Marrying Jesus in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe: Popular Culture and Religious Reform

Abstract

and has come through a scepticism towards ‘grand narratives’, but nevertheless engages traditions rooted in other places and in other times, taking seriously their claims on human reality. Clooney’s book makes a case for a strong, committed theology within a pluralist world. There can, I think, be no resolution to the problem of universal theological claims in the contemporary, pluralist context, but Clooney offers a constructive way forward in his religious reading across traditions. This is, I suppose, an indirect philosophy of religions but it seems to me that the kind of truth the book is about (and the texts it is dealing with) can only be approached elliptically. Clooney lets the poetry speak for itself in a process of crossreading and close reading, in which the truth of the traditions speaks to those who can hear. In a parallel move Flood avoids religious truth by generating ‘secular’ theory about the shared nature of human subjectivity that in the end is neither Christian, nor Hindu, nor Buddhist. There is an issue regarding religious truth that neither Clooney nor Flood directly addresses; indeed there is a sense in which questions of truth actually serve to obscure religious meaning and the meaning of texts for contemporary readers that both authors seek to avoid. The meanings of Clooney’s texts speak to human inwardness, to the reality of longing for an absent lover who lies hidden in the heart, and to the finitude of human life. This assumes a certain degree of sensitivity not only to poetry but to a mystical sentiment that allows the reader to let the readings so carefully presented speak to her; somebody who is not interested, for whom the one who hides in darkness does not speak, will simply not read the book. But there is great optimism that reading can change us, can improve us, and can point to a fullness of meaning to enrich our lives. It is here that there is a possible overlap with a hidden telos in The Truth Within, that displaying inwardness as it has occurred in history is to reveal something important about contemporary life and human subjectivity even under the conditions of late modernity. As Clooney’s book shows, to agree upon a shared subjectivity does not dissolve human problems but rather emphasizes the incompletion of both the stories told and the lives lived. Yet this is a place of hope, especially important in a world of polarization and fundamentalisms, in not deciding things too quickly, as Clooney eloquently puts it, ‘as if faith needs an end to questing because it cannot suffer poetry and the drama of uncertain love’ (141).