




































[Expositions 6.1 (2012) 43–51]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

 

Bellow’s Spiritual Quest 

GLORIA L. CRONIN 

Brigham Young University 

 

 

   “The Truth, whatever it is, is strange” 

       –Saul Bellow 

 

All of his life Bellow sought the “strange truth” of what might lie behind the appearances of life. 

His immersions in such thinking began with his mother, Lescha Bellow, who carefully chose 

Hebrew teachers and charged him with memorizing the Torah in the original language. By age of 

four he had already committed large portions of it to memory. However, the New Testament was 

originally given to him by a missionary who visited him during a long lonely childhood stay in a 

Montreal hospital. He was instantly enchanted by it and described himself as having fallen in 

love with the figure of Jesus. Feeling guilty about this he studied it secretly, fearing discovery by 

the family. This began Bellow’s lifelong study of the Bible. James Wood, Bellow’s teaching 

companion at Boston University, reported that shortly before Bellow died in April 2005, there 

was a very worn-out copy of the New Testament on his bedside table.
1
  

However, the full depth of Saul Bellow’s lifelong immersion in Hebrew and Judeo-Christian 

sacred texts has come to light with Ruth Wisse’s and James Wood’s accounting of biblical, 

Yiddish, Jewish, and other religious references throughout his works. Both have provided a 

careful critical testimony of Bellow’s singular contribution of religion to the language of the late 

twentieth-century novel. Wood describes Bellow’s his prose as “Dickensian, Tolstoyan, 

Lawrentian, Conradian,” but ultimately “biblically English.”
2 

He points out Bellow’s run-on 

sentences, loose melodic compounds, repetitions, semantic parallelisms, obtrusive overflowing 

lyricism, vaguely antique ring, and amassing of adjectives, all of which he calls “a perfumed 

overflowing antique prose, all faithfully carried over from Hebrew into the King James version, 

and down into Bellow’s Yiddishly inflected American works.”
3
 

Bellow therefore wrote his works literally out of the roots of this Judeo-Christian tradition and 

brought it into deliberate comic collision with the secular world of late twentieth-century 

America. The zany American street language that has become his literary hallmark is not only 

compounded of Yiddishisms, polyglot immigrant languages, and WASP speech, but also with 

the deliberately nuanced voice of the Bible. Hence Bellow’s masterwork spiritual comedies read 

more like spiritual autobiographies in the tradition of Job, St. Augustine, and Cervantes. Out of 

this mix Jewish scripture, Yiddish culture, and the twentieth-century crisis of faith, we find 

threaded throughout Bellow’s works his seemingly quixotic spiritual quest. 

This quest was motivated in part from the historical events of his time. For Bellow, the human 

soul was trapped in a condition of nihilism and lived in an age of ideology which made events 

such as the Holocaust possible. The projects of the Enlightenment, liberalism, and humanism had 



Bellow’s Spiritual Quest  44 
 

failed to stop the mass slaughter of wars and exterminations.
4
 Understanding the meaning of 

death therefore became the key to all the puzzles posed by the various religious and 

philosophical systems for Bellow. He lamented to Ignatieff in an interview that “ignorance of 

death is destroying us.”
5 

Modernism had left metaphysics and religion, not to mention secular 

society, without a viable understanding of death. 

This attempt to understand death was also personal for Bellow, as he was traumatized by the 

dying children he had befriended during his childhood hospitalizations. These experienced were 

compounded by watching, as a four-year-old, the endless black-clad funeral processions of 

victims of the 1919 influenza epidemic that moved beneath the Bellow family’s upstairs window. 

Finally, the death of his mother left seventeen-year-old Saul to the mercy of his verbally-abusive 

father and unsympathetic brothers. The emotional consequences of the break-up of his family 

during his childhood echoes throughout his novels as his protagonists desire to recover their 

families and fail to do so. Describing this period in “The Old System” found in Mosby’s 

Memoirs, Bellow writes:  

 

One after another you gave over your dying. One by one they went. You went. 

Childhood, family, friendship, love were stifled in the grave. And these tears! When 

you wept them from the heart, you felt you justified something, understood something. 

