LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature.

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

Since we revived the Literary Universals Project in 2016, I’ve been expecting, and hoping, to receive an article on literature and religion. This is not only because the topic is intrinsically interesting, but also because the data are complicated in a way that I believe illustrates some of the challenges that face the study of literary universals. I am very far from an expert in the field. However, cognizant of the relative informality allowed by a blog post, I finally decided that I should just go ahead and treat some of the material that I am familiar with, in the hope that this will inspire other writers, with greater depth and breadth of knowledge, to extend or correct my comments. To give a rough idea of what should be included here, I count something as literary if it is read, watched, or listened to by a significant body of recipients in part for the experience of emotions, whether those be suspense, wonder at beauty, empathic love, or something else. I count something as religious if it is read, watched, or listened to by a significant body of recipients because they believe that it communicates truths—including moral truths–that transcend mundane, human life.

To Start: A Small Point About Starting Points

Writers who argue that there are literary universals are often accused of Eurocentrism. That is probably often the case, though not necessarily in the morally objectionable sense of “Eurocentrism.” For example, writers raised and educated in Western societies often start out making use of the emotion concepts of their native language. I don’t see this as a problem, as long as emotion concepts from other languages are also included in the research program eventually and as long as researchers are sensitive to contravening evidence regarding their own-language concepts. My assumption would be that, if an emotion concept names an emotion that people in one culture experience, then it is probably an emotion that some people in other cultures do—or at least could–also experience. Conversely, if the concept is problematic when a researcher seeks to apply it to other societies, that probably suggests a problem with its application to his or her own society as well. For example, a common view of romantic love in the U.S. appears to be that it is “true love” only if it is eternal. In some other societies, researchers might have difficulty finding cases of true love, conceived in this way, as common conceptions of romantic love view it as ephemeral and those conceptions are likely to affect the ways in which people report their emotions. But it would actually be difficult to find “true love” in the U.S. also. Attachment or companionate love can be enduring, and seems to occur everywhere in an enduring form (e.g., parents do not stop loving their children after a certain interval). But “romantic love lasts between twelve and eighteen months” (Fisher 100) “True love” is as non-existent in the U.S. as elsewhere. We learn this when we begin to research “true love,” rather than assuming, for culturalist reasons, that we have it and other people don’t. In this way, having multiple, (temporarily) culture-“centric” starting points should only enrich our study of universals, rather than limiting it.

In any event, whatever my unself-conscious presuppositions may be, and however European they may be, this issue does not usually arise with my self-conscious adoption of models. Specifically, my explicit model for a given form of cross-cultural literary study is more likely to be Indian than European. This is in part a result of personal interest, and in part a matter of having learned about Indian literature through explicit study, rather than implicit assimilation. What is most important, however, is that in many respects, Indian literature and Indian religion—or, perhaps, philosophy of literature and philosophy of religion—seem often more finely differentiated and more comprehensive than the parallel cultural forms in other traditions.

By “finely differentiated,” I mean having clear, systematic definitions for key concepts. By “comprehensive,” I mean having a logically complete set of key concepts. For example, in religious philosophy, Indic traditions of ontology may be organized by reference to a few basic principles, which are subjected to systematic variation, yielding a set of logical alternatives. If we begin with the distinction between spirit and matter (puruṣa and prakṛti in Sanskrit), and that between monism and dualism, the logical possibilities are as follows: Dualism: both puruṣa and prakṛti exist; in the Indian tradition, this is the Sāṃkhya school (see Grimes 282-283). Monism: only puruṣa exists; this is Advaita Vedānta (see Grimes 15). Monism: only praṛkti exists; this is Cārvāka (see Grimes 102). Monism: both puruṣa and prakṛti exist, but they are not distinct from one another (e.g., to use current philosophical terminology, they are two aspects of the same [single] reality); this is “Absolute Monism” (see Pandit 45; see also Dmitrieva). The only remaining possibility is that neither exists. I am not sure that I know what such a claim means. But it is very reminiscent of the Buddhist idea that everything is śūnyatā or the void (see Grimes 305).  In effect, this covers all the schools of early Indic metaphysics, and indeed all possible schools defined by these premises. That breadth is what makes Indian metaphysics perhaps uniquely “comprehensive,” as I just put it. The explicit, well-specified definitions of each school are what make it “finely differentiated.”

