Faith & Spirit Quote by Marguerite Young

Experimental, for Marguerite Young, is not a laboratory trick but a lineage you either admit or pretend you invented. Her question needles a literary culture that treats innovation like a clean-room product: sealed off from old authority, scrubbed of religious cadence, suspicious of anything that sounds like inheritance. By naming the Bible and Saint Augustine, she chooses two sources that are basically engines of Western interiority: the Bible as a library of voices, genres, and moral drama; Augustine as the architect of confessional self-scrutiny, the mind talking to itself under pressure.

The intent is defensive and accusatory at once. Young is pushing back against the idea that being “experimental” means being ahistorical or anti-tradition. The subtext: if you think formal daring can’t coexist with ancient influence, you’re confusing novelty with depth. She also exposes the quiet snobbery of certain modernisms that want the prestige of rupture without admitting their debts to the oldest, most rhetorically potent texts around.

Context matters because Young’s own work sits at a crossroads: maximalist, obsessive, spiritually charged, and hard to categorize. In midcentury American letters, “experimental” often got coded as secular, cool, and cosmopolitan; Christianity, meanwhile, was treated as provincial or doctrinaire. Young flips the script. Augustine’s restless intellect and the Bible’s polyphonic structure are not constraints; they’re permission slips for audacity. The line is a reminder that the newest forms often come from the oldest sentences, and that influence can be a radical act when the gatekeepers prefer amnesia.