A Religious Theory of Literary Criticism

While listening to a lecture about the origins of psychological literary theory, I found myself wondering what a religious literary theory would be like. My vague recollection of “The Autumn of the Middle Ages” suggests it would be just as symbolic as feminist, Marxist, or Freudian theory, but symbolic of the intentions of God.

Instead of comparing Kirk, Spock, and McCoy to the Id, Ego, and Superego, or Heart, Mind, and Spirit, would they become the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and would we be arguing over which was which? (Note to self, write a novel in which the bad guys are the Freudian and the good guys are their New Age equivalents?)  It is easy to find intentional Christ-figures in many movies and books: “Man of Steel,” “Aliens III,” even the avowedly atheist “Atlas Shrugged” has the hero being tortured on a machine so the villains can expose the futility of their own evil.

Since we have a Christian mythos imbedded in our psychology, it’s normal to find Christian psychology in our literature and movies, but what about Buddhism? Books like “Cloud Atlas” and movies like “Groundhog Day” could be interpreted by my theoretical Buddhist literature professor as referring to how our spirits learn through the cycle of reincarnation. Martial art movies often discuss the proper control and channeling of emotions as the key to victory.

But no matter the philosophy or theology of your imaginary professor, these novels and movies are more often than not a push back against reality. All those movies about people giving up making more money to spend time with their families describes the behavior of a minority. All those movies about rogue cops breaking the rules to kill bad guys represent the frustration we have with rules designed to prevent rogue cops from imprisoning or shooting the innocent and incidentally make it more difficult to arrest the guilty. All those SF movies in which humans triumph over superior technology and overwhelming odds might well be push back against our fears of our technology and our smallness compared to the infinity of space-time.

Since moral systems are push back against the same amoral world, it shouldn’t be surprising that Christians, Buddhists, etc, have similar moral conclusions. Since philosophical systems are attempts to understand a similar world, we shouldn’t be surprised when we find similarities.  Since ideological systems are Ego-attempts to shape the world in Id-visions, and everyone’s Id is the product of the same evolution, we shouldn’t be surprised at similarities between tyrannies. When Christians and Buddhists disagree about moral decisions, chances are one of them is using their religion as a moral system and one of them is using their religion as an ideological system.