Comprehensiveness and fine differentiation as found in Indian traditions here have two consequences that are worth drawing out. First, all societies that have some practice of the relevant kind (here, they all have an ontology, or several—disputed–ontologies). As such, they must take up at least one of the possibilities set out in the early Indian scheme. Second, the existence of all the logical possibilities in India entails that there is not some general principle of cultural uniformity that prevents different people in a given society from believing distinct metaphysics or any one person from changing his or her mind. (On common assumptions about cultural uniformity, and some reasons why they are misguided–see Moody-Adams).

Actually, there is one significant aspect of ontology that is not explicitly separated out in Indian metaphysics, at least not early on. That is just where one should locate the mind. In Sāṃkhya, the mind is prakṛti. In the West, it has more usually fallen under the category of puruṣa. This is the sort of difference that can be very productive intellectually for both groups when they interact with one another and are thereby faced with contradictions between their assumptions and those common in the other society. Of course, our topic here is religious literature, not ontology, but the same basic principles apply.

From the Vedas to the Rāmāyaṇa and the Purāṇas

The most ancient, sacred texts of Hinduism are the Vedas. The first part of the Vedas, called “Saṃhitā,” meaning “collection” (Feuerstein 254), includes a range of hymns or poems. Within the Indian tradition, these are exemplary cases of religious literature. As such they have a number of characteristics that suggest possible candidates for universals of religious literature. Here are some:

• A religion will frequently include a body of literary works—often, poems—as central, canonical texts (thus as scriptural).
• These scriptural literary works typically are or come to be part of religious rituals.
• Such works frequently include allusions to myths, legends, and/or historical events.
• These canonical literary works become the objects of extensive interpretation. Such interpretations sometimes involve scholarly background (e.g., filling in mythological stories to which some verses allude elliptically), sometimes textual explication, sometimes explanation of the rituals.
• The collection of such works includes praise of deities and petition for benefits from them (e.g., adequate, but not excessive rainfall; see 5.83, pp. 172-174 of O’Flaherty).

Of these, petitionary prayer and hymns of praise are the functionally-defined categories of religious verse or, more broadly, religious literature that are most obviously candidates for universality. They are both pervasive in Christianity. Thus, we find both in such standardized prayers as the “Our Father.” Poems of praise are to be found throughout the psalms, which are Jewish in origin, but have become part of Christian religious literature as well. These functions are clearly not confined to the verses that are themselves part of the religion’s textual canon (parallel to the Vedic hymns). They appear also in works written by later authors in a literary context that is not specifically religious. For example, John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” is a (highly innovative) petitionary verse. As to presence in ritual, even a cursory look at the Catholic mass shows the presence of both types of literary speech (i.e., celebratory and petitionary). There has certainly been interpretive and scholarly commentary on the parts of the bible that we are likely to count as literature, though such attention is hardly confined to the poetic parts of that book.

Beyond Hinduism and Christianity, Gerstenberger discusses the presence of both forms of poetry in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hebrew verse. Moreover, he connects these functions with religious ritual (see 86-87). In addition, he isolates further characteristics of some religious literature, such as “confession of guilt” (83). This is of course an important feature of Christian tradition, and appears as part of the sacrificial story structure (see “Story”), which I will leave aside, having discussed story genres at length elsewhere (see chapter six of The Mind and Its Stories and chapter three of Affective Narratology). Gerstenberger goes on to refer to ritually-embedded petitionary prayer in the Americas as well, citing Navajo practice (85).

In Orthodox Islam, the Qur’ān is seen not only as the divinely revealed truth, but as the ne plus ultra of aesthetic excellence–thus, in effect, the greatest poetry (though believers would not phrase it this way). For example, Allen notes that “miraculous qualities” were “attributed to its style” (52). Despite this, for historical reasons, one of its surahs (the twenty-sixth) treats poets as deceptive and dangerous enemies of Islam. This makes the nature and use of poetry in Islam particularly complex. At the same time, however, I believe the aestheric status of the Qur’ān gives us license to count virtually any part of it as literature, as marked by the aesthetic qualities of verbal art. This, in turn, suggests a small but significant revision of the first candidate universal, which should now read as follows:

• A religion will frequently include a body of literary works—often, poems—as central, canonical texts (thus as scriptural). Sacred texts may also incorporate the sorts of aesthetic features that are prominent in verse.

