It is always a dangerous and potentially deadly error to consider the enemy of our enemies to be our friend, patting him on the back while he is stabbing us in ours. The truth is that Dr. Harold Bloom is himself a servant of dark forces, which are subtler by far than those politically oriented forces that he rightly condemns.
Only in an age of abject nonsense can peddlers of nonsense sell their wares and prosper thereby. Ours is such an age. In such times, erudition is put to the service of sophistry, and sophistry serves iconoclasm. It is not that nothing is sacred, it is that nothing sacred is safe. All that is truly good and truly beautiful is assailed by the sledgehammer slander of the nihilistically violent or betrayed by the wormtongue wit of the seemingly wise. Take, for example, the wit and seeming wisdom of the literary critic, Harold Bloom. Having made his reputation as a literary critic and as a critic of religion, Dr. Bloom has become something of a celebrity in the world of contemporary ideas, critiquing literature and religious faith from the bifocal perspective of relativism and Kabbalistic Gnosticism.
Dr. Bloom is best known perhaps for his work on Shakespeare, most especially Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). To offer credit where such is indubitably due, Dr. Bloom defends the Bard from those cultural vivisectionists who take Shakespeare’s living work and kill it with the weapons of idolatrous ideology. Dr. Bloom is no friend of Marxist or feminist criticism. On the contrary, he has been tireless in his defense of Shakespeare from the slings and arrows, and the sledgehammers, of outrageous criticism, condemning Marxist and feminist critics for serving what he calls the “forces of resentment.” And yet it is always a dangerous and potentially deadly error to consider the enemy of our enemies to be our friend, patting him on the back while he is stabbing us in ours. The truth is that Dr. Bloom is himself a servant of dark forces, which are subtler by far than those politically oriented forces that he rightly condemns. In Dr. Bloom’s case, he seems to harbor a deep-seated grudge against Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, which he refuses to stomach. This would be fair enough in itself, albeit regrettable. The problem is that Dr. Bloom refuses to stomach the presence of Christianity wherever he finds it, including in literature, the consequence of which is a singular blindness which is more comic than tragic. Thus, for instance, he criticizes G.K. Chesterton for suggesting that Shakespeare was a Catholic, asserting that “we cannot know, by reading Shakespeare and seeing him played, whether he had any extrapoetic beliefs or disbeliefs…. [B]y reading Shakespeare, I can gather that he did not like lawyers, preferred drinking to eating, and evidently lusted after both genders.” Commenting on these words in my own book, The Quest for Shakespeare, I noted that it was “a sorry reflection of the state of modern literary criticism that this woeful lack of penetration not only gains credence in academic circles but actually gains disciples.” I continue:
Apart from [Dr. Bloom’s] apparent inability to glean any meaning, intended by Shakespeare, from any of his plays—political, philosophical, moral, or religious—beyond the indulgence of the lower appetites, his use of the phrase “extrapoetic beliefs or unbeliefs” is curious. Is he really suggesting that poesis is possible in a vacuum, that poets create in the absence of belief in anything? If they believe in nothing, why are they inspired to say anything? If they believe in nothing, how can they say anything? If they believe in nothing, why do they have anything to say? Pace Bloom, poesis, like thought itself, is rooted in belief and is impossible without it. Shakespeare had to believe in something or else he would have written nothing.
This is not the place to begin to offer the strong and ultimately indisputable evidence for Shakespeare’s Catholicism, both in the facts that are known about his life and in the multifarious and innumerable instances of its presence in his plays. Needless to say that the mounting evidence for the Bard’s orthodoxy threatens the very foundations of Dr. Bloom’s credibility. It is, we might venture to say, the papal bull in Dr. Bloom’s precious china shop, threatening to bring his all too facile and therefore all too fragile scholarship crashing down. The sooner the better.
