Literature & Theology, Vol. . No. , June , pp. " doi:10.

1093/litthe/frm052 Advance Access publication 3 December 2007

THEOLOGICAL HUMANISM AS LIVING PRAXIS: READING SURFACES AND DEPTH IN MARGARET EDSONS WIT*
Chad Wriglesworth
Abstract This essay outlines and illustrates ways that theological humanism provides methodological possibilities for scholars working in religion and literary studies. I suggest there is a need to investigate more humanistic methods of interpreting literature by exploring approaches that engage questions of sacred depth. After stressing the necessary paradoxes of theological humanism as an interpretive and lived stance in the world, I offer a reading of Margaret Edsons Wit that is shaped by these principles.

As RELIGIOUS inquiry returns to the intellectual forefront, literary critics need to explore methodologies that are sensitive to questions of sacred depth.1 This will not be easy. As David E. Klemm suggests, the process of renewing theological engagement with culture will be fraught with difculties and pitfalls.2 Religion is a volatile subject. It will be challenging to sustain meaningful conversations without resorting to culturalpolitical cliches, moralistic mandates or exclusionary discourse. However, theological humanists are among those committed to opening space for scholars to investigate religious questions in ways that are non-restrictive and potentially expansive. With this in mind, I am proposing that a subcategory of theology of culture, known as theological humanism, offers interpretive possibilities for those interested in the intersections of religion and literature. After assessing the value of a lived, rather than strictly professionalised approach to theological humanism, this article calls upon key principles of this tradition in order to discuss aspects of sacred depth in Margaret Edsons Pulitzer Prize winning play, Wit.

I. THEOLOGICAL HUMANISM: SOME PARADOXES AND POSSIBILITIES

David E. Klemm denes theological humanism as a normative stance in life committed to the integrity of human life in its moral, ethical, and theological
Literature & Theology # The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press 2007; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

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dimensions. Klemms denition provides a stable point of departure, for he concretises a paradoxical term in a deliberately broad way. Theological humanists urge theologians to consider the ethical responsibilities that all humans have to each other, regardless of creed, race, gender or geographical location, while humanists are simultaneously called to confront the limitations of imagining a strictly material existence. Charles Taylor appeals to the necessary paradoxes of theological humanism when he explains that just because we no longer believe in the doctrines of the Great Chain of Being, we dont need to see ourselves as set in a universe that we can consider simply as a source of raw materials for our projects. We may still need to see ourselves as part of a larger order that can make claims on us.4 Theological humanists appeal to this larger order through a diverse body of traditions, generating a discourse that is broad and inclusive.5 Not all scholars work from confessional perspectives. As Klemm explains, many are wary of the churches with triumphal voices to cultural domination and seek to recover the humanistic tradition in a defence of the integrity and dignity of human life, with or without denominational support.6 Others maintain a critical, but authentic relationship with confessional communities. These individuals seek to reawaken a concern for lived ethics and cultural engagement by pressing confessional partners to engage the world in ways that extend beyond sites of worship. All humanists, whether theologically inclined or not, are devoted to the materiality of life, valuing the autonomy of the self, the importance of other individuals and the universal interdependence of all human beings. As Tzvetan Todorov explains, the interdependence of I, you and they is a phenomenon that paradoxically binds humans into autonomous-mutuality. We live as an individual-corporate people, called to dwell in a state of interdependence that prioritises the dignity of the other while still maintaining autonomous volition and accountability for the self. 7 The humanist vision becomes theological when an individual senses that something outside of materiality participates in culture in tangible or ineffable ways. This awakening may begin with an intuition and feeling, what Friedrich Schleiermacher describes as a response toward something not fully known, but nevertheless, suspected as a manifestation of the sacred.8 Paul Ricoeur describes such responses in terms of a rst and second navete. As Ricoeur observes, ancient cultures illustrate an open posture toward the idea of a sacredly charged universe. In sacred texts it is common to nd an active and engaged presence, a divine energy that participates with humans in a world of constant ux. Ricoeur describes a posture of radical openness to this presence as a rst naivete, a primordial state of acceptance that has been lost to dwellers of modernity. However, even after the violence of critique, secularization leaves behind traces of the sacred, fractures and shards of