This makes sense in part because there is no clear reason why, as a general rule, religions would canonize a particular body of verse. The revised version indicates that a spiritually elevated text would be associated with various sorts of excellence, including aesthetic excellence, and that there are different ways of accomplishing this—through a focally aestheticized part or through a more diffusely aestheticized whole. This also suggests a revision of our second possible universal, which might now read as follows:

• Scriptural literary works typically are or come to be part of religious rituals. Alternatively, rituals adopt some of the same aesthetic principles, thereby producing further scriptural literary works.

Here, too, the most obvious reason for the connection is that ritual—like canonical texts—is pre-eminent for its spiritual and moral excellence. As the most excellent of all excellences (from the religious point of view), one might reasonably view it as subsuming other excellences, including those that are aesthetic.

Continuing for the moment with Islam, it is unsurprising that praise of Allāh is pervasive in the Qur’ān. Petitionary appeals seem to be infrequent, perhaps due to the philosophical problems with petitionary prayer in monotheisms (see, for example, Davison). Even so, requests aimed at God are not absent. The Qur’ān begins “Praise be to Allāh, the Lord of the worlds” (Ali 1.1). It continues, “Thee do we beseech for help/Guide us on the right path” (Ali 1.4-5). Given that the Qur’ān, even more than the Vedic hymns, constitutes the centerpiece of its religion, it is unsurprising that it has been subjected to widespread analysis. This prominently includes the presentation of background, completing stories that are presented in only fragmentary, elliptical, allusive fashion, as with the Vedic hymns. It is also unsurprising that the Qur’ān figures in Islamic ritual—most obviously in the profession of faith and in the daily prayers required of Muslims (though, again, it is not so much the specific text as the broader aestheticization that seems crucial here).

Of the major written traditions, I have not yet mentioned those in China. China is an unusual case as the dominant belief systems in the society have downplayed ideas of divinity, relying principally on the relatively abstract and impersonal ideas, such as Tiān or Heaven. In some ways, Heaven has the same functions as the concept of God in the monotheistic religions. For example, the Tiāndào or Way of Heaven is the morally right path. That morally right path underwrites the sorts of social hierarchy that are often underwritten by “divine command” elsewhere, as when the Tiāndào is invoked to support filial piety (xiào), just as divine command is invoked to support “Honor[ing] thy father and thy mother” in the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments.

More precisely, the dominant religious orientations in China have been, first, Rú Jiā (“Confucianism”), associated with the sage, Kǒngzǐ (“Confucius”), followed by Dàoism, associated with the sage, Lǎozǐ. These are later joined by Buddhism. The foundational text of Dàoism is the Dàodéjīng, a highly poetic work, which certainly satisfies our aesthetic hypothesis (#1). It has also generated a sizable set of explications, along the lines suggested by other traditions. (For example, influential commentaries by Heshang Gong [2^nd Century C.E.] and Cheng Xuanying [7^th Century C.E.] are readily available in English.)

As to petitionary prayer, the different religious schools are not so mutually exclusive as the Middle Eastern monotheisms. In consequence, “According to individual needs and circumstances, lay persons may . . . address prayers and petitions indifferently to Dàoist, Buddhist, or popular deities” (Pregadio). On the other hand, neither petitionary prayer nor praise of a deity appears to be a common use of Dàoist or Confucian literature. Indeed, it does not appear to be a common use of religious literature in much of Buddhism either. This relative paucity of both genres seems likely to be a function of the degree to which the religions teach that important goals can—indeed, must–be achieved by the efforts of individual aspirants alone, as opposed to those that assert the centrality of something along the lines of divine grace. The Chinese religious philosophies tend to stress individual effort. Something like divine grace does become more prominent with Mahāyāna Buddhism, where the need for the beneficence of a bodhisattva is evident. This is particularly salient in Pure Land Buddhism, which is important for us as it guides a number of Chinese and Japanese literary works that are religious in their themes, though they are not themselves scriptural. A striking example is Zeami’s Atsumori in which the main character calls on the Amida Buddha to bring him and his enemy into the Pure Land where they may overcome their antipathy and reach enlightenment together. Even so, Mahāyāna Buddhism does generally maintain a commitment to personal effort as a key factor in achieving enlightenment. Perhaps in consequence, it seems fairly common for Buddhist literary works to suggest the benefits of Buddhist equanimity—rather than, say, appealing to a bodhisattva for spiritual aid. For example, a Buddhist poet, such as Wáng Wéi (8^th-Century China), may seek to convey the emotional results of a Buddhist sensibility through the depiction of the peacefulness of the speaker’s relation to nature. Other prominent examples of this sort may be found in the poetry of Bashō (17^th-Century Japan).

