The lesson plans below provide some suggestions as to how Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy might be incorporated into courses on literature and religion and/ or modernism.
Literature and Religion
Giovanni Lanfranco, Ecstasy of St Margaret of Cortona, 1622, oil on canvas, 230 x 185 cm, Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence. Digital image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons.
The bridge-themed mini-golf course set up in the nave of Rochester Cathedral in southeast England. Credit: Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A helter skelter amusement ride inside Norwich Cathedral in eastern England. Credit: James D. Morgan/Getty Images.
Paul Regnard, Attitudes Passionnelles Extase, 1878, Photograph, 10.3 x 7.1 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum Open Content Program.
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Download the lesson plan here: https://doi.org/10.17613/jxjr-z388
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To identify the ways in which scientific developments have reshaped attitudes towards religious phenomena.
To evaluate the ways in which poetry has responded to and interpreted attitudinal shifts towards religious phenomena.
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Callison, Jamie, Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 79-96, 140-43. Open Access title via EUP.
H.D., ‘The Flowering of the Rod’ (1944), in Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall; Tribute to the Angels; The Flowering of the Rod, with an introduction and readers’ notes by Aliki Barnstone (New York: New Directions, 1998), pp. 111-72. Available via archive.org.
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Open class with a slide displaying two key images. The first image is of a Christian saint in a state of ecstasy. The caption is: Giovanni Lanfranco, Ecstasy of St Margaret of Cortona, 1622, oil on canvas, 230 x 185 cm, Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence. Digital image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons. The second is a photograph produced of a patient in Jean-Martin Charcot’s hospital. The patient had been diagnosed with hysteria; she was in the ‘ecstasy’ stage of the disorder. The caption is: Paul Regnard, Attitudes Passionnelles Extase, 1878, Photograph, 10.3 x 7.1 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum Open Content Program.
The images should should lead into a discussion shaped by the following questions: What are the similarities between the two images? What is important about the context of both images (What were they produced for? How were they intended to be used?) How does the photograph interpret the oil painting? How are the viewer’s attitudes and assumptions about the oil painting changed by the existence of the photograph?
This section of the class addresses the first objective: To identify the ways in which scientific developments have reshaped attitudes towards religious phenomena.
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Class teacher now asks the students to share their insights from the secondary reading: Modernism and Religion. The teacher may wish to pre-circulate the discussion questions. The discussion should be informed by Jeffery Kripal’s observation that twentieth-century psychology facilitated the ‘transit of the sacred out of a traditional religious register and into a new scientific one’. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 40.
This leads into a discussion structured by the following questions: Based on your reading of Chapter 2, what was Charcot attempting to do with images like image 2? How did these images contribute to the emerging sense of the secular? How and in what ways does Charcot’s project and/or the photograph challenge ecclesial authority and to what end? If the audience of the oil painting was happy using a religious register and discussing prayer, the soul, and God, what terms would the audience of the photograph be likely to use instead? Why is this shift significant?
This section continues to address the first learning objective: To identify the ways in which scientific developments have reshaped attitudes towards religious phenomena.
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The teacher/ class read Trilogy, pp. 155-57 aloud and begin a discussion based on the questions below.
What do you notice about the register/ vocabulary used to describe the vision? What are the key features of this vision in terms of location and time? What is the significance of the vision to Kaspar’s relationship with Mary as a woman? To what extent does the vision challenge Kaspar’s understanding of femininity? Where might you be likely to find this kind of vocabulary? In what ways is this vocabulary similar to or different than the visual language of the oil painting discussed at the start of the course?
This part of the class addresses the second objective: To evaluate the ways in which poetry has responded to and interpreted attitudinal shifts towards religious phenomena.
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The teacher/ class read Trilogy, pp. 165-67 aloud and begin a discussion based on the questions below.
How does this passage challenge the status of the vision? What verbal patterns do you notice? Where would you place these patterns on a scale from very poetic to very prosaic? To what extent is the register/ vocabulary of this section close to or different from the photograph we looked at in the beginning of the class?
This part of the class continues to address the second objective: To evaluate the ways in which poetry has responded to and interpreted attitudinal shifts towards religious phenomena.
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The teacher draws together insights from discussions of Modernism and Religion and Trilogy with a discussion based on the questions below.
Why does H.D. include both visionary and sceptical passages / registers in her poem? What does it suggest about the way in which H.D. as a writer engaged with vision? How according to H.D. are visions experienced / what emotions do they call forth? How is this different from the ways in which visions might have been experienced in the Middle Ages or in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? What does this poetic account suggest about the religious subject in the twentieth and twenty-first century? How might H.D.’s dividedness make religious practice easier or more difficult for the subject in relation to 1.) their religious communities 2.) the secular world?
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As this is a retelling of the magi story, ‘The Flowering of the Rood’ works well with:
T. S. Eliot, ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927). Available at ‘The Poetry Archive’ (with a recording of Eliot reading the poem).
There is also ample scope for a comparison with other biblical retellings:
H.D., Pilate’s Wife (1934). Available via archive.org
D. H. Lawrence, The Man Who Died (or the Escaped Cock) (1929). Available via Project Gutenberg Australia.
J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (2014). Available via archive.org.
