Poets, Prophets and Healers (1993), Introduction

INTRODUCTION

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us, ––visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower...

––Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"


Picture a highly secured room inside the sort of modern facility in which radioactive materials are handled. The workers fit their hands and arms into insulating sleeves which, in turn, project into a large case where the materials are actually manipulated. Consider the components of this picture: The living beings reside in a primary environment –– the larger room –– which is appropriate to their natural mode of existence. But in order to accomplish some important tasks, certain portions of these beings must function in a discrete, secondary environment. These beings accomplish their tasks by a very clever means. They utilize a mechanism which is at once a shield and a tool. It shields their essential being from the harmful affects of the alien environment, yet it also enables them to interact with that environment, and with each other in the midst of that environment.
This picture is an analogy of general human existence as it is viewed throughout this treatise. What it presents is a Platonic, dualistic view of reality (as opposed to the Aristotelian, monist view which argues that no separation can be made between the "primary" and "secondary" realms). The analogy is intended for poetic more than philosophical use. That is, the picture has been offered, not because it representssome complete and absolute metaphysical truth, but simply because it is worthy of consideration for a time. The large case which encloses the alien environment is analogous to the environment of all common, daily experiences. It is the world of physical relationships and physical actions, the realm of what might be called ordinary consciousness. Even social interactions take place largely in this context. The "insulating sleeves" which are both "a shield and a tool" are analogous to the many entities which people use to interact in and with the secondary realm without completely uniting with it or emptying their entire selves into it. The human body is perhaps the best example. By closing my eyes or covering my ears, I can shut out some portion of the environment at will. By keeping silent, I can choose not to speak the thought that is in my mind. Likewise my feet, hands and skin are all obvious examples of mediators, allowing me to interact with the world while also shielding myself from it. One other example of an "insulating sleeve" is language. Words are a way of choosing out one small portion of reality from the whole, combining it with other small portions –– other words –– and considering these relationships as if they had their own independent existence. Thus with words I limit how much of the world I will digest at any particular time; and in the same way, with words I limit how much of myself I will express. I have the power, through language, to insulate my ideas from those of others, and vice versa.

The Transcendent Realm
What remains to consider from the analogy is the primary environment, the room which coincides with the truest, most essential nature of the workers. It is difficult for many in the present age to imagine any human existence, any human realm, other than that which includes our bodies, conventional human interactions, careers, institutions and the like. But in this respect our age is atypical. Human cultural history abounds in man's efforts to account for the sense of a realm beyond the temporal –– a transcendent realm. The ancient Egyptian preoccupation with death and burial was merely one component of their preoccupation with this realm; Homeric Greece offered Mt. Olympus; the Tao te Cheng teaches of an invisible and supra–rational Way, and invites its readers to enter this Way; the cathedrals of the Middle Ages were designed to invoke a supernatural realm in the worshipper's perceptions; the philosopher Berkeley provides one of the most extreme views when he declares that whatever is perceived as being "out there" is really the subjective creation of inward mental processes; and Emerson declared that "philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul" (36).
The baffling variety of such explanations demonstrates that the transcendent realm is vast and multifaceted. What is its nature? Where is it located? What does it look like? What sort of beings, other than man, inhabit it? What sort of rules does it run by? Such questions, if intended literally, only amuse because they attempt to treat the transcendent as if it were not transcendent. They point merely to how unaccustomed human language is with any but the most ordinary realities.
An understanding of the transcendent realm is gained primarily through metaphor and symbol, as was exemplified at the very beginning of this introductory essay. A sincere smile on one's face is a "picture" of that transcendent reality known ashappiness; a bicycle being peddled along the street is a manifestation of transcendent realities such as movement or progress; a song gives expression to something called melody; the farthest reaches of outer space have always symbolized the idea of limitlessness or mystery. So the transcendent realm and any of its components are potentially understandable to the rational mind by like comparisons with ordinary, bodily experiences. Emerson explained the matter eloquently:

