Harold Bloom as Speculative (Tillichian) Ontologist

On occasion, the great literary critic Harold Bloom has indulged his taste for Tillichian ontology. His reading of French Iranologist Henry Corbin on the multi-faceted religious genius Ibn 'Arabi is a case in point:

"I am not a Jungian, and so give no credence to the archetypes of a collective unconscious. But I am both a literary and a religious critic, a devoted student of Gnosis both ancient and modern, and I have enormous respect for recurrent images of human spirituality, no matter how they may be transmitted. Images have their own potency and their own persistence; they testify to human need and desire, but also to a transcendent frontier that marks either a limit to the human, or a limitlessness that may be beyond the human. I return here to ... Henry Corbin's 'suprasensible world which is neither the empirical world of the sense nor the abstract world of the intellect.' In that intermediate world, images reign, whether of the plays of Shakespeare, the scriptures of religion, our dreams, the presence of angels, or astral-body manifestations ... [I ask] who can establish or prophesy the ultimate relations between sense impressions, images, and concepts?" Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium, 11.

The question of the "ultimate" relations between sense impressions, images, and concepts is Tillichian in its flavor; it is also unanswerable, because "ultimacy" eludes clear definition. What independent criteria will allow us to decide that we have arrived at the ultimate relations among sensation, image, and concept? Indeed, what does such an expression even mean?

Bloom's reference to images as markers of a "transcendent frontier" either limiting or pointing beyond human reality is also Tillichian in tenor. But such remarks reflect a failure to consider the phenomenon of linguistic referentiality--how it "works" in ordinary usage.

In an article published in The Philosophical Quarterly, ("The Truth About Fictional Entities", Vol. 24, No. 94, January 1974, pp. 27-36), H. Gene Blocker brought much needed light upon this subject in deft, Wittgensteinian fashion.

Blocker focused his article upon fictional characters such as Tom Sawyer and asked in what sense such a character may be said to exist. He then notes that "our understanding of fictional characters is very much like our understanding of real people. We know that there are no such persons, but we understand the narrative as the revelation of a whole complex person, indicating, for example, general character-traits which nonetheless leave room for speculation as to what he is like in other respects. Through our referential use of language, the character in a work of fiction is treated as a partially disclosed entity about whom more can be learned, who therefore contains more than our description of him, and in that sense, transcends the actual descriptive sentences about him. In short, because of our referring use of language, we treat him as a whole person over and above the sum of properties actually attributed to him in the novel. This is what lies behind, and a better way of putting, the confusing idea that a fictional character is a non-existent object" (p. 32).

My only criticism of Blocker's handling of this issue is the naive realism reflected in his opening statement--that our understanding of fictional characters is "very much like our understanding of real people." I would add that our understanding of "real people" is very much like our understanding of fictional characters; elsewhere in the article, Blocker indicates an awareness of the complexity of this issue: "Many of our attitudes about love, for example, are formed more by novels, plays, and films than by real life. In this sense, nature imitates art, as Wilde noted, and this is the sense in which people live within a cultural framework which allows certain well-defined aspects of reality to be perceived more than others" (p. 35).

I hold, with historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith, that "map is not territory, but maps are all we possess." That said, the epistemological processes involved with linguistic reference are, I think, precisely as Blocker described them. No object of enduring interest--factual or fictional--may be exhaustively known or described. Speculation and commentary continue as a consequence of the hermeneutical instability ensured by the complexity of such objects as well as by the passage of time. New historical contexts invite fresh interpretations. I thank God for that--fully aware that God him/her/it-self is likewise an "object" of enduring interest.

Paul Tillich's "Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction"

In The Courage To Be, Paul Tillich argued that the "ontological nature of reality" (a redundant phrase if ever there were one) can only be described "ontologically"--a circular argument if ever there were one. An ontological description of reality uses "some realm of experience to point to characteristics of being-itself which lie above the split between subjectivity and objectivity and which therefore cannot be expressed literally in terms taken from the subjective or the objective side" (25). He then asserts that being qua being "transcends objectivity as well as subjectivity" but, in order to approach it cognitively, "one must use both." This feat is accomplished by the use of analogy (ibid).

How analogy helps one here is, at best, unclear. What is clear is that Tillich wishes to posit a "realm" of reality that is not exhausted by either "objective" or "subjective" approaches to it. In this regard, he appears to be indicating an apprehension of reality that eludes ordinary modes of descriptive discourse and borders upon the "apophatic speech" of the mystic--what Michael Sells has termed "mystical languages of unsaying."

I would suggest, however, that such uses of language are inherently literary and fictional: they do not rise "above the split between subjectivity and objectivity" but, rather, manage to straddle the two. Their credibility (if that's the right word) is a function of the degree to which they persuade us through their mimetic qualities--and this is where "analogy" or other modes of metaphorical speech come in. Dickens's character Charles Gradgrind is "believable" to the extent to which he successfully "embodies" the sort of individual or individuals I have encountered in my life who think, talk, and behave as (simile) this character in the novel Hard Times.

The so-called science of ontology is best appreciated by the Stevensian conceit of "notes toward a supreme fiction." Religion, as Harold Bloom reminds us, is "spilled poetry." It supplies us, as Northrop Frye argued, with "myths to live by" and "metaphors to live in." Indeed, as Frye insists, "imaginative structures contain a vast amount of truth about the human condition that it is not possible to obtain in any other way" [Frye, The Double Vision, 37] but we must not understand these figures of speech "literally" in the sense that we should expect to find a birth certificate on file in some county clerk's office that would serve as proof that the Charles Gradgrind of Dickens's novel was a living, breathing, eating, defecating, love-making, laboring, and eventually dying, individual.

