7 - Religious Studies and Life Stories

Religious Studies and Life Stories
By James Woelfel

"I recently decided to build the entire course around the lives of three ancient and three modern figures who stood in one or another direct relationship to religion: Socrates, Gautama, Jesus, Bertrand Russell, Gandhi, and Simone Weil …. This biographical and autobiographical approach seemed to generate student excitement and engagement. "

WHAT I want to do in this article is to describe and assess what I have done with the general "introduction to religion" course in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. As the title indicates, I have structured the course around individual life stories: biographies, autobiographies, other forms of personal statement expressed in journals, letters, essays, poetry, and (most recently), fictional lives.

In a period when theologians and biblical scholars have been reaffirming the centrality of metaphor for both faith and reflection, and the natural kinship of theology with such literary genres as parable, poetry, autobiography, and fiction, I do not flatter myself that I am doing anything particularly new or startling in introducing religious studies through life stories. Indeed, I am sure that there are teachers of religion who must have been doing this sort of thing for years. My restructuring the course along the lines of life stories has reflected my own longstanding interest in narrative and existential modes of reflection, and also my conviction that this sort of material engages beginning students in a singularly arresting way in the topics and methods of religious studies by providing them with a series of concrete, inherently interesting "case studies."

I introduced our general beginning level course in the fall of 1976. Our departmental efforts to come up with an attractive title produced "Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Religion." (I might say parenthetically that that title does indeed attract students to the course, sometimes unfortunately raising expectations about its "personal relevance" to individual students' quest that are not and probably cannot be

James Woelfel is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, the University of Kansas, Lawrence. He received his doctorate from the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of Bonhoeffer's Theology (1970), Borderland Christianity (1973), Camus: A Theological Perspective (1975), and Augustinian Humanism (1979). Designed specifically for college classes, Dr. Woelfel's suggestions would be applicable also for church and adult education groups of various kinds.

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fulfilled.) The course has been taught every semester since fall 1976, five times by me, and it is now a well established "entrance" course in religious studies, enrolling anywhere from forty to sixty or more students. Each time I have taught the course I have experimented with different approaches and readings, always with two course goals in mind: (1) to stimulate students to become knowledgeably and critically aware of the general human religious situation in a kind of dialectic with their own lives and cultural situations; and (2) to introduce students to some of the chief subject matters and methods in the study of religion.

I

Although I had previously used some biographical and autobiographical material "Search for Meaning," in the spring of 1979, ¹ decided to build an entire course around the lives of three ancient and three modern figures who stood in one or another direct relationship to religion: Socrates, Gautama, Jesus, Bertrand Russell, Gandhi, and Simone Weil. Now that I have named names, questions and criticisms may be immediately popping into readers' heads. Yes, I know full well that we do not in any sense have "biographies" of Gautama and Jesus; although our relative confidence about the authentic teachings of the latter preserved in the synoptic Gospels perhaps provides us with a kind of "autobiographical statement." I had students read introductory and textual material from E. A. Burtt's The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha,1 and selections from the Gospels and on the problem of the historical Jesus from Norman Perrin's The New Testament: An Introduction.² In my own presentations on Gautama and Jesus and in guest presentations by colleagues who specialize in Asian religions and New Testament, all the problems were brought out. Those units thus provided the opportunity to explore basic hermeneutical issues in dealing with sacred scriptures. At the same time, of course, the canonical stories of the two lives at the roots of the Buddhist and Christian traditions, just as they are, have had an enormous impact on those two men's followers.

How does Bertrand Russell get into the picture? I selected the three ancient and the three modern figures to go in pairs: Gautama and Gandhi for ancient and modern India; Jesus and Simone Weil for the founder of Christianity and one contemporary and provocative Christian; and Socrates and Russell for the Western philosophical tradition regarding religion, at the roots of that tradition and in one well-known recent expression. I am mainly a philosopher of religion, and wanted to expose the students to at least a sample of the inescapable issues raised by the critique of mythos by logos-issues which pervade all aspects of religious studies as an area of rational inquiry. We read Socrates' Apology and parts of the Phaedo, in both of which we see the early claims of reason criticizing certain traditional Greek religious ideas but also affirming transcendent realities and values.

