Showing posts with label Thomas Merton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thomas Merton. Show all posts

2020/06/22

Kang-nam Oh 등잔 밑이 어둡다 -우리 전통의 재발견

Kang-nam Oh  등잔 밑이 어둡다 -우리 전통의 재발견 


며칠 전에 <남의 밥의 콩이 굵다 = 나의 종교 남의 종교>라는 제목의 글에서 종교적 배타성을 경계해야 한다는 이야기를 했습니다.  오늘은 그 연장선에서 서양종교를 절대시하는 우리의 일반적 경향성에 대해 이야기해 보고 싶습니다.
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 독일 시성 괴테(Goethe)는 외국어를 모르는 사람은 자기 말도 모른다고 했다. 현대 종교학의 창시자라 여겨지는 맥스 뮐러(Max Müller, 1823-1900)는 이 말이 언어에 해당되는 것보다 종교 문제에 더 적절한 표현이라 보고 “하나의 종교만 아는 사람은 아무 종교도 모른다”고 선언했다.
 우리 중에는 종교나 철학의 문제라면 서양 사람들만 생각해 본 일이 있는 것으로 믿고 있는 이들이 더러 있다. 지금은 많이 바뀌었겠지만, 내가 한국에서 대학 다닐 때만 해도 철학개론 시간에 달레스가 어떻고, 소크라테스가 무슨 말을 했고, 칸트, 데카르트, 누구 누구 하다가 끝났다.
 그 후 철학을 논한다는 것은 의례 서양 철학을 들추는 것, 종교 철학을 이야기한다는 것도 그리스도교를 중심으로 하는 서양 종교사를 살피는 것쯤으로 생각했다. 지금 생각하면 얼굴이 붉어지는 이야기다.

 영국의 사상가 올더스 헉슬리(Aldous Huxley)라는 사람은 1940년대 초반에 출판된 그의 책 󰡔영원의 철학(Perennial Philosophy)󰡕에서 그 당시 동양 종교에 대한 자료가 충분히 번역되고 소개된 형편인데, 서양 사람들 중 ‘아직도 종교나 형이상학의 문제에 관한 한 유대인이나 그리스인이나 그리스도인들 이외에는 생각해 본 일이 없는 것처럼’ 착각하는 이들이 많은데, ‘오늘 같은 시대에 이런 무식은 전적으로 자의적이고 고의적이며, 불합리하고 창피스러운 일일 뿐 아니라, 사회적으로 위험한 일이기도 하다’고 했다. ‘모든 형태의 제국주의와 같이 신학적 제국주의도 영원한 세계 평화에 위협이 되기 때문’이라고 덧붙였다.

 1960년대 70년대를 거치면서 서양 사람들 중에는 동양의 종교 사상에 심취하는 사람들이 많이 생겼다. 그렇게 함으로써 그리스도교 정신의 진정한 의미를 재발견하는 기쁨을 맛보게 되었다. 그 대표적 예로 20세기 미국 종교사상가로 가장 영향력이 많았던 사람 중 하나인 토마스 머튼(Thomas Merton)을 들 수 있다. 그는 “서양이 동양의 정신적 유산을 낮게 평가하거나 등한시하기를 계속한다면 인류와 인류의 문명을 위해하는 비극을 자초하게 될지 모른다.”고 선언하고, 기독교 시작에 동방에서 선물을 받은 것처럼 지금 기독교에 필요한 것은 동방에서 오는 동양의 정신적 유산이라고 했다.

 동양인 자신들은 어떤가? 아니 우리 한국인들은 어떤가? 이제 우리는 우리의 정신적 유산을 올바르게 평가하고 있는가? 슬프지만 선뜻 긍정적인 대답이 나오지 않는다. 그래도 다행스러운 것은 요즘은 한류 붐에 따라 한국 정신이나 사상에 대해 새롭게 보는 시각이 움트는 것도 사실이지만 아직도 한국인들 중 많은 사람들은 마치 ‘빛은 서방에서’라는 것이 현대판 진리쯤 되는 것으로 생각하고 뭣이나 서양 것이라면 좋고 옳다는 태도를 보이고 있기 때문이다. 

 이런 태도가 두드러지게 나타나는 데가 특히 한국 그리스도교의 경우다. 상당수 그리스도인들은 아직도 그리스도인이 된다고 하는 것이 전통적 동양의 종교 사상이나 철학을 배격하고 서양 역사에서 형성된 그리스도교 사상에만 충성하는 것쯤으로 믿고 있다.

 이런 이들 대부분은 그리스도교 신앙과 동양의 정신적 유산과는 양립할 수 없다고 생각한다. 빛과 어둠이 어찌 합하며, 그리스도와 벨리알이 어떻게 손을 잡으며, 진리와 거짓이 어이 어울릴 수 있느냐고 한다. 따라서 동양의 전통적 종교 사상에 대해 무지하면 할수록 더욱 충성된 그리스도의 종이 되는 것으로 믿는 경향이 있다. 혹시 동양 사상에 대해 듣거나 읽거나 인용하려면 오로지 그것을 반박하고 비웃기 위해서일 뿐이다.

