism might raise the question of its utility as an analytical category in the present: does modernist studies’ continued deployment of the term—whether referring to given religious traditions, trans-cultural religious phenomena, or secularized forms of either—risk displacing assumptions baked into this category onto literary texts? For religious and literary studies scholars probing such issues, Modernism and Religion’s attentive, thought-provoking analyses will be essential reading—and to rethink orthodoxies alongside Callison’s book is sure to be an illuminating experience.
Graham Borland is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Cambridge.
Graham Killian Borland
Date Of Review:
August 27, 2024