The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history; the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature...Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us, is respectively our image of memory and hope. (48–49)

One of Plato's contributions to the Western philosophical tradition is his concept of forms, transcendent ideas or principles which are absolute and unchanging, and which give shape to all the changing physical and social realities of human existence. Twenty–three centuries after Plato, Carl Jung theorized extensively about what he called archetypes, by which he meant recurring patterns and themes in the collective unconscious of humanity. Though each thinker writes with a unique emphasis traceable to separate cultural epochs and personal interests, the proximity of somePlatonic forms with some Jungian archetypes is unmistakable. In each case, something generally unseen but potentially discoverable is held to shape and govern the changing realities of human experience.

Three Angles of Vision, One Object
Since the transcendent realm is so vast, and since there are numerous angles from which it may be perceived, the present treatise must place certain parameters upon itself. Therefore only three of the numerous perceptive grids –– Religion, Psychology and especially Literature –– will be treated herein. But each of these also is vast and multifaceted in itself, each with its component traditions, schools and family conflicts. No one work of this or any other kind could venture to provide full treatments. For this reason, corresponding to the particular interests and objectives of its author, this treatise will draw from the Protestant Christian Tradition, Freudian and Jungian Psychology, and British and American Literature.
But the subject matter is still too broad, even taking into account the synthetic rather than analytic nature of this treatise. What shall be its main organizing principle? In short, that there is an analogous relationship between literary, psychological and spiritual endeavor; and therefore, that the literary experience may be accounted for with reference to that analogous relationship. The single goal of this work is to formulate an approach to literature –– a way of experiencing or "using" literature –– based on some points of correspondence which literature has with both religion and psychology.
"The Kingdom of God is within you," says Jesus in the Gospel of Luke (KJV 17.21). And this is merely the best known statement of the New Testament's intense interest in a realm beyond common human consciousness which exerts great influence in worldly affairs. The apostle Paul speaks of the "heavenly places" (Eph. 1.3, 6.12,Heb. 12.1) in which angels, demons, the spirits of persons both alive and dead, and God himself reside. The writer of the book of Hebrews speaks of a world behind the veil (6.19, 10.20), interpreting the symbolism of the Jewish temple as a picture of a dualistic reality.
Such New Testament passages carry on the prominent Old Testament tradition of a spiritual, supernatural realm. The prophet Elisha prayed that his servant's eyes might be opened so that he might see a portion of this realm (2 Kings 6.17). When the prayer was answered, the servant was suddenly aware of a vast army of angels on a nearby hillside on which, just moments before, he had seen only Syrian soldiers.
In 19th century Europe, in the wake of the demise of church authority and the Judeo–Christian world view, the science of psychology gained a prominence which has continually increased up to the present day. With it came Freud's revolutionary doctrine of the subconscious, the doctrine that human beings operate out of a grand and in many ways frightening inner world of memories, desires, drives, feelings and ideas, most of which are not present to ordinary consciousness. Notwithstanding Freud's aversion to Christianity, the members of the primitive Christian churches saw one of the conspicuous benefits of the new faith to be what would today be termed psychological healing (2 Cor. 1.3–7, Eph. 4.20–24). It was largely in response to the church's decreasing effectiveness in this regard that psychoanalysis arose.
Spanning all epochs from Paul to Freud, and long before and long afterward, has been the ubiquitous presence of imaginative literature: poetry, myths, plays and, relatively recently, the novel. In the delicate yet powerful interplay between author and reader, as they meet together in the imagined world of the literary work, a very mysterious inward process is half observed, half invoked. Fictional characters, withtheir internal dynamics and external troubles, proceed toward various objectives, through various obstacles. But both the experienced reader and the knowledgeable writer recognize that this is definitely not "just a story." Something profound and magical is happening within the reader. There is a hidden world that is shared by writer, story character and reader alike, and the history of that world is progressing as the imaginative work is perused. Thus does the creative imagination prove itself to be something much more than just a faculty for making up things which do not really exist. Rather, the imagination is a remarkable way of seeing something that is really there.

