A Culture in Crisis: The Loss of Faith
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A FAILURE OF THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION: THE VICTORIAN CRISIS OF FAITH
WORLDVIEWS THAT CAPTURE the human imagination never entirely fade away; those that make no such appeal can expect to make little progress. Yet what of a worldview that once captivated and nourished the imagination of the West, yet slowly saw that power fade? It is of the utmost significance that those who were in the forefront of the revolt against God in Victorian England were poets and novelists, whose imaginative constructions of reality increasingly came to rest on secular, rather than religious, foundations. The wells of divine artistic inspiration seemed to them to have run dry; it was necessary to find new sources of inspiration elsewhere.
Christian ideas and images, previously seen as an imaginative resource and stimulus, were now held to be deficient. The imaginative quarry that had guided and nourished the poetry of George Herbert, John Donne, and John Milton was now regarded as exhausted. New mineshafts needed to be sunk and new ideas explored. God increasingly became an absence in the popular imagination, no longer able to resonate with the creative energy of the day. Victorian culture came increasingly to prefer to explore the imaginative potential of a world without God.
So why did this failure of the religious imagination develop within Victorian culture? There is no doubt that growing concerns over the intellectual credibility of Christianity were a major contribution to its fading appeal. The growing influence of biblical criticism, a persistent failure on the part of clergy to engage with the troubling issues of the day, and the rise of Darwinism all undermined the potency of faith. Perhaps the erosion of the Christian faith in later Victorian Britain is attributable not to its diminished appeal to human reason but to its failure to capture the imagination of its culture. Yet the origins of intentional atheism—as opposed to mere cultural indifference to religion—rest primarily on rational, rather than imaginative, concerns.
THE BIRTH OF INTENTIONAL ATHEISM IN BRITAIN
Historians date the birth of “avowed” or “intentional” atheism in Britain to around the year 1782, when William Hamilton drew attention to a recent incident in his Answer to Dr Priestley’s Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever: “Be it therefore for the future remembered, that in London in the kingdom of England, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-one, a man has publickly declared himself an atheist.” The tone of surprise, even outrage, at such an outlandish view is significant: Hamilton clearly expects his readers to share his astonishment that anyone should hold such a strange idea, let alone be so vulgar as to mention it in public. Such matters were best reserved for the privacy of the boudoirs and salons of Paris. Yet while atheism may have become conceivable to British minds of the 1790s, it was still very far from being fashionable. A series of influential writings, supremely Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), created the firm impression among political conservatives that atheism and republicanism were two sides of the same coin.
Others soon entered the fray, hiding their identities in order to advance their ideas. The unidentified “Scepticus Britannicus” who published An Investigation of the Essence of the Deity (1797) insisted that, far from being repressive, atheism was a liberator. “An atheist is a man who destroyeth chimeras prejudicial to the human species.” Thomas Paine had pointed to the role of religious institutions in perpetuating such servility some years earlier, in his Age of Reason (1794): “All national institutions of religion, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”
But credit for the serious advancement of atheism on the eve of the Victorian era is most due to William Godwin (1758–1836), one of the more colorful figures of the Romantic period in England. Like many, he regarded the French Revolution as having irreversibly changed the cultural face of the West. A new era had dawned, in which the advancement of human reason would lead to the elimination of governments, diseases, and death. Godwin’s somewhat extravagant ideas rested on a firm belief in the ultimate triumph of reason, which the French Revolution had championed. The corruption of government would be eliminated, in that people would make right decisions for themselves without the need for consultation or coercion; disease and death would be overcome through the final triumph of mind over matter. And for Godwin, the idea of God was an outmoded superstition that had no place in this new rationalist paradise on earth.
The atheism of Godwin’s Political Justice (1793) exercised a fascination over many during the 1790s, when his star shone brilliantly in the British intellectual firmament. Its radical—and, to many, profoundly attractive—social vision rested on the assumption of the perfectibility of humanity through reason. This notion, which arguably lay behind both the political and religious views of the French Revolution, swept to one side such notions as the authority of the past, a divine revelation entrusted to the church for interpretation, or any mysterious and dark force of destiny that governed the fate of humanity. Reason held the key to the moral transformation of humanity.
Godwinism was a philosophy that attracted many, as the young Wordsworth recalled. As he suggested in The Prelude, the attractiveness of its ideas to “young minds” lay in the fact that it
Was flattering to the young ingenious mind
Pleased with extremes, and not the least with that
Which makes the human reason’s naked self
The object of its fervour.