But what did you understand? Again, nothing. It was only an imitation of 

understanding. A promise that mankind might – might mind you – be a divine gift, 

comprehend why it lived. Why life, why death.
6
 

 

How to understand death was the question for Bellow and sparked his spiritual and imaginative 

convictions. As his son, Adam, recalls:  

 

My father believed strongly in the soul – in its powers, its eternity, and above all its 

connection with loved ones. He believed that parents and children were parts of the 

same soul, and that we are reunited with our family after death. When he talked about 

this I used to listen respectfully and inwardly roll my eyes. Now that he is gone, 

however, I finally begin to understand what he was talking about.
7
 

 

Bellow’s surrogate son, the British writer Martin Amis, reported similar conversations to a 

Sunday Telegraph interviewer. On the subject of the afterlife he reports Bellow saying:  

 

[I]t’s impossible to believe in it because there is no rational ground. But I have a 

persistent intuition […] call it love impulses. What I think is how agreeable it would be 

to see my mother and my father and my brothers again, to see my dead. […] In death 

we might become God’s apprentices and have the real secrets of the universe revealed 

to us.
8
 

 



45  Cronin 
 

 

 

 

This habit of personal and philosophical speculation about the afterlife was a constant with 

Bellow, who had no qualms about initiating metaphysical conversations with strangers. Leon 

Wieseltier encountered Bellow at the height of his theosophical period and recalls his initial 

amazement that he had finally encountered a “Lawrentian Jew”: 

 

“The truth, whatever it is, is strange.” I can still hear Saul’s voice, for a few moments 

absent its gaiety and wickedness, gently pronouncing those emancipating words. It was 

a summer afternoon in 1977. We were sunk in Adirondack chairs on the grass behind 

the shed of a house that he was renting in Vermont, and sunk also in a sympathetic 

discussion of Owen Barfield’s theories of consciousness. Chopped wood was piled 

nearby like old folios, dry and combustible. When I met Bellow he was in his 

theosophical enthusiasm. The legend of his worldliness went before him, obviously, not 

least in his all-observing, wised-up books, which proclaimed the profane charisma of 

common experience. Since I have a happy weakness of metaphysical speculation, a 

cellular certainty that what we see is not all there is, I thought I detected in some of his 

writings signs of the old hunt for a knowledge beyond knowingness, for an 

understanding that is more than merely brilliant. I was not altogether surprised when our 

first meeting moved swiftly toward an unembarrassed conversation about spirituality. 

[…] I had never before encountered a Jewish intellectual of his generation who could 

say “spirituality” without choking. And as Saul discoursed on the lawn, in an engineer’s 

cap, about “living significantly,” I celebrated my friend’s unlikely interest with 

incredulity. Saul’s particular combination of intellectuality and vitality was not 

paradoxical, it was category-shattering. 

 

He was a Lawrentian Jew, an impossible creature. Energy was, in a way, his very 

theme.
9
 

 

Part of Saul’s “cellular certainty” was that he was “God’s apprentice,” appointed to write and 

perform appointed spiritual tasks. To Gray, White, and Nemanic, Bellow openly revealed his 

sense of Karmic fate: 

  

I was brought here by my parents at the age of nine. Accident? I am reluctant to speak 

of “my karma.” Yet I do sometimes feel that I was stuck here, assigned to the place, 

shackled to it by one of those phantom intelligences that Thomas Hardy invokes his 

“Spirits Sinister and Ironic.” Mine would be a Spirit Comedic. In my late sixties I am 

able to share the joke with my tutelary spirit.
10

 

 

Clearly at this point he had begun to better manage the problem of death and its larger 

metaphysical ramifications. But how did he get there? 

 



Bellow’s Spiritual Quest  46 
 

*** 

 

Bellow’s career as a writer existed during a period which historians of philosophy refer to as the 

“post-positivist era” where radical skepticism was the dominant school of thought. Richard Rorty 

explains that the 1950s were marked by philosophical skepticism and a distrust of language.
11

 

According to these philosophers, language was socially contingent and therefore incapable of 

transmitting anything transcendent or universal. Writers consequently would have to forgo 

looking for a morally responsible self or authority from the beyond.
12

 

To Bellow’s mind, this philosophical climate undermined epistemological, linguistic, 

religious, and metaphysical certainty, as illustrated in his novels, Dangling Man (1947), The 

Victim (1947), and Seize the Day (1956). However, Bellow found such skepticism intolerable. 