¹ New American Library, 1955.
² Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.

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With some of the essays in Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian,³ essays that are intensely personal as well as philosophical, we have the more familiar modern philosophical and moral critique of traditional religious claims, in this case largely Christianity. In choosing Russell, I was also able to present to the class not only a vigorous case against what we might call "official" religion but also an exceptionally good "secular" writer who throughout his lifetime was passionately, indeed religiously, engaged with urgent human questions and the alleviation of human suffering. I read to the class the Epigraph and the Prologue from Russell's Autobiography,⁴ by way of challenging them to see that being "ultimately concerned" and even using religious metaphors is something broader than belonging to or even liking the church.

To round out the "great lives" and readings, Gandhi seemed a "natural," as a twentieth-century hero-saint who came out of a cultural and religious tradition vastly different from that of my students. I had the class read about two-thirds of the autobiographical selections in Louis Fischer's The Essential Gandhi.⁵ The life of Gandhi is challenging for a general study of religion because of his knowledge of Christianity and the influence of Tolstoy's radical interpretation of the Gospels on his own commitment to non-violence as a way of life. This is a good example of religious cross-fertilization since Gandhi was both sympathetic toward and critical of Christianity. Gandhi in turn influenced one of our authentic modern American prophets, Martin Luther King, Jr. A colleague who is an expert on King gave a guest lecture on some of the connections between the two. There are also good films on Gandhi's life, and I think one of the best is Mill the old "Twentieth Century" biography narrated by Walter Cronkite.⁶

There are several advantages in selecting Simone Weil: her contemporary influence as a kind of "worldly saint," like Bonhoeffer; her mysticism; her marvellously stubborn refusal to be baptized, although a Catholic by conversion and conviction, because the church excluded too much that she believed Christ included; her bold and imaginative seeing of the Christ in Plato, the Bhagavad-Gita, and elsewhere; her involvement in pre-war and wartime European social and political life; and the "strange," extreme, intense, self-abnegating character of her personality and actions, including the manner of her death. I try to point out that religion is full of people who, by our usual standards, appear "crazy" or "extreme" in their devotion or self-sacrifice. Students' minds are at least opened to the possibility that some of these people may in fact be more closely in touch with the "real" order of things than our bland, cautious "normality." In addition, I wanted very much to include at least one woman among the "great lives." Women's stories, as we now realize

³ Edited, with an Appendix on the "Bertrand Russell Case," by Paul Edwards, Simon and Schuster, 1957.
⁴ The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1872-1914, Bantam Books, 1969, pp. 3-4.
⁵ Random House, 1962.
⁶ McGraw-Hill, 1958, 28 min.

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acutely, have historically been much more hidden from view, and the search for a published woman's life story correspondingly more difficult. On Weil we read Leslie Fiedler's very good Introduction and her own letters to Father Perrin in the Harper and Row edition of Waiting for God.⁷

II

This biographical and autobiographical approach seemed to generate student excitement and engagement. Focussing on individual lives stimulated more discussion than standard approaches in which most of the reading was geared to textbook material and scholarly, rather than personal, primary literature. An obvious reason is that life stories are for the most part intrinsically interesting reading, providing personal and narrative religious models. The approach also "clicked" for me better than anything I had done previously. The material fell into place, and I felt good about working with it. The life stories lent themselves especially well to the use of guest lecturers, three of whom I have mentioned, and of films.

I hasten to add that in restructuring the course biographically and autobiographically I did not abandon the use of an introductory textbook and supplementary critical readings. The life-material was undergirded with standard sorts of secondary literature introducing the students to issues, perspectives, and methods in religious studies. In the spring of 1979, for example, I used as a basic text Michael Novak's Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove,⁸ which the class read and discussed systematically chapter by chapter through the semester. What I have found is that because students are naturally interested in "great lives," it is much easier to incorporate scholarly critical material intelligibly as an interpretative key to what is going on in the biographies and autobiographies. Thus using life stories becomes a "case study" approach, in which the intersection of psychological, social, cultural, historical, symbolic, and theological dimensions of religion can be examined concretely in the lives of persons involved in religious seeking and finding in a variety of ways and in different cultures. The methodologies of religious studies become useful tools in the task of understanding and interpreting life-texts.

