A great many books and articles have been written on Leonard Cohen, particularly with the revival of his fortunes following his hugely successful world tours between 2008 and 2013. His marathon performances of over three hours each night have become the stuff of legend. For the years since he left the monastery on Mount Baldy, California in 1999, where he had gone not for a new religion, despite ordination as a monk, but for a disciplined regime to heal the mental and physical scars of the gruelling 1993 world tour of The Future, he believed that he would not be able to attract sufficiently large audiences to concert halls again.

Financial ruin, however, was a great healer and with some encouragement from his new manager Robert Kory, Cohen began playing again modestly in provincial Canadian theatres, progressing to large arenas and music festivals throughout the world. The new millennium proved to be the most artistically productive of his life, and the success of his albums far exceeded the sales of his previous releases. He was a man on a mission, putting his affairs in order and consolidating his literary legacy, even to the extent of releasing an album, You Want It Darker, three weeks before his death in 2016, and recording the vocals for a posthumous release, Thanks for the Dance, brought to fruition by his son Adam in 2019.

Music and song have always been considered profound expressions of divinity and are central to the Judeo-Christian tradition with, for example, Jewish psalmodies chanted in the synagogue and the mass for Christians revolving around hymns requiring the participation of the congregation. The Book of Psalms exhorts us to ‘sing a song and play the tambourine’ (Ps. 81.2) in honour of the Lord. In Psalm 40.3 we are told ‘He put a new song in my mouth’. Song, along with prayer, is one of the principal means of communication between humanity and Divinity. St Augustine, the first Black saint, attested that song was crucial to his own conversion.

Leonard Cohen grew up in Montreal, which was predominantly French Catholic and British Protestant. He belonged to a very well-established Jewish community with his own impeccable links to its heritage. The two books under review are ostensibly exploring similar ground in the works of Cohen, yet they are very different in style and substance. Neither of them is primarily concerned with Cohen as a poet, songwriter or performer, although they acknowledge he was all three. These books are not about the poem or the poetry. They are about the subject matter, which is claimed to be particular religious sources. Freedman is explicit that his book is as much an exploration of Cohen's sources as it is of Cohen's work itself. They are personal and highly speculative explorations.

Freedman is fascinated by Cohen's sources of inspiration, particularly in Judaism and Christianity. Freedman's extensive knowledge of the sacred texts allows him to mine deep into the precise passages to which Cohen alludes, or from which he borrows. Freedman tells us that Cohen draws upon the folklore, legends and stories of the Christian and Jewish traditions. There is no doubt that Cohen's imagination is replete with sacred imagery that he has carefully self-referentially reimagined. Marcia Pally is less concerned with the sources of Cohen's imagery than with the Canadian as theologian. For her, Cohen has a theodicy revelatory of an obsession with covenants, which he has a remorseful habit of breaking.

In an interview in 1993, Cohen gave his own reason for relying continually on Biblical images. He stated that ‘even though the culture has changed in terms of where it gets its information – from television mostly – the images contained in the Bible have remained’ (cited in Burger Reference Burger2014, p. 367). Christianity and Judaism are deeply ingrained in Cohen's poetic landscape, so much so that Moses and Jesus are holy men to be emulated, both of whom at one time or other felt betrayed by God. Cohen, in his more despairing moments, felt betrayed by all three, and laments, in Pally's interpretation, ‘for all they have done, we abandon them and the humanity they loved’ (p. 100).