Yet however firm its rational foundations or radical its social implications, the new philosophy failed to excite the imagination. As William Hazlitt pointed out in his Spirit of the Age (1825), it proved to be “of such short life” precisely because it represented “reason without passion.” Like a setting sun, Hazlitt suggested, Godwin had “sunk below the horizon, and enjoys the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality.”
To deny God is one thing; but the outcome of such a denial, for many in the early nineteenth century, was a dull rationalism that failed to excite—that singularly lacked the ability to provoke a sense of wonder on the part of its beholder. A cold and dry rational account of nature might well satisfy the human reason, but it left the imaginative and emotional faculties untouched. For Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his circle, Godwin suffered from an imaginative deficit. He failed to appreciate the importance of the emotions and imagination.
If atheism was to take hold of British culture, it had to seize its imagination—something that Godwin’s dull and dry prose signally failed to achieve. A rational case for a godless world might have been made; the attractions of such a world remained, however, obscure. To polite British culture of the period, atheism was like a distant island in the tropics—a remote and faintly exotic place in which no cultured person would want to live. The great experiment of the Victorian age was to explore how such an uninhabitable island might become a paradise. One of the most promising early approaches lay in making an appeal to nature as a gateway to the transcendent.
NATURE: AFFIRMING THE TRANSCENDENT WITHOUT GOD
Convinced that the human imagination and emotions needed something to inspire them, many writers of the first decades of the nineteenth century now found themselves in something of a quandary. Caught up in the enthusiasm evoked by the radical ideas of the French Revolution, they were more than willing to jettison any lingering attachment to organized religion and its notions of divinity. Yet the explicit atheism of Godwin and others left them with nothing to which they could meaningfully anchor their sense of transcendence. If God was being irreversibly relegated to the margins of British culture, to be replaced by the more predictable and unimaginative enterprise of merely attending church, they would have to find something else to which to attach their longing for the transcendent. They found what they were looking for in nature itself.
Initially, this seemed a very unpromising approach. The rise of the mechanical worldview—a way of conceiving the world, faithful to Isaac Newton’s discoveries of the regularities of planetary motions and his explanation of the colors of the rainbow—led many to think of nature as a vast mechanical device. This posed serious difficulties for Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his circle; who would feel uplifted or thrilled at the thought that nature was merely a giant clock? For some British writers of the period, this was an excellent and highly instructive analogy. In his Natural Theology; or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802), William Paley argued that the “contrivance” (that is, the design and construction) of the universe pointed necessarily to God as its designer. Yet the images of God as a watchmaker and nature as a machine both seemed unspeakably dull and uninspiring, prompting William Blake to write scathingly of nature as “sheath’d in dismal steel.” If nature was to serve as the basis of a new worldview, independent of God, it would have to be reconceived and reimagined.
This process of the reenchantment of nature began in earnest from about 1790. An early example of the reconception of the natural world can be found in the writings of Mary Robinson, a former actress who became the mistress of a member of Britain’s royal family. After this liaison had ended, Robinson turned to writing poetry to make ends meet. Her Ode to the Infant Son of S. T. Coleridge (1800) makes a powerful appeal to nature as the ultimate ground of human aesthetic and moral judgments. Whereas for many writers of the period nature was regarded as something that God had created, Robinson foreshadows a growing trend to regard the beauty of the natural order as a thoroughly satisfying alternative to God. Nature was emancipated from being God’s creation, and became a divinity in its own right.
William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats attached the category of the transcendent to nature in somewhat different ways. For Wordsworth, nature is best seen as an agent that imparts moral and spiritual insights through elevation of the human senses—an idea expressed in his lines from “The Tables Turned” (1798):
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
In his later works, Wordsworth develops the theme of the ability of the natural world to evoke an aching sense of longing for something that ultimately lies beyond it—as in “Tintern Abbey,” which uses the poet’s experience of a natural landscape to evoke deeper questions about the mystery of human nature and destiny. It seemed as if there was an ecstatic desire for union with nature, or some “sweet melancholy” that seems to have no rational cause, yet is saturated with spiritual meaning.
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: a feeling and a love.