Of the East Asian religions, perhaps the most interesting, for our purposes, is Rú Jiā, due to the unusual way in which it conforms to these cross-cultural patterns. First, it does develop a central canon of religious poetry. Indeed, the Classic of Poetry (Shījīng) is so important to Rú Jiā that Confucian scholars were expected to memorize the 305 poems it contains. What is surprising here is that so many of the poems evidently deal with secular matters, such as love affairs. These are recruited to religious purposes through the extensive commentaries that turn evidently irreligious or at least non-religious poems into coded treatments of religious topics, principally morals. Thus, the Classic of Poetry includes the features we have been considering. However, it shapes this collection of poetry into a religious canon, not only—perhaps not even primarily–through the straightforward, intuitive meanings of the poems, but through self-consciously counter-intuitive reinterpretations of these poems.

As to the genres of the poetry, praise appears often enough. However, it is not praise of Heaven, but praise of morally exemplary individuals. This is what one would expect from a tradition that depersonalizes the usual, anthropomorphic divine beings. Tiān is, after all, a somewhat odd target for eulogizing. On the other hand, the narratives of exemplary individuals constitute another cross-cultural pattern in religious literature. We might then formulate a sixth candidate universal as follows:

• Stories of morally exemplary figures, often life stories, are frequently part of the set of sacred writings or at least have a sort of semi-canonical status for the religion. (In referring to “semi-canonical” works, I have in mind the model of śruti and smṛti in Hinduism; the former comprises eternal, revealed works, while the latter includes the most highly regarded, but still corrigible texts that originated at a particular time and place as the product of a human author.)

When possible, the morally exemplary subjects of such biographies are both divine and human or, if only human, are uniquely associated with the divine world. Thus, another Hindu scripture—more popular and more widely revered than the Vedas—is the Rāmāyaṇa, the exemplary life of the incarnation of the god, Viṣṇu, as Rāma. The point is no less obvious in the case of Christianity, where each gospel is a life of the morally exemplary divine incarnation, Jesus. The attention to the culminating prophet, Muḥammad, in Islam is similar. While not divine, Muḥammad is as close as a human comes to that status. For believers, his life represents the Sunnah or correct path; it stands as “the authoritative example of the way a Muslim should live” (Waines 288). This path (of Muḥammad’s life) appears somewhat elliptically in the canonical Ḥadîth and more fully in ibn Isḥâq’s (8^th-Century C.E.) Life of God’s Messenger, a work of nearly scriptural status. The life of the Buddha is exemplary also, without there being any particularly canonized or near canonized version, as far as I am aware—though there are works esteemed as part of the relevant literary canons, such as Aśvaghoṣa’s Sanskrit drama, The Life of the Buddha. We also find exemplar-defining works recounting the lives of the Christian saints and lives of the Jain Elders (e.g., by Hemacandra).

