Religion and literature, study of the interrelation between religious traditions and literary traditions whether oral or written. Religion plays a tremendous role in shaping our life, its events and socio-cultural parts whereas literature plays a great role in influencing our life and its bits. The most obvious part is you can see the literary materials at every sphere of life formed whether that be The Greek, The Indic, The Islamic, The Judeo-Christian, or the Sino-Japanese. Though they consist of vast parts, literature is what intertwines them together by thought culture, practice culture and symbolism. We might consider the role that religion plays in setting up a belief system, thought system in our lives taking up from The Book Of Ramayana purely of Hindu context to Paradise Lost to Christian context.
But these all had been considered the talks of old age. The new term that has been taken up by today’s leftists and secularists is “secularism”. However that be in regard with building a temple or a mosque in Ayodhya. Is it so? If the modern age is so likely to be secular then what and why are these protests going for. The work of ‘A Secular Age’ by Charles Taylor argues that secularism is not a term where the religion has gone away, but it's an age in which religion finds itself at a new place believing in each other, other than criticizing. Though this statement came into great criticism, that context gave a big topic to the modern age to research in religion and literature. We can only say how bloodshed can win from peace and prosperity by building mosques, now just keeping these political aspects at far returning to the main agenda of literature and religion.
This debate on religion and literature in the modern world has led to three theoretical approaches.
Theonomy:
Here supreme law and authority are considered God. No one, nothing lies above him. This theory was considered by Protestant Theologian Paul Tillich in 1948(The Protestant Era) which says that God is the root of all the religious sayings and all the literary contexts. According to Tillich, this context deals with the part of religion and literature that urges human creation, their expressions as well as the deep need to locate them.
Heteronomy:
Here supreme authority and law are outside. This was given by T.S Elliot in 1936. According to him the norm and truth for judging the literature mingled with religion can only be found outside literature. He argued that to evaluate greatness and value of religion, faith must intervene.
Autonomy:
Here supreme authority and law are within. Developed in 1956 which argued that norms and judgements to judge a discipline must come from within a discipline. It showed that literature can’t be considered by any alien norm, there is no relationship between religion and literature. As it's crucial that great literature can be tied up to religion, it can contain religion or might not.
Evidence of Religion with Literature:
Daoist rituals, Buddhist dogmas, and Confucian ethics when joined to imperial China shaped and sustained the classic forms of Chinese lyric poetry, prose, drama and plays. The Buddhist priests and their exploits in medieval Japan provide various topics of no drama with subtle debate topics of Buddhahood. In Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism several texts have developed at various periods in an influential manner.
The elements of this structure directly question our belief system and the question, Is secularism actually what we mean it. A society like ours that does not think of itself as religious and gives anger-provoking statements each day needs to understand the respective importance of religion and literature. The stories should be mentioned that relate us to big thought-provoking questions that religion always attempts and asks to answer.
