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Biography, Individuality and the Study of Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Richard A. Hutch
Richard A. Hutch
Affiliation:
University of Queensland, Australia
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Extract

During June, 1836 Soren Kierkegaard attended a soiree in Copenhagen where the wine flowed, witty conversation bubbled from every corner, and he himself was at the centre of merriment – sparkling, acerbic, enormously witty. After the party he returned home and penned the following lines in his journal:

I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away – yes, the dash would be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit…and wanted to shoot myself.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , December 1987 , pp. 509 - 522
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

page 509 note 1 As quoted in Lowrie, Walter, A Short Life of Kierkegaard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 107.Google Scholar

page 509 note 2 Ibid.

page 510 note 1 See especially, Reynolds, Frank and Capps, Donald (eds.), The Biographical Process: Studies in the History and Psychology of Religions (The Hague: Mouton, 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also, a refreshing new emphasis on individuality as any analytical category in the humanities, especially in Western culture, is recognized as a post-enlightenment phenomenon by Karl Weiltraub. He traces the increasing importance of individuality in a study of autobiographies. See his important study, which has implications for what is being suggested about biography, literature and religion in this paper: Weintraub, Karl, ‘Autobiography and Historical Consciousness’, Critical Inquiry, I (1975), 821–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 512 note 1 Boswell, James, Life of Samuel Johnson (London: Hill–Powell, I, 1971), pp. 29–33.Google Scholar

page 513 note 1 Quoted in Altick, Richard, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), p. 81.Google Scholar

page 513 note 2 Ibid. p. 383.

Edel, Leon, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 45.Google Scholar Also, typological ranges of biographical texts that demonstrate the ‘bridging’ nature of the genre of biography are evident in, Clifford, James, From Puzzles to Portraits (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), pp. 83–9;Google Scholar and Edel, Leon, Literary Biography (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957), pp. 82–8.Google Scholar

page 514 note 1 See Dodds, E. R., Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Barbu, Zevedi, Problems of Historical Psychology (New York: Grove Press, 1965).Google Scholar

page 515 note 2 Erikson, Erik, Young Man Luther (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958);Google Scholar and Gandhi's Truth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968).Google Scholar

page 515 note 2 Hutch, Richard A., ‘Helena Balvatsky Unveiled’, Journal of Religious History, XI (1980), 320–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 516 note 1 Lasswell, Harold, Power and Personality (New York: W. W. Norton, 1948).Google Scholar

page 516 note 2 For details of Buber's life, see Friedman, Maurice, Martin Buber's Life and Work: The Early Years, 1878–1923 (London: Search Press, 1982), pp. 3–25.Google Scholar

page 517 note 1 See, Buber, Martin, I and Thou (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1970).Google Scholar

page 518 note 1 Examples of religious studies scholarship along these lines are several articles contained in the volume edited by Frank Reynolds and Donald Capps and cited above. See especially, Richard A. Hutch, ‘Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Birth of a Seer’; Victor Turner, ‘Religious Paradigms and Political Action: “The Murder in the Cathedral” of Thomas Becket’; Willian LaFleur, ‘The Death and “lives” of the Poet-Monk Saigyo’; and Frank Reynolds, ‘The Many lives of the Buddha: A Study of Sacred Biography and Theravada Tradition’.

page 519 note 1 Kris, Ernst, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: International Universities Press, 1952).Google Scholar

page 519 note 2 This task is set by historian of religion, Eliade, Mircea in his ‘A New Humanism’, in The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 1–11.Google Scholar

page 520 note 1 Capps, Walter and Capps, Donald, The Religious Personality (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1970).Google Scholar

page 520 note 2 Hutch, Richard A., ‘Types of Women Religious Founders’, Religion, XIV (1984), 155–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 520 note 3 See, Pommer, Henry, Emerson's First Marriage (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967);Google ScholarPorte, Joel, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in this Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979);Google ScholarRusk, Ralph L., The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949);Google Scholar and Wagenknecht, Edward, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Portrait of a Balanced Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).Google Scholar A more ‘psychological’ biography that approximates the goal being suggested is, Allen, Gay Wilson, Waldo Emerson: A Biography (New York: Viking Press, 1981).Google Scholar

page 521 note 1 See, Hutch, Richard A., Emerson's Optics: Biographical Process and the Dawn of Religious Leadership (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1983).Google Scholar

page 522 note 1 Edel, , Writing Lives: Principia Biographica, passim.Google Scholar

page 522 note 2 Erikson, Erik, ‘On the Nature of Psychohistorical Evidence: In Search of Gandhi’, in Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership, edited by Rustow, Dankwart (New York: George Braziller, 1970), pp. 33–68.Google Scholar