Towards a <scp>Post‐Secular</scp> Theodicy: What We Talk about When We Are Talking about <scp>Leonard Cohen's</scp> ‘Appetite for Something Like Religion’

FROM THIS BROKEN HILL I SING TO YOU: GOD, SEX, AND POLITICS IN THE WORK OF LEONARD COHENBy Marcia Pally London: T&T Clark, 2021 . Pp. 181. Paperback, (£) [$]19.99. THE DEMONS OF LEONARD COHENBy Francis Mus Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2020 . Pp. 247. Paperback, $39.95 CA. “There Ain’t No Cure For Love,” (I’m Your Man, 1988) WHO BY FIRE: WAR, ATONEMENT, AND THE RESURRECTION OF LEONARD COHENBy Matti Friedman Toronto, Ontario: Signal, 2022 . Pp. 226. Hardcover, $32.95. LEONARD COHEN: THE MYSTICAL ROOTS OF GENIUSBy Harry Freedman London; New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2021 . Pp. 274. Hardcover, $28. LEONARD COHEN, UNTOLD STORIES: THE EARLY YEARS, VOLUME 1By Michael Posner Toronto, Ontario: Simon & Schuster, 2020 . Pp. 496. Hardcover, $30. LEONARD COHEN, UNTOLD STORIES: FROM THIS BROKEN HILL, VOLUME 2By Michael Posner Toronto, Ontario: Simon & Schuster, 2021 . Pp. 496. Hardcover, $30. Time has shown the staying power of Leonard Cohen's lyrics. The Montréal bard was on to something, as he prefaced singing “There Ain't No Cure For Love,” (I'm Your Man, 1988) at a Montréal Jazz Festival concert by acknowledging the reality that everyone is yearning for that elusive something through an “appetite for something like religion.” What conventional forms of traditional religion seem to be lacking for contemporary seekers is that opening of any appetite for such meaning-making with, any compelling theodicy, namely, a vindication of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil. Artists, such as Leonard Cohen, offer an unconventional “thick description” of highly poetic spiritual struggles with suffering that point to sophisticated, if not indignant, theodicies drawn from Jewish roots but not limited to them thereby re-infusing universal seekers with meaning along their journeys. In the review essay that follows, I will disentangle and clarify an emerging interpretive literature that often transforms the generic rock n’ roll biography into hagiographic accounts of Cohen, highlighting the evidence of a deeply spiritual quest for an original theodicy throughout his songbook. Interpreters often moisten Cohen's story with spiritual meaning in the wake of the Montréal bard's death. Such a tendency reveals a way of satiating that “appetite for something like religion” characteristic of a post-secular theodicy that wrests meaning from suffering to provide readers and listeners with what Cohen described once a “a manual for living with defeat.” The books under review in this essay conjure their own view on Cohen's spiritual lyricism. So, my intention here is to explore how the authors' interpretive conjurings are, on the one hand, deeply influenced by a post-secular need of some to return to religion, and on the other hand, how the Montréal bard's lyrics and their theological interpretations evoke for readers a kind of balm, a way for some to cope with human suffering (i.e., theodicy). Growing numbers of agnostic, atheist, and heterodox American seekers (especially but not exclusively Jews) are less connected to traditional images of God and prayer forms in their daily lives. Why? There are hosts of reasons, but to truly appreciate the growing disconnection one needs to first have a clearer structural view of the most salient concerns of religion, following anthropologist of religion, Clifford Geertz's claim (1973), that religion is effective when it functions as “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and longstanding moods and motivations in man [sic] by formulating conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” (Geertz 1973, 35–6). I want to explore how and why recent interpretations of Cohen confront the post-secular “system of symbols” including Cohen's righteously indignant way of imagining and communicating with God that are currently those very “acts [uniquely capable] to establish powerful, pervasive and longstanding moods and motivations” amidst the crisis of meaning after Auschwitz that marked the rupture of modernity from God, community, and prayer. It is in these ruptures that Cohen's emerging lyrical theodicy attempts to maintain what sociologist, Peter Berger (1969) called “plausibility structures” in the face of challenges to a give society's nomos or sense of order, meaning, and values of the cosmos we live within. More than mere “plausibility structures” that would function “as-if” what Cohen's ars poetica accomplishes, following Geertz, is a magical “formulation [of] conceptions with a such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (Geertz 1973, 35–6) such that his lyrical theodicy comes to shape our perceptions of reality—whether or not we are conscious of it. By post-secularism, I follow Talal Asad (2018) and Clayton