Book Review: The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought

Title: The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought

Editor: Jaroslav Pelikan

Date: 1990

Publisher: Little Brown

ISBN: 0-316-69770-2

Length: 630 pages plus 5 pages of acknowledgments

Quote: "And at a time when extremists on both sides seem to be insisting to us that our choice today lies between a religious conviction that leads to persecution and a religious toleration that is based on skepticism, I find myself looking instead for a definition of toleration that is based on religious conviction."

As Clifton Fadiman explained in a preliminary foreword, this book is part of a series of "World Treasuries published in cooperation with the Book-of-the-Month Club. Each of these Treasuries gathers, from as many literatures as possible, previously published, high-order writing of...a specific field or genre...edited by a recognized authority in the field."

As Jaroslav Pelikan explained in his longer preface,a World Treasury of religious thought is hard to put together. The field is so enormous that even a "recognized authority" can only know for sure that a lot of deserving books haven't even been considered. And how does one evaluate thought opposed to one's own? In active mission work it's possible to find sincere and honorable people whose tradition is different from yours, but merely by reading books, how can you discern between sincere separatists and bigots masquerading as separatists, between sincere social-gospellers who still naively believe in big government and would-be tyrants masquerading as social-gospellers, between sincere libertarians who desire freedom for all people (and all animals that don't eat people) and greedheads masquerading as libertarians? And how can you choose between perfection of the life and of the work, since many great saints were poor writers and many great writers were anything but saints? And, given the possibility of proportionately representing all of North America's living religions, how many readers are even interested in a book that proportionately represents other religions as well as their own?

Perhaps World Treasuries of more specific kinds of religious thought would have been a better idea.

Pelikan accepted, however, this preposterous idea of summarizing world-class modern religious thought in 630 pages, and on the third reading--the first reading having spread over three weeks, the second hasty reading in one, this third reading taking ten days--I say he did a fine job with it. You won't like everything in this collection but, if you're even an agnostic with a tolerance for religious language, you'll like some of these essays, and chapters, and poems.

I found some old favorites that are in other books, but had to be in this one: Dostoyevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" parable, some of Lewis's "Screwtape Letters," Hopkins' "God's Grandeur," Sayers, "Image of God," some of Chesterton's "Orthodoxy," some of Bonhoeffer's "Letters from Prison," and the original, unsingable full-length version of Lowell's "Once to Every Man and Nation." Having those in one place probably justifies the price of a book.

Some things that I don't particularly like also needed to be here: Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil," Freud's "Future of an Illusion," Marx's "Religion the Opium of the People," Lin Yutang's "Importance of Living," Rauschenbusch's "Social Principles of Jesus"--all basically anti-Christian, but a lot of the religious thought that's taken place in North America is and has been anti-Christian.

Three selections that are probably familiar to all baby-boomers, and aren't such great favorites of mine that I'd be delighted to see them reprinted somewhere every day, probably did need to be here too: King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Emerson's "Divinity School Address," and Black Elk's "Visions of the Other World." Then there's Unamuno's "Tragic Sense of Life," which is Christian in a very twentieth century, somewhat heretical way.

A few things I don't particularly like for other reasons: Weil's "Waiting for God," which tells us little about God and a lot about what a sick chick the young Weil used to be--and she died young. Henley's "Invictus," which I can believe he wanted to believe, when he wrote it, but not that he was able to believe. And why, out of Gandhi's massive Autobiography, select for reprinting the chapters where young Mohandas considers and rejects Christianity? Why pass over all of Gandhi's positively Hindu and Humanist ideas, about which he wrote hundreds of pages, and focus on his terse negative reactions? That decision may be instructive for Christians; I don't think it fairly represents either Hinduism, or Humanism, or Gandhi.

And translations...in the Bonhoeffer passages, which I like, very much, I was most aware of the way thoughts suffer in translation. In one of Bonhoeffer's letters he wrote the outline of a great book, possibly Wendell Berry's What Are People For, possibly an even better book yet to come, about the concept of "reserve." Tragically he wrote it in German, and I'm reading it in English. These two languages are too much alike to admit a really satisfying translation of anything. What German-speaking people say is good German writing, faithfully translated, always comes out as bad English. Words that were originally the same have evolved different meanings, and each language has many short common words that are used with lots of different meanings, and when it's possible for the translator to be confident about which possible translation of a word to use, the one that expresses the right thought usually has the wrong sound and associations. 

North America badly needed the benefit of Bonhoeffer's thoughts on reserve--the respect for others' privacy that makes a clear distinction between friendly and pushy manners, the respect for others' rights that absolutely bans "nannyism" or censorship or other misguided efforts to force others to be happy, the respect for all life that simply rules out options like strip mining and poison spraying. The twentieth century would have left us much less to recover from if more of us had discovered Bonhoeffer's thoughts on "reserve." But we didn't, because Bonhoeffer happened to be German, and so his letter comes out as turgid English that uses a lot of abstract words in bizarre ways that lack meaning for North Americans unless we spend some time pondering them in their historical and cultural context.

Pelikan, who had just written a five-volume history of the Christian church, cheerfully tells us that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Christians had written more in German alone than survives of all the writings of the early church. His tolerance for German writing in translation is high. A great deal of important Christian thinking has taken place in Germany but, whether it was good or bad Christianity, it all translates into unimpressive English--except where it's been good enough to inspire "free" or "singable" translations. ("A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" is an English hymn bearing some resemblance, mostly in the tune, to Martin Luther's older German hymn, "Ein' Feste Burg.") From the little I know--tourist-level German, not book-reading German--I think all the translations of German works into English, in this book, must be faithful translations; certainly they're uninspiring English. I ponder whether it might have been better to omit even the Bonhoeffer passages. Writing hasty personal letters from prison, Bonhoeffer hadn't really done justice to his thoughts on reserve in the first place; translation into English...

Then there are the good things I've found only in this book, like Ward's "Faith and Freedom," which all American Christians should know and love, but many don't, and Abraham Heschel's "Spirit of Judaism"...A majority of North Americans of my generation, being Gentiles, have only read/heard (and been encouraged to read/hear) about Judaism through pop culture. From pop culture we learned tidbits like "Him she loves? Oy vay!" We forget that Christianity, to which most of us feel at least ancestral ties, is a sort of sect or development of Judaism. What Heschel has to say, as a Jew, to Jews, would be as well said to Christians by a Christian.

Solzhenitsyn's "Beauty Will Save the World" is Humanist not Christian, but because it affirms my feeling that Highly Sensory-Perceptive Persons around the world are more kin than any "race" defined by physical features, I like it. You might or might not like it; you might think that, since it's not religious in a theistic sense, it's an odd choice to finish off a collection of religious thought. I agree. It's Humanist, but it's delightful.

Book-of-the-Month-Club books always sold well enough to stay out of the collector price range for a long time...$5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment; one other book of similar size will fit into a $5 package (squeezed hard, taped if necessary...). Unfortunately Pelikan no longer even has a charity to which to direct a dollar, but you're welcome, positively encouraged, to add a book by a living author to the package along with this one.