My office is the antithesis of emptiness. I am not sure how many books I have managed to cram into a 9 by 12 room, but suffice it to say I have used every available space, even to the point of violating the university's fire code. A year ago, when the fire marshal came around for a routine inspection, he informed me that I could not stack books all the way to the ceiling on top of 6-foot bookshelves but had to leave at least 12 inches' clearance. He told me he would be back for a repeat inspection in a couple of months. This forced me to do some culling—an excruciating task. So over spring break, I reluctantly downsized. Though every book now stood properly upright on a shelf, there was not an inch left anywhere in which to fit even one more volume.
Then Corrigan's Emptiness arrived in the mail. The beautiful cover photo of a wide, empty expanse seemed to mock my predicament. If only I had a bigger office! Fortunately, my dilemma about what to do with Corrigan's book was made easier by the fact that I had already seen it in manuscript and knew of its great value. Corrigan's Emptiness is the sort of book that displaces another if there is not enough empty space on the shelf.
His book is valuable first of all because it ranges authoritatively over so much material. In exploring how emptiness has been experienced emotionally, bodily, spatially, temporally, and doctrinally, he traverses four centuries of American history and cites enough primary and secondary literature to engage the interest of virtually any specialist. Indeed, the book touches on so many intriguing questions under the broad theme of emptiness that it suggests myriad avenues for future research. It is definitive yet prospective at the same time.
The book is also important because of the secondary arguments Corrigan makes in support of his main argument that the experience of emptiness underlies all of American Christianity. One of the most compelling is his claim that Christianity in America paradoxically combines a pervasive fear of “empty words” (a notion taken from Ephesians 5:6) with a persistent preoccupation with “right words” (a talismanic orthodoxy, even if poorly understood by most laypeople).Footnote 19 He further argues that American Christian traditions have often defined themselves by what they are not—what he calls “a style of solidarity that relies upon the via negativa.”Footnote 20 This leads him to the imaginative conclusion that American religion is like an M. C. Escher tessellation, defined spatially by the negative spaces as much as by the positive ones.Footnote 21
These are not the only gems of Corrigan's book. I could name others, including his evidence that a self-conscious or even cultivated emptiness was part of the spiritual autobiographies of Christians from across the ideological spectrum—from Billy Graham to Harry Emerson Fosdick; Thomas Merton to Dorothy Day.Footnote 22 Sometimes people conceived of this emptiness in abstract, bloodless terms, but sometimes it was (metaphorically at least) very bloody: evangelical protestants and sacramental Catholics both spoke of blood transfusion in imagining how an emptied convert could be filled with Christ.Footnote 23 Corrigan's book is full of such keen observations because he notices things that other scholars have missed. He pays attention to the empty spaces, as it were, and how people fill them.
What more can I say, then, about emptiness that has not already been said by my distinguished co-panelists? I do think that there is an empty space that deserves more attention, though I hasten to add that this is a friendly critique in the spirit of conversation, not an indictment of the logic or content of Corrigan's remarkable book. (I generally believe that scholars have good reasons for writing the books that they do, and I hate reviews that in effect upbraid the author for not writing the book the reviewer would have written.)
To his credit, Corrigan does notice the empty space I wish to focus on: death. Early in the book, he writes that he is interested in emptiness “first of all as a feeling, and not primarily as a theological construct.”Footnote 24 Then, at various points, he acknowledges that one of the key ways emptiness has been felt is through death—especially the death of a loved one, experienced as a haunting, gnawing absence.Footnote 25 In some cases, Corrigan suggests, this felt emptiness was a symptom of depression—a clinical issue more than a religious one. He cites, among others, the case of Lyman Beecher, who wrote of his “great emptiness” following the death of his first wife, Roxana.Footnote 26 I agree with Corrigan on the clinical reality of depression, but I also wonder if the emptiness of death is a more basic and universal element in Christian experience—one that underlies the whole of lived Christianity. I would like to build, in fact, on Corrigan's own contention that the “relation between the feeling of emptiness and the feeling of fullness for American Christians is . . . decidedly dialectical.”Footnote 27 If this is correct (and Corrigan has convinced me that it is), then does this not mean that at the heart of Christianity is the dialectic between death and life, or, to put it another way, between absence and presence? Thus conceived, the dialectic is all the more primal and poignant because it touches a reality that is inescapable for all humans, including non-Christians.
Among figures in the American literary canon, Mark Twain furnishes one of the most powerfully poignant examples of the inescapable emptiness of death. Corrigan mentions Twain only once, in connection with a point to which I will return, but I wish to recall here Twain's agonizing experience of loss and grief. In the last years his life, he became increasingly despondent following the successive deaths of his 24-year-old daughter Susy from spinal meningitis, his 58-year-old wife Livy from heart failure, and his 29-year-old daughter Jean from drowning after suffering a seizure in the bathtub. In his poem “Broken Idols,” written after Susy's death, Twain compared the parental bereavement over the loss of a child to the emptiness of a pauper: “You cannot know how long that seems to me, / Whose heart was once so filled with wealth / And now so empty stands.”Footnote 28 Later, after Livy and Jean died, and just one year before his own death, Twain published his darkly comic Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, which revealed his profound doubts about Christianity and its promise of an afterlife. In one scene, Twain mocks the seeming absurdity of a heaven that is constantly being further populated by resurrected humans; he also pokes fun at American denominational divisions. The context in the story is that Captain Stormfield has just arrived in heaven and is being instructed by his friend Sandy on the astronomical concept of a light year:
“Shucks, Stormy, one light-year is nothing . . . [I]t's four light-years from our earth to the nearest star—and nothing in between.”