Crockett (2018), who have posited that with the “return of religion” there is a process of “deprivatization” whereby religion lets go of the mask of privacy. Following Jacques Derrida, what emerges, according to Crockett, is that the stark binary between “public” and “private religion” as well as the “religious” and the “secular” is no longer tenable and becomes much more fluid in reality. For Derrida, it actually deconstructs, whereas for singers like Cohen, it melts away, returning to the lost primordiality of the Garden of Eden. By claiming that Cohen's songbook and its interpretations under review here are “post-secular” suggests at once an epistemological distance from secularism without rejecting the secular or even returning to religion beyond the secular. As will become evident throughout the books under review, Cohen's songbook serves as a soundtrack for dancing within this negative dialectical space of thinking. While researching in the Leonard Cohen Archive at the Thomas Fischer Rare Book Room (University of Toronto) for my book on the Montréal Bard, Tangle of Matter and Ghost (Glazer 2017), to my dismay I discovered that certain boxes remained out of reach, specifically box 13 from Manuscript Collection 122, labeled a “closed for 50 years until after the deaths of Leonard Cohen and the authors of the letter.” And when I inquired as to why these boxes were restricted to researchers, I was told it was due to their “sensitive nature.” This led me to speculate that the contents of these correspondences were between Cohen and his lovers (Janis Joplin? Joni Mitchell?) and would make for a fascinating book-length study that I would never live to research or publish! It left me wondering, why hide these secrets? What is it about the post-secular tzaddik (i.e., a righteous and saintly person) that invites such secrecy and demands such generational control of the narrative, if not a carrying forward of the hagiographic impulse to reveal while concealing? Researchers and readers clamor for the next release anticipating more secrets will be revealed. These concealed boxes indicate an interpretive challenge—how does one approach an analysis of Leonard Cohen's songbook, specifically in a post-secular context of revealing concealed secrets as part of this process of deprivatizing the “return of religion”? Namely, to what degree can Cohen's songbook be interpreted fully amidst the secrecy entangling his off-stage with his on-stage persona? Furthermore, how does a critical study of his songs researching the secrets Cohen's own spiritual quest fare when confronting fans' hagiographic impulses, which seal these secret boxes with deeper concealments, obfuscating deeper truths from being revealed in most of his rock n’ roll biographies? The songbook of the Montréal bard is at its strongest when conjuring a post-secular theodicy that converts Cohen's own deprivatized spirituality when the songs subtly express his own personal intuitions about God while he poetically laments the loss of such in traditional religious communities. The books under review, in their respective ways, attempt to study this process of de-institutionalization that is birthing new spiritual forms of religiosity, as evident in Leonard Cohen's songbook. There also remains an abiding critical value in analyzing the eclectic roots of Cohen's unique form of musical mysticism originating from the eclectic echoes of Kabbalah, Hasidism, and Rinzai Zen Buddhism. Those books under review, which go to great lengths to catalog these influences, are less frequently engaged in a critical analysis thereof, as will become evident, for example, in Harry Freedman's work. In the genre of rock n’ roll biography, Posner's recent three-volume work, Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories, serves as a Rashomon-like recounting of an oral history through transcribed interviews. Unlike Sylvie Simmons' more refined biography, I'm Your Man (2012), Posner's volumes leave the reader with the challenge of and accounts of the of Cohen who he was “a or a Posner's of the of a biography, in a Cohen to a the deaths of and the have the of them as make them not The are the who Posner for by this which a of be for his in a living of for readers a more of a and as Cohen after is a there a and that not in these by Posner at the to be as were in the process of their own to control the narrative, or to Cohen in some of their or What in of the volumes is Posner's of from in Cohen's The first The on the years and The of Cohen of of a of an The of the the is in of the There I a of Your The This concerns the from This in the in with me The for and a in the The of The There And the of Cohen's are once in a in the from and There is a to Posner's and of these into of the and that them to in their but one of the of Posner's work, the to the story of the lyrics of which also serves as 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