Unrevealed Religion
Spurred by Paul Griffiths’ intriguing review in Commonweal, I purchased Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, her posthumously published memoir. I had not read Rose before; and I confess the book is unlike anything I’ve read. It can be read in an evening; but its effect remains far beyond the initial encounter.
Here is a passage that tantalizes and provokes:
It is the unrevealed religion that troubles us more than any revealed religion: the unrevealed religion which has hold of us without any evidences, natural or supernatural, without any credos or dogmas, liturgies or services. It is the very religion that makes us protest, “But I have no religion,” the very protestantism against modernity that fuels our inner self-relation. Yet this very protest founded modernity. This self-reliance leaves us at the mercy of our own mercilessness; it keeps us infinitely sentimental about ourselves, but methodically ruthless towards others; it breeds sureness of self, not ready to be unsure, with an unconscious conviction of eternal but untried election.
This unrevealed religion is the baroque excrescence of the Protestant ethic: hedonist, not ascetic, voluptuous, not austere, embellished, not plain, it devotes us to our own individual, inner-worldly authority, but with the loss of the inner as well as the outer mediator. This is an ethic without ethics, a religion without salvation.
Have others read Rose; and what is their reaction?
I’m not familiar with Gillian Rose; I don’t think I’ve ever heard the name before. I’m intrigued by the excerpt, but I’m not sure what it is she’s talking about — what exactly is this “unrevealed religion”? She can’t simply mean “natural religion,” as in religion discoverable from reason alone unaided by revelation, can she? Is she talking about the “spiritual but not religious” thing?
(Incidentally, I wonder what Flannery O’Connor would say about “spiritual but not religious”? Perhaps some Southern equivalent of, “Honey, we’re ALL spiritual. Hell, even the devil’s a spirit.”)
Brendan,
I don’t know if you have access to Paul Griffiths’ fine review, but here is part of what he writes:
“As a twentieth-century Jewish woman fascinated by Christ, and as a writer and thinker of unnerving intensity, Rose has much in common with Edith Stein and Simone Weil, though she is of the generation after theirs. Stein, martyred by the Nazis, is now a saint of the Catholic Church and may soon be recognized as one of its doctors. Weil, who was unable, finally, to accept baptism, partly because of a deep strain of anti-Semitism in her own thought (she believed Christianity was too Jewish), martyred herself by starvation. Rose, like them, died young. Like them, too, she is one of the most significant philosophical voices of the twentieth century. In my judgment, her achievement is greater than either of theirs—and, her life and work, like theirs, are beginning to interest people outside the academy.”
I don’t think she means by “unrevealed religion” what was traditionally termed “natural religion.” It may be closer to what Robert Bellah, in “Habits of the Heart,” called “Sheilaism.”
Wikipedia says she converted to Christianity (Anglican) on her deathbed.
Ann,
The “Commonweal” review begins:
“Gillian Rose was born into a secular Jewish family in England in 1947, and died there in 1995 from complications of ovarian cancer—baptized, it is said, on her deathbed, by Simon Barrington-Ward, then the Anglican bishop of Coventry and her longtime friend.”
An older friend of mine knew her around the confines of Oxford and considered her truly a saintly woman.
Thanks for this. The Tablet, I believe, also had an article on her but this post and the review and the comments spurred me to buy this book. Now, I pray I read it…
Thanks, Fr. Imbelli! I looked up “Sheilaism” too; it sounds familiar — I think I may have come across an account of Sheilaism before.
Intense review and she sounds like a very intense woman. I like her style and her thinking and will definitely get the book. From the review:
Reminds me of Victor Frankl’s observation that religion and psychotherapy serve two different ends. Psychotherapy is concerned with psychological equilibrium and religion is concerned with spiritual salvation which implies a different kind of engagement with the world.
I do think though that it is difficult to live with that level of intensity and at that high of a pitch although the fruits of such a life become evident after their death. I am thinking of Simone Weil who I admire and Thomas Merton who also, as I understand it, had a similar kind of spiritual intensity.
My only comment is that I think some of this could be softened by the supernatural grace of charity but perhaps God gives these the graces they require to help us understand the salvific nature of suffering which is a pretty grim area of reflection in the wrong hands.
Many years ago, a similarly enthusiastic review or article led me to struggle through one of Gillian Rose’s books. It struck me as willfully turgid, and honestly I cannot reconstruct a bit of her argument in my mind today. When someone has such impressive admirers as Rowan Williams, Paul Griffiths, and others, I hesitate to be a nay-sayer. For that reason, I read Griffiths review very carefully, and I must say that he didn’t quite persuade me. I may try again. But I can’t shake the impression that Rose was such a remarkable individual and her life so dramatic — and the Oxford-Cambridge circles of British religious intellectuals so interlinked — that her writings, when separated from her personality, are being overrated.
Agree.
Her writing is repulsive. The snippet quoted in the opening post is gibberish.
This unrevealed religion is the baroque excrescence of the Protestant ethic: hedonist, not ascetic, voluptuous, not austere, embellished, not plain, it devotes us to our own individual, inner-worldly authority, but with the loss of the inner as well as the outer mediator. This is an ethic without ethics, a religion without salvation.
Peter.
Thanks for your reaction.
You say, Paul’s review “didn’t quite persuade” you — of?
Her importance? whether “Love’s Work” is worth the bother?
As I said in the post: this book, the only one of Rose I’ve read, remains with me long after the brief time it takes to read.
