The Crisis of Faith in Victorian England
The Crisis of Faith in Victorian England
In his important book God’s Funeral (2000), the British writer A. N. Wilson documents and analyzes the rise of atheism in Victorian Britain. One of the most interesting things about the book is his careful documentation of the ambivalence felt within late nineteenth-century England over its loss of faith. Politically and socially, Christianity remained highly significant in national life and would remain so until after the First World War. Yet its ideas were increasingly seen as discredited, unattractive, and outdated by novelists, poets, and artists. Wilson brings out clearly the deep sense of emotional loss and confusion that the apparently inexorable elimination of God brought in its wake.
It is difficult to seize on a single figure as illustrating or causing this crisis of faith. However, the novelist George Eliot (the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans, 1819–1890) is regularly identified as a major figure in this emerging climate of suspicion and hostility toward religious faith. Many of Eliot’s misgivings about Christianity concerned its apparent lack of concern for issues of morality in its own doctrine. Why, Eliot asked, did Christianity so devalue human love, except when directed toward the praise of God? We can see here a leading theme of the Victorian crisis of faith – a growing moral revolt against Christianity on account of its leading ideas. Writers such as J. A. Froude, Matthew Arnold, and F. W. Newman abandoned their Christian faith on account of a growing sense of the immorality of such doctrines as original sin, predestination, and substitutionary atonement.
Eliot, like many others, therefore turned to a “religion of human sympathy” in place of this rather dark and dismal conception of God. Similar patterns of alienation from conventional religion are found throughout her novels, from Adam Bede (1859) through to Middlemarch (1871–1872). The moral aspects of faith can, she believed, be maintained without the metaphysical basics of Christianity. We can be good without God. Indeed, belief in the Christian God can be a significant obstacle to the achievement of “individual and social happiness.” These views became the received wisdom of the age, shaping the emerging late Victorian consensus on the ability of humanity to shape its own destiny. While some – Thomas Hardy comes to mind – were more pessimistic about humanity’s ability to construct morality without God than Eliot, they were a distinguished minority in this discussion.
The Victorian era is widely regarded as undergoing major changes from about 1870 to 1900, which can be seen as ultimately subverting the values and beliefs of its earlier phases. Many writers of the period were conscious of standing at the threshold of a new age, uncertain of what it might bring, yet suspecting that the old ways of thinking were on their way out. In his Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, written around this time, Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) spoke of being caught …
Between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere to lay my head.
Arnold’s journey through the Alps is the backdrop against which he explores his sense of displacement, focusing especially on the erosion of faith in his culture – and perhaps even in himself. His once robust faith, he comments, more than a little wistfully, now seems “but a dead time’s exploded dream.” Arnold expresses a sense of melancholy and sadness over his nation’s loss of faith, which he saw pathetically mirrored in the ebbing of the tide on Dover beach:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
That tide was now ebbing, and Arnold never expected to see it return. It is impossible to read his poem “Dover Beach” without glimpsing something of his pain and bewilderment over his nation’s willing loss of its religious soul.