Two critical essays/ chapters also particularly relevant here:
Suzanne Hobson, ‘Credulous Readers: H.D. and Psychic-Research Work’, in Incredible Modernism: Literature, Trust and Deception, ed. by John Attridge and Rod Rosenquist (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 51–67 .
Suzanne Hobson, Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Moderns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 93-125.
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Download the lesson plan here: https://doi.org/10.17613/7cjv-q716
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To understand the differences between ‘theological’ and ‘lived religion’ approaches to literature and religion.
To apply ‘theological’ and ‘lived religion’ approaches to interpret modernist poetry.
To relate ‘theological’ and ‘lived religion’ approaches to poetic form and to evaluate how poetic/creative texts work differently to religious paratexts.
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Callison, Jamie, Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 105-114, 169-92. Open Access title via EUP.
Domestico, Anthony, ‘The Twice-Broken World: Karl Barth, T. S. Eliot, and the Poetics of Christian Revelation’, Religion and Literature 44, no. 3 (Autumn 2012), 1–26. Available via JSTOR.
Eliot, T. S., ‘Little Gidding’, in Four Quartets (1944) (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), pp. 49-59. Available via archive.org.
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Share with students two pictures from the article: Megan Specia, ‘God Save the Cathedral? In England, Some Offer Mini Golf or Giant Slide’, New York Times (13 August 2019),
The images are captioned: ‘The bridge-themed mini-golf course set up in the nave of Rochester Cathedral in southeast England. Credit: Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images’ and ‘A helter skelter amusement ride inside Norwich Cathedral in eastern England. Credit: James D. Morgan/Getty Images.’
The discussion is shaped by these questions: Look at these images. Why do you think the cathedral authorities introduced these amusements? How might religious people react? How do you think the entertainments serve (or undermine) the religious community of the cathedral or the aims of the Church of England more broadly? Who are these cathedrals targeting with these amusements? How are these target audiences likely to engage with the entertainments and the cathedral more broadly either at the time of the visit or in years to come? The Rev. Gavin Ashenden (quoted in the article in the article above), a former Anglican clergyman, has called the displays a ‘mockery.’ He continued: ‘We experience a saturation of stimulation and distraction in everyday life,’ he wrote in a blog post. ‘It is almost as if the pace and pleasure of life set out to make reflection and prayer impossible. The one place one might be free of this could be, ought to be, a cathedral.’ Do you agree?
This part of the course addresses the first learning objective: To understand the differences between ‘theological’ and ‘lived religion’ approaches to literature and religion.
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Share the following definition: ‘How religion happens in everyday life has come to be called “lived religion.” To study religion this way is to expand our lens beyond the official texts and doctrines so as to see how ideas about the sacred emerge in unofficial places. It is to include the practices of ordinary people, not just religious leaders. It is to expect to find religion both in “religious” places and in all those other everyday places. It is to focus on what people are doing, as well as what they are saying’. Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Studying Lived Religion: Contexts and Practices (New York: New York University Press, 2021), p. 5.
The conversation will be shaped by the following questions: How does this terminology help you understand our previous discussion? How would the scholarship of lived religion position Ashenden’s comments? How does lived religion relate to the theological ideas you have heard about in Domestico? How useful is the study of lived religion to discussions of modernist poetry? To what extent can modernism be said to concern ‘ordinary people’ and the ‘everyday’? Is Four Quartets best understood as part of the ‘official texts and doctrines’ of Christianity or does it (or did it once) represent something more ‘unofficial’? How do those different positionings inform your understanding of the poem?
This part of the class addresses the first learning objective: To understand the differences between ‘theological’ and ‘lived religion’ approaches to literature and religion.
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Turn to Domestico, ‘The Twice-Broken World’, 1–26 and ask the students to share their notes and observations from their reading. The discussion is shaped by the questions below. Teachers might pre-circulate all or some of the questions so students can make notes under these headings.
What are the theological ideas from Karl Barth that Domestico recovers? How are they different from our discussion of lived religion / innovations in the cathedral? How are these theological ideas related to developments in the age of modernism? What strikes you about the way in which Barth writes? How does this approach to writing/ his writing style seem similar or different to poetic writing? How and in what ways do Barth’s ideas relate to Eliot’s poetry? Can Eliot be said to implement Barth’s ideas in poetry or is he doing something different with Barth’s ideas? How and in what ways?
This part of the class addresses the second learning objective: To apply ‘theological’ and ‘lived religion’ approaches to interpret modernist poetry.
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Turn to Callison, Modernism and Religion, pp. 105-114, 169-92 and ask the students to share their notes and observations from their reading. The discussion questions below can organise this activity. Teachers might pre-circulate the questions so students can make notes under these headings.
How are twentieth-century retreats similar to or different than the entertainments we discussed at the outset? Why did people go on retreat? What did retreats help attendees do? Why were retreats necessary or desirable in the cultural context described? How are the issues brought forth by retreat different to the ideas described by Domestico and Barth? What new research tools/ foci are needed to think about what people do as opposed to what they write? How does the engagement with embodiment in various ways help discuss different aspects of Eliot’s poetry?