 영국 역사가 아놀드 토인비(Arnold Toynbee)에 의하면 유대교, 그리스도교, 이슬람교는 어차피 배타적인 종교들로서 자기들의 절대성을 주장하지 않고서는 속이 시원하지 못한 것으로 생각한다는 것이다. 그러나 그리스도교도 요즘 서양 신학자들 사이에서는 그런 절대적 배타주의에서 탈피해야만 된다고 주장하는 사람들이 많다. 그리스도교에만 계시가 있고 다른 모든 종교들은 ‘거짓 종교’라고 주장하여 그리스도교 배타주의의 선봉장이던 칼 바르트(Karl Barth)가 죽고 그의 후계자로 들어선 하인리히 오트(Heinrich Ott) 교수마저도 오래전 캐나다를 방문했을 때, 에드먼튼 저널 기자와의 인터뷰에서 “인류가 당면한 문제들을 해결하기 위해서는 새로운 가치에 대해 열린 마음, 그리고 인간이 된다는 것이 무엇인가에 대한 탐구가 있어야 하는데, 이 일은 모든 종교 전통들의 공헌을 감안하지 않고서는 이룰 수가 없다”고 공언했다.

 20세기 최고의 신학자로 꼽히는 폴 틸리히(Paul Tillich) 교수도 죽기 전, 시카고 대학교 세계 종교사학의 거장 머치아 일리아데(Mircea Eliade)와 세계 종교를 섭렵하고, 자기에게 시간적 여유가 있으면 세계 종교의 빛 아래서 새로운 조직신학 책을 써보고 싶다고 했다.

 서양 사람들이 동양의 정신적 유산에 대해 관심을 갖고 알아보겠다고 하는 판국에 우리는 어느 때까지 강 건너 불 바라보듯 보고 있어야 하는 것일까? 우리들에게 와서 우리의 전통적 종교 사상에 대해 물어오는 그들에게 본래 ‘등잔 밑이 어두운 법’이라는 진리만을 일깨워 주는 것이 우리가 해야 할 유일한 의무일까?
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이 문제에 대한 훌륭한 책으로 J. J. Clarke지음, 장세룡 옮김, <동양이 어떻게 서양을 계몽했는가>(Oriental Enlightenment) (우물이 있는 집, 2004)을 참조할 수 있다.  동양 사상이 서양에 미친 영향을 세심한 고증을 거쳐 상술한 책이다.
특히 한국 사상가로 최제우와  , 류영모와 함석헌을 주목할 필요가 있다.

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2020/05/16

Leo Tolstoy and the Origins of Spiritual Memoir - Los Angeles Review of Books

Leo Tolstoy and the Origins of Spiritual Memoir - Los Angeles Review of Books



Leo Tolstoy and the Origins of Spiritual Memoir

By Thomas Larson







     



JANUARY 13, 2017





I.



TWO THINGS ARE TRUE about Leo Tolstoy in 1879. First, he had mostly given up on fiction, having published his two titanic novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The latter book exhausted him physically and morally: not long after its appearance, he termed his saga of adultery “an abomination.” He found novel writing to be a poor substitute for confronting religious issues and his existential lot. Second, because of his early literary acclaim and the immoral lifestyle it had spawned and enabled, he was miserable. He was so ashamed of himself that post-Karenina his ambivalent atheism collapsed and he sought a new relationship to the “truth.” He abdicated the throne of novelist and took up the mantle of religious critic — on the side of Christianity and against it.



Raised in the Russian Orthodox Church, Tolstoy lost his religion at 18. After a life of debauchery, in his early 50s, he wanted religion — or some source of intellectual security — back. In 1882, he published his Confession, a retrospective analysis of the previous five years in which his midlife crisis of faith unbalanced his literary and philosophical bearing. It is among the oddest of Christian tell-alls, a treatise searching for its own focal truth. Throughout, he hungers for spiritual fortitude: “Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn’t be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?” Readers note that the title has no “a” or “the” attached. (There are no articles in Russian, but this particular absence in English is meaningful.) The singular noun by itself emphasizes its currency.



Early on in the book, he asserts, in defiance, that “Christian teaching plays no part in life; one never comes across it in one’s relations with others and one never has to deal with it in one’s own life.” He pegs believers as “stupid, cruel, and immoral people who think themselves very important.” He tags unbelievers as the finest people he knows: they have “[i]ntelligence, honesty, uprightness, goodness of heart, and morality.” He renounces religion in favor of “reading and thinking” — in essence, reason — and recalls that five years prior “my only real faith […] was a faith in self-perfection.”