It seems to be the case that the exemplary biographies must frequently resolve moral inconsistencies, conflicts between the way people act—or even the way gods are imagined to act—and the moral idealization demanded by the genre. As Barrett points out, we imagine gods  in much the same way we imagine people, though we may deny this when asked (see chapter eight of Barrett). Barrett does not extend this to our moral imagination, but the stories themselves would seem to suggest that such an extension is warranted. Consider the Fall of humankind. Referring to Paradise Lost, the esteemed literary critic, William Empson, observed that God “kills Adam and Eve and all their descendants for eating an apple,” which is the sort of behavior we would expect from “a merciless tyrant” (Leonard xxv, summarizing Empson), not the morally ideal agent. Of course, Milton’s poem is non-canonical (i.e., not part of scripture). But parallel points apply to many acts in canonical scriptures as well. Religious authorities must in some way deal with this problem. Sometimes, the canonical version just eliminates the offensive act (though we can know this only if an original including the act has been preserved). In narratological terms, this would involve rectifying the ethics of the work at the level of the story. When present in the story, the problematic act may be backgrounded, perhaps recounted diffusely, so that it requires effortful, self-conscious inference. In this way, a sort of ethical resolution is produced through discourse, the way the story is told. The Confucian approach accomplishes its purposes a bit differently, altering the standard interpretation rather than the story or the discourse (for examples, see Cai; actually all traditions adopt a number of strategies, but in varying proportions). Hindu traditions offer yet another another form of this ethical rectification by in effect placing an interpretation of the act in the story (through a character) or by way of discourse (through a narrator). For example, this occurs with some of Rāma’s more morally objectionable acts, such as abandoning his wife. In the context of the Rāmāyaṇa itself, it is clear that the mistreatment of Sītā has its source in patriarchal structure. In consequence,  the ethical contradictions that concern this mistreatment are not simply character flaws in Rāma, but are a reflection of the patriarchal structure and associated sexism and misogyny of the society. In this way, the ethical contradictions in any religious literature may derive from the politics of the society, rather than the psychology of the hero or heroine.

Leaving aside Gerstenberger’s reference to Navajo religion, the preceding comments have been confined to major world religions. Nonetheless, the cases we have considered do suggest the plausibility of a claim that the following tendencies are at least statistical universals of religious literature.

• A religion will frequently include a body of literary works (often, poems) as central, canonical—thus scriptural–texts (oral or written). Sacred texts also tend to incorporate the sorts of aesthetic features that are prominent in verse. (These scriptural works of verbal art should be distinguished from religious works of verbal art that have no scriptural status.)
• Scriptural literary works typically are or come to be part of religious rituals. Alternatively, rituals adopt some of the same aesthetic principles, thereby producing further scriptural literary works.
• Religious literary works frequently allude to myths, legends, or historical events, in effect presupposing the reader’s or listener’s familiarity with those works.
• Canonical, literary works become the objects of extensive interpretation. Such interpretations sometimes involve scholarly background (e.g., filling in mythological stories to which verses allude elliptically), sometimes textual explication, sometimes explanation of the rituals. In other words, the scriptural works of verbal art come to be embedded in traditions of commentary. Moreover, the commentaries may be incompatible with one another and with the most obvious, literal interpretation of the texts.
• Scriptural, literary works—and, to a great extent, non-canonized religious literary works also—often praise deities and petition them for benefits (e.g., adequate, but not excessive rainfall). While the praise is usually explicit, the petitionary purpose may be expressed indirectly, unless it is aimed at specifically spiritual or moral benefit (thus, some version of grace).
• Canonical religious story literature commonly recounts a religion’s myths.
• One particularly important genre of scriptural or near-scriptural story literature recounts the life of some moral exemplar.
• The fashioning of morally exemplary lives often involves reconciling human fallibility with the idealization that is required by the genre. In addition, it is likely to require the reconciliation of an unethical, ideological bias with moral or religious principles that contradict it (see, for example, the arguments used in the Bhagavad Gita in support of war). Such reconciliation may be achieved by changing (bowdlerizing) the relevant texts, changing the interpretation of those texts, or rationalizing the moral failings of the exemplar.

I imagine that some of these points (e.g., the importance of praise and petition) carry over to a range of orally transmitted religions, while others (e.g., the expanding corpus of commentaries) might be confined to highly literate societies. But I will have to leave those issues for another time (and probably another author).

Bhakti

It is important to turn now to a form of religious feeling that has been highly productive and is one source of much literature that has been both popular for spiritual reasons and esteemed for its aesthetic accomplishments. In an Indian context, this is referred to as literature of “bhakti,” which is usually translated as “devotion.” Bhakti is not the emotion of the poet who petitions Indra, an anthropomorphic deity who rules over the anthropomorphic Hindu pantheon and who might be prevailed upon to produce rain. Rather, it is a feeling of intense longing, a feeling that one’s well-being is wholly dependent on achieving and sustaining a close connection with the object of devotion—whether Viṣṇu as the warrior Rāma, or Viṣṇu as baby Kṛṣṇa, or the Goddess as a protective slayer of demons. In short, it is love. The bhakta or devotee may love the deity as one loves a romantic partner—as is most common in literature–or as one loves a parent, or one’s child, or a dear friend.  We find examples of each sort in Indian literature.