This part of the class addresses the second learning objective: To apply ‘theological’ and ‘lived religion’ approaches to interpret modernist poetry.
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Read Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, in Four Quartets (1944), pp. 49-59. Focus especially on Sections III and V. The discussion questions below can organise this activity. Teachers might pre-circulate some or all of the questions so students can make notes under these headings. The teacher might want to acknowledge that these passages contain allusions to the medieval mystical theology of Julian of Norwich and the author of The Cloud of the Unknowing.
What theological/ dogmatic/ technical vocabulary do you see at work in these passages? How do those words and phrases compare to other sections of the poem (are they common? Do they stand out in some way?)? Based on your reading of this passage, is Eliot best understood as an ‘ordinary person’ or a ‘religious leader’? Is Four Quartets addressing ordinary people or religious leaders? Why is that significant and how does it contribute to the meaning of the poem? How are we to understand the allusions? What major shifts in tone/ emotion do you detect over these passages? How can these shifts be understood through our theological or lived religion frameworks? How and in what ways is religion important to the context of Four Quartets as a WWII poem (and one written with expected defeat in mind)?
This part of the class addresses the third objective: To relate ‘theological’ and ‘lived religion’ approaches to poetic form and to evaluate how poetic/creative texts work differently to religious paratexts.
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Teacher shifts away from close reading of passages and asks summary questions modelled on those below.
What different elements of these passages do theological and lived religion frameworks alert you to? Are both frameworks equally relevant (or irrelevant) or does one approach have more to say about poetry than the other? How and in what way? To what extent is writing poetry like Eliot’s an attempt to find religion in ordinary, everyday experience? To what extent is poetry an attempt to draw out the theological aspects of life and experience that might otherwise be neglected? How do your answers to these questions inform your view of poetry and what it does more generally? Is poetry a religious structure like a cathedral or is it closer to one of the entertainments we saw at the outset?
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To develop the ideas here, students could read the texts below.
To develop an understanding of the connections between lived religion and literature, a student might read:
Jamie Callison, Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 122-54. Available via EUP.
This section of the book focuses on H.D.’s unexpected encounter with her own religious heritage while reading an otherwise secular book and the catalyst this provided for reimagining her past and present. Continuing with lived religion, a student might consult:
Elizabeth Anderson, H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 43-60
Anderson looks at the importance of developing a transatlantic and trans-temporal religious community amidst wartime London through creative reading and writing practices.
Theological concerns of medihttps://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frac034eval nominalist theologians are picked up in:
Erik Tonning, ‘Modernism, Nominalism, and the Hidden God in Samuel Beckett, Wallace Stevens, and David Jones’, Literature and Theology 37, no. 1 (2023), 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frac034 (Open Access).
An alternative engagement with theology is represented by:
Matthew Mutter, Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), pp. 65-113.
Mutter presents modernist literature as a form of secular theology. Finally, students might consult:
Michael Hurley, Faith in Poetry: Verse Style as a Mode of Religious Belief (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), pp. 129-58
Hurley presents poetic form as itself theological in design.
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Download the lesson plan here: https://doi.org/10.17613/mnsm-9s18
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To understand central features of the secular worldview and its cultural significance.
To examine how and for what reasons modernist poets challenged this worldview.
To appraise how literary form facilitated challenges to secular outlooks.
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Callison, Jamie, Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 1-18, 60-69, 154-63. Available via EUP.
H.D., Helen in Egypt (New York: New Directions, 1961), pp. 1-63, 288-304. Available via archive.org.
Jones, David, The Grail Mass and Other Works, ed. by Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Callison (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), pp. 53-85, 124-28, 143-52, 111-18. Purchase via Bloomsbury Academic.
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Teacher shares an article such as: Safya Khan-Ruf, ‘Le Pen is bad, but many French Muslims like me don’t want to vote for Macron either’, The Guardian (22 April 2022). Article provides the stimulus for the questions below.
What does the term laïcité mean in French cultural politics? How has it been applied and in what ways has it been criticised? How are ‘intersectional’ features at work in this criticism? What have recent applications of laïcité (and the resistance to them) revealed about the history of secularism? What are the differences (and connections) between the terms secularism, secularisation, secular?
This part of course addresses the first learning objective: To understand central features of the secular worldview and its cultural significance.
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Class develops working definitions of the terms: Secularism: a form of political organisation; Secularisation: a historical process about the declining power / public influence of religion; Secular: a worldview shaped by secularism and secularisation and related intellectual ideas. The act of definition leads into the discussion questions below.
What role does the ‘secular’ assign religion in public life? What assumptions does the principle of laïcité make about the value of religion as a whole or particular kinds of religion in public life? How is that reflected in aspects of the debate we explored at the outset?
This part of the class addresses the first objective: To understand central features of the secular worldview and its cultural significance.
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Read Callison, Modernism and Religion, pp. 1-18. This debate will be informed by the following observation: ‘[The secular entails] the reordering and remaking of religious life and interconfessional relations in accord with specific norms, themselves foreign to the life of the religions and peoples it organizes’. Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 21.