Of course, reason means progress, and progress, for an egoist like Tolstoy, entails an unchecked liberality in one’s behaviors. At this, the young Tolstoy, an aristocrat and braggart, more than excelled. Here’s part of his resume:



I killed people in war, I challenged people to duels in order to kill them, I lost at cards, I consumed the labor of peasants, I punished them, I fornicated, I deceived. Lies, theft, adultery of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder. … There was no crime I did not commit, and for all this my contemporaries praised me and thought me a relatively moral man, as they still do.



But the hyper-observant and self-obsessed Tolstoy suffers, despite his ego, a debilitating paranoia. He believes that people ridicule him because of his alcoholic, adulterous, and arrogant excesses. He has often imagined he’s dying: the darkness is drawing close, and he must find a purpose, because soon, for him, “nothing will remain but stink and worms.” (The death-obsessed Russian lived another 30 years after Confession.) At times, despair clings to his words like a rose vine: “You can only live as long as you’re drunk with life; but when you sober up, you can’t help but see that all this is just a fraud, and a stupid fraud. Precisely that: there’s nothing even amusing or witty about it; it’s simply cruel and stupid.” He says he doesn’t know why the universe exists. He is tortured by the question. He wants it answered; he can’t bear living in an untended and unintended cosmos.



By mid-book, Tolstoy’s searching starts to change — not just his focus but his sensibility. To unburden his longing, he quotes Bible passages, an Indian sage, and nuggets from the saints and the martyrs, honoring what he said earlier were useless “teachings of faith.” He wonders if to feel secure all we need is the wisdom of the ancients. These teachings have, he argues, lasted this long. His disclosures work him into a lather, and he declares that a pure belief in reason, without room for God as ultimate mystery, leads to insanity and suicide. A worrywart, Tolstoy plunges on with the tone of a querulous depressive. Moreover, he shifts, as it suits his gain, the blame for who should tow his anguish: from pagan nihilists to scientific rationalists to Orthodox dogmatists to jurisprudent bureaucrats — these last, the Ivan Ilyiches of the world. The only blameless one, he decides, is he who lives as Jesus lived. And yet, he counters, who can? It’s impossible.



Tolstoy decides that no faith is truer than the Christian peasant’s, whose “irrational knowledge” paves the road to happiness. Irrational knowledge is faith, he posits. Peasants should know. They are (though he aspires to join up, Tolstoy is definitely not one of them) the “great mass of people, the whole of mankind” — the nonindividuated mass, whom he lauds but who also rise, in his characterization, no higher than type. Uniformly, he writes in Chapter VIII, they believe God is “one and three,” father, son, spirit, “creation in six days, devils and angels and everything I couldn’t accept as long as I didn’t go mad.” That odd admission, with its tortuous grammar and emphatic final clause — as long as I didn’t go mad — is a performative leap away from his natural inclinations. He needs to believe something that transcends his inherent, incessant self-questioning, and he decides to do so. For him, peasant certainty is true because he, the great literary arbiter of truth, has arrived at it, not because Christianity has told him to accept it.



II.



Thus, with a thunderclap, Tolstoy’s short and intensely self-defensive polemic turns into a classic Christian conversion story, worthy of Augustine’s tale of tribulation. After weighing all the possibilities, mad or not, Tolstoy drapes the crucifix around his neck. As one of his best biographers, Martine de Courcel, writes, he has, rather Christianly, “admitted his sins and proclaimed his faith.” Saved, he declares that his actions from now on will embody his intentions — he will attend church, participate in sacraments, live frugally, leave his bourgeois habits, love God and peasant equally.



But wait. Opening faith’s creaking door hardly calms his restlessness. Though Tolstoy says he erred “not so much because I thought wrongly as because I lived badly,” the insight is not enough. He cannot settle his thoughts. Try as he might, Tolstoy, a self-cleansing fanatic, cannot rid himself of his deviant past or his disputatious nature. He can neither forgive himself nor stop analyzing the demands of Christian belief. As long as he keeps writing pages, he’s not sure about Christ as savior or about divine intervention. His belief demands more and more tuning.



The faith wedge splits him in two, before and after this, his so-called religious rebirth. Without God, Tolstoy has lived a life of pain and deceit. He declares he is now, with God, living a life free from such pain. But that’s too easy. Resolving each query brings another, and each time he squirms. De Courcel faults him. She writes that in “abandoning the dogmas of the Church, he thought he was freeing himself; in fact, he was about to become captive to the dogmas of his own making.” This is Tolstoy, the self-disappointment artist, his pattern, his personality. He confesses and converts — that is, he purifies religion down to what he finds valuable and cries, “Eureka!” But then he admits, often right away, that the conversion’s center cannot hold. Statement and counterstatement cancel each other out.



