Christian Wiman: It’s Not About the Abyss — It Is the Abyss

“The best modern book on belief is My Bright Abyss by my Yale colleague Christian Wiman.”

That’s David Brooks – who is a professor in the university’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs as well as a Times columnist. Needless to say, Brooks’s comment caught the eye – and not just because in it a columnist I trust applies an unstinting superlative to a book I consider remarkable by an author I know and admire. It’s also because it seems to me to praise the book in terms that the book, and the beliefs it sets out, seem to defy.

At Georgetown the past two years I’ve taught a course called World Literature with a Religious Dimension. The central question I take up about the books – from Brideshead Revisited and Wise Blood to My Name Is Red and The Tenth Parallel – is just what the religious dimension in them, in a work of literature, is.

One one level, I propose, the religious dimension of a work has to do with religious subject matter, religious imagery, and a religious aspect to the author’s point of view. On another level, it has to do with the nature or essence, the inner dynamism, of the work.

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung distinguished between the “psychological novel” (epitomized by Henry James’s novels) and the novel (here Moby-Dick was Jung’s example) that is an extruded piece of the author’s psyche — a piece of his mind, so to speak. In the course, I adapt Jung’s distinction and invite students to say whether each work is more “about” religion or more an extruded piece of religiosity.

In my reading, My Bright Abyss is clearly the latter more than the former. It’s subtitled Meditations of a Modern Believer, and it’s not so much a book “about” belief or a book “on” belief as a book of belief – a book in which Chris finds words for how it is that he believes and sets belief before the reader in terms as nearly whole and true to the experience as possible.

And that’s the source of the book’s power. Chris doesn’t explain belief, primarily (although there are some bang-up explanations). He sets out the character of the bright abyss of belief, and embodies the bright abyss-ininan that is the believer, from one sentence to the next. And he does so in ways that make credible — credible through their difficulty, their cruxes and double-positives — the claims of believers to stand somewhere outside the ambit of everyday explanation.

“Even if you tell people you are merely writing a column on faith, they begin recommending books to you by the dozen,” Brooks remarks in his column. Which books would you recommend? Send me an email about them to [email protected], and I’ll work up a piece about the replies.

Meanwhile, I’ll be reading Chris Wiman’s (relatively) new book of poems, Once in the West, in anticipation of a public conversation with him at Georgetown January 28 – when I’ll get to ask him how he understands the religious dimension of his work and of literature generally.

• 24 December 2014
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