We Definitely Need A New Religion Of Beauty And Love

In the 20th Chinese literary circles, the life of Shen Congwen is marked by vicissitudes. From the 1930s to 1940s, he was the leader of the North literary circles. In the late 1940s, he was denounced as "pink writer" by Guo Moruo and criticized and liquidated by the Left Literary Front. He Withdrawn from the literary circles and had long been dust-laden. In the 1980s, a study upsurge of Shen Congwen began to emerge in the mainland.Why so many praise or blame words on him? This is mainly due to the independence of his thinking and creation. This essay analyzes the religious orientation of his thinking and creation from the writer's cognition, emotional ways and spiritual orientation. Western human's natural landscapes nurture the religious Sentiments of the writer, making him fall in love with them and crazy for the earthly life. All these formed the basis of his creative write. Then he traveled around Western Hunan, experiencing violent fights between the warlords. Enlightened and inspired by his teachers and friends, influenced by national culture and Buddhist culture, he realized the history and reality and germinated his life consciousness, then began to gaze at the prospects of human life. Shen Congwen came to realize beauty from natural landscapes, whereas he read Buddhist books and Christian classic the Bible, mixing them with religious sentiments of Western humans idols worship .He found love and god from living. He established a new religion of beauty and love by trying to recreate the literary classics to achieve national and life reestablishment. Guiding by the new religious view, he wrote two contradictory literary world, "sacred" and "secular" worlds, also called western world and urban world. Intoxicated with beauty, love and divinity of life, he went far away, almost to a crazy world for the abstract. At last, he became a martyr to literature and religion.