Theological writers

Although lectures, articles, and other prosaic admonitions have tended to take their place, sermons, funeral orations, allegories, and the visions of eternal punishment brandished by theologians constitute some of the most unforgettable prose. This form of nonfictional prose literature dates from before the Christian Era; Jewish thought and style were molded by commentaries on the Old Testament and compilations of the wisdom of the sages. Later, and more nearly literary, works of this nature include Sebastian Brant’s didactic, poetical, and satirical Narrenschiff (1494; Ship of Fools), and the mystic writings of Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) in Germany, the moving sermons of Jón Vídalín (1666–1720) in Iceland. In England, Richard Baxter (1615–91) and John Bunyan (1628–88) were among the most eloquent of the 17th-century Puritans who composed doctrinal works of literary merit; along with the epic poet John Milton (1608–74), whose prose works hardly count for less than his poetry, they exercised a powerful influence on the English language through their doctrinal prose. Their contemporary, the Anglican Jeremy Taylor (1613–67), wrote the most sustained and dignified prose of an age that, on the continent, would be called Baroque. A little later, in northern Europe, the Norwegian Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), who spent most of his life in Denmark and became best known as a comic writer, also advised his contemporaries how to live morally in his Ethical Thoughts and other didactic treatises. The Swede Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), less gifted as a writer but far more original in his blend of mysticism and science, outshone all previous Scandinavians in impressing the imagination of other Europeans. No less influential, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), because of his stimulating ambiguities, his bold treatment of traditional theology and philosophy, and his extraordinary ability to write vivid, biting, and provoking prose, was, a century after his death, one of the most potent forces in the literature and thought of Western civilization.

Many 20th-century readers experienced a feeling of remoteness in this kind of doctrinal writing, which stemmed in part from a lack of vital interest in the beliefs it embodies and from a coolness toward religious dogmatism or fanaticism. During that century intolerance shifted from religion to the domain of politics. But estrangement from that rich literary heritage was due also to a distrust of high-flown eloquence. Cotton Mather’s Essays to do good (1710) has few readers in present-day New England, despite that region’s Puritan tradition, and Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), a writer of great spiritual warmth and imaginative style who was the first of the great prose writers of America, is admired today chiefly by specialists.

A less sonorous style, one that does not ring so monotonously ornate to the reader’s ears, is now preferred. In Spain, Antonio de Guevara (c. 1480–1545), a preacher who was at his best in his familiar and satirical moments, and St. Teresa of Avila (1515–82), in her records of her mystical ecstasies, have withstood the changing tides of taste. The French also succeeded in maintaining their appreciation of their two greatest religious writers, Pascal and Bossuet, at the very top of the nonfictional prose writers; both are still revered and occasionally imitated. Pascal took over traditional theology and treated it as literature; his unfinished Pensées have exercised far more influence than the rationalism of the greatest French philosophers on the sensibilities of the French. Bossuet’s orations reveal the magnificent but refrigerating decorum that seems inseparable from eulogies of the dead—a genre that precludes full sincerity and cultivates tremulous emotion to a dangerous degree. Bossuet’s sermons and treatises, however, include masterpieces of simple, terse, direct oratory, which show him as the majestic defender of the unity of faith, of absolutism, and of tradition. His was the last significant endeavour in the 17th century to arrest the flow of relativism and of rebellious individualism, which had engulfed Western civilization with the Renaissance, the Reformation, and Humanism. The two most brilliant writers of religious prose in France in the 20th century were Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), a poetical writer with a luxury of images, and Simone Weil (1909–43), more terse and restrained; they steered a middle course between dogmatism and humility in luring the lay reader to their ardent expressions of conviction.