Jeffrey Edward Green. Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2024. 368 pp.
Reviewed by Barry J. Faulk, Florida State University.
Jeffrey Edward Green’s new book, Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God, is a learned, carefully reasoned, and extensively researched study of Dylan’s relationship to the figure of the prophet; it is sure to interest readers who already regard the singer to be something more than an entertainer. However, Green, a political philosopher, also wants to persuade readers (and listeners) unmoved by Dylan’s songs, and skeptical of the claims that enthusiastic fans often make about the singer, that his life and work have had a transformative impact on contemporary thought as well as on contemporary life.
Green points to the “brilliance, poignancy, fecundity, uncanniness, arrestingness, and beauty” of Dylan’s “transmission through words” as perhaps the most compelling reason to bestow the “prophet” label on the singer (3). He takes great care to place the singer’s life and work in the context of earlier prophetic traditions, most notably the Hebrew prophets, who claimed to relay a divine message about redemption and justice to an errant people, and the principled civil disobedience advocated by Mahatmas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. That said, Green’s book is built on the premise that Dylan represents a crucial difference in kind from these earlier prophetic leaders. Green’s Dylan is a prophet of “diremption” and thus metaphorically a “prophet without God,” as the subtitle claims. Unlike earlier prophets who claimed direct access to higher truths and who were identified by the singular message they proclaimed, Bob Dylan is a postmodern prophet who inspires us to reflect on the structures of meaning-making. Dylan’s prophetic power lies in the unique ability of his words to illuminate the gaps between the various ideals–of faith, social justice, personal liberation – that we aspire to actualize. A prophet of diremption may speak on behalf of freedom and justice, but, as Green remarks, will “continually [insist], tragically, on the divergences and conflicts between these ideals”; such a prophet testifies to the absence of any court of appeals that might help us adjudicate the contest between incommensurate values (vii). Prophets of diremption speak for a hidden God, not a revealed one, and testify to God’s absence in the world, even as they urge us to recognize the true and enact the good. As Green puts it, “Dylan makes the very conflicts between the grounds of normative authority ethically meaningful. He discloses the conflicts between incommensurate values of normative authority so that normative authority is no longer a stable unity or a foundation without cracks or fissures” (34). To recall the words of another prophet, Green’s Dylan comes not to bring peace, but a sword. And as Green also reminds us, the singer’s vehement rejection of the prophet’s role at crucial points in his career keeps faith with the venerable precedent set by the Hebrew prophets themselves, such as Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Amos (12-13).
Green approaches the subject of Dylan and prophecy from the perspective of a political philosopher: besides situating the artist’s life and work within the broader history of Western theological and philosophical thought, he wishes to examine what Dylan’s popular audience might reveal to us about the persistence of belief in ideas about the good, the true, and the beautiful in modern secular democracies. Given their divergent starting points, there is an interesting convergence between Green’s thesis and music writer Ian MacDonald’s account of Bob Dylan’s post-Newport transformation into a distinctly modern prophet, committed to “inoculate the world with disillusionment” by means of amplified sound: a role that, as MacDonald notes, Dylan “applied himself to … with perverse relish and, as audience resistance persisted, an increasing militance” (The People’s Music 32). In this view, Dylan remains a man with a mission even as he rejected a leadership role in the folk music revival of the early 1960s. The message may have changed, the volume had gotten louder, but behind it all the prophetic stance and the presumption on the part of both the artist and audience that the singer’s words reflected a higher wisdom and a more penetrating view of the nature of reality persists. That MacDonald builds his observation on a phase by bohemian writer Henry Miller suggests that what Green describes as Dylan’s “prophetic” stance may be grounded in the history of art as much as theology, specifically in the notion of the artist-as-outsider that the singer might have learned from modernist literature.
In three chapters that demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the by-now voluminous scholarly literature analyzing and explicating Bob Dylan’s life and music, and referencing a wide range of political philosophers from Niccolò Machiavelli to Hans Morgenthau – with insightful readings of the key concepts of Max Weber, William James, Charles Taylor, and Jurgen Habermas offered along the way – Green draws our attention to the rich commentary that Dylan has provided on his own ethical struggles at different stages of his career. For Green, the singer’s extensive discourse on these internal conflicts constitutes his prophetic message. In Part I, “A Rebel Rebelling against the Rebellion,” Green traces the history of Dylan’s participation in the 1960s folk music revival and the shock waves created by the artist’s very public disavowal of his popular audience. Dylan’s music as well as his fateful career choices during these years challenged a cherished myth of political democracy, especially prominent in the Cold War era, that the ideals of individual liberty and communal belonging are easily reconciled. Dramatized in songs like “My Back Pages” and enacted on stage during his 1966 concert tours with the Band, Dylan both articulated and embodied the conflict experienced by a generation that sought to simultaneously achieve personal fulfillment and enact revolutionary change. Greil Marcus’s description of Dylan’s Basement Tape recordings as “deserter’s songs” could reasonably be applied to the whole of the singer’s musical output after 1963, until the release of the Christian-inspired Slow Train Coming recording in 1979. Although the music styles may vary, most of the songs Dylan writes during this period locate happiness and self-fulfillment in moments of profound introspection or in personal relationships. As Green eloquently observes, the Prophetic Dylan of the 1960s bears witness “not to the resolution of competing ethical duties in a better-organized future world, but to the permanent moral chaos of the present, in which individuals such as himself will routinely turn their backs on causes they otherwise recognize as just out of a competing commitment to their own freedom” (39).
