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Introduction to the Symposium: The Search for the Spiritual in Saul Bellow 

LEE TREPANIER 

Saginaw Valley State University 

 

 

One of the great American writers of the latter-half of the twentieth century, if not the greatest 

American writer of that era, is Saul Bellow. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976 and 

other numerous awards, Bellow’s place in both popular and academic cultures is secured, with 

nearly over thirty volumes and fifteen hundred essays written about his work. His appeal resides 

in his precise diagnosis of the malaise that afflicts modernity – rationalism, existentialism, 

modernism – and his affirmation of religious and social values in a secular world. Rather than 

deriding the modern world or celebrating its fragmentation and disorder, Bellow writes about the 

comedy inherent in life and the possible paths of spiritual fulfillment. For Bellow, life is not a 

wasteland or a trial to be endured but a journey to be enjoyed with the hope of being able to 

make sense of it.  

This roundtable explores this theme of faith and spiritual fulfillment in Bellow’s own life and 

works. The first essay, Gloria L. Cronin’s “Bellow’s Spiritual Quest,” is a review of Bellow’s 

own attempts to find spiritual enlightenment. At various points in his life, Bellow became a 

disciple of the works of Wilhelm Reich, Rudolph Steiner, and Owen Barfield in his search to 

find meaning in the world. What is confirmed to him intellectually by these thinkers is his own 

belief in the spiritual capacity of language that places him in opposition to the modernist 

tradition of Joyce, Eliot, and Hemingway. This opposition stems from a continual love of British 

Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, Eastern philosophy, and, most importantly, his 

Biblical Judaism. It is from this source, as a Jew, where he could literally dream and imagine 

himself out of his European ghetto ancestors to find dignity and meaning in a hostile world. 

The second essay, “The Search to be Human in Dangling Man,” is my continuation of a 

theme raised by Joseph Baim that the protagonist, Joseph, is seeking spiritual fulfillment – to 

find what it means to be “human” in the present age. However, unlike Baim, I argue that Joseph 

remains trapped in his “ideal construction” of reason and therefore is not able to accept reality’s 

life-affirming nature even when he experientially encounters it at the end of the novel. In fact, 

the various archetypes offered to Joseph – reason, romanticism, stoicism – all fail to provide a 

path towards spiritual fulfillment. But it is the very failure of his reason that preserves Joseph, for 

reality is too diffuse and complicated to be conceptualized entirely. Bellow therefore suggests to 

us that the meaning of life is to be experienced and not conceptualized whatever form it may 

take. 

In the third essay, “Society, Self, and Spirituality in Herzog,” Elyse Zucker explores how 

Herzog overcome a reductive and utilitarian culture to find spiritual meaning. What Bellow 

concludes is that human nature is too mysterious and complex to become exhausted by empirical 

methods to find existential meaning. Instead of finding refuge in the works of Heidegger or 



Symposium: Introduction  42 

 

 

 

Kierkegaard, one should find meaning within one’s own soul and its encounter with God. The 

paradox is that such meaning cannot be conveyed in language: it cannot be directly spoken on 

but only spoken about. Once Herzog recognizes this, he becomes liberated from the constraints 

of language and begins his search for spiritual enlightenment. 

The fourth essay, “Bellow, Kierkegaard, and American Estheticism,” is Julianne Romanello’s 

adoption of Kierkegaard’s philosophy of the esthetic, ethical, and religious life to interpret Mr. 

Sammler’s Planet. According to Romanello, Bellow, like Kierkegaard, did not think the task of 

discovering an authentic self was neither inevitable nor impossible in modernity, and that such a 

self is to care for others which require knowledge of the divine and one’s relations to it. We see 

the characters Margotte, Shula, and Elya show Sammler to recognize that knowledge is not the 

end of life itself; rather, it is to act with compassion and love in order to find one’s true meaning. 

The final essay, “Immortality in Ravelstein,” is Stephen Block’s Straussian exploration about 

the theme of immortality in the novel and how this theme is drawn from the Platonic dialogue, 

The Symposium. Interestingly, the question of immortality for Ravelstein is not a serious one as a 

philosopher. But for Chick it is a continual and viable one, forcing us to choose between faith 

and philosophy. The question of the “return” that is raised at the beginning of the essay is 

therefore a return to immortality whether in the form of philosophy and its study of great texts or 

faith with its rituals and mysticism. 

Of course, this roundtable is not comprehensive in its treatment of the theme of religion and 

faith in Bellow’s works. Certain non-fictional works, like To Jerusalem and Back, as well as 

seminal novels like The Adventures of Augie March and Humboldt’s Gift, are absent from this 

roundtable and could have further contributed to our understanding of religion and faith in 

Bellow’s thought. Perhaps this could be a project for the future. In the meantime, we invite the 

readers to reflect what we hope to be a starting point in a conversation about religion and faith in 

Bellow’s own works.  