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divine presence. According to Ricoeur, postmodern responses to these manifestations contribute to a second navete, a belief founded on the traces of the sacred which continue to surface throughout cultures in meaningful ways.9 From a theological perspective, traces of the sacred emit from Being itself, which dwells outside the boundaries of human niteness, but, nevertheless interpenetrates the limitations of human understanding and experience.10 As Rudolf Otto explains, the sacred is numinous or holy, that which can be thought upon, while simultaneously refusing to be possessed or anatomized by any human construct. The holy cannot be pinned or harnessed, for, as Otto contends, the ground of Being is the hermeneutic center, making it both holy and Wholly Other.11 From an interpretive standpoint, the principles of theological humanism have much to offer critics working in literary studies. As questions of religion and theology reenter intellectual discussions, critics need to imagine methods of interpretation that move beyond ideological disputes and into questions of cultural depth. This will be a challenge for a couple of reasons. Postmodern critics are trained to read with radical suspicion. We go into texts armed, prepared to battle enslaving ideologies and cultural metanarratives. However, criticism of this tenor risks becoming an intellectual transaction, where one ideology is exposed, autonomously deconstructed and exchanged for another. As Mark Ledbetter explains, most critical methodologies privilege the reader, who works hard to seduce narrative into a relationship that serves to support pre-existing master plots which are both convenient and empowering to the reader . . . much of the critical exercise of reading reaches the stage of an assault on the text, particularly if the text resists the imposition of an expected story.12 Postmodern discourse has obvious advantages, but there are also limitations. It is a liberating methodology. However, it is a creative energy which typically side-steps questions of ethics and obligation. Aesthetic playfulness may produce limitless avenues of inquiry and self-marketability, but such luxurious game-playing can also turn interpretation into an exploitive and industrialised form of high art that is nothing short of anti-humanistic. Valentine Cunningham proposes a turn from this pattern, one which starts by seeking a rational, proper, moral even, respect for the primacy of text over all theorizing about text, a sensible recognition that though reading always comes after theory, theory is inevitably the lesser partner in the hermeneutic game. Readerly tact or simply tact should tell us that.13 I tend to agree, but am compelled to make one thing clear. I am not suggesting that literary studies abandon current interpretive practices, or that theory must be abolished both claims smack of absurdity. However, I am convinced that a postmodern spirit of radical individualism contributes to what Charles Taylor calls the malaise of modernity, an intuitive feeling of loss or a decline, even as our profession develops.14

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A more humanistic method of interpretation recognises that although theory shapes critics in necessary and inescapable ways, texts also possess what Paul Ricoeur calls a face, a presence or trace of the other that warrants ethical obligation and sincere conversation.15 If two faces are engaged in mutual, rather than fabricated or coerced dialogue, the end result is a necessary paradox, one that encourages an autonomous interpreter to volitionally release complete control. It is an attempt to hear the other, the physical and textual face that we are ethically obligated to acknowledge. It is a posture I will take in what follows, a reading of Wit that is shaped by key principles of theological humanism.
II. THEOLOGICAL HUMANISM AS INTERPRETIVE PRAXIS: A READING OF MARGARET EDSONS WIT

Margaret Edson has published only one play, but it will not soon be forgotten. When Wit received the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, theatre critics recognised Edson as one of the least likely playwrights of the 20th century. There is something to be said for this. After completing a degree in Renaissance history from Smith College, Edson sampled a variety of jobs, such as selling hot dogs on the street in Iowa City, doing manual labor for a convent in Rome, [and] working as a clerk in an oncology unit. She decided to get serious about her life while working in a bike shop in 1991. At this point, she gathered up the fractures of her alternative careers in order to write Wit, a play shaped by her experiences as an oncology and AIDS clerk in a university research hospital.16 By the time Wit was recognised as a tour de force and HBO lm production, Edson had established herself as an elementary school teacher in Atlanta. After a litany of awards and international recognition, she has no plans of leaving elementary education or writing another play. Everything about her dees the stereotypes attached to modern intellectuals. She is refreshingly human. Wit tells the story of Vivian Bearing, a professor of Renaissance literature and leading authority on the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. The physicality of this production is of extreme importance. Each time Wit is performed, a new audience meets Professor Bearing, a renowned scholar who introduces herself wearing a baseball cap. Vivian has been diagnosed with stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer and performs her life-narrative alone, a face among strangers. As word made esh, Vivian is embodied text, a tangible face that stands before usa battered corpus that hovers somewhere between life and death. As an object of research, Vivian is anatomised, probed and penetrated for the sake of professional advancement and intellectual possibilities. However, below the surface of things, she is mysteriouseven sacreda more complicated character than anyone in the production or audience might begin to imagine. When staged, Wit is like the cancer in Vivians bodynothing short