Dylan’s conversion in the late 1970s initiated another ethical struggle, this time with the “self-reliant individuality” that was previously the hallmark of the singer’s work and career (37). In Part II, “Never Could Learn to Drink that Blood, and Call It Wine,” Green persuasively argues that Dylan’s prophetic status represents a point of continuity amid change, and he challenges us to take a broader view of this dramatic turning point in Dylan’s life and career. Green’s analysis of Dylan’s prophetic stance on religion provocatively includes not only the uncompromising declarations of faith in songs from the Slow Train Coming and Saved recordings, but the more muted, delicate Christian testimony of “Every Grain of Sand” from 1981’s Shot of Love, as well as Infidels (1983) and Empire Burlesque (1985), recordings from the singer’s putative “post-conversion” period, once again writing songs on non-religious topics. For Green, all these recordings represent different steps taken on the same path in a longer, more enduring faith journey.
Viewed as a totality, Green claims that Dylan’s different modalities of faith represent a new manner of being religious in a secular age, more appropriate to a prophet of diremption. Green draws on the theories of postsecular democracy advanced by the social philosophers Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas to interpret the significance of Dylan’s prophetic message on religion. The postsecular theory advanced by Taylor and Habermas asserts that, since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, governance in modern liberal democracies has evolved beyond hostility to religious belief to a more comprehensive view that treats, as Green puts it, “both religion and non-religion as standpoints of equal integrity, which each of us might adopt at any time” (xvi). While Taylor and Habermas advocate the postsecular ideal, Green regards Dylan to be “perhaps the greatest representative of a postsecular mentality”: its prophetic embodiment, in other words. As Green demonstrates in a detailed survey of Dylan’s post-conversion interviews and in thoughtful close readings of song lyrics from the era, the singer clearly aimed his late 70s/early 80s musical ministry at a popular audience that he presumed was non- or anti-religious. Yet at the same time, Dylan’s new gospel songs were rarely explicit declarations of faith. As Green establishes in his readings of “Covenant Woman” and “Precious Angel,” Dylan’s preferred mode of gospel song paid homage to his mentors, to those who inspired him by possessing a faith that he regarded to be far stronger than his own. Other Dylan songs from this period (“Property of Jesus,” “Watered Down Love,” “Slow Train Coming”) are preoccupied with defending believers against the taunts of non-believers rather than with advancing religious doctrine, or indeed any specific claim about religion. Green interprets Dylan’s post-1980s recordings as an effort to build a musical bridge among believers and non-believers, and he makes a bold assertion about the singer’s success in this regard: “Dylan, almost uniquely in popular culture, has demonstrated for non-religious people the integrity, dignity, and plausibility of religiosity” (ix).
In Part III of Prophet Without God, “Strengthen the Things that Remain,” Green analyzes Dylan’s “prophetic pessimism,” his belief that “the political world will never become the site of secular salvation,” which, as Green documents, seems as informed by the singer’s careful reading of Thucydides, Carl von Clausewitz, and various historical accounts of the American Civil War, as by the singer’s religious convictions (253). Here, Green traces a by now familiar pattern, where the artist first inhabits an intellectual tradition and then rubs it against the grain. As Green demonstrates with copious textual examples, modern political realists such as Hobbes, Machiavelli, and more recently Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger often place great faith in a fantasy image of the Strong Leader, unafraid to commit any crime to maintain order and stability, and unconsciously bring to the fore the idealism they sought to eliminate from their positivist political science. Green first situates Dylan within a long-standing tradition of political realists who take it for granted that human institutions are imperfect, since they are built and operated by flawed humans. Then, referencing song lyrics from throughout Dylan’s writing career, as well as an extensive range of contemporary interviews where Dylan has been uncharacteristically effusive about American politics and his reading of classic history texts, Green makes a compelling case that Dylan significantly alters the discourse of political realism by addressing his message not to “the Prince,” or an elite, but “to a real constituency–ordinary, non-specially empowered individuals – [who are] typically overlooked by canonical political realists with their focus on leadership” (254). As Green details in an extended close reading of “Man of Peace,” Dylan’s prophetic stance on politics focuses on practical matters of conduct: on how ordinary people can attain a clear-eyed view of political realities and still work to “strengthen the things that remain” (“When You Going to Wake Up”).
One of Green’s stated aims in writing the book is to illuminate the character of a people who would regard Bob Dylan to be a prophet: yet one can’t help but notice a disconnect between Dylan’s prophetic messaging as described by Green and the lived experience of the singer’s popular audience, and doubtless of Dylan himself. The hope that a mutual respect and tolerance can still bind together those who hold opposing opinions in matters of faith or politics seems a very weak revenant in “Trump 2.0” America. The polarized discourse of social media seems light years away from the ideals of mutual respect between believers and nonbelievers that Green claims are at the heart of Dylan’s prophetic message on religion. Digital algorithms leave little room for the idealized notions of dialogue and mutuality articulated by theorists of the public sphere. Social media is about profits, not prophets; its algorithms are meant to keep us engaged online, regardless of the content of our messaging. Trolling is not a “bug” of online life, it’s a deliberate part of its functionality.
Still, as Green memorably puts it, prophetic testimony always presumes “the permanent moral chaos of the present moment”: it presupposes this chaos (or diremption), even as the prophet exhorts us to act differently, and deliberately. In that sense, Dylan’s exhortation to strengthen the things that remain may prove to be the artist’s timeliest message, and Green has done us a considerable service in elucidating and contextualizing the nature of Dylan’s prophetic communications.