I think the critical point here is that “the dogmas of [our] own making” come to writers because personal writing is testimony — what I affirm or doubt can become as scriptural as a so-called sacred text. The problem with religious autobiography before Tolstoy is that it had to be based on Biblical reasoning (alas, not a clear field of study) and, apparently, required the author’s God-directed epiphany mid-confession. And yet almost all autobiographers of faith after Count Leo realize they are primarily writers of personal, not religious, revelation.



The final five chapters of Confession embroil us in his hemming-and-hawing conversion and deconversion. Tolstoy sides with Christianity only to oppose it, again and again, the combat all his, faith dispersing like a noble gas — free, loose, unbonded. What’s remarkable in Tolstoy is not his conversion but the way he evaluates his confession while he’s confessing.



Tolstoy’s energy comes from his questions, which often crowd out or undermine his answers. His telling has power, though it’s not the power we get from the dramatic narrative of a novel or a contemporary memoir. It’s something else. There’s little attempt in Confession to show action or deed, no scenes, no reportage, no exchanges with others, and few stories. Analysis trumps narrative. And yet it’s not all rhetoric. There is a dialectic — a reasoned discussion in which Tolstoy debates himself. What’s going on is a mélange of preaching virtues to the reader and arguing vices with himself, the self who can’t figure out what he should believe.



III.



To illustrate his mastery of fictional drama, consider Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, written just after Confession. The character of Ilyich comes vividly to life via thought and action: we hear about the offstage pettiness of his family and the bureaucratic sycophants who eagerly await his death and we participate in moments of tenderness between him and a loyal, pure-hearted peasant during Ilyich’s final months. For the most intense scenes, we’re inside Ilyich’s head as he seethes and self-deludes, undone by his illness and repulsed by his approaching death. Nothing tempers his fervid anxiety:



He wept for his helplessness, for his horrible loneliness, for people’s cruelty, for God’s cruelty, for God’s absence.



“Why have you done all this? Why have you brought me here? Why, why do you torment me so horribly?”



He didn’t expect an answer, but he also wept because there wasn’t and couldn’t be an answer. The pain increased again but he didn’t move or call anyone. He said to himself, “More, go on, beat me! But why? What have I done to you, why?”



The message is that fiction like Ivan Ilyich possesses a verisimilitude to life we recognize and an actual character who breaks down and dies, slowly, through story-time, while the nonfiction Confession shapes the verisimilitude of thought, the analytical riding on didactic summary and blatant assertion. Both types of writing (they can be equally emotional and purgative) feel necessary from Tolstoy — while exhausting one form, he seems to invite the other.



Narrative is what I find missing in Confession, scenes and torments from Tolstoy’s life, which, of course, got into his fiction and which, for better or worse, I’ve grown accustomed to reading in the contemporary memoir. If only he had shown us the depth of his suicidal despair, the effect on himself and others when he cheated them in gambling, when he felt hollowed out by his adultery (“of every kind”), when he killed a man in a duel — in short, narrative drama might have been more persuasive than exposition. As a result, we might have sympathized with the moral disease he suffers in Confession — as we do with Ivan Ilyich. (And as we do with Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov.) I sympathize not with the meaning of Ilyich’s struggle; I sympathize with the felt struggle itself. For example, in a moment of physical pain (he doesn’t know he has cancer), he says:



It’s not a case of the appendix or of the kidney, but of life … and death. Yes, I had life and now it’s passing, passing, and I can’t hold it back. That’s it. Why deceive oneself. Isn’t it obvious to everyone but myself that I am dying, and it’s only a question of the number of weeks, days — maybe now.



I feel the fact of Ilyich’s dying terrorize him. And that terror expresses itself, in Tolstoy’s handling, as a contentious belief Ilyich cannot shake. As long as we are alive, death cannot transform us. There is no death, an idea Tolstoy or any of us want to believe. It doesn’t matter that we are deceiving ourselves; we need to avoid death’s psychic pain. But Ilyich is bursting with psychic pain. So, too, we feel, is Tolstoy himself. Religions say there’s no end, but we know there is. Despite our belief in a resurrected Christ and the immortality we are promised, the sight of death insists that death is final. Tolstoy refused to mute the existential turmoil of his literary character. And if Ilyich couldn’t settle that turmoil, neither could Tolstoy. His way forward was to shift forms and go deeper in his next venture, a play, The Power of Darkness.



IV.



The more I study Confession, the more apparent Tolstoy’s conflicts become. (He becomes less a religious author than a spiritual one — less dogmatic and more interesting to read as he interrogates his leaky faith.) On one hand, I could fault Tolstoy, in this book, for abandoning the drama of narrative propulsion. On the other hand, I recognize the book he has written represented a major risk: to argue for uncertainty and identify faith-based deception in oneself and in the state was apostasy.