This leads into discussion shaped by the following questions: What are some of the features of the secular remaking of the religion in the age of modernism? How did these ideas anticipate/ reflect the ideas we discussed at the outset? How did religious institutions and religious leaders respond to these shifts? How do the shifts identified contribute to the sense that religion is a matter of personal, private choice and of relevance to individual lifestyles and personal development only?
This part of the class addresses the second learning objective: To examine how and for what reasons modernist poets challenged this worldview.
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Teacher asks for student response to reading Jones, The Grail Mass, pp. 53-85, 124-28, 143-52, 111-18.
The conversation is structured by the following questions: (On pp. 111-18): what are the features of Roman attitude towards art, creativity and religion? What are their justifications for this view and what is their focus? How are these views expressed? What is the reader’s attitude towards the speaker here? This piece of The Grail Mass was published independently as ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’. How is it different reading this text in context? What is different about the style / vocabulary / viewpoint of the text at pp. 111-18 and at pp. 143-52? How does this reposition the reader in relation to the Tribune? How does this contrast between the sections relate to Jones’s portrayal of empire (Roman or British)? What does Jones diagnose as problematic in the imperial mindset? What does Callison, Modernism and Religion, pp. 60-68 say about the significance of Jones’s attitude to empire? How does the passage at pp. 143-52 address those problems? What does that reveal about the significance that Jones assigned to reading and writing poetry?
This part of the class addresses the third learning objective: To appraise how literary form facilitated challenges to secular outlooks.
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Teacher asks for student response to reading Helen in Egypt, pp. 1-63, 288-304.
The conversation is structured by the following questions: Focus on pp. 24-25, 39-40, 51-52, 53-54, 288-90. Helen in Egypt is a dramatic poem. In these sections, what do you see as distinctive about Helen’s voice in terms of concern, language, sentence structure? How is Achilles’s voice similar to or different than Helen’s? Are there moments when they sound like the other character? How are we to interpret the significance of this according to Callison, Modernism and Religion, pp. 150-61? How does this shape their relationship? What is problematic about the relationship that develops between Helen and Achilles? Why does H.D. stress both the discomfort/ problematic dimension and their closeness? How does H.D. stage their problematic relationship in pp. 288-90? How can this connection be understood in terms of personalism?
This part of the class addresses the third learning objective: To appraise how literary form facilitated challenges to secular outlooks.
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Teacher shifts away from close reading of the passages and asks summary questions modelled on those below.
What are some of the commonalities between The Grail Mass and Helen in Egypt? How are these common elements related to their political purpose? What is it about the form of the modernist long poem that enables it to challenge the secular isolation of religious concerns? What kinds of reading do these poems demand? How does this contribute to or detract from their religio-political purpose? These are poems that make use of sometimes troubling ideas. What are we to do with these poems if we disagree with them?
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The ideas discussed in class provide a stepping-stone for a broader consideration of postsecular theory. Students might consider the following texts:
Rita Felski, The Limit of Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 14-52.
Lori Branch, ‘Postsecular Studies’, in The Routledge Companion to Religion and Literature, ed. by Mark Knight (Oxford: Routledge, 2016,), pp. 91-101.
Felski (as Branch notes) challenges the use of a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in literary studies and notes how critique has obscured (among other things) attention to values and appreciation of beauty. Postsecular approaches can be situated as a response. For an accessible introduction to postsecular hermeneutics, see:
John D. Caputo, Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information (London: Pelican Books, 2018), pp. 273–304
Muslim worshippers pray around the Kaaba at the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia's holy city of Mecca on 5 July 2022. AFP/Getty Images
Modernism
Giovanni Bellini, St Jerome in the Desert,1505, oil on canvas, 49 cm × 39 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Public Domain.
Akshardham, Delhi. Creative Commons.
Rogier van der Weyden, The Last Judgement (detail), c. 1445–1450. 220cm x 548cm, Oil on oak, Hospices de Beaune. Public Domain.
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Download the lesson plan here: https://doi.org/10.17613/79a4-c949
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To understand the relationship between the modernist epiphany and religious culture.
To identify alternative forms of engagement with religious culture.
To assess the relationship between shifts in religious attitudes and developments in modernist style and form.
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Callison, Jamie, Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 1-12, pp. 79-96, 140-43. Open Access title via EUP.
Eliot, T. S., ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927). Available via Poetry Archive (with a BBC recording of Eliot reading the poem).
Fletcher, John Gould, ‘H.D.’s Vision’, Poetry 9, no. 5 (February 1917), 266–69. Available via Poetry magazine.
H.D., ‘The Flowering of the Rod’ (1944), in Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall; Tribute to the Angels; The Flowering of the Rod, with an introduction and readers’ notes by Aliki Barnstone (New York: New Directions, 1998), pp. 111-72. Available via archive.org.
——— ‘Hermes of the Ways’, in Collected Poems, 1912-1944, edited by Louis Martz (New York: New Directions, 1983), pp. 37-39. Available via archive.org.
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Share the following passage: ‘This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance.’ James Joyce, Stephen Hero: Part of the first draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, edited with an introduction by Theodore Spencer (London: Jonathan Cape, 1944), p. 188.