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of invasive. Vivian speaks and the audience is called to participate. There is an ethical obligation to listen, see and learn. And with less than two hours left to live, there is no intermission, no chance to fetch a drink or break this painful, but necessary fusion of life and text.17 Vivian begins by offering the audience a standard medical greeting: Hi. How are you feeling today? Perhaps there is a chuckle from the crowd, but more than likely there is only the weight of silence. Although Vivian is terribly funny, she is no laughing matter. Clothed with two hospital gowns, one to cover her front and the other to conceal her backside, she hobbles around with an IV pole, lecturing her nave audience on the importance of linguistic precision and the virtues of textual criticism. Then, on the turn of the word curtain, Vivian disrupts linear time. She pulls out her IV and is healthy again. She tells the audience, Ill never forget the time I found out I had cancer.18 With these words of liturgical institution, Vivian takes control of the stage and becomes a narrative guide, bearing a new group of participants into a series of ashbacks which cross metaphysical boundaries of life and death, erasure and regeneration. The majority of critics respond to Wit in one of two ways. Many viewers are so enamored with the plays intertextual charm that it becomes an ironic play of linguistic chemistry, a rapid series of puns and metaphysical conceit that pulls the mind into an intoxicating web of allusions to John Donnes life and work. This is certainly a provocative line of interpretation. It is almost irresistible to read Vivian as a character who ironically self-fashions her own death as the embodied esh-text of Donnes work. Such readings appeal to theological aspects of Wit; however, they are discussions which usually hinge on questions of orthodoxy and Edsons handling of Donnes devotional poetry.19 A second group of critics read Wit as social critique, a stern and sometimes stereotypical assessment of academic-medical research practices. This perspective focuses on ways that institutional and cultural attitudes toward illness lead to the dehumanisation of people.20 I have no intention of dismissing this line of interpretation either. However, by interpreting Wit from a perspective that is both theological and humanistic, a new space opens, one which considers questions of sacred depth. At the start of each production, Vivian Bearing warns the audience that her story is riddled with irony, a weapon-like device that will necessarily be deployed to great effect.21 And it is. The major characters in Wit are doctors of interpretation, professional readers of texts and bodies. However, viewers learn, rather quickly, that few people in this play have any desire or ability to read below the surface of anything. Despite a stockpile of degrees, certicates, and awards of recognition, the expert readers are far from humanistic. Academic-professional practices have made them unable to read texts or bodies as anything but objects for professional advancement.

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Elizabeth Klaver offers an insightful commentary on this situational irony when she observes that Wit demonstrates a contradictory moment in the history of Western culture: two humanist elds dedicated to a tradition of social and individual improvementmedicine and literatureare both guilty of yielding to a perspective that precludes compassionate treatment of human beings.22 Vivian is a renowned textual critic, a scholar of Renaissance literature, who only late in life, learns to read below what Raymond Carver calls the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things.23 After learning she has stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer, Vivian signs a patient informedconsent form that will make her a signicant contribution to specialized knowledge.24 As Klaver states, in this moment Vivian willingly offers up her body as experimental matter for medical science.25 However, armed with linguistic prowessher witVivian informs the audience that there is little to fear, for she knows all about life and death. She is, after all, a scholar of Donnes Holy Sonnets, which explore mortality in greater depth than any other body of work in the English language.26 As narrative guide, Vivian leads the audience forward by offering several ashbacks which access pivotal moments in her personal and professional development. In these scenes, viewers gather clues which help them understand the irony of Vivians present situation. Vivian, like her doctors, prefers research to humanity.27 She keeps relationships and texts at a safe distance, using her wit as a linguistic shield from authentic social and textual engagement. Vivian sees, but does not see. She knows, but does not know. Early in the play, Vivian takes the audience to a time when she is twentytwo, an undergraduate student, studying with the great E.M. Ashford. It is a scene of devastation, laced with possibilities of redemptive hope. Ashford tells Vivian that her recent essay on Donne is a melodrama, with a veneer of scholarship unworthy of youto say nothing of Donne. Ashford attempts to guide Vivian into the depth of Donnes work through an analysis of life, death, and life eternalhighlighting ways that close textual analysis actually illuminates theological depth. At the conclusion of the lecture, Vivian claims that she understands, but she sees only linguistic play, a web of poetic surfaces. She claims, its a metaphysical conceit. Its wit! Ashford reprimands her by stating, It is not wit, Miss Bearing. It is truth.28 The professor attempts to unearth a deeper understanding by advising Vivian to live an embodied life, one which blurs the lines between scholarship and lived experience. It is a concept that Vivian cannot grasp. She ponders the paradoxical nature of Ashfords advice: simple human truth, uncompromising scholarly standards? Theyre connected?29. In an effort to crack the linguistic code, Vivian returns to the library and the labor of poetic scansion, believing the answer to the mystery resides somewhere in Donnes wordplay and wit. As this ashback gives way to Vivians present condition, the audience sees that not much has