Several examples nail this yes/but rhetoric of Tolstoy’s bristling hostility: “To comprehend the truth one must not stand apart, and in order not to stand apart one must love and accept what one may not agree with”; “In the Mass the most important words for me were: ‘Let us love one another of one mind …’ The following words, ‘We believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,’ I omitted because I could not understand them”; “How often I envied the peasants for their illiteracy and lack of education. The statements of faith, which for me produced nonsense, for them produced nothing false.” And,



[T]he more I began to be imbued with these truths [Christian dogma] I was studying and the more they became the foundation of my life, the more burdensome and painful these conflicts became and the sharper became the dividing line between what I didn’t understand and what couldn’t be understood except by lying to myself.



We hear an almost effortless aversion to faith in these quotations (truths are “conflicts”). We also hear (“except by lying to myself”) how much the Orthodox Church, whose religious audacities are “interwoven by the thinnest of threads with lies,” repulses him.



Indeed, in the final pages of Confession, Tolstoy states that those “teachings of faith,” which have enraged him and to which he has submitted, cannot be true. “But where did the falsehood come from,” he writes, “and where did the truth come from? Both falsehood and truth had been handed down by what is called the church. Both falsehood and truth are contained in tradition, in the so-called sacred tradition and holy writ.” The only alternative is to drop out of organized religion, which Tolstoy will do, while his anti-Orthodox screeds will mount up — another way was via the privately circulating book A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology — before the church excommunicates him in 1901.



In 2013, Peter Carson’s translations of Confession and The Death of Ivan Ilyich were published in one volume, from which I’ve been quoting. In her introduction, Mary Beard raises the problem any life-writer faces when her subject is turning personal faith into textual description. “[A]utobiography is never quite transparent,” Beard writes, “and […] first-person spiritual memoirs are always partly constructions — retrospective and simplifying fictions imposed on the confusing stream of memories and on intellectual doubts and dilemmas.” That’s true of any memoir: the writing subdues and revamps the rawness of life. Beard’s view, however, doesn’t capture the unique quality of Tolstoy’s work. With Tolstoy, the core story is his confusion, his grappling with what’s unresolved, his placing “doubts and dilemmas” at the center of his soul’s inquiry. He’s trying not to simplify or fictionalize his faith-crumbling point of view: he is confessing the trauma of his spiritual crisis. That’s why he’s writing. This is nothing like Augustine’s hang-ups with sin, which in the Confessions lead him shamefully and self-loathingly to accede to God’s plan. If anything, Tolstoy is contending with his own unexamined life in Christianity, and it’s that which is making him so ornery or, if you like, a nonfictional Tolstoyan character.



The real issue, I think, is rhetorical: how does one persuade others of what one believes without listing unevidenced expository statements, whether agnostic or affirmed, which end up sounding simplistic, though they may not be simplistic at all? I like Robert Jensen’s tack in Arguing for Our Lives: “[W]hile faith experiences can be described to others, and patterns in faith experiences can be evaluated, a faith experience is not evidence in the sense we use that term in intellectual life — it can’t be replicated or presented to others to examine.” Faith is opinion, not fact. It is wished for, not verified. Christ was born of a virgin, did not die, and was resurrected? Just believe it. Once you do, these feel like facts, making emotional sense. Imagine there’s a videotape of the resurrection, for instance. We see the body, soul on board, leave the tomb together; the soul’s separation comes in a later “Caught on Camera” moment. But there isn’t any videotape — which is the point. There is only the scriptural claim. It’s why there’s only a scriptural claim. If you accept it, you accept two things: one, that the Immaculate Conception “can’t be replicated or presented to others to examine,” and two, such a truth is wholly a province of text.



Which, again, is not fact. But a reader and writer like Tolstoy or like us is highly susceptible to believing it, because it is written down — and to disbelieving it or, at least, questioning it, by way of the very writing with which we interrogate the validity of beliefs in the first place.



Testaments of common faith, ritualized in human ceremony and endowed in textual statements, take on the strange actuality of a religious experience. Thus, one’s doctrine can be one’s experience. Muslims need only say, “There is only one God and Allah is his name,” and you’re in. Christians need to say, “I believe that Jesus Christ is my personal savior,” and you’re in. What are you “in”? You are in the secure club of the people who have asserted the creed. In fact, the most secure bond of the tribe is its reliance on religious language. In Confession, Tolstoy’s great insight is that when he himself had to assert Orthodox creeds, he couldn’t turn such statements into religious experience. He couldn’t suspend his disbelief. He had to speak out and write against any dogma he couldn’t practice. Exploring the enigma of religious language — that what you say is true because you assert it and you believe it — led Tolstoy to, in a sense, give up on literature, though not entirely. Fiction couldn’t assuage his spiritual dryness. But anti-religious and pro-spiritual polemics, his forte as a writer for the rest of his life, offered a tonic to the most vexatious questions about how to live.



V.