This is not unique to South Asia, though the emphasis on romantic love is even more pronounced in other traditions. Most obviously, we find it in the mystical poets of Christianity and Islam. The former include such figures as Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Ávila. Lamenting the relative neglect of these writers today, Housden pleads that “we [Christians] too have our great love songs to God, our cries of longing, our sorrows of separation, our bliss of union” (xvii; see Housden for a selection of Christian mystical poetry also). In the mystical branch of Islam, Ṣūfī writers sometimes employed allegory to convey their unorthodox views. The allegory was regularly one of romantic love. For example, Nizami’s great narrative poem, Layla and Majnun, represents Majnun’s passionate longing for spiritual union with Allāh indirectly as Majnun’s passionate longing for romantic union with Layla.

But there is a difficulty here. The clear cases of religious bhakti literature are found almost entirely in Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Perhaps the earliest examples of such poetry are to be found in Judaism (“The Song of Songs”) and Hinduism (e.g., in the Kṛṣṇabhakti sections of the Bhagavad Gītā). Ṣūfism was influenced by Hinduism, and Christian mysticism was influenced by Ṣūfism. Due to such influence (“areal contamination,” as it is sometimes called), we cannot feel confident that these three cases point to a universal feature of religious literature (in the technical sense of universal). On the other hand, we almost certainly need to loosen this linguistic criterion in the case of literature (see the section on areal contact in “What are Literary Universals?”). In any event, given the degree of contact between these three religions and other religious traditions, we are left to wonder why a form of sacred poetry so enthusiastically embraced from India to Spain seems not to have inspired similar devotion on the part of Confucians, Buddhists, and others.

One possible explanation begins with the nature of the emotion at issue. No matter which analogy best fits the poet’s feelings—spousal, parental, or filial love or close friendship—a central component of those feelings is attachment care. Though prototypically associated with the bonding of parents and small children, attachment is a key component of romantic love and deep, enduring friendship as well. One peculiarity of attachment as an emotion system is that it takes individual persons as its targets. Most emotions are elicited by any member of a class of objects. While it is possible to be afraid of one particular wolf and not others, we are usually wary of all wolves. In contrast, a toddler is likely to be attached to his or her own mother, not everyone who shares the property of being a mother, and similarly the mother is attached to her own child.

Understanding this fact about attachment might lead us to hypothesize that attachment relations to a deity would be marked by two features. First, the attachment object should be singular. Second, that target should be distinguished by individuating characteristics. After all, the toddler identifies his or her mother, and rejects substitutes; he or she must be able to distinguish one from the other—by scent, voice, and so on. These two features of attachment would seem to suggest that the members of monotheistic religions might be more open to a bhakti orientation, at least insofar as that religion imagines the deity to be distinctively personified. In the technical terminology of the study of universals, this would constitute an hypothesis of a typological and statistical universal (see “What are Literary Universals?”), an hypothesis that literatures of a certain type—here, religious literatures associated with a monotheistic religion–are (statistically) more likely to develop works expressing a bhakti-like passionate emotion for God, modeled particularly on romantic love.

At least, as a simple, first approximation, this seems to fit the data reasonably well. Various forms of Christianity clearly share these characteristics. In consequence, it is unsurprising to find an emphasis on devotional love in some of its literature and at least lip service to love in its general teaching. Islam too fits here in being monotheistic. In orthodox Islam, Allāh is rather minimally personified, but He is given a voice and some traits through the Qur’ān. On the other hand, Ṣūfī mysticism—often considered heretical in orthodox Islam—is perhaps the form of bhakti-based religious poetry and prose that involves the most elaborate creation of individual characters to allegorize the mystic’s relation to God. We see this in, for example, Niẓāmī’s development of the spiritual allegory of Laila and Majnun, or in some elements of ‘Aṭṭār’s Conference of the Birds (also mystical allegories), and in the dense metaphors of Rūmī’s poetry. We find a similar situation in Judaism—a monotheism with a rather minimally personified deity. Jewish tradition does include the early “Song of Songs,” a love poem commonly interpreted as an allegory for the relation between the Jewish people and God (see Jerusalem 991). In keeping with this, Harold Bloom sees the poem as influencing St. John of the Cross (see 221-222). Still, given the way in which Ṣūfī mystical poetry  developed, we might expect to find more bhakti-like literary work in unorthodox writings of Judaism—perhaps, for example, those influenced by Kabbalah.

