Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy

Jamie Callison

An open access monograph in Edinburgh University Press’s ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture’ series.

Available as a hardback or paperback via the Edinburgh University Press website or other good bookstores

A perceptive, absorbing, irreplaceable study. In showing how modernist writing was shaped by an interplay between the claims of mysticism as individual experience and the benefits of ecclesiastical frameworks, Callison illuminates a rich seam of innovation and perplexity not just in Jones, Eliot and H.D. but in the broader life of early twentieth-century Christianity.
— Douglas Mao, Johns Hopkins University
Callison’s study is a valuable resource both for students of literary modernism who have observed the persistence of religious questions and influences in the modernist period and for students of practical theology, particularly those of us who continue to experience and explore the appeal of various forms of retreat in our own time. Indeed, Callison’s categories of spilt mysticism and wavering orthodoxy provide helpful frameworks to consider the role of Christian spirituality in the arts and religious practices, not only in historical studies but also in contemporary
developments and innovations.
— Kathleen Henderson Staudt, "Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality"
Callison’s book offers significant original insights into the contested status of both orthodox and mystical religion in the early 20th century. That very historical slipperiness of the term mysticism might raise the question of its utility as an analytical category in the present: does modernist studies’ continued deployment of the term—whether referring to given religious traditions, trans-cultural religious phenomena, or secularized forms of either—risk displacing assumptions baked into this category onto literary texts? For religious and literary studies scholars probing such issues, “Modernism and Religion’s” attentive, thought-provoking analyses will be essential reading—and to rethink orthodoxies alongside Callison’s book is sure to be an illuminating experience.
— Graham Borland, "Reading Religion"

Remaking religious poetry in a secular age

Modernism and Religion locates modernism in the ferment of twentieth-century religious change. While the literary epiphany channelled modernist fascination with immanence and religious immediacy, the study attends to the strategic response of a range of religious authorities to an emerging mysticism. The work of T. S. Eliot, H.D. and David Jones, this study argues, was shaped by an orthodoxy made new in the age of modernism. These poets responded to the crisis of modernity through an engagement with Catholic theological modernism, the liturgical revival, human rights, Christian sociology, philosophical personalism and an international retreat movement – developments that resisted the silencing of religious voices in public debate. Modernism and Religion presents the long poems of these writers, marked by their internal heterogeneity, clashing registers and mechanical construction, as an alternative to epiphanic modernism, and positions what it terms their ‘wavering orthodoxy’ as a fusion of the sacred and the secular.

Jamie Callison describes what made religion so important to David Jones, T. S. Eliot and H.D. Video: Gunvor Helling/ UiA.

Transforming religious orthodoxy in the age of modernism

Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy:

  • Provides a historical and theoretically informed account of mysticism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

  • Details the significance of a range of religious practices to modernism, including communal worship, conversion, and retreat.

  • Reads modernism through the lens of recent postsecular theory.

  • Offers close readings of major works by David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and H.D., including the first extended discussion of Jones's recently published The Grail Mass, informed by extensive work in the personal archives and libraries of individual authors.

  • Outlines an expanded understanding of religious poetry.