There is a strong sense of the loss of connectedness here, a deep and passionate feeling that individuals have become alienated, not merely from nature, but from their true destiny, which nature somehow has the capacity to declare—at least in part. The Romantic poets knew a sense of melancholy, wonder, and yearning, which they believed has its basis in the fundamental human displacement or alienation from its true objects of desire. Humanity had become disconnected from its true transcendent goals and longings, and needed to be reconnected. Yet this process of restoration was not understood to involve God, being envisaged primarily in terms of the achievement of an individual’s true human potential.
Shelley politicized the notion of nature, arguing that it served as the inspirational basis for revolutionary notions of liberty and equality, encouraging a revolt against king and priest, God and religion. Keats regarded nature as something that accentuates the human hunger for sensuous and aesthetic experience. Declining to adopt Shelley’s more revolutionary political ideas, Keats held that nature was capable of disclosing truth and beauty through an engagement with the imagination. Yet despite these different readings of nature, each of these three poets believes that the fundamental human emotions are inadequately served by a denial of the transcendent. If God is to be removed, there must remain some corresponding metaphysical category to which human emotions and imagination may be linked.
Keats is thus especially scathing over Isaac Newton’s scientific explanation of the rainbow. In “Lamia” (1820), he complains of the effect of reducing the beautiful and awesome phenomena of nature to the basics of scientific theory. The theory may help us understand them, but somehow it seems to deprive them of their glory. Keats here expressed a widely held concern: that reducing nature to scientific theories empties nature of its beauty and mystery and reduces it to something cold, clinical, and abstract.
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings.
The poet uses the idea of “unweaving the rainbow” to express his concern. Does not the scientific explanation of the colors of the rainbow in terms of refraction of sunlight through raindrops somehow destroy any sense of awe or amazement at this arc in the sky? Newton’s reduction of the rainbow to a generalized optical effect uncouples any link between this natural phenomenon and the world of the transcendent. The intuitive link between the rainbow and a sense of wonder points, for Keats, to the joyful romantic longing for beauty that only finds its goal beyond the physical world.
Keats did not expect to find much help in this quest for transcendent beauty from the established church. His sonnet “Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition” (1816) depicts conventional British religion as casting a “black spell” over its congregations. The sound of church bells seemed to him to mark the passing of such a corrupt religion, to be displaced by new growth, new ideas, and a new future:
Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp,—
A chill as from a tomb, did I not know
That they are dying like an outburnt lamp;
That ’tis their sighing, wailing ere they go
Into oblivion; —that fresh flowers will grow,
And many glories of immortal stamp.
In his 1818 sonnet “To Percy Shelley, on the Degrading Notions of Deity,” Keats argues that the established church created its peculiar notion of God out of fear, passion, vested interests, and downright bigotry. But what could replace it? For Keats, the answer lies in a return to the “old golden age”—a clear allusion to the period of classical Greece—in which the beauty of nature inspired humanity to worship more worthy divinities.
What wonder, Percy, that with jealous rage,
Men should defame the kindly and the wise,
When in the midst of the all-beauteous skies,
And all this lovely world, that should engage
Their mutual search for the old golden age,
They seat a phantom, swelled into grim size,
Out of their passions and bigotries.
Keats’s most thorough exploration of the potential of classical Greek natural religion is to be found in Endymion, which explores how the “clear religion of heaven” arises from an imaginative encounter with “symbols of immensity.” The work is notable for its articulation of the Platonic notion of ascent to heavenly realities through the contemplation of their earthly symbols and types. We rise on a Platonic ladder from contemplation of mortality to immortality; from sensuous experience of love, beauty, and joy to their ultimate origin and final goal.
Feel we these things?—that moment have we stept
Into a sort of oneness, and our state
Is like a floating spirit’s. But there are
Richer entanglements, enthralments far
More self-destroying, leading, by degrees,
To the chief intensity: the crown of these
Is made of love and friendship, and sits high
Upon the forehead of humanity.
Wordsworth found Endymion puzzling, dubbing it “a very pretty piece of Paganism.” This judgment is open to question; what is clear is that Keats, distressed by traditional Christian understandings of God, sought to find an alternative vision of divinity in the ancient world. This is clearly not atheism in the traditional sense of the term; if anything, it is a quest for alternative conceptions of deity, or for an alternative metaphysical foundation for the human quest for transcendence that might have the power to “make men’s being mortal, immortal.”