III

One of the most significant values of the life-stories approach seems to be its clear and comprehensible "fleshing out" of the topics and methods of religious studies. Typically, many students find critical works in the area of religion extremely daunting. This situation is not only a function of the broad cross-section of student backgrounds and abilities at a large public university. It is related to the more general phenomenon that most students have virtually no experience with formal critical thinking

⁷ Translated by Emma Craufurd, Harper & Row, 1973.
⁸ Harper & Row, 1971.

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about religion, in contrast to the level of formal knowledge they may have attained in, for example, the sciences or mathematics. I find that even most introduction-to-religion textbooks tend to be pitched too high for the average student. I have a great admiration for the person who can write a really clear, interesting, intelligible introductory textbook in any field. It is probably the single most demanding kind of scholarly writing, and should be recognized in the academic reward system more than it usually is. Writing an introductory text is the supreme test of a scholar-teacher's ability to communicate. It demands the bracketing of all sorts of assumptions, terms, data, and reasonings which have become second nature. It is an arduous task, and one has to remain constantly vigilant about letting one's guard down and forgetting a body of assimilated knowledge that is completely unfamiliar to students. The best rule of thumb for the writer of introductory textbooks in religion is: "Don't assume that the students know anything!" (It is, of course, precisely that realization that has so far prevented me from undertaking to write a textbook.)

Another advantage of the life-story approach has been its relationship to a major course requirement. Every time I have taught the course I have had the students do for a term project a personal religious journal or autobiography in which they reflect critically on their own religious background and quest for meaning in knowledgeable relationship to the issues, methods, and readings of the course. Structuring the course around life stories has served to integrate the term project more directly with the work of the course generally. It has also provided concrete models for students in working on their own life stories, as the journals and autobiographies they have written show. With their personal interest in the "great lives," students now tend to articulate their own life and quest in conversation with the figures studied.

IV

Returning to "Search for Meaning" in the spring semester of 198 1, 1 used the same approach with different life stories but with similar student enthusiasm. This time, however, I introduced a new element, the use of fictional lives along with biographical and autobiographical writings. For some time, I have worked with theological and philosophical issues in modern literature.⁹ It is a major area of background and interest, and I saw in the use of fictional lives yet another creative application. Fictional lives clearly have the advantage of broadening the possibilities and importantly adding or richly enhancing significant dimensions of religious studies such as the relationship between the religious and the aesthetic, religion and the arts, experience and interpretation. A possible disadvantage is that they may raise problems of authenticity and identification in the minds of students.

⁹ As, for example, in my book Camus: A Theological Perspective, Abingdon Press, 1975; and in my article "Charlie Citrine and the Argument from Absurdity," Religion in Life, vol. 47, no. 4, Winter 1978, pp. 460-476.

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I used three non-fiction works in the spring of 1981: Black Elk Speaks,¹⁰ Elie Wiesel's A Jew Today,¹¹ and Naomi Goldenberg's Changing of the Gods.¹² My experience with the powerful and moving narrative of Black Elk's life corroborated that of a colleague who had previously used it. Students find it an utterly fascinating and compelling account of Native American religious experience, and a heartbreaking account of one of the more recent ugly chapters in the history of white oppression of Native Americans. A very good film to use in connection with Black Elk, by the way, is "Legends of the Sioux."¹³

Elie Wiesel's impassioned essays and word portraits in A Jew Today challenge widespread ignorance and false assumptions among Christian students about Judaism and its relationship to Christianity. Wiesel's characteristic focus on the Holocaust and its implications for Judaism, Christianity, and the human future valuably confronts students with one of the most inexhaustibly significant events that have shaped the world in which they live. Film resources on both Wiesel and the Holocaust are, of course, excellent.

Naomi Goldenberg's book was, I confess, "fudging" a bit. Although Changing of the Gods contains personal narrative in several places, it is primarily an academic-style critique of Jewish and Christian patriarchalism building on the work of Freud and Jung. I chose Goldenberg because I wanted students to be confronted by a post-Christian religious feminism. There was the added advantage that Goldenberg's study usefully describes a new religious movement of our time with its examination of feminist witchcraft. Most of the students were simply not ready for the strong dose of religious feminism in Goldenberg.