Rejecting these philosopher’s claims, Bellow argued that literature can provide the “true 

impressions” of reality. As he puts it:  

 

This is the best we can do just now. It is a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which the 

spirit takes shelter. A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the 

multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every 

human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an 

illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill 

something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice. What Conrad said was 

true: Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is 

fundamental, enduring, essential.
13

 

 

Ultimately, these post-positivist skeptics impelled Bellow to seek other thinkers who would 

admit the spiritual viability of language, the existence of the human soul, and worlds beyond 

mere appearances. Inevitably they would not be mainstream philosophical thinkers: Wilhelm 

Reich, Rudolph Steiner, and Owen Barfield. Bellow deeply invested himself in the systems 

developed by these thinkers and their spiritual exercises, only to emerge after each phase passed 

as chastened, but a free agent beholden once more to no-one’s system, and eager to try other 

avenues.  

In the 1940s Bellow read Reich’s book, The Function of Orgasm, which argued that bourgeois 

society was so repressed that it needed to be liberated by embracing our erotic and orgiastic 

nature. Sexual intercourse was the mystical portal towards transcendence. But after Reich was 

arrested for fraud by the US government in 1954 and found guilty in a highly-publicized trial, 

Bellow and others quickly distanced themselves from Reich’s ideas. However, Bellow was able 

to convert these experiences into comic material for the cynical Dr. Tamkin and the romantic 

Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day, and King Dahfu and Eugene Henderson in Henderson the 

Rain King (1956). 

Bellow’s next transcendental guru was Rudolf Steiner, a philosopher and head of the German 

Theosophical Society.
14

 Seeing Steiner as a true polymath and fascinated by the fact that Steiner 



47  Cronin 
 

 

 

 

had become deeply interested in the occult, Bellow was influenced by Steiner’s ideas as revealed 

in Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and The Dean’s December (1981) where the protagonists pursue 

Steinerian ideas until they reach an impasse. At the end of Bellow’s Steinerian period, his 

acquaintances and family all marveled how he could have tolerated for so long such odd ritual 

proceedings and formal liturgy, e.g., the Socratic sessions, séances, and Ouija boards. Bellow 

seemed far too Yiddishly pragmatic for such esoterica, and yet family members report that 

during this period there were Steiner reading materials left open all over Saul’s apartment, as if 

he has just gotten up from reading one of them. He also kept a portrait of Steiner on his campus 

desk for many years. 

Once the lengthy Steinerian phase was over, Bellow was still on the old hunt and this time he 

found Owen Barfield, another anthroposophist. In interviews with Clemons and Kroll in 1975, 

Bellow confessed that he had spent the previous winter reading Barfield’s Saving Appearances 

(1965), and that he had even taken a special trip to England to meet Barfield himself.
15

 For 

Barfield, humanity had lost its connection with its inner nature, devalued romantic poetry, and no 

longer could understand the meaning of words: “the full meanings of words are flashing, 

iridescent shapes like flames – ever flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness 

beneath them.”
16

 For Bellow, he “was impressed by the idea that there were forms of 

understanding, discredited now, which had long been the agreed-upon basis of human 

knowledge.”
17

 He had another intellectual’s confirmation about the spiritual capabilities of 

language.  

Bellow’s belief in the spiritual and imaginative capability of language can be placed in 

opposition to the modernist tradition of Eliot, Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, and Hemingway, as well 

as modern philosophical rationalism. This opposition came from his continual love of British 

Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, Biblical Judaism, Eastern philosophy, and 

nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthroposophy. Nor does he reject his Jewish roots. Few have 

credited him with a historically and personally rooted telos in his anti-modernist intellectual 

methodology in transcending his terror of death. He engaged Jewish covenantal issues, such as 

being our brother’s keepers, and clung to the tarnished traditions of Judeo-Christian liberal 

humanism, wrestled in theodical thinking, and employed philosophical tools to engage the 

philosophical and religious challenge of modernity. 

Perhaps his entrance into wisdom and the seriousness of what would be his last phase of 

spiritual pursuit is best accounted in 1994 in Sanford Pinsker’s classroom when Bellow spoke 

openly of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual tradition of metaphysical skepticism: 

 

I think a person finally emerges from all this nonsense when he becomes aware that his 

life has a much larger meaning he has been ignoring – a transcendent meaning. And that 

his life is, at its most serious, some kind of religious enterprise, not one to do with the 

hurly-burly of existence.
18

 

 



Bellow’s Spiritual Quest  48 
 

It is in this last phase of his life that Bellow the mandarin writer and intellectual’s intellectual 

provides a very surprising revelation as a new self-identification as a religious thinker. By now 

he has long since reclaimed some of the customary and moral world view of the traditional 

