The Jouissance of Belief: Devotional Reading and the (Re)Turn to Religion

Abstract

In part, the contemporary critical interest in religion derives from epistemological and not ontological concerns, meaning that ideas about God aren't what contemporary scholars find compelling so much as the knowledge of what religious experience when they read or write as religious adherents. A materialist focus on religious practices as both a type of knowledge and a way of knowing is thus becoming more common, and practicing members of Christian communities can have greater insight and familiarity with their community's ways of knowing than those who approach matters of religion from without. Etymology itself suggests that religious scholars are in fundamental ways interdisciplinary inasmuch as disciplines--adherence to a given set of distinguishing practices--exist in both the spiritual and secular worlds as profound markers and components of group identity. The great diversity of methodological practices in contemporary literary criticism means that explications of Christian ways of knowing and reading are both less unusual and more potentially transformative than ever, at least when they are, as Sharon Kim proposes in her article in this issue, inculturated in both secular and religious ways of knowing. I argue in this article that the traditional Christian practice of devotional reading cultivates a worldly and self-critical faculty which accords with the humanistic reading practice that Edward Said terms worldliness. In accord with our group's interrogation of the academy's to religion, I write to clarify the basis of my confidence that the study of literature in the humanities has been and remains an act of religious significance, though not in many cases a specifically Christian one. To critically appraise any human production is to take seriously both our creative ability and our provisional nature, to acknowledge both production and limitation, agency and errancy, history and communion. I take as a given that the impulse toward theory in modern academic study was metaphysical in nature. Fundamental questions about the relationship of humans to each other, to the universe, and to the acts of cognition and existence itself remain plangent even when traditional approaches to them have been discarded. (1) What was seen by many within Christian circles as a sophisticated assault on their fundamental beliefs was, in fact, a muscular appropriation of their methodology. Literary criticism, as it is practiced in most universities today, is frequently more adept in the religious function of self-analysis and cultural critique than much of what is produced in the name of specifically Christian scholarship. As is apparent in the slippage of terms from literary study to cultural critique, I am as concerned with the question of why we study literature as I am with the issue of how. I believe that it is impossible to seriously consider what Christians can contribute to the recent turn toward religion in literary studies without acknowledging that much of what has been attacked as anti-Christian or anti-metaphysical modes of literary criticism has, in elements of its praxis, been prophetically acute in its engagement with and critique of our world and in revealing the spiritually fundamental truth of humanity's embeddedness in both created and received textuality. In methodological terms, the movement from people of the Book to discursively produced and apprehended cultural identities is a stunning appropriation of the disciplinary logic inherent in text-based world religions. To sum up, the discursive reality that Foucault, Althusser, and others argued that all texts conspire to create has long been a valued outcome of devotional meditation upon holy writ. By focusing on Edward Said's critical methodology, I am taking what is arguably one of the easiest paths towards illustrating my claims regarding the consonance between Christian devotional reading and humanist applications of post-structuralist and postmodern theories of textuality. …