For all of that, however, Charles Gradgrind lives, has lived and, alas, shall live on: we have met him on many occasions and in numerous guises. And wherever we have met him he has always presented himself in a manner that is true to his novelistic form: a soul-withering adding machine for whom everything--and everyone--has a price.

With the proper adjustments--i.e., by substituting "notes toward a supreme fiction" for the various references to ontology that appear in Tillich's work--we can begin to appreciate Paul Tillich as a stimulating philosopher of culture and intellectual history.

Apocalyptic Humanism Refined

Reconciliation with one's personal mortality (i.e., one's humanity) as in the Gilgamesh epic need not be conflated with capitulation to the prevailing social order (i.e., the status quo). In the Ancient Near Eastern city-state--a social order that displayed the hierarchical pyramid structure paradigmatic for Western civilization ever since--the humanism of the Gilgamesh epic was enlisted for precisely this purpose. But, in the Axial Age, figures arose who questioned this structure on ethical grounds (e.g., the Near Eastern prophetic tradition) and in the post-Axial period of Hellenistic ascendency, this mode of cultural critique cultivated new utopian tropes of intensity which we call today "apocalypticism."

There is an implied threat of violence involved when State authority calls upon one to remember her mortality: "We are bigger and more powerful than you; don't resist us; remember that you are mortal--the State is not."

Go along to get along: or suffer the consequences.

Apocalyptic utopianism replied to this threat by denying humanism: "We may be mortal in the present round, but we shall be immortal in the next. We may be sown a natural body, but we shall be raised a spiritual one." The often inhumane humanism of the Imperial state was answered with a fearlessness founded in a new mythological structure: the hope of the resurrection. Insurrection was now possible.

One wonders if Constantine the Great, shrewd politician that he was, did not recognize in the willingness of the followers of Christos to face martyrdom rather than bow to the assertion of Roman power an untapped source of new Imperial potential--a source that he was determined to domesticate and harness. Men and women unafraid to die can change the course of history.

As it turns out, there is more than one way to accept one's mortality.

Apocalyptic humanism accepts the limitations that mortality imposes upon a given individual life, but retains enough utopian intensity to refuse victory to the prevailing State [of Affairs]. This "great refusal" is but the stubbornness of humanity to assert its worth in the face of those forces that seek to deny human dignity and worth. I think that this is what Paul Tillich may have intended when he argued that "courage is an ethical reality, but it is rooted in the whole breadth of human existence and ultimately in the structure of being itself. It must be considered ontologically in order to be understood ethically" [Tillich, The Courage To Be, 1].

Ontology is an extremely problematic science. For it to be useful at all, it must be carefully and deliberately construed. In my view, Tillich made some progress in this direction, but there is much more work to be done. There is something quite suggestive, however, in his view of human self-affirmation as an "ontological act" [Tillich, 15]. Tillich may well have been one the last great theoreticians of apocalyptic humanism in the previous century--alongside Northrop Frye and Norman O. Brown.

Apocalyptic Humanism Distinguished

Humanism's classical epic Gilgamesh articulates what historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith names a "locative" world-view: it is essentially conservative in the sense that it attempts to reconcile human beings to their mortal nature. This view is echoed and encapsulated in Pindar's third Pythian ode: O my soul! Do not aspire to immortal life but exhaust the limits of the possible.

The locative world view was placed in question during the Axial Age when utopian impulses gave rise to the so-called "prophetic tradition" in the Eastern Mediterranean. After the advent of Alexander, the prophetic tradition re-asserted itself in new florid hues with apocalyptic literature and political movements. The locative world view has remained in tension with various shades of utopian thinking ever since.

Blake's "apocalyptic humanism" is but one expression of this unmitigated tension. Edward Said's advocacy of humanism combined with "democratic criticism" is another. Essentially, what distinguishes post-Axial humanism from its conservative pre-Axial counterpart is the conviction that reconciliation with personal mortality ought not to be reduced to capitulation to the status quo. The ratio achieved by means of the logic of either/or is eschewed in favor of a new ratio: one achieved by means of the logic of both/and. It is an impossible logic: but such is the stuff of which dreams are made.

Apocalyptic Humanism Elaborated

As far as I am aware, the earliest instance of the use of the phrase "apocalyptic humanism" is found in Northrop Frye. On page 188 of his landmark study of William Blake (Fearful Symmetry, 1947), Frye mentions Blake's "apocalyptic humanism" almost in passing. What Frye intends by his use of this phrase is to be discovered by reading this book--all of it. As Frye explains, all attempts to Christianize Blake (in any traditional or orthodox sense of the term) run aground on the rocks of Blake's insistence that the "only God that exists exists in man, and all religion consists in following the right men" (Frye, 217--notice Frye's use of the plural here). And who are the right men? Those who become the "true Jesus" by means of uniting the divine and the human in their own minds and, thereupon, activate their innate poetic genius and acquire vision (Frye, 387). The notion that the Word became Flesh once and for all in Jesus is anathema to Blake. Instead, the Word must become Flesh continually. When this happens, a visionary/utopian/apocalyptic humanism is achieved.