Ruin the Sacred Truths by Harold Bloom, a literary review
Harold Bloom’s Ruin the Sacred Truths—an expansion of his 1987-88 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard—stands as a formidable testament to the critic’s lifelong engagement with the Western literary canon and its tangled relationship with religious tradition. Characteristically combative, erudite, and suffused with Bloom’s trademark agonistic spirit, the book is both a celebration of poetic originality and a lament for the waning of deep reading in an age of ideological critique. Bloom’s project here is nothing less than a defense of the autonomy of the literary imagination against what he sees as the reductive forces of historicism, theology, and what he dismissively terms the “School of Resentment.” His method, as always, is that of a “critical pragmatist,” one who privileges the aesthetic experience of reading while remaining acutely aware of the struggles for primacy that define literary history.
Before I begin musing here, I do not find it necessary to point out that this book might be interesting for a very small circle of readers, especially those who have a separate lamp to read literary texts in the long hours of lonely nights. So, getting back to business. At the heart of Ruin the Sacred Truths lies Bloom’s concept of “facticity,” a term he borrows from Heidegger but reinvents to describe the inescapable cultural and imaginative force exerted by certain foundational texts. For Bloom, the J writer of the Hebrew Bible—that shadowy, audacious figure responsible for the earliest strands of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers—inaugurates this tradition with a Yahweh who is “uncanny, dynamic, and motor,” a deity of surprises and unsettling intimacy. Bloom’s reading of J is a tour de force, emphasising how this ancient author’s radical originality has been obscured by centuries of normative redaction and theological domestication. J’s Yahweh, who strolls in the garden at Eden, bargains with Abraham, and wrestles with Jacob, is not the abstract God of later Judaism or Christianity but a literary character of Shakespearean complexity. Bloom’s insistence on J’s primacy over Homer, over the redactors, over even the New Testament—is a provocation, one that challenges the reader to confront the sheer strangeness of these texts before they were smoothed into dogma.
This emphasis on the disruptive power of originality carries through Bloom’s readings of the Hebrew prophets, particularly Jeremiah and the author of Job. Jeremiah, in Bloom’s account, is a figure of unparalleled rhetorical violence, whose accusations of sexual brutality against Yahweh mark a rupture in prophetic tradition. The Book of Job, meanwhile, is read not as a theodicy but as a literary event that pushes against the limits of representation—a text where Yahweh’s speech from the whirlwind is less an answer than a sublime evasion. Bloom’s juxtaposition of these voices—J’s ironic Yahweh, Jeremiah’s furious deity, Job’s incommensurable God—creates a dialectic of divine representation that underscores his larger argument: the Bible’s greatness lies not in its unity but in its contradictions, its capacity to generate endless reinterpretation.
When Bloom turns to Greek literature, the contrast with Hebrew thought becomes stark. Drawing on Nietzsche and Bruno Snell, he posits an irreconcilable divide between the agonistic, competitive spirit of Homer’s heroes and the inwardness, the filial piety, of the Hebrew tradition. Homer’s gods are anthropomorphic, while J’s Yahweh is “theomorphic”—a crucial distinction that shapes Bloom’s view of Western literature’s dual inheritance. His reading of Virgil’s Aeneid as a “self-wounding” text, where Juno’s wrath overshadows Aeneas’s piety, subtly critiques the Augustan project of synthesis, suggesting that the poem’s greatness lies in its unresolved tensions.
The heart of the book, however, is Bloom’s engagement with the giants of post-classical literature: Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Romantics. His Dante is not the theological allegorist of American criticism (Auerbach, Singleton) but a Nietzschean poet of ruthless will, whose Commedia is less a journey toward God than a triumph of personal gnosis. Beatrice, in this reading, is not a figure of divine grace but the center of a private mythology, a muse who enables Dante’s poetic self-aggrandisement. It is a bracing interpretation, one that strips away centuries of devotional commentary to reveal the poem’s sheer audacity.
Shakespeare, as always in Bloom’s work, occupies a privileged position. Here, he is the apex of literary originality, the inventor of modern consciousness itself. Bloom’s Shakespeare does not merely represent human nature; he creates it, forging the very modes of self-reflection and inwardness we now take for granted. The analysis of Hamlet is particularly incisive: Bloom sees the prince of Act V as a figure who has achieved a near-Buddhist disinterest, a knowledge of representation that transcends the play’s bloody plot. Falstaff, meanwhile, emerges as the ultimate “metalepsis,” a comic overreacher whose vitality defies moral or Freudian reduction. Bloom’s claim that Shakespearean representation “originates us” is hyperbolic but compelling—a reminder of how thoroughly the playwright has shaped our ways of seeing.
Milton, for Bloom, is the last great monist, a poet whose sublime ego absorbs and transumes all precursors, including the Bible. Paradise Lost is read not as a Christian epic but as a colossal act of creative misprision, where Milton stations himself as the central figure between antiquity and modernity. The Spirit brooding over the abyss in the invocation becomes, in Bloom’s hands, a metaleptic reversal—Genesis rewritten as a commentary on Milton. Satan, inevitably, is the star: a dualist in a monist poem, whose tragic grandeur overshadows the poem’s official theodicy. Bloom’s Milton is a poet of unapologetic strength, a rebuke to contemporary critics who would reduce literature to ideology.
The final sections on Romanticism and modernity are tinged with elegy. Wordsworth’s “egotistical sublime” is praised for its invention of the “perpetually growing inner self,” but Bloom is ambivalent about its legacy—the godhood of the imagination, he suggests, has become a weary cliché. His readings of Freud and Kafka, meanwhile, frame them as heirs to the J writer’s facticity: Freud the secular rabbi, Kafka the evader of interpretation, both wrestling with a tradition they can neither embrace nor escape. The book’s closing nod to Beckett—another master of negation—hints at Bloom’s melancholy sense that the sublime mode may have exhausted itself.
Ruin the Sacred Truths is not without its flaws. Bloom’s dismissals of historicist and feminist readings can feel like straw-manning, and his insistence on “strength” as the sole criterion of literary value will strike some as reductive. At times, the prose veers into oracular excess, as when he declares that “Shakespearean representation originates us”—a claim that begs for more historical nuance. Yet these are minor quibbles against the book’s monumental achievement. Bloom’s erudition is staggering, his passion for literature contagious, and his central argument—that great writing thrives on misreading, contradiction, and the ruin of sacred truths—remains a vital corrective to the deadening orthodoxies of academic criticism.
In an age where the humanities are increasingly besieged by instrumentalism and identity politics, Bloom’s unapologetic elitism feels both anachronistic and necessary. Ruin the Sacred Truths is a book that demands to be argued with, a provocation that reminds us why literature matters. It may not convince everyone, but it will send readers back to the texts—to J, to Job, to Falstaff, to Milton—with fresh eyes. And that, for Bloom, is the highest praise.
Alok Mishra for The Last Critic
