Bloom's Great Agon: On Harold Bloom's Jesus and Yahweh, etc.

by Jerry Harp

When Harold Bloom's The Western Canon appeared in 1994, Charles McGrath in his review for The New Yorker answered with a Bloomian analysis. This impulse thus to criticize the critic in his own terms had some brilliant results in McGrath's search for Bloom's great precursor. According to Bloom's theory of influence, as McGrath puts it, this precursor whose mantle the later writer seeks to carry often functions as a hidden authority, for the really strong influences are those who remain unnamed. Locked in a relationship of struggle with the precursor, the later writer tends to mute the precursor's presence. McGrath identifies Bloom's great precursor as Samuel Johnson. As McGrath puts it, what is the Chelsea House Critical Series, edited by Bloom, but Johnson's "Lives of the Poets writ large?" McGrath also cites Bloom's prodigious output, love of books, and "Johnsonian seriousness and largeness of spirit" as traces of Bloom's relationship to Johnson. As McGrath also points out, however, Johnson gets his own chapter in The Western Canon; Bloom names him the "canonical critic." Thus, while McGrath is quite correct that Johnson is an important precursor, it is not the case that his presence is quite muted in Bloom's writing.

Bloom has continued to refine his theory of literary tradition since its early statement in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), and it continues to be a compelling and in many ways difficult theory to negotiate, one that is easily misread. If it is the case that a strong writer's work struggles with a hidden authority whose presence is everywhere felt though explicit mention is sparse, then I think that Bloom's muted precursor must be T. S. Eliot. As Bloom himself points out, he began his work as a literary critic in an academic world dominated by Eliot, whose ideas roused him to fury. In fact, much of Bloom's work has been devoted to redeeming the reputation of the Romantic poets, whose work Eliot had to some extent marginalized. While Bloom shows admiration for Eliot's poetry at least through The Waste Land, the Old Possum's other work does not fare so well. Eliot does not get his own chapter in The Western Canon, and such mentions as he merits are sometimes swipes at his reputation, as when Bloom refers to him as a minor critic, a designation that would come as a surprise to any number of readers. Perhaps the most telling mention of Eliot in The Western Canon occurs near the beginning of the chapter on Johnson, where Bloom in effect displaces Eliot by pointing out that Johnson was everything--and more--that Eliot wished to be: Johnson "was authentically royalist, Christian, and classicist--unlike T. S. Eliot, who aspired to that triple identity with considerable bad faith."

In my more reductive moments, I have been tempted to say that were one to blend Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" with Freudian family romance theory, the result would be Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence. While I continue to think that there is a little something to this suggestion, it remains a reduction, and reductiveness will hardly do in considering so capacious and expansive a critic as Harold Bloom, whose work spans many of our Western traditions. In his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot points out that literature and religion ought not to be confused, for each has its own work to perform. In his own Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, published as Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (1989), Bloom adverts to the "scandal" of "the stubborn resistance of imaginative literature to the categories of sacred and secular." It is not so much that Bloom confuses literature and religion as it is that he finds little interest or use in maintaining a strict boundary between sacred and secular texts. He reads for transcendence, and whatever he reads he interprets in terms of the literary agon that has been his focus for the more than forty years of his writing career.

Certainly, Bloom reads for both transcendence and understanding literary influence in Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005). Of course, Bloom has been writing about specifically scriptural and religious texts for a long time; see, for example, Kabballah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (1982), Ruin the Sacred Truths (1989), and The Book of J (1990). In Jesus and Yahweh, he relates how back in the early seventies when he was composing The Anxiety of Influence, he had originally included a chapter on the Christian Scripture's anxiety of influence with regard to the Hebrew Bible, though he did not include this chapter in the book. He takes up this issue of the belatedness of Christian Scripture--save for the unprecedented sayings and parables of Jesus--in his chapter entitled "The Belated Testament." The term 'Belated Testament' pretty much squares with my own sense of how the Christian Scriptures relate to the Hebrew Bible. As I have reminded my students over the years, when I am teaching my Bible and/as Literature courses, those of use who are Christian are mere latecomers in the world of these texts that we are studying.