The discussion is structured by the following questions: Where or in what context have you heard about epiphanies in modernism or literature more broadly? What happens during epiphanies? What kinds of vocabulary/ register are used to narrate epiphanies? What are the key elements of the word epiphany as you understand it? Where does this word come from? Is there any vocabulary that is connected to this original context? What is it being used to describe in this context? Does the following quotation help you understand the shift from religion to aesthetics: Modernist poetry is ‘the imitation of imitating’. It is ‘centered on the effort to create poetry and on the “moments” themselves of poetic conversion, rather than on experience to be converted into poetry’? Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1961), pp. 3–21 (p. 8, p. 7).
This part of the class addresses the first objective: To understand the relationship between the modernist epiphany and religious culture.
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Share T. S. Eliot, ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927) and note that this poem is a dramatic monologue that recounts the event celebrated during the feast of the epiphany. Discuss the questions below:
In what ways does the poem resist or complicate the idea of epiphany as outlined by Joyce? How does the poem relate to the quotation from Greenberg? What drew Eliot to the epiphany story and how was that different from Stephen/Joyce’s motivations?
This part of the class continues to address the first objective: To understand the relationship between the modernist epiphany and religious culture.
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Ask students to share their notes on Callison, Modernism and Religion, pp. 1-12. The discussion is shaped by the questions below, which the teacher might wish to pre-circulate among students.
How does ‘epiphany’ slot into a history of writing about literature and religion and/ or religious experience? What historical factors drove and shaped this approach to literature and religion and/ or religious experience? What does this approach prioritize? How is the epiphany of Stephen Hero more in keeping with secular concerns than ‘Journey of the Magi’? What kinds of knowledge/ commitments/ interests does ‘Journey of the Magi’ require that Stephen Hero doesn’t? Would it be fair to describe Joyce’s epiphany as ‘materialist’?
This part of the class addresses the second objective: To identify alternative forms of engagement with religious culture.
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Read Fletcher, ‘H.D.’s Vision’, 266–69, which is a review of H.D.’s first volume of poetry Sea-garden.
What crossovers can you detect between H.D./ Fletcher’s imagist commitments and the epiphany? Where does Fletcher use religious terminology in the article? To what end does he use it? What connections does Fletcher identify between religious experience and the aesthetic experience of reading H.D.’s verse? How does that differ from the way in which Eliot writes about religion in ‘Journey of the Magi’? Another way of asking this final question is: What forms of cultural knowledge does the reader need in order to recognise H.D.’s poems as religious and what forms of cultural knowledge does Eliot’s poem require or draw on? Why is this development important for religious history? What does it reveal about the claims made by and about modernism?
This part of the class continues to address the second objective: To identify alternative forms of engagement with religious culture.
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Read H.D., ‘Hermes of the Ways’, pp. 37-39. Students are asked to go through the poem and pick out words that appear twice or more (avoiding prepositions). This leads into a discussion about the natural world/ its relationship with the I/ the contrast with Hermes. This should be structured by the questions below, which the teacher might wish to pre-circulate to students.
Where does the speaker come into the poem? What happens to her? What actions are connected to the natural world? Is there a contrast between the natural world described in the two parts of the poem? How is Hermes a contrast with nature? If the natural world is characterized by violent movement/ change, how would you categorize Hermes’s existence? Is there a difference between how Hermes and the speaker are treated by nature? Why do you think the speaker addressed a poem to Hermes? What does he give her? How is this different to Eliot’s dramatization of the magi? How does ‘Hermes of the Ways’ reflect Fletcher’s account of H.D.’s poetry.
This part of the class addresses the third objective: To assess the relationship between shifts in religious attitudes and developments in modernist style and form.
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Ask students to share their notes on Callison, Modernism and Religion, pp. 122-50. The discussion is shaped by the questions below, which the teacher might wish to pre-circulate to students.
How did H.D.’s religious concerns broaden or shift in later life? What role does initiation play in her religious thinking? How did this manifest in her encounter with Freud? How does this revise Fletcher’s account of H.D.’s vision (or at least as related to the later work)? To what degree does H.D. move closer to Eliot’s approach to religion? To what extent does a difference between Eliot and H.D. remain?
This part of the class returns to the second objective: To identify alternative forms of engagement with religious culture.
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Read H.D., ‘The Flowering of the Rod’ (1944), pp. 111-72. The teacher will note that the two major figures in the text are Mary (a composite of all the New Testament Marys, but particularly Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary) and Kaspar (a magus, but more merchant than king). Over the course of the poem, Kaspar meets Mary and is unsettled by her and goes on to have a vision inspired by her. The teacher may wish to share this summary with the students in advance of the class to help situate the reading.
Trilogy, pp. 155-57: What do you notice about the register/ vocabulary used to describe the vision? What are the key features of this vision in terms of location and time? What is the significance of the vision to Kaspar’s relationship with Mary as a woman? To what extent does the vision challenge Kaspar’s understanding of femininity? Where might you be likely to find this kind of vocabulary? Is this language closer to the epiphany of Joyce or Eliot? How? Why is this significant?
Trilogy, pp. 165-67: How does this passage challenge the status of the vision? What verbal patterns do you notice? Where would you place these patterns on a scale from very poetic to very prosaic? How does this reconfigure Joyce’s combination of the spiritual and the everyday in the epiphany?