Differences
The idea that these three endeavors –– Christianity, psychology and literature –– are analogous in significant ways should not be startling at all since each encounters the identical human reality. The reason for surprise consists in their customary segregation, and the animosity with which each is sometimes defended against the others' intrusions. Thus before exploring the many ways in which the three coincide, an acknowledgement is in order that they are, at certain points, mutually exclusive. It is obvious, for example, that Christianity has a far greater explicit interest in a personal God than the others. Some of the most helpful manifestations of literary or psychological endeavor have been frankly atheistic. Another contrast can be made between Psychology, which generally strives to be scientific, and the other two, which are often blatantly anti–scientific in many of their methods. A third example can be found in the fact that literature, even great literature, is very often acknowledged as being little more than a mere diversion. Whatever ways religion and psychology may be at odds otherwise, they clearly share the common conviction that they offer much more than mere entertainment.

Convergence and Mutual Supplementality
As Matthew Arnold expressed in his poem "Dover Beach," different ages and cultures have their different emphases. To him, some ages were religious, some irreligious. But no matter what the emphasis, the primary realm of human beings, what has been labeled here the transcendent realm, remains a constant, and will continuously be engaged by one method or another. Thus Arnold called for poetry to take the moral place of Christian spirituality in what he considered a post–Christian age. What Arnold expected of poetry, Freud expected of his psychoanalysis. But what they shared –– both with each other and with the Christianity they saw being eclipsed –– was a belief in the transcendent life and the need to engage it. And this common bond –– surprise to Freud –– is much deeper and more profound at points than whatever differences they observed. It is the contention of this treatise that a remarkable number of these differences are merely apparent –– matters of emphasis, language or cultural expression –– and that, notwithstanding the important work of Jung and the archetypal critics, there is still much to be gained by exploring the points at which they converge. Furthermore, some of the points of seeming divergence merely involve equally applicable elements which have been discovered in one context but not in the others. That is, the three are or could be, at many points, mutually supplemental. If a simple Venn diagram is brought to mind, the point has been established. Many of their seeming differences present opportunities for learning, since the insight of one will often –– once the analogous relationship is seen –– fill a gap in another.
Without a doubt, some of what might be called oversimplification will be necessary for the purpose of this treatise; some significant nuances in each field will have to be put aside in the cause of the larger picture. But it will not be unlike the "oversimplifying" which aims at curing racial prejudice by emphasizing common humanity. There really is a profound commonality that unites people of differing races. And there really is a profound commonality between these three endeavors. The analysand through the process of his psychotherapy is becoming more conscious and alive by exploring and externalizing his hidden psychic forces under the guidance of a healer. The Christian "disciple" is "working out his salvation" by becoming more conversant with spiritual reality under the guidance of the Scriptures and the redemptive community. The poet expresses with symbols a vision he has seen wherein some commonplace has been charged with profound, inward meaning. He does so under the guidance of his muse and the wider literary dialogue. The reader, under the guidance of the author and even of the story's protagonist, experiences some unexpected portion of himself and his inner life in the characters and setting of a story. A devotee of any one of these endeavors, conscious of the unique glories of his own area of interest, will most likely chafe at such comparisons. And rightly so, if my intention is to collapse all the boundaries that exist between them. But though these are largely separate pursuits in many ways, the over–specialization which characterizes our age is not an unmixed blessing. The health of a culture depends at least in part on the ability of its various components to sometimes gather and "compare notes."
One note of caution: It will be an unfortunate misreading of this treatise if the term "Christianity" invokes images merely of inquisitions or witch burnings; or unsubstantial television preachers, shiny offering plates, and hymns that are sung powerlessly for the sake of tradition; or missionaries who add the burden of Western Fundamentalism to poorly developed cultures; or any other image of one's humanity being sacrificed in the name of "righteousness." Such images are unavoidable in a post–Christian world (by which is meant a world in which the institutional church no longer drives public policy). But a fruitful reading of this treatise must allow for a thriving, albeit uncelebrated, Christian subculture, a version of Christianity which has little connection with the negative stereotypes. Arnold described Western culture's flow of ideas as being a dialectic between Hellenism and Hebraism. This is in many ways a helpful paradigm, but the point must not be missed that the best of each was long ago synthesized and vitalized in that version of Christianity which existed in the First Century A.D. And it has been to the great detriment of the modern church that it has lost both of these in any living form.