Bloom spends much of Jesus and Yahweh explaining that there is no easy congruence between the Jewish Bible and the Belated Testament. As he emphasizes, belated texts misread the earlier texts to which they are responding, and if the later texts are to endure and circulate, their misreadings must be strong. It is important to distinguish between weak and strong misreadings, the former of which may be, for example, mere mistakes of fact, or they may be the kinds of normative interpretations that ignore the sometimes disturbing complexities and dynamics of a given text. By contrast, a strong misreading is one that works in excess of the precursor text's milieu and author's manifest meanings. Further, as Bloom puts it, a strong misreading must be "eloquent, coherent, and persuasive to many." Such, for example, is the strong misreading of Satan, in Milton's Paradise Lost, as the epic's tragic hero, as is Bloom's reading of "Paradise Lost as an allegory of the dilemma of the modern poet, at his strongest" (The Anxiety of Influence). Such also, in Bloom's estimation, is the Christian Testament a strong misreading of the Hebrew Bible. As Bloom points out again and again, the idea of God incarnate dying as atonement for the sins of humankind is simply incongruous with the world of the Hebrew Bible. I am no scripture scholar or expert in religions (though I read as I can, especially in the Catholic tradition, to which I am devoted), so I cannot say with finality if this is the case; I take the point, though, on Bloom's authority. Further, it sounds right to me that any new tradition will have to enact various strong misreadings, in Bloom's sense of the term, of its precursor; otherwise, it will not be a new tradition, but rather a weakened version of the old. The struggle involved in such a strong misreading demands strong attention and a kind of love, as Bloom's writing has been pointing out for decades.

Even though Bloom says early in the book that he alternates "endlessly between agnosticism and a mystical gnosis," I cannot persuade myself for a minute that Bloom does not believe in Yahweh heart and soul. For one thing, Bloom is far too angry at Yahweh not to believe in him; he calls Yahweh a bad parent who has withdrawn into the outer spaces, and he insists again and again that he does not trust in Yahweh's covenant. I see no way that anyone this haunted and enraged by Yahweh could be anything but a fierce believer after the manner of Job, who wanted to call the Divine to accounts, and to whom the Divine spoke from the whirlwind. While my own faith experience differs markedly from Bloom's, I must thank him for his strong reading and writing. I sometimes encounter my own faith tradition anew in Bloom's book. The Jesus whom readers will encounter here is a master ironist and, as Bloom puts it, a "Jewish spiritual genius." As Bloom puts it at another point, "Elliptical, ironic parabolist as Jesus was, it may well be that he was an enigma even to himself." Implicit in this statement is a complex and compelling Christology worth pursuing much further. Or consider the following passage, in which Bloom is discussing the three names that he focuses on throughout the book--the Yahweh of the J writer (this writer is the 'Yahwist,' whose designation was spelled with a 'J' by the nineteenth-century German scholars whose convention Bloom follows in naming the author-figure of some of the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible); the Jesus of the Gospels (whom Bloom also refers to as Yeshua of Nazareth); and Jesus Christ (whom Bloom thinks of as a theological construct owing as much to Greek philosophy as to Christian Scripture):

Yahweh declares his unknowability, Jesus Christ is totally smothered beneath the massive superstructure of historical theology, and of Yeshua all we rightly can say is that he is a concave mirror, where what we see are all the distortions each of us has become. The Hebrew God, like Plato's, is a mad moralist, while Jesus Christ is a theological labyrinth, and Yeshua seems as forlorn and solitary as anyone we may know. Like Walt Whitman at the close of Song of Myself, Yeshua stops somewhere waiting for us.

In my studies and spiritual reading, I am constantly looking to, besides the books of Scripture (both the Hebrew and the Belated Testaments), Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Teresa of Avila, Teilhard de Chardin, Walter Ong, and Thomas Merton; but I can read a long time without encountering anything quite so moving and edifying as Bloom's lines about Yeshua.