“Nothing between? Nothing but just emptiness?”
“That's it; nothing but emptiness. . . .”
“Why, Sandy, if that's true, the sky is emptier than heaven.”
“Oh, indeed, no! Far from it . . . [T]here ain't any Christian sect in heaven that is nearer than 5,000 light years from the camp of the next sect . . .”
“Why, Sandy, what have they made heaven so large for?”
“So's to have room in the future. The redeemed will still be coming for billions and billions and billions and billions of years, but there'll always be room, you see.”Footnote 29
As we now know from biographical studies of Twain, this excerpt reveals his own haunting suspicion that traditional Christian talk of heaven was, to quote Ephesians 5:6 again, “empty words.” Indeed, Corrigan briefly references Larzer Ziff's identification of Twain as a classic American literary nominalist: one deeply skeptical of empty verbiage, or, as Ziff puts it, one who believes that “no reality exists apart from particulars.” As Ziff points out, in “Eve's Diary,” Twain's parody of the Garden of Eden story, it is the no-nonsense Eve who names God's creatures, commenting, “The minute I set eyes on an animal, I know what it is.” Adam, meanwhile, is launching humankind down a dubious verbal path as he ostentatiously tosses about words such as “superfluous,” “judicious,” and “enigma.”Footnote 30 Twain's fear was that Christian doctrine stemmed from this latter impulse toward empty verbosity. Unfortunately for him, though, this skepticism left him increasingly bereft of religious comfort as he approached his own death.
Corrigan astutely observes that the American fear of “empty words” has been particularly pervasive in conservative protestant culture. Fundamentalist biblical literalism, paradoxically, stems from a distrust of mere words that do not correspond to rock-hard empirical certainties. Even pentecostal glossolalia, which to outsiders is mere empty gibberish, is an attempt to replace the allegedly empty ritual and sermonizing of the mainstream churches with the authentic language of heaven. Corrigan quotes Grant Wacker: “In pentecostals' view, nominalism—Christianity in name only—bedeviled all the mainline churches.”Footnote 31 And though it is not protestant per se, we might also include here Joseph Smith's First Vision (invoked elsewhere by Corrigan), which expresses for Mormons an anti-nominalism similar to that espoused by pentecostals. As the angel famously told Joseph, all the existing churches were wrong, for they “draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me”; they “teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.”Footnote 32
Yet beyond the ever-present danger of empty words, the profounder emptiness that fundamentalists, pentecostals, Mormons, and for that matter, most other Christians yearned to dispel was death, and they sought to vanquish it with, paradoxically, the greatest emptiness not mentioned by Corrigan: the empty tomb of Christ. Though I have not surveyed how often the empty tomb comes up in American apologetic, pastoral, or other literature, anecdotal evidence suggests that there remains today considerable cultural anxiety about the reality of bodily resurrection that the empty tomb purports to prove. Witness the New Testament scholar and bestselling author Bart Ehrman, himself a skeptic somewhat like Twain, who recently raised the ire of evangelicals by suggesting that there may never have been a tomb at all but that the story was concocted by early Christians seeking to prove that Jesus was physically, not merely spiritually, raised from the dead. (His argument, familiar among biblical scholars, is partly based on the fact that the earliest New Testament author, the Apostle Paul, never mentions the empty tomb but instead invokes the apparently more primitive tradition that Jesus miraculously appeared to select followers, including Paul himself, after the resurrection.)Footnote 33
Death, in any case, is the ultimate emptiness, and in Christianity it exists in perpetual counterpoint to the life represented by the empty tomb. Even Twain could not escape this yearning for life beyond the grave. After Susy's death, he and his wife consulted a spirit medium in a vain attempt to communicate with their beloved daughter.Footnote 34 Twain's onetime neighbor in Hartford, Harriet Beecher Stowe, also brooded heavily over death and the afterlife, especially after her son Henry accidentally drowned while swimming in the Connecticut River. But whereas Twain found no solace in the reputedly empty words pronounced by the churches, Stowe, a convert from Calvinism to Anglicanism, ultimately took refuge in churchly liturgies and their frank acknowledgment of the human predicament.Footnote 35 “In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for succor, but of thee, O Lord,” reads the burial liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer. Stowe thus relied on the grandeur of Prayer Book English to consecrate the dialectic between emptiness and fullness that, as Corrigan has so skillfully shown, is woven throughout the fabric of American Christianity.
