Roger Lundin has had a long-term interest in the distinctively American aspect of modernity, particularly as it took form in the 19th century. In From Nature to Experience, Lundin suggestively links these concerns to contemporary culture as well. The central figure in Lundin’s narrative is Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Lundin’s title reflects this preoccupation by alluding to two of Emerson’s most famous essays. Lundin ingeniously reads these two rather oppositional pieces as symptomatic of “a dramatic shift in cultural authority” that leads ultimately to the postmodern theories of Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, et al., writers who “assume as givens a series of beliefs about nature and human destiny. … [and yet provide] neither proof of their beliefs nor an apology for them.”
From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority (American Intellectual Culture)
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
278 pages
$47.00
In the course of showing how American intellectuals have grounded belief over time, and why Americans have “come to prize experience as highly as we do,” Lundin tells a story that echoes a number of other influential books, including James Turner’s Without God, Without Creed, Andrew Delbanco’s The Death of Satan, and Bruce Kuklick’s Churchmen and Philosophers, all of which are cited. But there are several remarkable aspects of Lundin’s argument that are worth noting here. First is Lundin’s daring attempt to bring certain Christian thinkers into close conversation with the looming cultural and literary theorists of our era. It is not often that one reads criticism of this sophistication pairing Rorty and Fish with Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Lundin’s mastery of literary theory is on full display here, and he writes a lucid prose that makes this mastery accessible. Along the way, he highlights the accomplishments of theorists and critics whom he believes share his desire to bring theology and the Christian tradition into closer dialogue with the reigning priests of the “hermeneutic of suspicion”: in particular, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Charles Taylor, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Paul Ricoeur all receive ample consideration. In addition, the study considers major American writers (besides Emerson) in the light of the cultural shift charted in the book, particularly Emily Dickinson, Henry Adams, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and that honorary American W. H. Auden. It is thus a model for those of us who are looking to engage current literary theory with the resources of the Christian tradition.
But From Nature to Experience is out for much bigger game than merely outlining a view of intellectual history. It is an attempt to recover lost wisdom and reassert lost knowledge. A crucial moment occurs at the end of the first long section, in Chapter 4, entitled “‘Diminished Things’: Literature and the Disenchantment of the World.” Arguing that we can “re-enchant” the world, Lundin enlists the aid here of Ricoeur, whose emphasis on teleology, eschatology, and destiny are the antidotes for an unbalanced hermeneutic of suspicion. Ricoeur, along with Gadamer and Bakhtin, “acknowledge[s] the spiritual and epistemological limits of naturalism,” and in echoing these theorists, Lundin reveals the burden of his overall argument: “literature and theory must recuperate certain resources that naturalism has suppressed or forgotten.” Or, as Alister McGrath argues even more bluntly in his book The Reenchantment of Nature, we must “reclaim the idea of nature as God’s creation and act accordingly.” Lundin is taking an approach similar to McGrath’s into the field of literary theory, desiring to “re-enchant” literature, and thus turning current theory on its head.
Indeed, it is in his discussion of Ricoeur that Lundin most explicitly challenges many of the reigning assumptions at work in the humanities divisions of universities today, and in the intellectual spaces of high-brow periodicals and influential media of all sorts. His argument is learned and complex, and yet the book’s rewards are not only invaluable for the field of literary and cultural studies but also edifying on a spiritual level, something pretty rare in English departments these days.
The cover features a breathless proclamation by Stanley Hauerwas: “This could well be one of the most important books written in recent times.” These are strong words, and of course elevated claims are the staple of advertising copy. And yet there is something both timely and sobering about the implications of Lundin’s book; it would be unwise to dismiss Hauerwas’ praise as mere gush. We are, after all, living in a time of widespread confusion regarding the nature of spiritual authority—a time marked as much by yearning as by hostility for well-grounded belief. In such a context, this is indeed an important book. And it is a hopeful book in a field that rarely seems much interested in hope anymore. The study of literature, ostensibly about helping people become more humane, has been for decades now overly influenced by the nihilist underpinnings of high theory.
The decisive insight of From Nature to Experience is that this need not be the case. The book ends powerfully with Karl Barth’s meditations on the “real mystery of Easter,” which Lundin pits against Dante’s version of Limbo as a place of hopeless sighing and never-ending discussion (rather like some of the departmental meetings I’ve attended lately). Lundin cites Dorothy Sayers’ remarks about the citizens of Limbo: “Their failure lay in not imagining better … . [They fall] short in the imagination of ecstasy.”
Emerson began his literary career with just such elan, but it faded as he aged. Lundin seeks to recover and re-baptize the Emersonian “ecstatic” imagination, taking it through and beyond the endless conversation and jaded skepticism of “Experience” to make it a new thing. Re-enchanting Emerson for a post-critical America while simultaneously reasserting the possibility of a supernatural source of authority beyond history, From Nature to Experience is itself an exemplary work of the critical (and hopeful) imagination.
Harold K. Bush teaches at Saint Louis University. He is the author most recently of  Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age (Univ. of Alabama Press).
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