To the socially conservative, these ideas were subversive and seditious. To a cultural and literary avant-garde, they were like pure oxygen in a stale room, fueling controversy, exploration, and the advancement of discourse. Atheism was something sensational, whose exploration broke social taboos. This is not to say, of course, that all those who explored unorthodox ideas, by the standards of the time, were atheists. Some were like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was obsessed with atheistic ideas without actually commiting himself to them. An engagement with atheists was a convenient means of developing his own distinctive ideas. Others found alternatives to traditional Christian belief, particularly through the neoclassical revival, which encouraged an imaginative preference for the pantheon of classical antiquity over its Christian rival.
One of the most interesting features of British literary culture throughout the nineteenth century is that a growing interest in atheism did not entail abandoning belief in the transcendent. Reductionist forms of atheism, especially those which held that nature and humanity were essentially physical or biological mechanisms, were resisted as cold and mechanical. While poets such as Keats affirmed a transcendent dimension to human existence, they did not see this as necessarily entailing a belief in divinity, whether in the general or specifically Christian sense of the term. If the good, the true, and the beautiful were Keats’s masters, he made no attempt to attach these absolutes to the concept of God.
To further our exploration of this fascinating aspect of atheism, we may consider Percy Bysshe Shelley’s vigorous affirmation of atheism in the early nineteenth century.
SHELLEY AND THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM
In 1811, the young Shelley was expelled from University College, Oxford, for having published a brief essay entitled “The Necessity of Atheism.” The essay sets out a critique of belief in God that parallels earlier such arguments in the writings of G. E. Lessing and Denis Diderot. Shelley argues that, since compelling evidence for the existence of God is lacking, there is no intellectual obligation to believe in God. The essay actually makes a case for a practical agnosticism—or perhaps a skeptical empiricism—rather than atheism, in that Shelley’s argument leads only to the conclusion that an informed mind cannot reach a reliable conclusion on the existence of God on the basis of the available evidence.
Without in any way wishing to call the reliability of Shelley’s judgment on such matters into question, it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that his essay “The Necessity of Atheism” does little more than make a point already familiar to generations of Christian theologians—that the existence of God cannot be proved and is ultimately a matter of faith. Like Aquinas before him, Shelley merely makes the point that, on the basis of the empirical evidence of the world and the rational resources at his disposal, belief in God is not a necessary conclusion. There can be little doubt that Shelley’s thoughts on this matter may well have been catalyzed by at least a passing knowledge of the arguments of philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume. The title of the treatise simply does not represent its contents; nor do its contents entail what the title proclaims. Yet it presaged more radical views that were waiting in the wings for their moment to take center stage.
In his Queen Mab (1813), Shelley puts explicitly atheistic sentiments into the mouth of the poem’s fairy queen, who offers the following account of the true state of the universe: “There is no God! / Nature confirms the faith his death-groan sealed.” The queen seems to speak for Shelley himself in exulting in the abandonment of belief. The death of God is to be applauded, not mourned, in that this god has been allowed to sanction all kinds of atrocities and crimes. To reject God is to reject the tyranny that religious belief brings in its wake.
The name of God
Has fenced about all crime with holiness,
Himself the creature of his worshippers,
Whose names and attributes and passions change,
Seeva, Buddh, Foh, Jehovah, God, or Lord,
Even with the human dupes who build his shrines,
Still serving o’er the war-polluted world.
Religion is thus destructive and deceitful. The traditional Christian understanding of the fall of humanity holds that the first representative humans were expelled from paradise for seeking to be like gods. Queen Mab points to an alternative rendering of the fall of humanity: it is organized religion that caused us to defect from the true worship of nature, and our true natural goal.
Look on yonder earth:
The golden harvests spring; the unfailing sun
Sheds light and life; the fruits, the flowers, the trees,
Arise in due succession; all things speak
Peace, harmony, and love. The universe
In nature’s silent eloquence, declares
That all fulfil the works of love and joy,—
All but the outcast man. He fabricates
The sword, which stabs his peace; he cherisheth
The snakes that gnaw his heart: he raiseth up
The tyrant, whose delight is in his woe,
Whose sport is in his agony.
The reattachment of humanity to nature is the essential prerequisite for the regaining of paradise, for the restoration of a lost Eden. Yet God has no place in such an Eden, in that religion is seen as the corrupting influence that led to the degeneration of human nature and the origin of strife and conflict. It is not nature but belief in God that destroys and degrades human innocence and joy.
Nature!—no!
Kings, priests and statesmen, blast the human flower
Even in its tender bud; their influence darts
Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins
Of desolate society. The child
Ere he can lisp his mother’s sacred name,
Swells with the unnatural pride of crime, and lifts
His baby-sword even in a hero’s mood.