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changed, even after two decades. Vivians cancerous body-text is now being read by a scanner. As she passes through the machine, past joins the present and Vivian continues to boast of her ability to explicate the corpus of Donnes poetry, its meter and scansion, in extensive detail.30 Donnes textual body, like her own esh, is merely a source for anatomising arguments that will lead to publication and professional advancement. The strongest moments of situational irony appear through Jason Posner, Vivians resident physician and former student. At their rst meeting, Jason informs Vivian that he took her course in seventeenth-century poetry as an undergraduate.31 It was a transformative moment for Posner. Vivian taught Jason to scan Donnes poetry as a puzzle, something like a cancerous riddle which expands and consumes through linguistic knots and paradoxical allusions. As Jason explains, Donnes poetry was great training for lab research. In contrast, his fellowship, the part with the human beings, is considered to be a colossal waste of time.32 As a professional reader of objectied matter, Jason is unable to read the depth of Vivians situation. Ironically, Vivian, the teacher and interpreter of surfaces, has taught Jason to read human bodies the same way. Vivian Bearing and Jason Posner illustrate ways that interpretive praxis crosses the boundaries of academia and enters into what Paul Ricoeur simply calls the real of the world.33 Vivians ashbacks illuminate a pattern of heartlessness toward students, while her former student, Jason, is now unable to empathise with the complexity of her situation. Early in the play, Jason takes Vivians medical history in a tenor of complete indifference, hearing her condition, but not really hearing her. After documenting Vivians responses, he attempts to read her body through a diagnostic pelvic exam. According to Jacqueline Vanhoutte, the spectacle of a powerful woman humiliated by a previously vulnerable young man has faintly pornographic overtones. Vanhoutte provides a valuable observation, as her comment exposes Vivians loss of dignity in the interpretive process. She is mere matter a body-text that requires no sense of ethical obligation. Although Vanhoutte speculates that Edson probably did not intend to evoke a pornographic scenario, the connection between interpretation and exploitation is vital, as Vivians body-text is an objectied other whose textual face is literally erased from the interpretive process.34 In a study of interpretive violence and victims, Mark Ledbetter comments on ways the relationship between the objectied body and the violated text metaphorically blurs from academic praxis into the real of the world:
I am convinced that texts have traditionally been treated, in terms of gender, as woman. The reader assumes a traditionally aggressive role as male, and the metaphors for gaining access to the text are those of a far too common

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understanding of male sexuality. A text is opened and entered. The narratives story is penetrated, which is the readers goal of getting inside the narrative. The text itself is passive, a receptical waiting to be made complete by the reader. The narrative becomes victim to a traditional sort of gender stereotyping. It is not complete until it couples with the reader and gives birth to the readers meaning of its content. The reader plays the traditional male role of courting, seducing, fondling the text until a preconceived end result is achieved.35