Rather than laboring the Shakespearean point any further, let’s look instead at Dr. Bloom’s singular blindness with regard to his reading of other well-known works. Take, for instance, his reading of Beowulf. “Is Beowulf a Christian poem?” he asks. “Just barely,” he replies grudgingly. “In any case,” he adds hastily, “it has a profoundly elegiac relation to its Germanic origins”:
Though the nameless poet of this heroic epic must have been at least ostensibly Christian, Beowulf eschews any mention of Jesus Christ, and all its biblical references are to the Old Testament…. Perhaps aesthetic tact governs the poet of Beowulf: his hero’s virtues have nothing to do with salvation, and everything to do with warlike courage.
Note, Dr. Bloom’s use of words. The poet doesn’t merely fail to mention Christ, he “eschews” any mention of Him, implying a deliberate shunning of the Saviour in favour of a eulogizing of the pagan past. As for Dr. Bloom, he eschews any mention of the Beowulf poet’s explicit condemnation of pagan practices as devil worship; instead he claims that the hero’s virtues “have nothing to do with salvation.” How does Dr. Bloom square this absurd assertion with the repeated insistence by Beowulf that he can do nothing of his own strength without the assistance of the will of God? How does Dr. Bloom explain, or explain away, the miraculous gift of the supernatural sword which saves Beowulf from certain destruction at the hands of Grendel’s mother? How does he explain, or explain away, the fact that the monsters are described explicitly as the offspring of Cain, connecting the evil in the poem with the account of Original Sin in the Bible? Is he blind, either from willful arrogance or woeful ignorance, of the way in which the poem can be seen as an Orthodox Christian response to the heresy of Pelagianism?
In spite of this abundant evidence, Dr. Bloom ends his own commentary of Beowulf with another question: “But does Beowulf conclude with the triumph of the Christian vision?” A question which he answers in the negative: “God’s glory as a creator is extolled in the poem, but nowhere are we told of God’s grace. Instead, there are tributes, despairing but firm, to fate, hardly a Christian power.”
Let’s respond to the last part of Dr. Bloom’s conclusion first. There are no tributes to “fate” in Beowulf, despairing or otherwise, but to wyrd, which is an altogether different thing. It is true that the word wyrd is usually and inadequately translated as “fate,” but it is not the same thing, not least because wyrd is not merely fatalistic, as in its being a mere manifestation of blind fortune. Wyrd, from which we get the modern word “weird,” denotes the weirdness of things, suggesting a supernatural or providential dimension to human destiny. The tributes are therefore to the power of wyrd, to the power of a providential Will beyond the will of man. Incidentally, the reason that wyrd is never translated as “providence” is aesthetic, rather than definitive. Translators of the poem are understandably keen to evoke the feel and sound of the poem by choosing the Germanically rooted word rather than its Latin equivalent; hence “freedom” over “liberty,” and “fate” over “providence.” (Ironically “fate” is itself Latin in derivation but it has the feel of Old English, at least as compared to “providence.”)
Let’s conclude our exposé of Dr. Bloom’s blindness by answering his question as the text demands: Does Beowulf conclude with the triumph of the Christian vision? No, says Dr. Bloom; yes, says the poem itself.
In the final part of the poem, which tells of Beowulf’s fight with the dragon, there are numerous numerical signifiers connecting the hero’s actions with the Passion of Christ, the latter of which is the archetypal Hero’s fight with the archetypal Dragon. We are told that Beowulf has twelve hand-picked followers, one of whom betrays the rest by stealing from the dragon’s hoard. Of the eleven remaining hand-picked followers, all but one betray the king when he faces the power of the dragon. The king, therefore, has only one of the twelve present with him as he lays down his life for his kingdom. At the very conclusion of the poem, an eternal burial mound has been raised in memory of the king and there are once more twelve more hand-picked followers circling the mound. Clearly, the twelve knights signify the apostolic Church, as does the burial mound itself, with the circling of knights signifying the eternal nature of the bond between the apostles and the Church. Does this signify “the triumph of the Christian vision”? Of course, it does!
