We Need To Talk About Religion

By Cindy Zeng ’27

The religious literature we read and interpret in English class, that is.

But first, let us talk about one specific religion: the 3000-year-old Eleusinian mystery religion of ancient Greece. This religion revolves around the Eleusinian Mysteries, a series of rites that recounted and celebrated the story of Demeter and Persephone. In this myth, Persephone’s abduction into and return from the underworld establishes Earth’s seasons and agriculture, gifts graciously bestowed by Demeter after nearly wiping out the entire planet with eternal winter. Unfortunately, aside from speculations of psychedelics used in these Eleusinian rites (flower power indeed), our knowledge of their details is extremely limited because the whole point of the rites is that they must remain secret. Only those initiated into the religion can know and deeply perform them.

All religions inherit a crucial feature from the Eleusinian Mysteries of the long-obscured past: that the meaning of religious beliefs is found only in a life that employs said religious beliefs. This feature functions well enough in a religiously insulated environment, such as the Eleusinian Mysteries, but creates complications in a community like Milton, where there is a diverse religious makeup and an equally diverse host of religious literature to which we are exposed. How do we contend with the fact that the religious beliefs in the texts we read might mean everything to one student and nothing to another?

I do not believe the answer lies in completely disregarding the central religious nature of these texts, treating them purely as works of literature. Nobel prize-winning poet (secondary achievement to being a Milton alum) T.S. Eliot declared in his 1935 essay “Religion and Literature” that “those who talk of the Bible as a ‘monument of English prose’ are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.” Nor do I believe in forcing every student to praise or condemn the text according to the relevant religious doctrine, an ideology that has historically led to intellectual censorship and unfreedom. I believe the answer lies in providing a more comprehensive methodology for analyzing the theological dimensions of religious texts, just as the English Department provides methodology for other aspects of literary criticism, from granular grammatical clarity through Megablunders to the clearly partitioned essay structures of Class III.

Critically, let us first delineate between two types of religious literature: religious scripture and religious fiction. Religious scriptures are documents believed to be canonical, foundational, and authoritative to a certain religion. The Ramayana, read in Founding Voices, is a religious text sacred in Hinduism. Religious fiction, on the other hand, is creative literature not recognized by the religions the author drew on and often explores spiritual and moral themes. Dante’s Inferno and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, read in Founding Voices and Literature and the Human Condition, respectively, exemplify this genre. As a non-religious student who’s taken both of these courses, I can say that a lack of religious framing has limited the scope of analysis I could have produced and wished to be able to produce when reading all three of these texts.

In his seminal 1910 essay “The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Manifestations of Life,” German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey seems to propose two contradictory purposes of “understanding” literature. Dilthey claims that literature is a medium through which to understand the total individual of the author, yet he describes reading Christian scriptures as the “experience [of] a religious process… beyond the possibility of direct experience” due to his not being Christian. I believe this contradiction solves itself when one recognizes that the subject—that is, the thing the reader should care about or be persuaded to care about by the text—of religious scripture is the faith itself, while the subject of religious fiction is the author’s experience of that faith. This important distinction directs analysis of religious literature in completely different ways: analysis of religious scripture centers around the relationship between the expression (the text) and the expressed subject (the faith), while analysis of religious fiction centers around that between the expression and the expressor (the author).

I believe the work of reading any literature at Milton should center around the concept of empathy as Dilthey defines it: to make “the possibilities of human existence… accessible to us” and to allow us to “glimpse alien beauty in the world and areas of life beyond [our] reach.” Accomplishing this empathy in the context of religious literature requires a reevaluation of our approach: a new methodology of analysis that provides adequate religious context, highlights the nuance between the subject matters of religious scriptures vs. religious fiction, and directs the student to productively engage with the text’s theological dimension. An education in approaching religious literature then becomes an exercise in understanding life in all its impossible potentialities.