Europe, it was the monks who preserved some of the
most valuable books of ancient Greece and Rome by
diligently copying them on vellum by hand before
the advent of the printing press. Dante Aligh-
ieri’s The divine coMedy, and Saint Augustine’s
conFessions and The City of God are all intensely
religious in content. While Dante presents a com-
plicated three-tier system of the Inferno, Purgatorio,
and Paradiso, an imaginative and allegorical imag-
ining of the afterlife, Augustine’s autobiographical
text presents a compelling view of the journey to
religion and selfhood. Geoffrey Chaucer’s The
canterbury taLes, written in the 14th century, is
structured around the tales told by a group of 23
pilgrims on a pilgrimage from London to the shrine
of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. Although
Chaucer presents a fairly wide cross section of medi-
eval English society from the noble Knight to the
humble Yeoman, a majority of the pilgrims, such as
the Monk, the Pardoner, the Friar, the Prioress, and
the Summoner, among others, belong to the Chris-
tian orders. These characters are some of the most
interesting in The Canterbury Tales, and Chaucer
satirizes corruption among the church’s functionar-
ies through them.
Some of the most emotionally resonant wrestling
with questions of faith can be found in the meta-
physical poetry of 17th-century poets such as John
Donne, Andrew Marvell, and George Herbert, in
appeals such as Donne’s “Batter my heart, three per-
soned God” or in Herbert’s poems “The Affliction”
and “The Collar.” In 19th-century Victorian litera-
ture, the question of faith and doubt that afflicted
people after Charles Darwin’s publication of On
the Origin of Species, which declared that man is not
made in the image of God but is descended from
apes, is a recurring theme. In different ways, Mat-
thew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Alfred, Lord Ten-
nyson’s in MeMoriaM, a. h. h., Thomas Hardy’s
tess oF the d’urberviLLes, all express the painful
incomprehension and angst of a world suddenly
deprived of the certitudes of religion expressed so
well in Robert Browning’s “Pippa’s Song”: “God’s in
His Heaven— / All’s right with the world” (ll. 7–8).
Religion may seem to have been in slow retreat
because of the onslaughts of industrialism, the com-
ing of the railroads, the depopulation of the coun-
tryside, the findings of the geologist Charles Lyell
and the psychiatrists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung,
and Karl Marx’s declaration that “religion is the opi-
ate of the masses,” but it nevertheless has continued
to preoccupy writers, whether they be poets, novel-
ists, or dramatists. T. S. Eliot’s modernist master-
piece The wasteLand articulates a deep sense of the
loneliness and alienation experienced by people
lost in the facelessness of the modern metropolis,
but it also closes with a heartfelt prayer of “Shantih,
Shantih, Shantih,” invoking the ancient mantra of
peace from Hindu religious traditions. In his later
work “Burnt Norton,” and particularly in his poetic
dramas, Eliot turned to religion in his quest for
answers to the modern malaise of isolationism and
loss of faith. Murder in the Cathedral, his best-known
play, centers on the martyrdom of Saint Thomas
Becket and explores with insightful nuances the
nature of temptation for one even so deeply steeped
in Christ as Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury.
Even the desire to martyrdom, as long as it springs
from an earthly desire to garner spiritual capital, can
be corrupt and compromised. Becket’s union with
God can only come once he transcends this greed
for spiritual acclaim and annihilates all egotism.
Beyond spiritual and ethical explorations, lit-
erature also portrays religion as a great source
of discord and dissension in the world and thus
critiques the violence and fanaticism that results
from a narrow-minded adherence to creed. Much
of Salman Rushdie’s work, for instance, refers to
the violence arising from the conflicts between the
Hindu and Muslim communities in India, such as
his MidniGht’s chiLdren. But the power of reli-
gion to inflame passions is most aptly demonstrated
through the controversy surrounding the publication
of his The Satanic Verses in 1988. The Satanic Verses
is a part-fantasy, part-realist novel in which Rushdie
presents a fictionalized story related to some apocry-
phal verses from the Quran, and consequently makes
references to the life of Muhammad, the Prophet.
The creative liberties taken by the text upset some
sections of the Islamic community, which widely
condemned it, and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued
a fatwa, or religious decree, condemning Rushdie as
an infidel. Rushdie went into hiding in fear follow-
ing much violence involving the publication of this92 religion