Much of what I appreciate about Bloom's work is his refusal of the kinds of simplifications and reductions that one encounters in the various strains of fundamentalism. As Bloom points out so well, the histories of humans' ideas about the Divine are caught up in all of the complications of texts and the ways that their meanings shift and proliferate as they move from hand to hand, tradition to tradition, across geographies, and through time. So strong is the reach of much of Bloom's prose that it often matters little that I register disagreements, at times even strong disagreements, with him; I am moved and learning plenty too, swept along in his grand agon. Consider the following passage from the chapter on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine that God is three divine persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) in one divine nature. Bloom has just been discussing the role of Athanasius of Alexandria in the development of the doctrine.

The historical Yeshua, insofar as he can be isolated, had his own anguishes of contamination, including toward his immediate precursor, John the Baptist, and also to such forerunners as Abraham, Moses, and Elijah. But he apparently suffered no anxiety of influence in regard to Yahweh, unlike the metaphoric Jesus Christ, whose separate identity demanded the subtraction of all ironic irascibility from Yahweh, who was after all a failure as a father. Oscar Wilde mordantly observed, "Fathers should be seen but not heard; that is the secret of family life." Athanasius, though no wit, may be accounted an ancestor of Oscar Wilde, who, as Borges said, was always right.

I am tempted to say that Bloom is always wrong, though in precisely the right way, for his swerves and strong misreadings often yield grandeur. Nevertheless, Bloom is right about plenty also, so I must resist my own attempts at wit. Once in a great while, however, he is simply wrong, as when he refers to the Immaculate Conception as the Catholic doctrine that when the Virgin Mary was conceived, her mother was herself a virgin. What the doctrine refers to is Mary being conceived without the stain of original sin. While in the minds of some Catholics, with what may be something of an obsessive concern about sex, immaculate conception might necessitate virginity, this latter idea remains outside the purview of the official doctrine. But among the points that I believe Bloom gets quite correct is his assertion that many attempts at Jewish-Christian dialogue have been quite farcical. Any dialogue must be grounded in, among other things, respect for such differences as get erased with facile references to the "Jewish-Christian tradition," a tradition that makes sense only from the point of view of Christian assumptions.

Jesus and Yahweh is quite an inspiring book, a complicated study that defies easy classification. Bloom himself spends some time ruminating on the genre of the work. He identifies the book as literary criticism with an admixture of religious criticism somewhat in the manner of William James. In his The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James, reflecting on the genre of his study, insists that he is not a theologian, religious historian, or anthropologist, though he does admit some level of expertise in psychology. Bloom mixes elements of all of these fields of study, though he is careful to point out that his real area of expertise remains literature. He is also a grand aphorist in the manner of Emerson with admixtures too, it seems to me, of such Jewish sages as Hillel and Akiba, both of whom he quotes. The book also includes some touches of spiritual autobiography, as in the following passage:

But I wake up these days, sometime between midnight and two A.M., because of nightmares in which Yahweh sardonically appears as various beings, ranging from a Havana-smoking, Edwardian-attired Dr. Sigmund Freud to the Book of Daniel's silently reproachful Ancient of Days. I trudge downstairs gloomily and silently, lest I wake my wife, and breakfast on tea and dark bread while rereading yet once more in the Tanakh, wide swatches of Mishnah and Talmud, and those disquieting texts the New Testament and Augustine's City of God.

Here is a portrait of the gloomy and solitary reader, haunted by Yahweh along with the whole Western tradition, rising earlier than some Trappist monks I know. Bloom's is a work of severe discipline whose pleasures make great demands.

Eliot ends The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism with the "sad ghost of Coleridge" beckoning from the shadows. Earlier in the book, Eliot discusses the difficulty of pursuing both poetry and philosophy. "Coleridge is the apparent example," he says, "but I believe that he was only able to exercise the one activity at the expense of the other." I take it that Eliot, who wrote a dissertation on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley, includes himself in this criticism, implicit in which is a law of economy of energy. It is difficult to work diligently at more than one discipline without diluting one's accomplishments. Bloom's solution to the problem has been not to choose one genre over another, but rather to combine genres, thus writing several at once. Perhaps for such a book as Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine we need a new genre designation. Whatever we might call it, it is often sublime.

Jerry Harp is a Contributing Editor at Pleiades. He is also the author of Gatherings (Ashland, 2005) and Urban Flowers, Concrete Plains (Salt, forthcoming).