Given that the other clear cases are all monotheisms, one might wonder how India became such an important source of bhakti-based literature. But, in fact, Hinduism has a monotheistic structure, albeit of an unusual type. It refers to an array of “gods.” However, the anthropomorphic court of Indra is not of the same ontological type as the “Trinity” of Brahma, Viṣṇu, and Śiva. Moreover, for many Hindu theologians—indeed, virtually all those who follow the Vedāntic principles of the Upaniṣads—the supreme deity (e.g., Mahāviṣṇu) encompasses even the Trinity. Finally, in the case of Vaiṣṇavites (devotees of Viṣṇu), this supreme deity has been incarnated and thus given a wealth of personifying characteristics, as both a child and an adult. On the other hand, the ultimate unity of the divine in philosophical Hinduism is not so much a monotheism of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic sort as monism, an assertion that every soul is ultimately one in that divine being (who is, in this respect, commonly referred to as brahman). This division in personification is given a name in Hinduism—that between devotion to a deity “with properties” (saguna) or as absolute, thus “without properties” (nirguna; see Feuerstein 201-202 and 247-248).

This may at first appear to pose a problem. However, it fits the mystical analogy with romantic love perfectly. The longing of the bhakta for God in both Hindu and non-Hindu religious literature is not a longing to set up a home and have children, or to enjoy any worldly benefit. It is, rather, a longing to be one with the beloved, to be united in such a way as to overcome the sometimes unbearable isolation of being a conscious self. Mysticism could be conceived of as a sort of therapy for the existential loneliness of consciousness (a point I have discussed elsewhere; see chapter six of Personal Identity and Literature, and “Literature, God, and the Unbearable Solitude of Consciousness”). As such, it is certainly not confined to monotheisms. However, the development of a carefully personified single, potentially all-encompassing deity may facilitate the literary development of mysticism.

Future Directions

The implications of all this for future research on universals of religious literature are fairly straightforward. Here are a few possible directives, based on the preceding analyses.

• Evaluate hypotheses 1-8 by reference to as wide a range of orally (as opposed to chirographically) maintained and local (as opposed to world) religions as possible. This may include further specifications of the hypotheses (e.g., as to whether the same sorts of goods are requested in petitionary prayer across cultures and whether there is any pattern when they diverge).
• Consider historical factors as well. I have treated the world religions almost as if they were timeless. That may work well enough for petition and praise (of which human beings never seem to tire). But the bhakti-based literature was not always a prominent part of religious literature; its proliferation occurred during certain periods. Why was that?
• Systematically examine the division between an emphasis on grace and an emphasis on individual effort, addressing its implications for the features and purposes of religious literature.
• Systematically consider if there is any necessary connection between bhakti-based literature and the sort of religious counterculture that is so evident in certain forms of Ṣūfism. More generally, we need further exploration of the political dimensions of bhakti and mysticism.
• Systematically explore the relation between religion and attachment, which seems to be virtually unconsidered. This might include such specific sub-topics as the place of bhakti-like literature in the Jewish tradition, particularly Kabbalah, which the preceding analysis suggests would be likely to include such literature.

Addendum. Rather on a whim, I decided I would take maybe an hour to see what I could find that bears on the final point about Kabbalah. Within about five minutes, I came upon a virtual treasure trove of mystical poetry of eros, due to Cole’s valuable collection. Like Christian, Muslim, and Hindu writers, many poets of this tradition do indeed draw on the model of romantic love to express and convey the poet’s devotion to God.

Works Cited

Abhinavagupta. Tantrasāra. Translation and commentaries by B. N. Pandit. Varanasi, India: Indian Mind, 2020.

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