Here is her ending:
“I like to pass unnoticed, which is why I hope that I am not deprived of old age. I aspire to Miss Marple’s persona: to be exactly as I am, decrepit nature yet supernature in one, equally alert on the damp ground and in the turbulent air. Perhaps I don’t have to wait for old age for that invisible trespass and pedestrian tread, insensible of mortality and desperately mortal.
“I will stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk; learning, failing, wooing, grieving, trusting, working, reposing — in the sin of language and lips.”
The bit you quote is intriguing. I’ve ordered it for my iPad. Thanks!
http://www.amazon.com/Loves-Work-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590173651/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1311789351&sr=8-1
George (7/27 2:30 am):
You mean if it leads to despair? Perhaps despair is a lot more rare than we imagine. I imagine nearly all of us live in the half-light/half-dark of purgatory, accepting it as common and unavoidable. I’m guessing Rose simply says this at length, in anguish, and poetically.
Bob, Paul’s review did not persuade me that I should put “Love’s Work” anywhere near the top of the all-too-lengthy list of books I would like to get to, including the last one that you yourself recommended. It didn’t persuade me that her “difficulty,” maybe as a person but certainly as a writer, reflected a wisdom that would be of value to me rather than the fascination and magnetism that her dramatic and painful life conveyed to those who knew her in person. Of course, I’m a very slow reader who never manages to skim a book for its nuggets but plods through it dutifully.
Peter (7/27 2:50):
You can’t possibly be anywhere near as slow a reader as I. In my old age, I’ve begun to read some and, now and then, skim some. (For example, I read most of John Allen’s book on Vaticanthought, then skimmed very quickly the last bit on Iraq. Absolutely no feelings of guilt.)
I imagine that few books carry with them any moral imperative to read to completion. Just as one can learn from a scrap of a conversation, one can learn from a chapter or two of a book. Sometimes, getting the main idea can be just about all that matters. A href=”http://www.forward.com/articles/14250/”>the rest is commentary.
The rest is commentary.
Sigh. Old age.
Well, let’s try a third time:
http://www.forward.com/articles/14250/
I haven’t read Rose, but judging from the quotations here she seems to be the heir of the agnostic/atheist Oxbridge intellectuals of the 20s-50s (see the paradigm Bloomsbury) who themselves were the end product of the long process of secularization of those two universities. Unlike the others (e.g., B. Russell) she didn’t throw out spirit, but accept it as *there* and as such demanding to be valued, regardless of the problems that presents.
I don’t think she writes gibberish. What she seems to do is take the existential bull by the horns and accept, though not always approve, all the contradictory, opposing factors in life. She was a Hegelian and like the others apparently wrestled with competing values and problems with prioritizing values. It seems that ultimately she simply admitted them all into her life, a very difficult thing to do. She obviously even accepting pain as of metaphysical value, a most difficult thing to do. In doing so I think she shows a heroism that most of us just aren’t capable of .
(Actually I see the whole movement of modern philosophy as a series of attempts to deal with contradictions. She certainly seems to have an original solution — just accept and live it all.)
Peter,
As the Teacher truly said: “Of the reading of books there is no end.” Perhaps if I read less, I’d write more.
Ann,
G.R. discovered Plato and Pascal as a teenager; reading them, she says, “I never found philosophy abstract or abstruse…Philosophy intimated the wager of wisdom — as collective endeavor and as solitary predicament. It redeemed the earnest stupidity of my schooling. It did not prepare me for the deeper stupidity of reading philosophy at university…The oppressive opulence of Oxford was married to a vision of philosophy which would have induced in me a lifelong alienation from it, had I not already made a pact with my daemon.”
Fr. Imbelli ==
Looks like she had highly negative feelings about the British philosophers of her day. There wasn’t one with any existential inclinations, so I suppose that explains it. I can see how the Hegelians appealed to her.
Hi David:
“You mean if it leads to despair?”
No because its genesis can actually lie in a sentimentality that is opposed to charity. Flannery O’Connor wrote that to expect to much is to be sentimental and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
Although nowhere near as highbrow, I think Rocky nails it for his son in this clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uASVzkrEKgs
As I said I am intrigued but there is a slight hint of victim mentality with her. I mean the cynical part of me wants to just wake her up when she laments her love lost with the various people. She does have personal agency, she does have choices. She is not at the mercy of the fates and furies.
That said, i do understand how difficult it can be to try to embrace all of life’s contradictions and to engage with full gusto into a world that is, in the end, full of suffering (as Jesus knew and embraced and for that matter as the Buddha did as well).
Still I will check her out for the reasons i mentioned.
Am reading it, finding it episodic (intelligible) and murky (maybe less so on eventual rereading). She seems to be wandering among real people in a fog of feeling, her way only fitfully lighted by what she thinks of as her Jewish intellect. Probably intended for better minds than mine.
Finished it, less much of the last chapter, which was over my head. It’s a combination of personal narrative, emoting about sexual passion and the intellectual, emotional, and artistic glories of decadence, and some sort of philosophy. The narrative’s easy to follow, the emoting sometimes makes sense and sometimes feels like nonsense, and the philosophizing is, I suppose, something bright people pick up at university to confirm their superiority over the rest of humankind. The priesthood thing: only I and my very special class understand this extremely important gibberish.
I guess the experience was worth ten dollars. But that’s enough.
David Smith,
I hope I’m not responsible for the loss of a night’s sleep — 1:19 am >>> 5:23 a.m.!
As the “facilitators” say: I’m still “processing” the book. But reading it led me to remember Gillian Rose at Mass this morning.
I guess what flummoxed me was the juxtaposition of narrative with philosophy and ideology.
Lesser mortals are easily flummoxed.