Having exposed Dr. Bloom’s blindness with regard to Beowulf, we will not be surprised to learn that he had a very low opinion of The Lord of the Rings, which he would no doubt have liked even less had he been aware of its “fundamentally religious and Catholic” character. “I suspect that The Lord of the Rings is fated to become only an intricate Period Piece,” Dr. Bloom opined with dismissive superciliousness. Begging to differ with the invariably myopic critic, we might venture to suggest that “fate” is likely to prove that works which exude timeless verities about the nature of man and his place in the cosmos will survive, whereas followers of fallacious philosophies will fade with the fads they idolize. Heroes will survive and will continue to vanquish the monsters. As for the wayward critics, they will vanish as the vanquished victims of their own lack of vision, their “bloom” fading as they wilt upon the very vine of verity that they have rejected.
This essay was first published here in February 2018.
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The featured image is a photograph of Harold Bloom scanned from a first-edition dust jacket of Bloom’s book Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, published by Oxford University Press in New York. This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Thanks!
Thank you.
I had more respect for Bloom before this, unaware of his huge blind spot on Shakespeare. Metaphors are not his strength, a fatal flaw for someone who thinks of themselves as a literary expert.
One thing Bloom taught me was that Freud got his ideas from Hamlet. But he couldn’t see the obvious, Hamlet was Catholic.
Very good and insightful.
Of equal concern is Bloom’s apparent envy (and hence, degradation) of canonized poets. In his volume The Best Poems of the English Language, his diction drips with transparent jealousy of widely recognized and respected poets, and his views on their contributions are flawed by his own unfulfilled ambitions.
Before I write my comment I should mention, since it seems to matter, that I am a conservative convert, full of the fire and vigor conscious conversion endows one with. Please consider my words without defensiveness.
Having actually read most of his work, including those sourced for this article, this criticism of him does not penetrate the soil.
He is the editor of Library of America’s “American Religious Poems” which contains, to near exclusion, Christian poetry selected by Bloom, an inconceivable project from a Yale professor today.
So the idea that he was somehow allergic to Christianity is baffling at best.
He was an irreligious man who called the King James Bible and Shakespeare cohabitors at the peak of literary achievement. His book Shadow of a Great Rock is the greatest contemporary tribute to the Bible from an atheist.
The only secular defender of religious text among his contemporaries he is ( he is dead but speaks) also the best.
He was not a conservative by political standards. Does that matter if his ideas are good?
Is criticism towards people themselves not a clandestine form of the argument from authority fallacy?
Essentially, this article attempts to seed mistrust or outright discourage people from reading his works for themselves by way of saying “he isn’t one of us”. As though it requires being “one of us” to have ideas weighed.
Some of the comments don’t make sense. The criticism that he degraded canonized poets is hard to grasp considering he was the last scholastic Romantic and, likely, the last academic standing to champion traditionally canonized poets.
He called Emerson and Whitman the eminent examples of America’s literary voice.
His selections in the “Best Poems of the English Language” include Chaucer, Wyatt, Ralegh, Donne, Campion, Milton, Carrew, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Longfellow, Poe, Thoreau, Dickinson, Tennyson, Kipling, Lawrence, and many more canonical poets.
He was the defender of the Western Canon, entirely ostracized from others for being so.
As for metaphors, he called them the bedrock of meaning. He suggests they are what make thought possible. His literary criticism about metaphor are now increasingly accepted truths among cognitive and linguistic scientist. He was ahead of the curve on his understanding, appreciation, and use of metaphor so I am uncertain how he was weak with metaphor.
There are areas of criticism that can be leveled at the man but they fall outside the purview of this article.
His personal life was messy. He was temperamental to a fault. He wrote a novel of his own that became an embarrassment to him.
As for literary criticism, he is hard to beat if you believe in the strength and importance of the individual in making art. The quality of his work is to be admired even if his fundamentals are disagreed with.
Since yesterday, when I posted my initial comment, I happened across an old interview between Bloom and Harvard Business Review.