This part of the class continues to address the third objective: To assess the relationship between shifts in religious attitudes and developments in modernist style and form.
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Teacher moves the discussion away from specific passages and develops the following summary reflections:
What does the religious language of the literary epiphany suggest about the commitments and claims made by and about modernism? How does H.D.’s early work reflect these claims? How does her later work shift away from them? What does this suggest about H.D.’s and/ or Eliot’s developing attitudes towards modernism’s aesthetic characteristics and utopian aspirations? Why is religion brought into this critique? Conversely, what do the claims made for and about modernism as a conduit of or to the spiritual reveal to us about religious history? To what extent has the epiphany etc provided a support for religious ideas in an otherwise secular world? To what extent has the epiphany helped shape, strengthen and sustain the secular?
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Development:
H.D.’s concerns/ the limitations of the epiphany can also be addressed in a theoretical register via postsecular theory. Read:
Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 101-32.
Kearney’s interpretations of specific modernist texts uncover embedded quasi-metaphysical religious attitudes, which represent the persistence of a traditional religious outlook, and then go on to unpick the ways modernist texts undermine that view, ultimately embracing the spiritual potential of the everyday. See also:
Richard Kearney, ‘Epiphanies of the Everyday: Toward a Micro-Eschatology’, in After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy, edited by John Panteleimon Manoussakis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), pp. 3–20.
Richard Kearney, ‘Epiphanies in Joyce’, in Global Ireland: Irish Literatures for the New Millennium, edited by Ondřej Pilný and Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2005), pp. 147–82.
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Download class plan here: https://doi.org/10.17613/k4pt-5322
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To describe the challenge of defining religion in the age of modernism.
To sketch how modernist literary cultural responded to these challenges.
To evaluate how these challenges shaped formal choices made in twentieth-century religious poetry.
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Callison, Jamie, Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 1-17, 34-60. Open Access title via EUP.
Eliot, T. S. ‘Religion and Literature’ (1935), in Selected Essays, new edn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), pp. 343-354. Available via archive.org.
Jones, David, In Parenthesis (London: Faber & Faber, 1937), pp. 59-102, 153-87. Available via archive.org.
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The class opens with a series of images of religious items (see images above). These images stimulate answers to the questions below.
What is religion? Who is involved? What is religion based on? How is manifested? What does it exclude/ attempt to keep out? What practices does it encompass? How is religion similar to or different than related terms culture, politics, spirituality, theology?
This part of the class addresses the first objective: To describe the challenge of defining religion in the age of modernism.
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Observe to students that Four Quartets has been called ‘the most important Christian poem of the twentieth century’. Kevin J. H. Dettmar, ‘“An Occupation for the Saint”: Eliot as a Religious Thinker’, in A Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. by David E. Chinitz (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 363–75 (p. 374). Draw a contrast with Eliot himself, who said of Ash-Wednesday: ‘I don’t consider it any more “religious” verse than anything else I have written: I mean that it attempts to state a particular phase of the progress of one person. If that progress is in the direction of “religion”, I can’t help that; it is I suppose the only direction in which progress is possible’. T. S. Eliot to Rev M. C. D’Arcy SJ, 24 May 1930, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 9 vols (London: Faber & Faber, 1989–), 5: 1930–31, ed. by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, p. 201 (p. 201).
How can Four Quartets be considered a ‘Christian poem’ but Ash-Wednesday not be considered ‘“religious” verse’? Do you think Eliot would have accepted ‘Christian’ but resisted ‘religious’ or is something else at stake here? What is Eliot’s resistance to ‘religious’ or ‘Christian’ verse? Why might that create problems in terms of audience and their expectations about this poetry? What does the label religious or Christian lead you to expect about the subject and the emotional range of such poetry?
This part of the class addresses the first objective: To describe the challenge of defining religion in the age of modernism.
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Share the following comment from Eliot: ‘For the great majority of people who love poetry, “religious poetry” is a variety of minor poetry: the religious poet is not a poet who is treating the whole subject matter of poetry in a religious spirit, but a poet who is dealing with a confined part of this subject matter; who is leaving out what men consider their major passions, and thereby confessing his ignorance of them.’ See T. S. Eliot, ‘Religion and Literature’ (1935), in Selected Essays, new edn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), pp. 343-354 (p. 345).
Why does Eliot consider religion a ‘confined part’ of the subject matter? How is it connected to the sense that the age of modernism is a secular age? What is it to address ‘the whole subject matter of poetry in a religious spirit’? How would religion/ religious poetry need to be redefined to make room for this expansive definition?
This part of the class continues to address the first objective: To describe the challenge of defining religion in the age of modernism.
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Discuss student responses to Callison, Modernism and Religion, pp. 1-17. The discussion will be structured by the questions below, and the teacher may wish to circulate these questions to the students in advance of the class.
How was religion redefined in the age of modernism? In what sense could this redescription be interpreted as a reduction or limitation of what religion once was? How might this new limited role be challenged by institutional religion itself? What was the new religion focused on? What did it avoid or circumvent? Why did this shift become necessary? What opportunities did the shift bring and what were its challenges?
