Wagering on Transcendence: The Search for Meaning in Literature

Wagering on Transcendence: The Search for Meaning in Literature. Edited by Phyllis Carey. Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1997. xxiii + 299 pp. $24.95 (paper). A collection of essays on literary works that express spiritual concerns, Wagering on Transcendence addresses a perceived gap in literary criticism that results from a contemporary academic dismissal of religious faith. The essays, which grew out of weekly faculty discussions at Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, address texts by authors from St. Augustine to Annie Dillard and faith stances from the orthodoxy of T. S. Eliot to the comic pessimism of Samuel Beckett.

One strength of the collection is its interdisciplinarity. In addition to literary critics, essayists include a physicist (Patricia Ann Obremski, S.S.N.D.) explicating Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics; theologians discussing Dutch writer Etty Hillesum's Holocaust diaries (Joan Penzenstadler, S.S.N.D) and Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine (Paul J. McGuire, S.C.J.); and a philosopher (James Conlon) outlining Albert Camus' counter-arguments against Pascal's wager on faith.

Written predominantly by religious authors, these essays are admirable for their openness to questions about faith and acknowledgement of its difficulties. Conlon's analysis of The Stranger and The Plague, for instance, does justice to Camus' narrative arguments that believers miss some of the pleasures and engagements of this world because of their focus on the next. Conlon is never defensive, but instead acknowledges that Camus' rejection of a judgmental God matches even the views of many contemporary believers.

These essays offer an opportunity for readers to reflect on their own beliefs and to learn from the experiences of the authors. Penzenstadler's account of Etty Hillesum's growth in becoming "Attentive to Transcendence," both before and during her incarceration in the Nazi work camp at Westerbork, is instructive in this way. Faced with evidence of the Nazis' cruelties, Hillesum realizes, "each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others." She feels increasingly led to spend time every day in silent contemplation and prayer and begins a "fast from anxiety" that helps her to attend more closely to the presence of God. Shortly before being sent to die at Auschwitz, she finds herself able to love those who might seem unlovable: "There is no causal connection between people's behavior and the love you feel for them . . . the fellow man himself has hardly anything to do with it."

In order to encourage readers to reflect personally on literature and faith, the authors have appended to the essays brief accounts of their personal responses to these works and a series of questions that reading the works has raised. This feature makes Wagering on Transcendence a useful resource for small group discussions. Some essays, such as Patricia Ann Preston's survey of spiritual autobiography from Augustine to the French existentialists, choose a breadth of coverage over a more focused discussion, making this anthology particularly suitable for non-specialists. The authors have deliberately eschewed the jargon of literary criticism. At the same time, several essays benefit from the pointed analysis that a particular theoretical perspective can provide. These include Mary Beth Duffey's Jungian treatment of T. S. Eliot's drama, The Family Reunion, and Phyllis Carey's use of the continental philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to elucidate Beckett's Catastrophe and Vaclav Havel's Mistake.

Editor Phyllis Carey places this collection in a tradition of works that address issues of transcendence in literature, reminding readers that such resources have become infrequent. Wagering on Transcendence fills this gap, offering an accessible and thought-provoking look at a range of twentiethcentury authors, a sense of history traced back to the early days of Christendom, and an experience of the ongoing mystery of living a life that is open to the possibility of God.

SARAH J. FODOR Northwestern University Evanston, Illinois

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Summer 1999
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