Although these ideas were slow to take root, they had become the received wisdom of the age by the end of the nineteenth century. An important witness to this trend is to be found in Mathilde Blind’s short, privately published essay “Shelley’s View of Nature contrasted with Darwin’s,” which appeared in 1886. For Blind, Shelley liberated Britain from the “gloomy and cruel superstitions” of the Christian religion. In its place the poet promoted a religion of nature and reason, in which humanity would seek inspiration and vision from contemplation of the glories of the world, instead of the superstitions of religion. “The human heart turning thirstily toward a rehabilitated nature, saw that she was fair, and felt a thrill of delight at the beauty of moonlight on still waters, at the radiance of snow-crowned Alps, at the sublimity of seas in storm or calm.” Blind is clear that Shelley was of central importance to this major shift in attitude toward nature, and lauded his achievement with the overexcited enthusiasm of the amateur. Get rid of kings and priests, and return to nature—and all will be well.
Shelley, above all, was profoundly and permanently swayed by this fervid feeling. In his youth, as is testified by Queen Mab, and the notes appended to it, he had been vitally influenced by the study of Rousseau’s writings and those of the other philosophical precursors of the French Revolution. From them he had to a great extent imbibed the firm conviction that if you could only rid society of kings and priests we should immediately enter on the Golden Age, and instead of discord, war, and wretchedness, the earth would become the abode of love and harmony.
Religion corrupts nature by forcing people to contemplate and capitulate to its irrational absurdities, when the natural study of humanity is nature itself.
This is all splendid stuff, and represents an important witness to the way in which Shelley was understood and appropriated within more radical and skeptical circles in the 1880s and beyond. Yet Shelley himself, I think it is important to note, does not explicitly deny the existence of a God in general, or any specific conception of that God—even the much-maligned God worshiped by members of the established Church of England on Sundays (although what happened during the rest of the week is very much open to question). In his remarkable “Essay on Christianity” (1815), Shelley launches a sustained attack on institutional religion, not least because its preoccupation with power and status corrupts its vision of God. “An established religion turns to deathlike apathy the sublimest ebullitions of most exalted genius, and the spirit-stirring truths of a mind inflamed with the desire of benefiting mankind.”
Yet the ultimate basis of the existence of Christianity—namely, a belief in God—is not challenged; rather, it is identified as a “Power” that saturates the world and evokes human attempts to capture the beauty of things. God is not eliminated; He is merely renamed. “We live and move and think; but we are not the creators of our own origin and existence. We are not the arbiters of every motion of our own complicated nature; we are not the masters of our own imaginations and moods of mental being. There is a Power by which we are surrounded, like the atmosphere in which some motionless lyre is suspended, which visits with its breath our silent chords at will.”
Hints of this can be seen in Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” which posits the idea of an intuited higher power, which saturates nature with its presence and beauty—a power which, as we have seen, he clearly associates (while avoiding outright identification) with the Christian God.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us,—visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.
The human experience of this beauty may be sporadic rather than continual; it is, nevertheless, an integral aspect of the phenomenon of nature. Nature is not simply to be investigated and understood as “the other” by detached observers; it is to be encountered and allowed to evoke wonder at its sheer beauty. Nature thus elicits the memory or knowledge of “some unseen power,” whose shadow or reflection can be discerned within its order and structures. Shelley’s skeptical inclinations rule out any direct equation of this intuited transcendent reality with any specific God, particularly the rather troubling possibility that this might turn out to be the God of the established church.
On closer examination, Shelley’s atheism thus proves somewhat problematic. Queen Mab sets out a radical atheist vision, which seems to be modified in Shelley’s later writings. Making sense of such inconsistencies is not unduly demanding: Shelley may have deliberately wanted to shock what he regarded as a complacent establishment, or simply to assert the right to argue about some of the most fundamental and seemingly settled questions of his day, the existence of God being a case in point. As Robert M. Ryan has pointed out, the most radical poets of this era were not averse to returning to orthodoxy in their later works, their protests having been made and noted.
We may now move on to explore some further aspects of the Victorian crisis of faith by turning to the writings of one of the most important atheists of the period: the novelist George Eliot.