Orthodox Judaism of his childhood, if not its belief system and ritual practices. But having 

finally come to terms with the Holocaust as well he finds his passage out of the tyranny of 

modern history:  

 

My Jewish history gives me an entirely different orientation. The heavens in all their 

glory can open up above a ghetto sidewalk, and one doesn’t need Gothic or Renaissance 

churches, Harvard University, or any of these places, in order to condemn the nihilism 

of the modern age from a viewpoint sufficiently elevated.
19

 

 

This is no longer the speaking position of a cultural historian, Nobel Laureate, and student of 

metaphysics, but the speaking position of a ghetto Jew, perhaps even a pre-Holocaust figure. In 

this lies his final spiritual statement of triumph over the skeptical twentieth century, as a man 

with a lineage of two thousand years of Jewish persecution who nevertheless manages to 

maintain the spiritual power of the imagination over the exigencies of a life. Now he is dreamer 

and ghetto dweller. 

Skeptical of the seriousness of any of these commitments, Roger Shattuck labeled these bouts 

of spiritual inquiry as intermittent “fits of noticing […] just that – fits.”
20

 But he sells Bellow 

short. They were not “fits” but lifelong endeavors pursued with great hope. Similarly, biographer 

James Atlas suggests that by this time in life Bellow’s skepticism was overshadowed by his 

yearning to believe and that it was really the Emersonian soul residing within of which Bellow 

he was speaking.
21

 But in Bellow’s own words, and those of his family members and friends, do 

not bear this out. When Melvin Bragg asked him if he believed in God he got a prompt and firm 

“Yes.”
22

 As for his prayer habits, Bellow told interviewer Jack Miles that his was a “casual 

checking in at universe headquarters, at night, as I pull up the covers.”
23

 Bellow remained a 

biblical theist for whom his dead were not truly dead, and positioned himself finally as a ghetto 

Jew whose imagination could triumph in any ghetto. 

The net result of Bellow’s lifelong quest through Western philosophy, literary romanticism, 

and the American carnivalesque was his remarkable body of fiction, essays, and numerous 

awards culminating with the Nobel Prize. Capturing the essence of Bellow’s Yiddish and 

romantic inclinations toward the transcendent, Leon Wieseltier wrote: 

 

Saul liked his profundities vernacular. […] He never lost the freethinker’s delight in a 

good blasphemy. But Saul blasphemes equitably, and all around: he was a recreational 

savager of pieties. There is the view that finally he was a comic writer, the quarrelsome 

master only of the American urban carnivalesque […] [capable always of] an operatic 

Bellovian laugh. […] His laughter was the sound of a snatched victory.
24

 

 



49  Cronin 
 

 

 

 

This “snatched victory” literally re-inscribed the transcendental quest in contemporary fiction. 

Upon the occasion of Bellow’s death in 2005, the writer of the Australian obituary reminds us 

that Bellow, who was not a conventionally religious individual, had once described himself as “a 

religious man in a retarded condition.” Retarded condition or not, perhaps only fellow writer 

Marilynne Robinson truly recognized just what Bellow’s spiritual contribution was: “He was a 

writer of the highest seriousness. […] The scale of his interests, of his meditations, were in the 

highest traditions.”
25

 But it was high seriousness easily missed. At the end we have neither a 

biblical Job nor T.S. Eliot’s Fisher King: just the tearful metaphysical lamentations of his classic 

Jewish eine kliene mensches or Jewish little persons. It was a profane metaphysical comedy that 

was literally seized from the twentieth-century intellectual wilderness, and, in the end, Bellow 

placed himself with his European ghetto ancestors who could literally dream and imagine 

themselves out of degradation. 

 

 

Notes 

 

1. Wisse 1996, 129–30; Wood 2005, 12–13. 

2. Wood 2005, 32. 

3. Ibid. 

4. For more about the historical, philosophical, and literary influences on Bellow, please 

refer to Chavkin 1984; Cronin 1989 and 2007. 

5. Ignatieff 1994, 228. 

6. Bellow 1968, 82–83. 

7. Bellow 2005, 21. 

8. Qtd. in Sanderson 2005, 12. 

9. Wieseltier 2005, 38. 

10. Gray, White, and Nemanic 1994, 205. 

11. Rorty 1997, 1–3. Representative works of the post-positivist period are Wittgenstein 

1953 and Quine 1953. 