For Jason Posner, Vivian is mattera body-text that will provide new possibilities for interpreting cancerand nothing more. The social implications of this play are relentless. In Wits darkest moments, Vivian exists as something to be used and disposed of, ironically, as she observes, bearing nothing. She is a thing among things, just the specimen jar, just the dust jacket, just the white piece of paper that bears the little black marks.36 By the end of the play, Jason is no longer able to imagine that Vivian even carries a name. He emphatically believes, Shes Research!37 Despite a lack of compassion which dominates this play, there is also a nagging theological depth that will not go away. It surfaces as paradox. For example, as Jason tactlessly examines Vivians pelvic cavity, he simultaneously encounters what he calls immortality in culture, the cancerous and ineffable mass within her body.38 When Jason holds this puzzling and inexplicable matter, Edson offers stage notes which simply indicate that he feels the mass and does a double take. He responds with a single utterance, Jesus! and is moved to tense silence . . . amazed and fascinated.39 Vivian asks for an explanation, but Jason has no audible answer. Cancer dwells outside of his interpretive range. It is something that cannot be harnessed or fully understood by human constructs or modes of discourse. He leaves the roomspeechless. A similar occurrence takes place at the end of the play. While performing his daily rounds, Jason asks Vivian the standard question, Professor Bearing. How are you feeling today? Only this time Vivian is dead. With his research subject lost, Jason can do nothing but repeat two names: Jesus Christ and Oh, God.40 When read in a theological context, Jasons repetition of these sacred names is more than a response of anger and frustrationit is an intuitive response of awe, even terror. It is a tting response, for as the play develops, Vivian transforms from an autonomous and isolated woman into a gure of mysterious, even sacred depth. In many respects, she enacts the role of suffering servant, a quality perhaps loosely tied to the one described by the prophet Isaiah and later fullled in the New Testament through the divinehuman personhood of Jesus, the Word made esh.41 In the Christian tradition, the image of the suffering servant suggests a deliberate and volitional carrying of metaphysical weight. Vivians name actually embodies

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this burden. She is a woman who has not only lost her personal bearing, but she is also Vividly Bearing mortality among usperforming and carrying the burden of the unknown for the sake of others. This is, yet, another irony. When Vivian becomes an object of medical research, she agrees not to teach.42 However, as narrative guide of her own life-text, Vivian teaches her audience how to die. And in doing so, she also teaches us how to live. As a dynamic character, Vivian transforms from a state of radical autonomy into a state of mutuality and interdependence. This transition is felt most profoundly when she opens herself to the kindness of Susie, her nurse. In a moment of crisis, Vivian receives Susies compassion and confesses her professional regrets and fear of death. Together they decide that Vivian will not be resuscitated, but will hold the status of No Code. They tell each other nostalgic stories and share a Popsicle together. When Susie leaves the stage, Vivian shrugs off her embarrassment and confesses:
. . . it cant be helped. I dont see any other way. We are discussing life and death, and not in the abstract, either; we are discussing my life and my death . . . (Quickly) Now is not the time for verbal swordplay, for unlikely ights of imagination and wildly shifting perspectives, for metaphysical conceit, for wit. And nothing would be worse than a detailed scholarly analysis. Erudition. Interpretation. Complication. (Slowly) Now is a time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness.43

By accepting kindness, Vivian awakens to a new possibility of being-in-theworld. Although Wit does not offer a clear or veriable moment of religious conversion, the audience is fully aware that Vivian Bearing is no longer who she once was. Something about her is radically different. In her brokenness, she is stronger. In her emptiness, she is beautiful. Despite Vivians transformation, viewers remain unprepared for her storys most extreme measures, the plays chaotic and redemptive ending.44 In the nal moments of Wit, physicians, nurses, and medical teams argue over the status of Vivians dead body. At this point a secret and spontaneous eruption is released upon the audience through reconciliation, redemption and renewal.45 However, on the surface, there is only chaos. Physicians and nurses argue over the status of Vivians lifeless body. Meanwhile, Vivian follows a narrative of greater depth, a secret seen only by the audience. As Edson explains, she gets up from the bed, disrobes and moves toward a little light. There is no explanation as to why this happens. The deceased Vivian, whose body is being haggled over by researchers and nurses, simply gets up from her bed and walks toward a light emerging from the edge of the stage. Along the way, Vivian drops everything, her hospital bracelet, her cap, and her gowns. In this state of volitional self-emptying, or kenosis, Edson explains