A comment Bloom made is relevant to the conversation and should give us insight into his view on religion-
“It may indeed be true that the business of America is business—and always has been business and always will be business. But I believe that the ultimate concern of America, for better and for worse, is religion. I think that religion largely explains the genius of this country. For example, I believe that it is religion in this country that refutes Marx. As I’ve said so often, religion is not the opiate of the American people; it is their poetry. “
Thank you Charles for the thoughtful and balanced contribution. As an only occasional reader of poetry and criticism the article had indeed made me more skeptical of Bloom but your reasoned response restored my confidence I can continue to read Bloom and not just shun his work. Like any literary creator he will have good and bad. The article and your response combined to give me a suitably nuanced approach when reading him. To take what is good and allow my own common sense instinct to weed out the flaws or bloodsport in his writing.
Excellent!
I would suggest Bloom’s musings on Shakespeare, the Bible, and other timeless classics are considered wisdom only by those who’ve spent little time with these works themselves.
Always insightful, Joseph
Thank you for this worthwhile article and for showing the courage to offer a cautionary tale about a magnum critic. We have all learned a great deal from Professor Bloom, and we are sincerely grateful. But there is a catch. I first came to doubt Bloom a bit when he averred that Dante’s Divine Comedy is not an especially Christian work. Bloom’s sniffing out the exponents of “resentment” and cultural repudiation is an invaluable good. Perhaps we should regard Bloom in the manner a mentor of mine once told me to handle a certain German biblical critic: “Read him, of course, but read him with fire-proof gloves.”
I believe Harold Bloom professed a sort of political correctness. In his Western Canon he simply ignores Wyndham Lewis and Ford Madox Ford. Even if we consider Lewis flirtation with Hitler’s ideology in the early 1930’s, followed by a recant when he wrote The Hitler Cult, 1n 1939, there are no reasons for Bloom to ignore this major writer, except the fact that, by birth, Lewis was Roman Catholic. As for ignoring Ford Madox Ford, a truly quintessential author in the Western Canon, the true reason for Bloom’s omission was perhaps Ford’s conversion to Catholicism in 1892, at the age of 18. Anyway, for my pure enjoyment, I’d rather reread The March of Literature than the Bloom’s canon.
He hated T. S Eliot, therefore I cannot like him.
This brought to mind something Chesterton wrote which I recently came across in his essay “The Don and the Cavalier” in the collection “The Well and the Shallows”. Chesterton quotes a critic of a book on John Dryden as saying “in these words or almost these words”: “We have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Dryden’s conversion to Roman Catholicism; but after all, in the case of so great a man as Dryden, does the question matter very much?”. Chesterton then of course proceeds to show the absurdity of such a statement. When Bloom avers that we can’t know from reading Shakespeare whether he had “any extrapoetic beliefs or disbeliefs”, it seems to me he’s making very much the same sort of suggestion as that critic — that for such a great playwright as Shakespeare, it doesn’t really matter what his beliefs were.
It is overstating Bloom’s errors to say, “Dr. Harold Bloom is himself a servant of dark forces.” Dark forces implies ontological evil, at least for many readers. I have read Bloom, and have disagreed with much of what he has written; however, much of what he has written seems true to me. In sifting through his prose, what I have found most confounding is that he makes claims based on no evidence (aside from his own opinion); that he doesn’t provide footnotes; and that his authorial presence sports a massive ego, something which other authors are better at covering up. However, it is a blessing to the reader that his biases (which this essay’s author notes) are ingenously apparent. I would think a truly Mephistophelian author would do a better job of hiding them, thereby forcing the reader to do some real excavating in order to bring them to light. Bloom spares us that trouble.
As a baptized Christian who is descended from Jews who were pursued across continents by the Spanish Inquisition, I am perhaps more sympathetic to Bloom’s wariness (or hostility) toward Christianity, even though I myself do not harbor that wariness. Suspicion of Christianity does not necessarily stem from “dark forces.” Looked at from the other side, for Jews the historical experience of Christianity itself has often seemed an expression of dark forces.
I think we can agree that all author have biases. The question we might ask, in evaluating an author, is do his biases make sense? Are they reasonable? And do they detract from his work? In Bloom’s case, I would say they make sense and do not detract from his work, but rather provide a foundation for it. The fact that I disagree with much of it is another issue.
