Modernist Reformations: Poetry as Theology in Eliot, Stevens, and Joyce by Stephen Sicari (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Modernist Reformations: Poetry as Theology in Eliot, Stevens, and Joyce by Stephen Sicari
• John Whittier-Ferguson (bio)

MODERNIST REFORMATIONS: POETRY AS THEOLOGY IN ELIOT, STEVENS, AND JOYCE, by Stephen Sicari. Clemson, South Carolina: Clemson University Press, 2022. 277 pp. $143.00 cloth.

Stephen Sicari’s earnest study of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and James Joyce has an agenda: “I want to tell a new story about high modernism, one that deals with the period’s need for a reformation of theology” (101). Encouraged by the French priest Jean Sulivan (1913–1980) to rethink the vocabulary and the conceptual limitations of “conventional theology” (3), Sicari finds in the work of these three modernists “the most thoroughgoing and comprehensive efforts to reform religion for their time” (5). He argues that “their entire body of work can be seen as motivated by the desire to reform and renew religious experience” (6). “[A]rt is essential to the reformation of religion in the modernist period” (34), Sicari believes, and his chosen writers, convinced of Christianity’s “need to reform itself by engaging honestly with the religions of the people it had colonized,” turn to the East for their expansive, pluralist revisions (101–02). Sustained by the writings of Catholic, evangelical, and interfaith authors (for instance, David Tracy, Raimon Panikkar, Karen Armstrong, John Hick, and John C. Cobb Jr.), Sicari emphasizes Buddhist aspects in these modernists’ works. In a passage about Eliot’s poetry, closing with a quotation from Cobb, Sicari reveals the programmatic urgency of his project (the first-person-plural pronoun here deserves notice):

it is the engagement with the East that poses both the challenge and the opportunity we must grasp. What we one hundred years later share with Eliot is the need to continue the reformation of Christianity through an encounter with Buddhism: “The Buddhization of Christianity will transform Christianity in the direction of greater and deeper truth.”

121)¹

Buddhist aspects of these authors’ works have been noted and written about before. What is different in Sicari’s approach is his premise that his manifest desires for the reform and renovation of the Christian church today are shared by his readers as well as by these three writers and that twenty-first-century readers should learn from them how a “Buddhized Christianity” can aid in that renovation (107).

This approach works with modest success when applied to Stevens and Eliot, even when the proportions of each poet’s work (Stevens) or the principles of his faith (Eliot) feel distorted by Sicari’s “Buddhized” Christian program: Stevens’s “lifelong project . . . was a religious [End Page 629] project deriving from a poetics of reformation” (92). “Eliot might be seen as moving toward a thoroughgoing pluralism. . . . [P]erhaps his family’s Unitarian background and attitudes also prepared him to be receptive to other religions” (109). (Eliot’s published writings on orthodoxy and his private, repeated denigrations of Unitarianism in his letters to Emily Hale hardly speak of pluralist inclinations.²)

But the two chapters on Joyce (34 of the book’s 249 pages) ask us to concede a great deal more if we are to find their arguments convincing. We will have no trouble agreeing that Stephen and Joyce are dismayed by the history and contemporary practices of the Catholic church, but we will need to go further and believe that Joyce was animated throughout his writing life by a deeply rooted mission to “reform religion for the modern era”—or even more provocatively, in Sicari’s words, that Joyce aimed “to reclaim Christ for the West” (148, 140): “Joyce is attempting for his day what St. Paul did for his: as St. Paul created Christianity as a hybrid of Judaism and Greek philosophy, Joyce develops a reformed Christianity through the agnostic Bloom whose behavior can be called a hybrid of Christianity and Buddhism” (139). Joyce “turns to Buddhism to restore to Christianity its original impulses of mercy, forgiveness, and love. Buddhism allows Bloom to act like Christ. . . . Like Eliot, Joyce is reforming God” (145).

And Sicari asks us to do more than to find in Bloom a form of “Christ who is a model of suffering” (146). We...