Here’s the writerly difference between Augustine and Tolstoy, separated by more than 14 centuries: Augustine exsanguinates his body of sin until he aligns with Christian teaching, over-loathing himself to be overcompensated by God’s love. Tolstoy wrestles with Christian discourse and rejects much of it in favor of his own salvational plan. He will be a better man when he serves the poor, abnegates attachment, and adopts peasant deprivations, many abject, some unattainable — but so be it. These values culminate in one that he himself creates: spiritual self-reliance. Though he’s salvaged Christ’s call to social justice, Tolstoy is convinced that he is the originator of his post-Christian beliefs. If others follow suit, they often do so because of the writer’s textual prowess. It is an odd by-product of any religious confession — the idea that autobiographers are promulgating a reformed path for likeminded readers or adepts (think Gandhi or Deepak Chopra) because they themselves have refined the faith, made it more workable in the contemporary world.



For life-writers, Tolstoy offers existential scrutiny of religion; like Kierkegaard, he is a pioneer in this “field.” He rejects the package: a church, a religion, and the political system that underpins it. His is a writerly means to spiritual understanding: the author, ever-free, ever-seeking, ever-burdening himself, denies that any other source can change him. In effect, he spiritualizes himself. As such, Tolstoy births a primitive or nascent or proto-subgenre of the memoir, life-writing whose purpose is to lead the self away from its own and the world’s deceptions. The self on the page knows. Sometimes that self knows best. Not God. Not Jesus. Not the Bible. Not the clergy. The “I” I create via the writing.



Perhaps, you say, this skirts history and community and tradition, and thus is deeply flawed. But the authority of religious autobiography would need no Tolstoyan reformation had the form ensouled the values of the writer’s inner authority. Today, with the memoir explosion and its focus on narrative self-disclosure (mixing strategies of scenic fiction with those of nonfiction discourse), we have new ways for autobiographers to enact their religious and spiritual quandaries. There are more than just formal reasons for this change.



In one sense, Tolstoy’s imperative-driven form — listen to me confess — has had scant legacy, if any at all, in European and American literature. For the most part, literary writers have found religious confession irrelevant — because most writers and artists of the past century and a half have viewed Christian life, belief, and tradition as unrewarding, to say the least. Excepting the (very) Catholic Thomas Merton and the pan-religionist Alan Watts, in the United States we’ve had few writerly souls bent by the ferocity of a Leo Tolstoy. Indeed, some of the best writing on religion and spirituality has been unrelentingly critical or disestablishing of traditional faith. While beloved, C. S. Lewis’s many books on Christianity, including his religious autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955), are works of pious Christianity, which is, in many ways, a ship that has sailed into the sunset. Much to Lewis’s consternation, the foundational writers of the last two centuries — Paine, Whitman, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, Twain, Russell, Camus — have been anti-religious or nonreligious in the extreme. Despite Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Marilynne Robinson, and Anne Lamott in the United States and Roger Scruton and Don Cupitt in England, Christian themes are moribund, like coal deposits in Wyoming. There but unexcavated.



In our time, spiritual and nonreligious memoirists embrace doubt and disbelief. For them, remaining in doubt is not a hostile act, but a way to unlock the numinous, parlay the transcendent, in the writing life of the author. This would not be incongruent to Tolstoy, who, for the most part, killed off the religious autobiography. For contemporary writers, the spiritual is that which wrestles itself free from religion to become an act of self-reclamation, and perhaps of cultural reclamation as well. Each body that comes into the world comes in with a soul, intact. An Edenic unity. Under no prior system. Despite the parents’ wishes or those of the state. What is the moral geography of this individual’s inner life? That’s the door in each of us Tolstoy pushed open.



¤



Critic, memoirist, and essayist, Thomas Larson is the author of three books: The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease, The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative. Larson teaches in the MFA Program at Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio. His website is www.thomaslarson.com.








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2020/03/26

Harvard Classics - Wikipedia

Harvard Classics - Wikipedia

Harvard Classics

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The Harvard Classics
Harvard Classics.jpg
The first 10 volumes of The Harvard Classics
EditorCharles W. Eliot
Original titleDr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf
PublisherP. F. Collier and Son
Publication date
1909
The Harvard Universal Classics, originally known as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf, is a 51-volume anthology of classic works from world literature compiled and edited by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot and first published in 1909.[1]
Eliot had stated in speeches that the elements of a liberal education could be obtained by spending 15 minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf. (Originally he had said a three-foot shelf.) The publisher P. F. Collier and Son saw an opportunity and challenged Eliot to make good on this statement by selecting an appropriate collection of works, and the Harvard Classics was the result.[2]
Eliot worked for one year with William A. Neilson, a professor of English; Eliot determined the works to be included and Neilson selected the specific editions and wrote introductory notes.[1] Each volume had 400–450 pages, and the included texts are "so far as possible, entire works or complete segments of the world's written legacies."[3] The collection was widely advertised by Collier and Son, in Collier's and elsewhere, with great success.