This part of the course addresses the second objective: To sketch how modernist literary cultural responded to these challenges.
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Discuss student responses to Callison, Modernism and Religion, pp. 34-60. The discussion will be structured by the questions below, and the teacher may wish to circulate these questions to the students in advance of the class.
What are sacraments? How does Jones’s religion, in particular his interest in Roman Catholic sacramentalism, shape his aesthetics? How does his aesthetics shape his understanding of sacramentalism (Why is it significant? How does it happen? Where does it happen?)? Are there tensions between Jones’s aesthetics and his religion? Are there distinctions and boundaries that theology might insist upon that Jones’s aesthetics refuses to respect? Does his insistence on the religious dimension restrict or limit his work in some way?
This part of the course continues to address the second objective: To sketch how modernist literary cultural responded to these challenges.
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Read In Parenthesis. Students read the chapter and identify the religious/ spiritual vocabulary used in the passage. Key sections include pp. 68-69 (the vision in no-man’s land) and p. 73 (distributing the rations).
Here we have religious imagery in a war poem. Is that unusual? Why or why not? What are the tones and/ or emotions associated with the religious terminology in In Parenthesis (lament, ritualistic, celebratory etc)? Is it significant that In Parenthesis is a retrospective poem i.e., that the imagery identified helped Jones look back/ provided a new dimension for reflection? (Jones didn’t convert to Catholicism until after his return from WWI).
This part of the class addresses the third objective: To evaluate how these challenges shaped formal choices made in twentieth-century religious poetry.
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Note that In Parenthesis has been criticised for language/ imagery choices. ‘In Parenthesis [...] can't keep its allusions from suggesting that the war, if ghastly, is firmly “in the tradition”’. He continues ‘despite Jones's well-intentioned urging, we refuse to see these victims as continuing the tradition' of soldier heroes. Paul Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 152. [For Fussell, the allusions here are allusions to King Arthur etc., but the religious allusions help sacralize the solders].
What are the problems with suggesting that a war like WW1 is firmly ‘in the tradition’? Is it fair to say that the religious imagery throughout this section sacralises warfare or is there another way in which this imagery is working? Is the debate about sacralising (or not) connected to how we define religion/ religious poetry? Does it make a difference if we think about Jones approaching ‘a confined part of this subject’ through his imagery or whether he is approaching ‘the whole subject matter of poetry in a religious spirit’? Is his sense of religion restricted to Christianity? Do you see evidence of Jones’s aesthetic sense/ his artistic temperament in his description of the war scene?
This part of the class continues to address the third objective: To evaluate how these challenges shaped formal choices made in twentieth-century religious poetry.
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Read In Parenthesis, pp. 153-87. Students attempt to link the Queen of the Woods episode with aspects of the earlier chapter.
What is different about the vision pp. 68-69 as opposed to the Queen of the Woods section? Why do you think that Jones broadens the religious imagery beyond the Christian in this final section? To what extent does this reflect the pressures of the secular? To what extent does this decision reflect concerns similar to those outlined in Eliot’s essay? To what extent is the Queen of the Woods episode an attempt to write a religious ritual? To what extent is it a form of aesthetic experiment? How useful is that distinction between aesthetics and religion for Jones based on what you have read today?
This part of the class continues to address the third objective: To evaluate how these challenges shaped formal choices made in twentieth-century religious poetry.
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Teacher moves away from specific passages and draws threads of various discussions together using the questions below.
Does it make sense to describe In Parenthesis as a religious poem? If so, in what sense? How do we redefine religion/ religious poetry in a way that responds to Eliot’s critique of the category? How relevant or significant is this religious dimension to secular readers (i.e., those that aren’t Roman Catholic)? How does this religious element of the poem endeavour to reflect or explore a dimension of human experience not captured in secular terms? How is framing the issue in this way different from Dilworth’s sense that reading Jones requires the ‘suspension of religious disbelief.’ The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 5. How is modernism changed or developed by the inclusion of a religious dimension?
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The class leads into a consideration of new religions and how these reflected the definitional challenges and changes that shaped institutional religion in the age of modernism. The following secondary literature offers an outline of the issues involved:
Elizabeth Anderson, H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
Lara Vetter, Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
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Download lesson plan here: https://doi.org/10.17613/x00d-yr64
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To understand the connection between silence and religion in the age of modernism.
To sketch the ways in which literary culture responded to or reflected retreat culture.
To evaluate how the form of the modernist long poem facilitates a meditative approach to its subject matter.
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Callison, Jamie, Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), p. 12, pp. 99-105, 169-92. Open Access title via EUP.
Eliot, T. S., ‘Little Gidding’, in Four Quartets (1944) (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), pp. 49-59. Available via archive.org.
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Show students footage by British Pathé, London Traffic (1920-30) ; London Early Morning People Going To Work (1933)
What is strange watching this footage? What do we miss? Why is that significant?
This part of the class addresses the first objective: To understand the connection between silence and religion in the age of modernism.