12. Bellow encountered some of these philosophers, like Van Orman Quine, who argued 

about the indeterminacy of translation because language is so contingent on social 

context and social contract (Quine 1953, 97). Wittgenstein asserted that human 

linguistic agreements derive principally from what human beings say in socially 

contingent and agreed-upon social practices, therefore there is no certain system of 

transcendent referentiality behind language itself (1953, 96–7). 

13. Bellow 1994, 97. 

14. See Steiner 1972. Bellow also knew Steiner’s The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity 

(1894), Occult Science: An Outline (1913), Investigations in Occultism (1920), How 

to Know Higher Worlds (1904), and The Ahrimanic Deception (1919). 



Bellow’s Spiritual Quest  50 
 

15. Barfield’s Poetic Diction was especially influential to Bellow’s thought (Barfield 

1928). 

16. Barfield 1928, 43. 

17. Clemons and Kroll 1994, 130. 

18. Pinsker 1994, 96. 

19. Gray, White, and Nemanic 1994, 220–21. 

20. Shattuck 1975, 21–25. 

21. Atlas 2000. 

22. Bragg 1975, 675–76. 

23. Miles 1989, 8–9. 

24. Wieseltier 2005, 38. 

25. Qtd. in Sanderson 2005, 12. 

  

 

Works Cited 

 

Atlas, James. 2000. Saul Bellow: a Biography. New York: Random House. 

Barfield, Owen. 1928. Poetic Diction: a Study in Meaning. Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan 

University Press. 

Bellow, Adam. 2005. “Missing: My Father.” New York Times June 10, Late Edition, A21. 

Bellow, Saul. 1968. Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories. New York: Viking. 

---. 1975. Humboldt’s Gift. New York: Viking. 

---. 1994. It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction 

Collection. New York: Viking.  

Bragg, Melvin. 1975. “Off the Couch by Christmas: Saul Bellow on His New Novel.” The 

Listener November 20, 675–6. 

Chavkin, Allan. 1984. “Bellow and English Romanticism.” Studies in the Literary 

Imagination 17:2, 7–18.  

Clemons, Walter, and Jack Kroll. 1994. “America’s Master Novelist: An Interview with Saul 

Bellow.” In Conversations with Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria Cronin and Ben Siegel. Jackson: 

University Press of Mississippi, 122–131. 

Cronin, Gloria L. 1989. “Holy War against the Moderns: Saul Bellow’s Antimodernist 

Critique of Contemporary American Society.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 8:1, 

77–94. 



51  Cronin 
 

 

 

 

---. 2007. “Saul Bellow and the Holocaust Moment.” Saul Bellow Journal 23:1–2 (Winter), 

95–116. 

Gray, Rockwell, Harry White, and Gerald Nemanic. 1994. “Interview with Saul Bellow.” In 

Conversations with Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel Jackson: University 

Press of Mississippi, 199–222. 

Ignatieff, Michael. 1994. “Our Valuation of Human Life Has Become Thinner.” In 

Conversations with Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel. Jackson: 

University Press of Mississippi, 223–29. 

Miles, Jack. 1989. “Saul Bellow’s Life is an Open Book.” Los Angeles Times March 30, sec. 

V, 1, 8–9. 

Pinsker, Sanford. 1994. “Saul Bellow in the Classroom.” In Conversations with Saul Bellow, 

ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 93–103. 

Quine, Willard Van Orman. 1953. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In From a Logical Point 

of View: 9 Logico-Philosophical Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  

Reich, Wilhelm. 1972. The Function of Orgasm. London: Panther Books. 

Rorty, Richard. 1997. “Introduction.” In Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of 

Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1–3. 

Sanderson, Mark. 2005. “The Literary Life Bestsellers of the Week.” Sunday Telegraph 

April 10, 12. 

Shattuck, Roger. 1975. Review of Humboldt’s Gift, by Saul Bellow. New York Review of 

Books September 18, 21–25. 

Wieseltier, Leon. 2005. “Saul.” New Republic April 25, 38. 

Wisse, Ruth. 1996. “Language as Fate: Reflections on Jewish Literature in America.” 

Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn. Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 129–147.  

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. 

Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. 

Wood, James. 2005. “The Jewish King James Version: Saul Bellow: Not Exactly English But 

Biblically English Commentary.” Times Literary Supplement August 5, 12–32. 


