Maybe a writer doesn’t want enriching motifs, characters, themes, or plots, but just needs a title. The
Bible is full of possible titles. I mentioned East of Eden before. Tim Parks has a novel called Tongues of
Flame. Faulkner has Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. Okay, that last one’s from a spiritual,
but it’s biblical in its basis. Let’s suppose you want to write a novel about hopelessness and infertility and
the sense that the future no longer exists. You might turn to Ecclesiastes for a passage that reminds us that
every night is followed by a new day, that life is an endless cycle of life, death, and renewal, in which one
p. 51generation succeeds another until the end of time. You might regard that outlook with a certain irony
and borrow a phrase from it to express that irony—how the certainty that the earth and humanity will
renew themselves, a certainty that has governed human assumptions since earliest times, has just been
shredded by four years in which Western civilization tried with some success to destroy itself. You just
might if you were a modernist and had lived through the horror that was the Great War. At least that’s
what Hemingway did, borrowing his title from that biblical passage: The Sun Also Rises. Great book,
perfect title.[Ecclesiates1:5“Thesunalsoariseth,andthesungoethdown,andhastethtohisplacewherehearose.”]
More common than titles are situations and quotations. Poetry is absolutely full of Scripture. Some of
that is perfectly obvious. John Milton took most of his subject matter and a great deal of material for his
great works from you-know-where: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes.
Moreover, our early literature in English is frequently about, and nearly always informed by, religion.
Those questing knights in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Faerie Queen are searching on
behalf of their religion whether they know it or not (and they generally do know). Beowulf is largely
about the coming of Christianity into the old paganism of northern Germanic society—after being about a
hero overcoming a villain. Grendel, the monster, is descended from the line of Cain, we’re told. Aren’t all
villains? Even Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales (1384), while neither they nor their tales are
inevitably holy, are making an Easter pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, and much of their talk invokes
the Bible and religious teaching. John Donne was an Anglican minister, Jonathan Swift the dean of the
Church of Ireland, Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet American Puritans (Taylor a minister). Ralph
Waldo Emerson was a Unitarian minister for a spell, while Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Catholic
priest. One can barely read Donne or Malory or Hawthorne or Rosp. 52setti without running into
quotations, plots, characters, whole stories drawn from the Bible. Suffice it to say that every writer prior
to sometime in the middle of the twentieth century was solidly instructed in religion.
Even today a great many writers have more than a nodding acquaintance with the faith of their ancestors.
In the century just ended, there are modern religious and spiritual poets like T. S. Eliot and Geoffrey Hill
or Adrienne Rich and Allen Ginsberg, whose work is shot through with biblical language and imagery.
The dive-bomber in Eliot’s Four Quartets (1942) looks very like a dove, offering salvation from the
bomber’s fire through the redemption of pentecostal fires. He borrows the figure of Christ joining the
disciples on the road to Emmaus in The Waste Land (1922), uses the Christmas story in “Journey of the
Magi” (1927), offers a fairly idiosyncratic sort of Lenten consciousness in “Ash-Wednesday” (1930). Hill
has wrestled with matters of the spirit in the fallen modern world throughout his career, so it is hardly
surprising to find biblical themes and images in works such as “The Pentecost Castle” or Canaan
(1996). Rich, for her part, addresses the earlier poet Robinson Jeffers in “Yom Kippur, 1984,” in which
she considers the implications of the Day of Atonement, and matters of Judaism appear in her poetry with
some frequency. Ginsberg, who never met a religion he didn’t like (he sometimes described himself as a
“Buddhist Jew”), employs material from Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and virtually
every world faith.
Not all uses of religion are straight, of course. Many modern and postmodern texts are essentially ironic,
in which the allusions to biblical sources are used not to heighten continuities between the religious
tradition and the contemporary moment but to illustrate a disparity or disruption. Needless to say, such
uses of irony can cause trouble. When Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses (1988), he caused his
characters to parody (inp. 53order to show their wickedness, among other things) certain events and