The focus of both books on Cohen's extensive use of biblical and religious traditions offer the reader an opportunity to delve into Cohen's ambiguous relationship with spirituality and profanity. In his discussion of ‘Different Sides’ (Old Ideas, 2012), Freedman argues that the song shows us how Christianity and Judaism are very fluid and closely related creeds, which explains why Cohen seemed perfectly comfortable with drawing upon both the New and Old Testaments. Pally contends that Moses and Jesus are inspirational figures for his ‘theodical laments’, yet they are also objects of his jealousy, giving rise to the ‘bitter undertone’ of ‘Take This Longing’ (p. 97). She argues that the song shows at once Cohen's reverence for Jesus and resentment that the Saviour was loyal and constant in love, while Cohen was not (p. 98). Many of Cohen's songs and poems are prayer-like, especially after Various Positions (1985). In a letter to his publisher, dated August 1965 (Leonard Cohen Papers, Fisher Library Toronto), Cohen even described his second novel Beauftiful Losers (1966) as ‘a prayer … a disagreeable religious epic’.

Cohen said of himself that he was the type of person who tried everything, drugs, Jung, Zen meditation, love, and experienced it all falling apart. One of Leonard Cohen's most memorable and famous lines (in ‘Anthem’, The Future, 1992), alludes to the imperfections or flaws in our world: ‘There is a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in’. Cohen said of it: ‘That sums it up; it is the closest to a credo as I've come’ (cited in Burger Reference Burger2014, p. 366). It was, in his view, one of his best songs because it expressed the fundamental ideas behind all his other songs, despair and optimism.

In terms of the methods employed, these books are exemplifications of what is called idealisation, as opposed to abstraction. Abstraction is necessary in any characterisation of whatever the author wishes to depict, whereas idealisation is the elevation of certain aspects of a work, situation or event, as fundamental to its understanding, to the exclusion of all else. No one would want to deny the importance of the religious imagery on Cohen's work, but in doing so we are in danger of ignoring the wit and humour, the irony and sarcasm, the self-deprecation and the vast amount of non-religious imagery. Probably the most famous, and certainly the most successful, of Cohen's songs is ‘Hallelujah’. There are over 300 covers. The most well known are, of course, the hits by Jeff Buckley (1994) and Alexandra Burke (2008). Testament to the popularity of the song is John Cale's 1991 version included in the 2001 soundtrack of Shrek, directed to an entirely different audience. Cohen is said to have written over 90 verses, some of which crop up in his different renditions. Both Freedman and Pally take the Various Positions (1985) version, which is heavily religiously saturated, for their analyses. Yet the version Cohen recorded shortly afterwards at Austin City Limits TW Studio (Cohen Live 1994), in 1988, completely replaces the first three verses, eliminating the ‘baffled king’ David. The song becomes almost entirely secular and profane. And we see Cohen at his most self-deprecating and humorous in ‘You Got Me Singing’ (Popular Problems, 2014), which irreverently invokes his famous song, referring to it as the only song he ever had. He is at his most ironic, while mockingly self-obsessed, in for example, ‘Almost Like the Blues’ (Popular Problems, 2014), in which he sings: ‘There's torture and there's killing/There's all my bad reviews’.

The authors don't really give us an evaluation of Cohen the artist, nor indeed of Cohen the man. While both books offer considerable insight into Cohen's Jewish and Christian imagery, a more balanced assessment of his art, nature and character would have been achieved by exploring some of the influences he drew from, and the many other religions he studied with alacrity. Cohen once joked that he had never met a religion he didn't like (Lawson Reference Lawson2008), and acknowledged that he was something of a spiritual dilettante before he met the Buddhist monk who profoundly shaped his life. Cohen mused: ‘I participated in all those investigations that engaged the imagination of my generation … I even danced and sang with the Hare Krishnas – no robe’ (cited in Simmons Reference Simmons2012, p. 216).

The 1960s were a decade characterised by an atmosphere of experimentation when alternative lifestyles and cultures were explored by those rebelling against the ‘system’ and the traditions of their elders. Freedman refers to Cohen's early rebelliousness and explains that it was a common trait among young Jewish people to reject the traditions of their elders, because it had become too materialistic (pp. 5–6). Young, disillusioned Jews and Christians sought their own paths politically, socially and spiritually. Allen Ginsberg, a young Jew, and Jack Kerouac, a Christian, like many of those experiencing the ‘generation gap’, looked to Buddhism for spiritual sanctity, as indeed did Cohen.