I also selected three novels to read and examine: Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha,¹⁴ Par Lagerkvist's Barabbas,¹⁵ and Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych.¹⁶ Each narrates a fictional life; while Barabbas is presumably a historical figure, nothing is known about him and so Lagerkvist's work is entirely fictional. As with all of Hesse's fiction, there is a great deal of the writer's own modern, Western, many-staged struggle with and search for meaning in Siddhartha. But it is also very useful in introducing students concretely into something of the cultural and religious ambience of ancient India. In addition, it contains the interesting encounters with the great historical Siddhartha, Gautama the Buddha, which provide an entree into consideration of Buddhism. Barabbas is a very provocative parable of the modern anguish of the religiously-inclined skeptic over the historical claims of Christianity. Students read Van Harvey's article, "A Christology for Barabbases," in

¹⁰ As told through John G. Neihardt, Pocket Books, 1972.
¹¹ Translated from the French by Marion Wiesel, Random House, 1979.
¹² Beacon Press, 1979.
¹³ Nauman Films, 27 min.
¹⁴ Translated by Hilda Rosner, Bantam Books, 1974.
¹⁵ Translated by Alan Blair, Bantam Books, 1968.
¹⁶ In The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories, translated by Aylmer Maude, New American Library.

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connection with the novel.¹⁷ Tolstoy's great and widely-read classic, The Death of Ivan Ilych, needs almost no comment. Students universally find it a powerful story of inauthenticity and authenticity in life and before death, and it provides an excellent opportunity to deal with religious perspectives on death and dying.

The use of fiction is important because teachers in the humanities have a special obligation to pry today's students loose from the deadening literalism and dualism that permeates their thinking, awakening their imaginations to a more holistic and humane approach to truth and reality. Too many come to us locked into the familiar and false dichotomies between fact and symbol, thought and imagination, "truth" and fiction, "reality" and myth, "objective" and "subjective." With regard to sacred scriptures and theological beliefs, these dichotomies come to the fore with a vengeance.

There are a number of ways in which the use of fictional lives can help initiate students into the essential role of metaphor and symbol in apprehending reality. Illuminating comparisons can be made between the art of the novelist and the art of the biblical narrator. The issue of the relationship between historical event and imaginative interpretation in Jewish and Christian scriptures can be usefully explored. The symbolic character of and kinship between fictional and religious visions of life are likewise made clearer. The rich variety of typically metaphorical ways in which human beings try to express the connections between the seen and the unseen-between the conscious and the unconscious, the self and other selves, the visible world and the ineffable mystery surrounding it-are seen in the craft of the creative artist. Both the rich repertoire of human imagination and the inherent limitations of human perspective are shown to characterize both art and faith. At a foundational level, the intimate existential and historical connections between the religious and the aesthetic imagination, religion and the arts, are opened up for consideration and discussion through the use of fictional lives. Two helpful films in exploring such issues are "The Truth of Fiction"¹⁸ and "Literature: Legacy for the Future."¹⁹ The university art museum provided a guided tour of religious art that proved to be both an enjoyable and an illuminating experience for the students.

A possible disadvantage of using fictional lives is that their impact will not be great because students will not take them as seriously as real lives. I mention this as a "possible" disadvantage, because I have not specifically tested it by soliciting student opinion. An important aspect of good biography and autobiography is the reader's realization that "This person really lived, really did and said those things; was flesh and blood like me!" In other words, non-fiction lives have a reality and credibility and evoke a sense of identification at least in the average reader that perhaps fictional lives do not. This may be particularly

¹⁷ Perkins Journal, vol. 29, no. 3, Spring, 1976, pp. 1- 13.
¹⁸ McGraw-Hill, 1972,19 min.
19 McGraw-Hill, 1972,17 min.

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important in a course in religious studies, where the issues of authenticity and truth are central ones in the minds of the students.

To read the testimonies of persons like Black Elk, Simone Weil, Elie Wiesel, and Gandhi and to realize that they actually underwent the experiences they did, engaged in the actions they did, and interpreted life in the ways they did, almost undoubtedly has a salutary impact on the student. But I can at least imagine questing students, however much they might enjoy a fictional life like that of Siddhartha or, say, Raskolnikov, feeling that they are not obliged to "take it seriously." After all, aren't these only "made up" characters, "merely" the product of someone's imagination? Particularly if students have problems with certain aspects of the fictional life or its religious implications, they find an easy way of dismissing it. No such "out" exists with non-fiction.

