The best academic writing in the humanities, in my opinion, is the kind that makes a careful theoretical argument while simultaneously buttressing it with 3-4 deeply specific examples. In the closing pages of Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, Alasdair MacIntyre describes the growth in and practice of the virtues in the lives of four diverse individualsranging from Trinidadian socialist author C.L.R. James to U.S. Supreme Court justice Sandra Day OConnor. In Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, Anthony Kronman discusses the latent Spinozist philosophy permeating the paintings of the Renaissance, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and the fiction of George Eliot. And in his titanic The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, Eugene McCarraher traces the history of theological reception of capitalismboth positive and negativethrough the works of John Ruskin, Henry Ford, Ayn Rand, Peter Drucker, and countless others. The genius of this approach is that it demands so deep a knowledge of the field under investigation that one can sift the representative exemplars from the inferior imitations.

Joseph Bottums slim new volume, The Decline of the Novel, is a masterful example of this approach to inquiry. Through close readings of Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, and Tom Wolfe, Bottum outlines a fascinating and original thesis: the novel, as a genre of fiction writing, is a distinctly Protestantphenomenon, one that centers on the spiritual journey of individual human beings rather than describing the broad drama of social order.

Specifically, Bottum distinguishes between the chanson fictionof Catholic society and the roman fictionof Protestant-dominated culture. The former type of fictionepitomized by texts like Chaucers Canterbury Talesand Cervantess Don Quixoteframes the central narrative conflict around the individuals performance of societal duties that transcend the individual self. The drama is as much communal as it is personal. The latteras reflected in the dominant trajectory of Western literatureunderstands conflict as a matter of individualprogress along some spiritual dimension or another, toward some kind of individualized resolution or realization. Dickenss David Copperfield carries the day once he grows to maturity and exercises his rational faculties in the proper manner, overcoming the deceptive forces that surround him; similarly, Wolfes Charlotte Simmons triumphs when she rejects the exploitative social patterns of her university setting and affirms her individual value and capacities.

That thesis, at least, feels intuitively correct. But it nevertheless seems to me that the particular disjunction upon which Bottums argument relies does not perfectly correspond to the distinction between Catholicand non-Catholic; more accurately, it seems to reflect the gap between Catholicand Calvinist. Though plenty of criticism has been levied against Max Webers seminal argument that Puritan salvation-anxiety drove the emergence of contemporary capitalism, one can surely speak of the Calvinist tendency to seek evidence of ones election to eternal life through ones good worksand, more broadly, ones desire to performsuch works. Thisnot the Protestant critique of Rome per seis the particular type of anxiety that animates the texts Bottum surveys, although the theological underpinnings never come fully into view.

Applying Bottums specific criteria, I find it difficult to conceive of a distinctly Anglicannovel, say, oras is relevant to mea uniquely Lutherannovel. (I would welcome thoughts on this front from my former professor and fellow Patheos blogger, Gene Veith, if he has any!) The existential anxiety and motif of spiritual progress that Bottum identifies as definitive characteristics of the Western novel dont seem to logically correlate with the Anglican and Lutheran traditions, both of which share a distinct sacramental and ecclesological consciousness absent from the Reformed paradigm. Im halfway tempted to suggest that the definitive narrative expression of Lutheran theology is the congregational hymna literary form harmonizing theological concerns with cultural ones (how else should one take Luthers pleato restrain the murderous Pope and Turk?) as well as one that invites the participation of both clergy and laity, But that doesnt seem to directly address Bottums questionwhat sort of fictionemerges from a given Christian tradition.

What say you, blog readers? Is the concept of a Lutheran novelor, more broadly, a non-Calvinist, yet Protestant novel intelligible? If so, where might one find such a text?

Continued here:

Is There Such a Thing as a Lutheran Novel? - Patheos