Precedents
Of course, this treatise is by no means the first attempt to explore these types of connections. Many precedents have already been established, some of them for millennia. Indeed, one regularly observes in pre–classical civilizations a blurring of distinctions between ritual, the arts, religious practices, and the primitive expressions of social psychology.
There is some apprehension in the present age, especially among the educated,about whatever bridges may exist between Christianity and literature. Much of this uneasiness may stem from associations with medieval Scholasticism, and the constraint that was placed upon the imaginative mind by the medieval church. Literature during that time, indeed all the arts, seems often to have been little more than the endless rehearsing of Catholic doctrines. The extant morality play Everyman (ca. 1500) is an example, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678) reflects a Protestant continuation of this strategy. It is now acknowledged that the Renaissance annulment of this unhealthy marriage profited both the arts and the individual practice of Christianity.
There is no artistic benefit whatever to be gained by making literature the servant of some particular philosophical, academic or social agenda. But it would be a mistake to think that the medieval church has been the only force that has used literature for such purposes. Feminist criticism provides a more recent example of an approach which sometimes forgets to let art be art in its eagerness to carry out a social agenda. Orr demonstrates how such over–eagerness can remove literary criticism to too great a distance from aesthetics, even in our own day. Speaking of recent developments in feminist criticism, he says

Black and lesbian feminist critics charged that most feminist criticism of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties was still exclusionary, even racist and homophobic, valorizing white, middle–class, heterosexual women writers while ignoring minority and lesbian writers and characters...In a similar way, Marxist–feminist critics accused much of the early feminist criticism of studying only bourgeois or elitist productions while ignoring the most popular literary and artistic genres or literature designed for the working class women, or ignoring the whole question of class difference and material conditions among women... (139)

Formalist criticism, or ideas such as those of Walter Pater, will always have relevance because there will always be these kinds of excesses; the church is not the only offender.
In addition, it would be a mistake to automatically associate a Christian commitment with literary mediocrity, even in the modern age. A continuing beneficial association of Christianity with literature has been demonstrated by the likes of Dostoyevsky, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis and, very recently, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
The psychological approach to literature already has a one–hundred year old tradition. Freud himself can be labeled the official founder of this tradition since his considerable literary background nurtured virtually all of his theorizing and writing. Continuing the tradition have been the likes of I. A. Richards, who applied psychology to the creative process and the interactions of author and reader; and F. L. Lucas and Ernest Jones, who explored the "inner life" of fictitious characters. There is also the intermittently popular practice of analyzing an author's unconscious by means of his writings. And as recently as 1979, J. Hillis Miller was able to speak of a "powerful new form of psychoanalytic criticism, mostly imported from France" (174).
An important offshoot of the psychological approach is archetypal criticism, whose origin is associated most with Jung, but which is equally connected with Sir James Frazer, especially his Golden Bough (1922). Northrop Frye is the most prominent critic in this field, and Joseph Campbell devoted his life to it, collecting, organizing and disseminating myths from every culture. Its major tenets are that human beings draw their psychic energy and broad psychological categories from thesame inward source, which Jung labeled the collective unconscious; that this source preserves the accumulated experiences, feelings and ideas of human evolution and history; that such content is maintained and made available in various constant, repeated patterns, called archetypes; and that these patterns are expressed recurrently in all societies through rituals, myths and any other symbolic cultural forms.
Frye illustrates this approach in a well–known passage:

In the solar cycle of the day, the seasonal cycle of the year, and the organic cycle of human life, there is a single pattern of significance, out of which myth constructs a central narrative around a figure who is partly the sun, partly vegetative fertility and partly a god or archetypal human being. (Bate 606)
Frye goes on to summarize the four parts of this "single pattern": First there is the dawn, spring and birth phase, which is the source of myths about the hero's birth, of creation and resurrection. This phase leads eventually to the archetype of romance and of most dithyrambic and rhapsodic poetry. Secondly, there is the zenith, summer, and marriage phase, which is the source of myths about apotheosis, sacred marriage and paradise. This phase leads eventually to the archetype of comedy, pastoral and idyll. Next comes the sunset, autumn and death phase with its myths of death and sacrifice, leading eventually to tragedy and elegy. The final phase is that of darkness and winter, myths about floods, chaos and defeat, and the eventual archetype of satire. Of course, the cycle then begins again.
Equally illustrative is Campbell's monomyth. "Monomyth" is the label Campbell gave to the product of his efforts to combine and synthesize the myths of hundreds of cultures. In the monomyth, the hero begins by being lured to some threshold of adventure. He then journeys through "a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimateforces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers)"...Eventually there is a supreme ordeal followed by a reward...Then he returns to the world of ordinary experience bringing with him some great help for its troubles (adapted from Campbell 245–46). An excellent recent exercise in archetypal criticism has been contributed by the poet Robert Bly. His book Iron John explicates the old story from Grimm's Fairy Tales in such a way that it becomes a literary–psychological study of the psyche of the modern American male.
Beyond the obvious value of such an approach to the present study, Wilbur Scott summarizes archetypal criticism's integrative role in relation to other critical systems:

It requires close textual reading, like the formalistic, and yet it is concerned humanistically with more than the intrinsic value of aesthetic satisfaction; it seems psychological insofar as it analyzes the work of art's appeal to the audience...and yet sociological in its attendance upon basic cultural patterns as central to that appeal; it is historical in its investigation of a cultural or social past, but nonhistorical in its demonstration of literature's timeless value, independent of particular periods. (247)

Applications
In summary, it is evident then that an interchange, sometimes detrimental, sometimes beneficial, is already well established between literature and Christianity on the one hand, and literature and psychology on the other. Based on all the foregoing, a study which seeks to bridge the three endeavors could assume the form of a call to contemporary Christians: You are no longer powerful influences in culture because of two deficiencies. You have lost your imagination, and you have lost the intimate self–knowledge which John the Apostle once called "walking in thelight" (1 John 1.7). In this age, to be a disciple must involve a season of regaining these two lost gifts of God. You are invited to go in the name of Christ to the poets and the exposers of the psyche and discover what the boon they offer to your faith.
Or such a study could assume the form of a call to psychologists: Your pursuit is not as exclusively modern as you may think. Aristotle saw the theater of his time as providing the same service to its audience that you now offer: "Through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions" (Bate 22). Tragedy called up their repressed psychic forces, activated them in a safe environment, and integrated or purged them as appropriate. The Jesus of the New Testament was a healer of mental processes as well as physical diseases, as can be observed simply by an imaginative reading of his many conversations (as in John 3, 4, 8 & 13). And from pre–history to our own day, stories, poems and myths have confronted the subconscious and hastened its progress. If you leave behind such resources as these, you do so to the detriment of your own calling.
But rather than pursuing a goal which is primarily religious or psychological, this treatise will focus on the literary endeavor, on some of the components of stories and poems that make them worth reading and re–reading. How is a poet different from a non–poet? How can some fictional characters create such emotion in the reader? Why do mere stories or poems sometimes have the power to change the entire direction of the reader's life? What is it about mere arrangements of words that make them so compelling? And why do some people seem to gain nothing at all from even the best imaginative literature?
Answers to these and like questions will be implied or explicitly provided by what follows. And at many points the answers are religious and psychological withoutbeing any the less literary.


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