Literature and Religion

or is literature good or bad?

Literature as an aesthetic

experience or literature

as a spiritual pleasure

Edgar Allan Poe “The

Philosophy of

Composition” 1846

• That pleasure which is at once the

most intense, the most elevating, and
the most pure, is, I believe, found in
the contemplation of the beautiful.
When, indeed, men speak of Beauty,
they mean, precisely, not a quality, as
is supposed, but an effect — they
refer, in short, just to that intense
and pure elevation of soul

As spiritual literature is
good as pleasure it may

be something suspect

Thomas Jefferson

To Nathaniel Burwell

Monticello,

March 14, 1818

• A great obstacle to good education is the

inordinate passion prevalent for novels, and

the time lost in that reading which should be

instructively employed. When this poison

infects the mind, it destroys its tone and

revolts it against wholesome reading. Reason

and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected.

Nothing can engage attention unless dressed

in all the figments of fancy, and nothing so

bedecked comes amiss. The result is a bloated

imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust

towards all the real businesses of life.

The first to criticize literature (poetry to be
precise) in this vein was Plato, the man from
whom not only the history of philosophy but also
the history of literary criticism (or theory of
literature) begins.
In Book II of The Republic, Plato describes
Socrates' dialogue with his pupils. Socrates warns
we should not seriously regard poetry as being
capable of attaining the truth and that we who
listen to poetry should be on our guard against its
seductions, since the poet has no place in our idea
of God (wikipedia).

The Romantics believed that
beauty and truth are one, i.e. if
something is beautiful it has to be
good, if something is ugly it has to
be bad

Emily Dickinson

• I died for beauty, but was scarce

Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, -the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

John Keats

“Ode on a Grecian Urn”

1819

• "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," -

that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need
to know.

This belief is dangerous because it
might mean that literature (or art)
is a better religion that the
traditional one.

• On the other hand, some people

(though they are very few nowadays)
think of all art as a form of idolatry:

• “You shall not make for yourself a

carved image, or any likeness of
anything that is in heaven above, or
that is on the earth beneath, or that is
in the water under the earth” (the
Bible)