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that she is naked, and beautiful, reaching for the light. She stands before the audience as what Emmanuel Levinas calls the face of the other, a human presence with sacred reverberations. Her nakedness is a stripping away of intellectual posturing and professionalism, what Levinas describes as extreme exposure, defenselessness, vulnerability itself.47 Although Vivian is broken, she is beautiful. This is because at the core of Levinasian ethics resides a mysterious and paradoxical truthan intersection of transcendence and immanence. As Levinas asserts, in the face of the other, there is a real presence of God, not actually God, but a reverberation of the sacred dwelling in the world.48 When we awaken to the sacred dimensions of this face, we are changed, called to a new stance, a revised posture of being-in-the-world. The theological depth of Wits ending leaves many critics bafed. As Martha Greene Eads states, although some critics recognise that the play is about redemption, the nature of that redemption . . . is difcult for many of them to describe.49 It is not surprising that we are unsure how to respond to such questions. We have lost the language to address depth, and Edsons play, like much of art, confronts these issues more profoundly than most directly religious expressions of our time.50 Even Elizabeth Klaver, who offers the most insightful reading of the plays ending, fails to adequately address the redemptive possibilities at work in the nal moments. For Klaver, the ending essentially provides two conclusions, one for the dualist and one for the materialist. The dualist interpretation is saturated with sentimentality, suggesting that Vivian moves toward the light in order to escape the restrictions of her diseased body. According to Klaver, Vivians shedding of clothes is a symbolic act of leaving behind her old reptilian skin in exchange for a purely spiritual essence which glories a separation of body and mind. In contrast, the materialist conclusion offers a blunt commentary on the reality of death, as the light at the end of the play is interpreted as nothing more than the brains hallucination as it is slowly starved of oxygen.51 In short, when the lights go out on the stage, they also go out in Vivians body. Conning Wit to either a dualist or materialist conclusion is problematic. The rst option is indicative of popular forms of escapist theology, while the latter caters to an overzealous commitment to rationalism. At its core, Wit asks questions of far greater metaphysical depth. As Edson herself states, Wit is not about punctuation or the portrayal of research hospitals, the play is about redemption, and Im surprised no one mentions it.52 From a theological perspective, it is possible to encounter Vivian as something more than a ghostly presence, or an extinguished material ame. First, it is essential to acknowledge that the play ends with Vivian getting up as embodied esh. There is no attempt to separate her materiality from a spiritual or mental essence. The union of mind-esh-spirit constitutes her humanity. Edson does not present Vivian as a hologram freed from esh, but something quite

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the opposite. The materialist alternative is even more problematic. As the play ends, Vivian walks across the stage, moving toward a little light. A truly materialist reading of the extinguished body would offer nothing but an imagined, motionless reality of death. In contrast, Vivian is in motionclearly alive and well. Paul Tillichs humanistic theology of the New Being offers an alternative method of interpreting Wits ending. Tillich suggests that a person becomes a New Being through re-conciliation, re-union, [and] re-surrection to the Ground of Being. This New Being is only new in the sense that it is a renewal of the Old [being] which has been corrupted, distorted, split and almost destroyed.53 Vivian is this New Being. By moving toward a little light, she pursues something she does not seek to possess or master in the name of professional advancement. In doing so, she experiences a greater knowledge, the knowledge of being accepted by something larger than a professional academy. She responds with openness and radical vulnerability thus, her nakedness. Like the light that breaks onto the stage as a small navigational guide, Tillich asserts that sometimes, in moments of despair, a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is though a voice were saying: You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know.54 When we become conscious of being reconciled and accepted by the sacred, a new creation is made. It isas Tillich concludesa work of grace. Margaret Edson rarely comments on the theological depth of Wit. However, in an interview with Betty Carter, she offers a series of thoughts which are congruent with the redemptive message of the New Being. When Carter asked Edson about the religious dimension of the play, the playwright responded with a long pause before offering the following comments:
[Wit is] a very religious play, and youre the rst person whos ever said that to me in an interview. People always want to talk about the medicine, want to talk about the punctuation, and so I compliment you and thank you for that. Its not doctrinal, and thats a very important distinction. And its about a point that a lot of people who call themselves religious would not necessarily commend, which is the point where you leave off even religion. Vivian has to let go of knowledge, of scholarship, of expertise, of pride, of everything, including religion. By the end of the playand when its staged, its so unlike the rest of the play that its shockingas Vivian drops her bracelet and drops her cap and drops her gown and crosses the stage, she lets everything fall away from her . . . . If youre completely united with God you dont need religion.55

In the nal moments of the play, Vivian is released from the burden to know all things. Her response is to unhinge the present and walk toward what is unknown. As Tillich suggests, in this moment, no religion mattersonly

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a new state of things. It is a posture which privileges disarmament of hostility toward the sacred over any institution or particularized creed. And as the nal moments of Wit suggest, reconciliation, reunion, and resurrection into the New Being is immediate, not something futuristic, escapist, or ephemeral. As Tillich explains, resurrection happens now, or it does not happen at all.57 Theological humanism and Wit are both invitations to possibility. The role of the theological humanist is not to demand or coerce, but to offer possibilities of reconciliation and mutuality. As Wit and the principles of theological humanism suggest, if we blur the boundaries between categories such as theology and humanism, lived life and professionalism, a deeper and more fullling possibility of being-in-the-world begins to emerge. This is an act of faithnot sentimentality or nostalgiabut faith which unhinges what is accepted as normative truth and practice.58 By unhinging and resisting the cultural-professional idols of the present, theological humanists participate in acts of transformative vigilance. Moving forward, we trust that a new state of being will emerge.