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Share with students the following quotations: ‘Our so-called civilization gets more and more complicated, more and more noisy. It is like one of those mills where the noise of the looms makes it impossible for the workers to hear each other speak’. Evelyn Underhill, ‘The Need of Retreat’, The Vision, 49 (January 1932), 3–7 (p. 4). Alan H. Simpson: ‘talk of Committees produces minutes and resolutions; the silence of retreats produces consecrated lives’. ‘Retreat and Progress’, The Vision, 7 (August 1921), 1–3 (p. 3).
Why is the metaphor of a ‘mill’ appropriate here considering our discussion of the modern city? How is retreat to be understood in relation to the noise? What does retreat offer that cities do not?
This part of the class continues to address the first objective: To understand the connection between silence and religion in the age of modernism.
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The teacher draws attention to the fact that with retreat the focus is on lived religion and/ or religious practice not theology / reasoning. Using the questions below, the teacher highlights the methodological implications of this difference.
How is silence/ retreat different from interpretation of scripture/ an example of moral reasoning /or a theological argument? What does the initial contrast we have drawn suggest about the content or the significance of this silence? What are the challenges of talking about silence as opposed to ideas? What are some of the advantages of connecting literature with emotionally rich / embodied practices? What is the challenge of talking about silence in relation to poetry?
This part of the class continues to address the first objective: To understand the connection between silence and religion in the age of modernism.
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Discuss student responses to Callison, Modernism and Religion, pp. 169-92. The discussion is shaped by the questions below. The teacher may wish to circulate these questions in advance.
How was silence as a principle within retreat developed? What was necessary in terms of space and facilities to maintain this silence? What was the intellectual background for silence? How was silence experienced differently on different kinds of retreat? Which form of silence is most relevant to modernist literature as far as you understand? What is silence able to achieve that other forms of talk/ practice aren’t? Is silence only a negative (the absence of noise) or does it take on some positive content?
This part of the class continues to address the third objective: To evaluate how the form of the modernist long poem facilitates a meditative approach to its subject matter.
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Discuss student response to Callison, Modernism and Religion, p. 12, pp. 99-105
To what extent might we characterise retreat as a form of antimodernism? How does retreat address some of the principles that shape Eliot’s Christian sociology? To what extent does the retreat movement offer a different model to that offered by Eliot for understanding the role of religion in society?
This part of the course addresses the second objective: To sketch the ways in which literary culture responded to or reflected retreat culture.
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Read T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, in Four Quartets (1944) (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), pp. 49-59. Note that the religious community at ‘Little Gidding’ featured prominently in histories of retreat in England published by The Vision. Students go through the poem and identify moments where the poem invokes sounds, the absences of sounds, silence, the failure of speech.
Silence etc is often discussed in the context of the failure / limits of language. How does retreat engage silence differently? What sense of silence is most important to Four Quartets: the purgative silence of the Catholic Worker or the rich silence of the APR? How do these different types of silence bring out different tones / resonances in the poem?
This part of the class addresses the third objective: To evaluate how the form of the modernist long poem facilitates a meditative approach to its subject matter.
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Share F. R. Leavis’s observation: ‘The criticism regards his [the poet’s, as expressed in the poem] fear of life and contempt (which includes self-contempt) for humanity. This combination of fear and contempt commits him to a frustrating and untenable conception of the spiritual. By “untenable” I mean one that cannot without his implicitly contradicting it be served by poet.’ F. R. Leavis, The Living Principle: ‘English’ as a Discipline of Thought (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975), p. 205
The discussion is then shaped the by following questions: Is Eliot’s embrace or invocation of silence a retreat from his job as a poet? Does it show contempt for the community as Leavis suggests? Is there a different kind of value found in this silence? Why might this form of silence be particularly relevant / necessary in the context of modernity? Why is silence relevant to the immediate political and cultural context of Eliot’s poem?
This part of the class continues to address the third objective: To evaluate how the form of the modernist long poem facilitates a meditative approach to its subject matter.
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Note to the students that Four Quartets is poem in which difference voices rub against each other and free verse is juxtaposed with lyric measures.
The discussion is shaped by the following questions: How is reading a sequence like this with its juxtaposition of forms and styles different from a piece written in a single style? How does the work of reading Four Quartets (the tracking back from one voice to another, the looking back from the later poems in the sequence to the earlier ones to understand the structure and development) reflect the kind of work done on retreat with its rhythms of retreat and return?
This part of the class continues to address the third objective: To evaluate how the form of the modernist long poem facilitates a meditative approach to its subject matter.
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Teacher uses the questions below to draw together the threads of the discussion.
‘Little Gidding’ is often connected with Christian dogma / theology. How does it read differently as a poem of retreat? To what extent does this difference arise from elements of the poem and to what extent does this difference arise from an expanded sense of religion (as meaning more than dogma; assent to proof texts etc)? How might you categorise the relationship between Four Quartets and The Waste Land in relation to the retreat house / the city? In what ways does retreat challenge certain expectations about the way in which modernism relates to modernity/ the city/ industrialisation? What kinds of retreat practices do texts with that kind of focus demand? How does the poetry of retreat call for different forms of reading practice?
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Retreat as a specific religious practice opens out into a discussion of modernism and spirituality more broadly. Two helpful studies for tracing this connection are:
Elizabeth Anderson, Material Spirituality in Modernist Women’s Writing (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2005)