Very little has been written, however, about his detour into the Church of Scientology in 1968. He was driving with Joni Mitchell in Los Angeles one afternoon when she noticed the organisation's headquarters and asked what it was. Cohen responded by describing it as a crackpot religion (Nadel Reference Nadel1996, p. 160). In his often dramatic tongue-in-cheek fashion, he phoned Mitchell a month later and told her he had joined the Scientologists and was ready to take over the world (Nadel Reference Nadel1996, p. 160). One of its major tenets is that humans suffer spiritual trauma as a consequence of past life experiences. Scientologists are subject to periodic audits by the church authorities with the intention of revealing the sources of their trauma. Electrical impulses in their bodies are measured by an e-reader to determine the manifestations. The process is frequently repeated in order to overcome the psychological trauma of their previous lives with the result that they ‘go clear’. Aficionados of Cohen's music will recognise the concept from his ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ (Songs of Love and Hate, 1971) when he refers to ‘the night when you planned to go clear. Did you ever go clear’? The question is left unanswered. We know, however, that Cohen received the certificate of Senior Dianetic, Grade IV Release, which is a good indication, from the point of view of the Church, that he had gone clear (Simmons Reference Simmons2012, p. 216). We know very little about his time in the Church of Scientology, about which he was evasive, perhaps because of the renowned secrecy that enveloped the organisation and the widespread hostility against the members who left it. Cohen had extreme difficulty in leaving the organisation. He did admit in 1994, nevertheless, that in continuing his studies he could see ‘how really good Scientology was’ (Kurzweil Reference Kurzweil1994).

Both Freedman and Pally are fundamentally asking variations of the same question: what are the origins of the imagery in the works of Leonard Cohen? In searching for the origins, however, they are in danger of abandoning originality. What is important for them is not the uniqueness of the poetic image as it is captured in a moment, which can't be reproduced, or replaced by re-description or substitution, but the fact that similar images or imaginings may be found elsewhere, in traditions from which Cohen borrows, but to which he contributes little. He is portrayed as the seeker after truths, in search of answers to age-old questions in order to make sense of this vale of tears in which life, or the human predicament generally, is regarded as a source of sorrow, suffering and tragedy. If he is rescuing and rewriting traditional religious truths, or reconstituting a theology, then Cohen is betraying the fundamental philosophy of his poetic hero, Federico García Lorca.

Neither Freedman nor Pally pursue the lines of enquiry that follow Cohen's spiritual path, nor indeed account for his spiritual restlessness. Cohen himself, pace Freedman and Pally, saw his extensive studies and poetic imaginings as a quest for truth, or deeper meaning. Nor did he think that he would get closer to and in touch with his inner feelings. ‘Inner feelings’, in his words, ‘come and go’ (‘That Don't Make It Junk’, Ten New Songs, 2001). There is no fixed self to get in touch with, no real Leonard Cohen to locate. Instead, he says, he was only trying to be honest, an ideal that is an aspiration, but can be never reached. No one knows the truth of this vast cosmic enterprise, ‘no one has a handle on it’ (cited in Burger Reference Burger2014, pp. 472–3). Had Cohen pursued the abatement of mystery, sought explanations for the inexplicable, he would have been writing the type of poetry that the poet he most admired considered second rate. The poetry of imagination in which the artist tries to resolve problems, uncover fundamental truths, interrogate everything for its deeper meaning, are futile enterprises in García Lorca's mind. If Cohen wasn't writing this sort of poetry, what was he doing? He was creating, contemplating and delighting in the images, irrespective of their sources, revelling in the mystery, the incomprehension of it all, feeling the pain, the angst, the despair, the joy, the ecstasy, exhilaration; appealing to the emotions that take us places the intellect fails to comprehend. This is what García Lorca (Reference García Lorca1998) called the poetry of Inspiration, in which the depth of emotion feels like ground glass surging through one's veins.