University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1499, USA chad-wriglesworth@uiowa.edu

REFERENCES
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I started this essay during a seminar taught by David E. Klemm at the University of Iowa. I would like to thank him for his encouragement and inspiring teaching. See D. Taylor, The Need for a Religious Literary Criticism, Religion and the Arts 1.1 (Fall 1996) 124150; S. Fish, One University, Under God?, The Chronicle of Higher Education 51 (2005) C1. D.E. Klemm, Introduction: Theology of Culture as Theological Humanism, Literature and Theology (18 2004) 239250, esp. p. 239. Ibid., p. 241. C. Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto, ON: Anansi, 1991), p. 89. The trans-religious nature of theological humanism is indicated in a special issue of Literature and Theology 18. (2004), where scholars engage aspects of Christianity,

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agnosticism and Buddhism from diverse perspectives and methodologies. Klemm, p. 240. T. Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, trans. C. Cosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 30. F. Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. and ed. R. Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 22. M. I. Wallace, Introduction, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1995), pp. 132, p. 2. P. Tillich, The Essential Tillich, ed. F. Forrester Church (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1987), pp. 1921. R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. J.W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1923, 1958), pp. 57.

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M. Ledbetter, Victims and the Postmodern Narrative, or Doing Violence to the Body (New York, NY: St. Martins, 1996), p. 146. V. Cunningham, Reading After Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 169; see also pp. 1337; T. Eagleton, After Theory (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2003), pp. 140. C. Taylor, p. 1. P. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans. D. Pellauer (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1995), p. 46. J. Loohauis, Divining the Wisdom the Lies behind Wit, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ( February 2001). M. Edson, Wit (New York, NY: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 7. Ibid., pp. 67. See M.G. Eads, Unwitting Redemption in Margaret Edsons Wit, Christianity and Literature 51.2 (2002) 24154; R.J. Frontain, Reaching for the Light: Donnean SelfFashoning in Margaret Edsons Wit, Publication of the Missouri Philological Association 25 (2000) 115; J.D. Sykes, Jr. Wit, Pride and the Resurrection: Margaret Edsons Play and John Donnes Poetry, Renascence 55.2 (2003) 16374; R.C. Lamont, Coma versus Comma: John Donnes Holy Sonnets in Edsons Wit, Massachusetts Review: A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts and Public Affairs 40.4 (1999) 56975. See J. Vanhoutte, Cancer and the Common Woman in Margaret Edsons Wit, Comparative Drama 36 (2002) 391410; W. Booth, The Ethics of Medicine, as Revealed in Literature in R. Charon and M. Montello (eds), Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1020. Wit, p. 6, 11. E. Klaver, A Mind-Body-Flesh Problem: The Case of Margaret Edsons Wit, Contemporary Literature 45 (2004), 659 683, p. 660.

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55

56 57 58

R. Carver, Fires (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 26. Wit, p. 11. Klaver, p. 665. Wit, p. 12 (emphasis mine). Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., pp. 1215. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., pp. 189. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., pp. 557. Ricoeur, p. 43. Vanhoutte, p. 401. Ledbetter, pp. 14546. Wit, p. 53. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., pp.815. Isaiah: 52, John 1: 14. Wit, p. 11. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 85. E. Levinas, Entre-Nous: Thinking-of-theOther, trans. M.B. Smith and B. Harshav (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 145. Ibid., p. 110. Eads, p. 241. Tillich, p. 6. Klaver, pp. 6757. A. Martini, The Playwright in Spite of Herself, American Theatre " (1999) 225, esp. p. 22. Tillich, p. 94. Ibid., p. 201. B. Carter, An Interview with Margaret Edson, Books and Culture 5.5 (1999) 256, p. 26. Tillich, p. 91. Ibid., p. 97. J.D. Caputo, On Religion (New York, NY: Routledge, 2001), p. 13.

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