Vol. 1-10[edit]

Volumes 1-10

Vol. 11-20[edit]

Volumes 11-20

Vol. 21-30[edit]

Volumes 21-30

Vol. 31-39[edit]

Volumes 31-39

Vol. 40[edit]

Volume 40

Vol. 41[edit]

Volume 41

Vol. 42[edit]

Volume 42

Vol. 43-49[edit]

Volumes 43-49

Vol. 50[edit]

Volume 50

Vol. 51[edit]

Volume 51

The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction[edit]

The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction was selected by Charles W. Eliot, LLD (1834-1926), with notes and introductions by William Allan Neilson. It also features an index to Criticisms and Interpretations.
Charles William Eliot, compiler and editor of The Harvard Classics anthology.

Enduring success[edit]

As Adam Kirsch, writing for Harvard magazine in 2001, notes, "It is surprisingly easy, even today, to find a complete set of the Harvard Classics in good condition. At least one is usually for sale on eBay, the Internet auction site, for $300 or so, a bargain at $6 a book. The supply, from attics or private libraries around the country, seems endless — a tribute to the success of the publisher, P.F. Collier, who sold some 350,000 sets within 20 years of the series' initial publication".[1]
The Five-Foot Shelf, with its introductions, notes, guides to reading, and exhaustive indexes, may claim to constitute a reading course unparalleled in comprehensiveness and authority.
— Notes on the Lectures by William Allan Neilson
The main function of the collection should be to develop and foster in many thousands of people a taste for serious reading of the highest quality, outside of The Harvard Classics as well as within them.
— Charles W. Eliot, LLD[70]

Similar compendia[edit]