It may be that my concerns about fictional lives are not realistic ones. As I said, I have not yet tested through student comments on what is at this point entirely my own speculation. None of the student autobiographies or journals in the spring of 1981 made anything of the difference between the real and the fictional persons we studied. Perhaps the mix of clear advantages and possible disadvantages of using fictional lives suggests doing precisely what I did in the spring of 1981: using some of both, fiction and non-fiction.

V

The life-story approach to introducing religious studies clearly provides rich possibilities, transcending what I have described in this article. Available to any teacher are not only a wide range of biographical, autobiographical, and fictional resources, but also a variety of ways of organizing a course around such resources and of integrating them with critical issues, perspectives, and methods in religious studies. I hope what I have described of my own limited use of life stories may be of some help to others by way of stimulation and suggestion. With these goals in mind, I have appended a select bibliography of autobiographical and fictional resources.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This is very far from an exhaustive bibliography. It reflects my own reading, interests, usage, and knowledge of what is available. I have omitted entirely the many good biographies of religious figures, on the grounds that the range of possibilities is even more vast. My list, with all its limitations, is meant simply to indicate a number of possible resources for teachers working with life stories. The autobiographical writings include not only straightforward autobiography but also journals, letters, essays, and poetry. The fictional lives included are novels and, within that genre, typically Bildungsromans; a few are historical novels.

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(1) AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS

Augustine, Confessions
Black Elk Speaks (as told to John Neihardt)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papersfrom Prison
Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace
John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
Albert Camus, essays in The Wrong Side and the Right Side, Nuptials, and Summer
Harvey Cox, The Seduction of the Spirit
Nawal El Saadavvi, The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World
Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Living of These Days
Mohandas Gandhi, An Autobiography and The Essential Gandhi (ed. by Louis Fischer)
Dag Hammarskjold, Markings
John of the Cross, Poems
Sam Keen, To a Dancing God and Beginnings Without End
Soren Kierkegaard, Journals and The Point of View for My Work as an Author
Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom
Corliss Lamont, Yes to Life: Memoirs of Corliss Lamont
Madeleine L'Engle, The Crossswicks Journal Trilogy: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Thomas Merton, The Asian Journals, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, and The Seven Storey Mountain
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua
Flannery O'Connor, selected essays in Mystery and Manners
Yogananda Paramahansa, Autobiography of a Yogi
Plato, The Apology of Socrates
Adrienne Rich, Diving Into the Wreck
Richard Rubenstein, Power Struggle
Bertrand Russell, portions of The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell and selected essays in Why I am Not a Christian Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought
Henry Suso, Life of the Blessed Henry Suso
Teresa of Avila, Autobiography
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Letters to Two Friends, 1926-1952
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Leo Tolstoy, My Confession
Alan Watts, In My Own Way The Way of a Pilgrim
Simone Weil, Waiting for God
Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today, Night, and One Generation After
John Woolman, Journal

(2) FICTIONAL LIVES

James Agee, A Death in the Family
Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin

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Saul Bellow, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift, and Mr. Sammler's Planet
Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest
Frederick Buechner, Godric
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
Albert Camus, The Fall
Margaret Craven, I Heard the Owl Call My Name
Peter DeVries, The Blood of the Lamb
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot
Petru Dumitriu, Incognito
Graham Greene, A Burnt-out Case and The End of the Affair
Hermann Hesse, Demian, Siddhartha, and Steppenwolf
Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
Par Lagerkvist, Barabbas
Bernard Malamud, The Assistant and The Fixer
Joyce Carol Oates, Son of the Morning
Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine
Andre Schwarz-Bart, The Last of the Just
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
John Updike, The Centaur and Rabbit, Run
Gore Vidal, Julian
Edwin Lewis Wallant, The Pawnbroker
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
Elie Wiesel, A Beggar in Jerusalem, The Gates of the Forest, The Testament, and The Town Beyond the Wall