The Sacred and the Dialectic of Religious and Literary

Abstract

The nature of the relationship between sacred text and literary text is here examined through a reflection on the extent to which each benefits from the achievement of the other. Comparisons are thus made to reveal the religious within the literary text and the literary within the sacred text. Old and modern European poetry were chosen as the first object of study, and the Holy Qur'an and the corpus of the Hadith as the second. The paper concludes that the link between the sacred text and the religious text helped enrich both of them, be it on the level of signification or of artistic structure. The literary is present in the religious in the form of myth to use Northrop Frye's term, and expands the imagination in it, intensifies its symbols, makes present the pure experience of the ancients, and infuses rhetoric into its linguistic texture, making it transcend the level of explanation and magic. The (Islamic) religious is present in the literary as a means to spread Mohammed's call and is its means to implant it in the hearts of the believers; it advocates morality as well as it being a flexible means to formulate wisdom and to facilitate its expression by means of systems of comparing present circumstances with those of the past through different arguments and proofs – all of which are suited to the nature of human needs.