  • The concept of education through systematic reading of seminal works themselves (rather than textbooks) was carried on by John Erskine at Columbia University, and in the 1930s Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago carried this idea further with the concepts of education through study of the "great books" and "great ideas" of Western civilization. This led to the publication in 1952 of Great Books of the Western World, which is still in print and actively marketed. In 1937, under Stringfellow Barr, St. John's College introduced a curriculum based on the direct study of "great books". These sets are popular today with those interested in homeschooling.
  • Gateway to the Great Books[71] was designed as an introduction to the Great Books of the Western World, published by the same organization and editors in 1952.
  • Palgrave's The Golden Treasury[71] is a popular anthology of English poetry, originally selected for publication by Francis Turner Palgrave in 1861.
  • The Oxford Book of English Verse[71] is an anthology of English poetry that had a very substantial influence on popular taste and perception of poetry for at least a generation.
  • The Loeb Classical Library is a series of books, today published by Harvard University Press, which presents important works of ancient Greek and Latin literature in a way designed to make the text accessible to the broadest possible audience.
  • The Book of Life[72] offers a contemporary self-education in transcribing pragmatic lessons from some of the greatest philosophical and literary minds, stretching as far back as Ancient Greece.
  • The Sacred Books of the East is a monumental 50-volume set of English translations of Asian religious writings published by the Oxford University Press between 1879 and 1910. It incorporates the essential sacred texts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, and Islam.
  • The Delphian Society created the 10 Volume Delphian Course of Reading--with the Harvard Classics editor Dr. Eliot in mind--for young and developing minds.[73]
  • The Thinker's Library is a selection of essays, literature, and extracts from greater works by various classical and contemporary humanists and rationalists, continuing in the tradition of the Renaissance that were published between 1929 and 1951 for the Rationalist Press Association by Watts & Co., London, a company founded by Charles Albert Watts.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b c Adam Kirsch, The "Five-foot Shelf" Reconsidered, Harvard Magazine, Volume 103, Number 2. November–December 2001
  2. ^ Smith, Roy L. (2 October 1948). "The Book That Has Proved Itself: SUNDAY SCHOOL LESSON OF THE WEEK". Lawrence Journal-World. Retrieved 29 April 2019.
  3. ^ "Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf of Books: Toward a Centennial of The Harvard Classics". Find Articles. LookSmart. Archived from the original on 2007-03-01.
  4. ^ Franklin, Benjamin. "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  5. ^ Mee, Arthur; Hammerton, J.A., eds. (10 June 2004). "The World's Greatest Books: John Woolman Journal". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  6. ^ Penn, William (7 October 2004). "Some Fruits of Solicitude". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  7. ^ Plato. "Apology". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  8. ^ Plato. "Crito". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  9. ^ Plato. "Phaedo". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  10. ^ Epictetus. "The Golden Sayings of Epictetus, with the Hymn of Cleanthes". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  11. ^ Aurelius, Marcus. "Meditations". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  12. ^ Bacon, Francis. "The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  13. ^ Bacon, Francis. "New Atlantis". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  14. ^ Milton, John. "Areopagitica". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  15. ^ Tractate on Education From the Edition of 1673. P.F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY. 2001 [1909]. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  16. ^ Browne, Sir Thomas. "Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  17. ^ Milton, John. "The Poetical Works of John Milton". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  18. ^ Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  19. ^ Burns, Robert. "Poems and Songs of Robert Burns". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  20. ^ Bishop of Hippo Saint Augustine. "The Confessions of St. Augustine". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  21. ^ Kempis, Thomas a. "The Imitation of Christ". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 21 February2018.
  22. ^ Aeschylus. "The Agamemnon of Aeschylus". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 22 February2018.
  23. ^ Aeschylus. "The House of Atreus; Being the Agamemnon, the Libation bearers, and the Furies". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 22 February 2018.
  24. ^ Aeschylus. "Specimens of Greek Tragedy". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 22 February2018.
  25. ^ Aeschylus. "Specimens of Greek Tragedy". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 22 February2018.
  26. ^ Jump up to:a b Sophocles. "Plays of Sophocles: Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 22 February 2018.
  27. ^ Jump up to:a b Euripides. "Hippolytus; The Bacchae". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 22 February2018.
  28. ^ Aristophanes. "The Frogs". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 22 February 2018.
  29. ^ Jump up to:a b Cicero, Marcus Tullius. "Treatises on Friendship and Old Age". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  30. ^ Cicero, Marcus Tullius. "Letters of Marcus Tullius Cicero". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  31. ^ The Younger Pliny. "Letters of Pliny". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  32. ^ Smith, Adam. "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  33. ^ Darwin, Charles. "On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  34. ^ Plutarch. "Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  35. ^ Virgil. "The Aeneid". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  36. ^ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. "Don Quixote". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  37. ^ Bunyan, John. "The Pilgrim's Progress from this world to that which is to come". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  38. ^ Walton, Izaak. "Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, &c, Volume 2". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  39. ^ Smith; Wiggin; Parrish. "The Arabian Nights: Their Best-known Tales". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  40. ^ Aesop. "Aesop's Fables". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  41. ^ Grimm, Jacob; Grimm, Wilhelm. "Household Tales by Brothers Grimm". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  42. ^ Andersen, H. C. "Andersen's Fairy Tales". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February2018.
  43. ^ Dryden, John. "All for Love; Or, The World Well Lost: A Tragedy". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  44. ^ Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. "The School for Scandal". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  45. ^ Goldsmith, Oliver. "She Stoops to Conquer; Or, The Mistakes of a Night: A Comedy". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  46. ^ Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Volume 1". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  47. ^ Browning, Robert. "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February2018.
  48. ^ George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron. "The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 4". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  49. ^ Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. "Faust — Part 1". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  50. ^ Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. "Egmont". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February2018.
  51. ^ Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. "Hermann und Dorothea". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  52. ^ Marlowe, Christopher. "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  53. ^ Dante Alighieri. "Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Complete". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  54. ^ Manzoni, Alessandro. "The Betrothed". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  55. ^ Homer. "The Odyssey". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  56. ^ Two Years before the Mast and Twenty-four Years after. P.F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY. 2001 [1909]. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  57. ^ The Sayings of Confucius. P.F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY. 2001 [1909]. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  58. ^ The Book of Job. P.F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY. 2001 [1909]. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  59. ^ The Book of Psalms. P.F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY. 2001 [1909]. Retrieved 5 May2019.
  60. ^ Ecclesiastes Or, The Preacher. P.F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY. 2001 [1909]. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  61. ^ The Gospel According to Luke. P.F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY. 2001 [1909]. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  62. ^ The Acts of the Apostles. P.F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY. 2001 [1909]. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  63. ^ The First and Second Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians. P.F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY. 2001 [1909]. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  64. ^ Hymns of the Christian Church. P.F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY. 2001 [1909]. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  65. ^ Buddhist Writings. P.F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY. 2001 [1909]. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  66. ^ Dickson, J. F. (January 1874). "Art. I.—The Upasampadá-Kammavácá being the Buddhist Manual of the Form and Manner of Ordering of Priests and Deacons". The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. 7th: 1–16. doi:10.1017/S0035869X00016336. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  67. ^ The Bhagavad-Gita Or, Song Celestial. P.F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY. 2001 [1909]. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  68. ^ Chapters from the Koran. P.F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY. 2001 [1909]. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  69. ^ Neilson, William Allan; et al., eds. (1914). Lectures on the Harvard Classics: Contents. 51(1st ed.). Collier Press New York: P F Collier & Son (published 1909). pp. 1–4. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  70. ^ "Full text of The Harvard Classics Volume 50". Internet Archive. Retrieved 26 February2018.
  71. ^ Jump up to:a b c Adler, Mortimer J.; Doren, Charles Van (1972) [1940]. "Appendix A. A Recommended Reading List". How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (PDF)(Revised ed.). New York: Simon & Schuster. pp. 349–350. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  72. ^ "The Book of Life". The Book of Life. The School of Life. Retrieved 26 February 2018.
  73. ^ The Delphian Society. "The Delphian Course. Vol. 1: The Delphian Course of Reading Introduction". Internet Archive. Chicago: The Society. pp. viii–xi. Retrieved 4 March 2018.

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]


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