ABSTRACT
John Lennon, playing his celestially white piano, begins the song entitled‘God’ (1970) by singing: ‘God is a concept / by which we measure / our pain’. What kind of concept is God? In this chapter we propose to explore this question and its relation to literature. In doing this we shall try to emphasize not only that literature is pervasively concerned with religious themes but also that the ways in which we think, read and write about literature are likewise pervaded by religious – and particularly Judaeo-Christian – ideas. The concept of God, in other words, has as much to do with the practice of literary criticism as with the nature of literature. Let us give three very brief instances. The most famous atheist in the history of English poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley, asserts that a ‘poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth’ (Shelley 1977, 485): in the phrase ‘eternal truth’, Shelley is being religious. In his Preface to Poems (1853), Matthew Arnold writes of the name ‘Shakespeare’ that it is ‘a name the greatest perhaps of all poetical names; a name never to be mentioned without reverence’ (Arnold 1965, 599): with the word ‘reverence’, Arnold is being religious. Finally, in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), T.S. Eliot declares, ‘The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’ (Eliot 1975, 40): by appealing to ‘self-sacrifice’, Eliot is being religious.