“…descended from Jews who were pursued across continents by the Spanish Inquisition.”
I would suggest further investigation of the true nature of “The Inquisition”. The reclamation of one’s nation from Islamic invaders was more complicated than the current convenient position espoused by today’s academicians. It is intellectually lazy to equate the actions taken to restore a kingdom with the simple assessment that they were anti-Semitic in the current implementation of the term. Cultural snobbery distorts the truth.
As a doctoral student who holds a personal Christian faith and devotion and whose values (particularly concerning literature) might be described as predominantly conservative, I wholeheartedly affirm both Ruth’s recent comment and Charles’ comment left in 2018 on the original essay.
Charles noted a particular fallacy which I’d like to reiterate here: that “it requires being ‘one of us’ to have ideas weighed.”
I have pursued MA and PhD programs at two separate, public, R1 universities, and throughout the entire course of both of those programs I have consistently been made aware that, insofar as my peers are concerned, I am not “one of them.” Every class discussion consists in a destructive, cynical, useless banter over the personal morals of a particular poet. Why should we care for Milton’s prosody when it is apparently far more interesting to discuss his views of race or women? To celebrate Donne rather than castigate him as a misogynist earns a graduate student peculiar looks at best and open censure at worst.
Scholars should seek to exhort, to uphold “the best that has been thought and said,” and to internalize and share with others the beautiful language that has been passed down to us. I do not share Bloom’s views on many things, namely his censure of the moralist critics including Eliot, nor his suspicion of Christianity and his hesitance to identify the Christian imagination in the poetry in which that imagination is undoubtedly pervasive.
But in Bloom there is much value to be had. As a reader of poetry, Bloom’s internalization of it and the obvious care with which he treats it has long been an example to me in my own study. As Ruth put it so beautifully and simply: “much of what he has written seems true to me.”
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether one finds value in Bloom’s work. To counter the vulgar cynicism and exclusivity of secular academia with an exclusivity equally as vulgar in its hyperbolic assertion that Bloom is some sort of boogeyman lurking in the shadows, waiting to entrap the unsuspecting reader, doesn’t reflect the sort of rigorous intellectual liberalism that the Western tradition represents.
Bloom isn’t required to be “one of us” any more than Milton, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, or for that matter Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Cicero, or any other poet or thinker in our great tradition is completely “one of us.” If we are going to evaluate those who defend the literary canon with the tenacity that Bloom did on the basis of our disagreement with their personal views, religious or otherwise, then we are no different than those who, possessing precisely the same criteria, seek to dismantle the canon itself.
I’d always had my guard up with Harold Bloom without being able to explain why. Thank you for articulating the knot in my stomach. It takes courage and sharp intelligence to go up against someone like Bloom, at least someone with his reputation. Well done as per usual.
A wonderful article by my ever-admired Joseph Pearce. I would love for him to write a book on the Christian meaning of “Beowulf” and other kinds of epic poems. In Bloom’s case, shouldn’t we understand it the other way around? That is to say, the author uses a pagan hero to highlight Christianity even more and, so that we become even better Christians, as Poul Anderson defended in his writing of the saga of Hrolf Kraki. I think we should look at things that way. As for the twelve companions and the thief of the ciborium, it escaped my notice that there were twelve companions. I read the poem a long time ago.
Many Jewish scholars of Bloom’s generation bore significant resentment against the heavily Christian academic departments that excluded them. Bloom himself referred to Yale as “An Anglo-Catholic nightmare … everyone was on their knees to Mr. T.S. Eliot.”
See Anthony Julius, T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form, p. 52
Whatever his shortcomings may have been, I believe Bloom helped a lot of serious readers better appreciate great literature. Here is a reflection on Bloom from a former student as well as an excellent and renowned scholar himself, Gary Saul Morson, which might be helpful to better understand Bloom: https://theamericanscholar.org/my-teacher-harold-bloom/