THE UNCONVERT: GEORGE ELIOT
Those who are converted to a creed often prove its most effective ambassadors. The story we are about to tell is how a devout but rather shy evangelical Christian came to be one of atheism’s most important advocates in Victorian England. Mary Ann Evans (1819–80)—who later assumed the pen name George Eliot—was born on South Farm, part of the estate of Arbury Hall, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, on November 22, 1819. She was the daughter of a farmer, Robert Evans, who was also land agent at Arbury. When she was four months old the family moved to Griff House on the edge of the estate. Mary Ann attended church with her family at Chilvers Coton and was educated at boarding schools in Nuneaton before going to school in Coventry between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. After her mother’s death in 1836 she came home to Griff House to help run the household. She continued to educate herself, however, being allowed free use of the library at Arbury Hall. She learned Italian and German with the help of a tutor in 1840. While Robert Evans raised his daughter as a conventional member of the Church of England, Mary Ann encountered more enthusiastic forms of Christianity while attending local “ladies’ seminaries.”
The form of Christianity that so shaped Eliot’s early life was evangelicalism, a growing presence in early-nineteenth-century England. Various hints in her personal correspondence suggest that her early religious beliefs corresponded to those that were gaining momentum within the Church of England in the 1830s. In an 1860 letter to a colleague in Geneva, Eliot spoke of “the strong hold evangelical Christianity had on me from the age of fifteen to two and twenty.” While earlier forms of evangelicalism had been theologically generous, laying emphasis upon personal devotion to Jesus rather than fidelity to theological dogmas, a new stridency within the movement around this time led to a hardening of attitudes. The quality of a person’s faith was now judged by doctrinal correctness rather than a love for Christ. The warmheartedness of earlier versions of evangelicalism now gave way to increasingly dogmatic and impersonal construals of the Christian faith, which repelled as many as it attracted. One of those who was permanently alienated from God in this manner was Eliot herself.
On January 2, 1842, Eliot informed her father that she no longer intended to go to church. A certain coolness descended upon their relationship, which was never entirely removed by the healing passage of time. His refusal to even discuss the matter with her forced Eliot to write to him, setting out her reasons for withdrawing from church life in this dramatic manner.
I wish entirely to remove from your mind the false notion that I am inclined visibly to unite myself with any Christian community, or that I have any affinity of opinion with the Unitarians more than with any other classes of believers in the Divine authority of the books containing the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life and drawn as to its materials from Jewish notions to be most dishonourable to God and most pernicious on individual and social happiness.
There is little doubt as to the cause of her alienation from faith. Some of Eliot’s concerns were peculiar to specifically evangelical doctrine; others were more general, pertaining to Christianity in its most basic form. Her reading of Charles Hennell’s An Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838) raised questions over the supernatural aspects of faith. Eliot’s personal copy of Hennell’s Origin of Christianity has a highly significant date inscribed in its flyleaf: January 1, 1842, the day before she ceased attending church.
Was not, Hennell asked, Christianity a purely natural set of ideas, spread by purely natural means? “The true accounts of the life of Jesus Christ, and the spread of his religion, would be found to contain no deviation from the known laws of nature, nor require, for their explanation, more than the operation of human motives and feelings, acted upon by the peculiar circumstances of the age and country whence the religion originated.” Jesus Christ was a religious teacher with aspirations to reclaim the throne of David. Having failed in this effort, he suffered martyrdom. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea removed his body as a precautionary measure. The early church mistakenly interpreted the empty tomb as evidence of a resurrection, and thus initiated a relentlessly inflationary understanding of Jesus’s identity that transformed him from a Jewish teacher to the Son of God incarnate. Yet Hennell had no doubts that something might be salvaged from this mess. “Christianity thus regarded as a system of elevated thought and feeling, will not be injured by being freed from those fables, and those views of local or temporary interest, which hung around its origin.”
Eliot was not prepared to leave matters there. Making good use of her knowledge of German, she set about translating one of the most radical works of German New Testament scholarship—David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus, which caused a sensation on its publication in Germany in 1835, partly on account of its appeal to socially and religiously alienated progressive elements, who recognized it as a useful propaganda weapon in their concerted attack on each and every aspect of the German establishment—above all, the church.
Strauss’s interpretation of the events recorded in the Gospels reflects the rationalist criticism of orthodox Christianity resulting from the Enlightenment. In the face of growing skepticism concerning biblical miracles, Strauss set out to explain how Christians came to believe when there was no objective historical basis for their faith. Taking the Resurrection as the key article of faith, Strauss concluded that religion was ultimately an expression of the human mind’s ability to generate myths in the first place, and then to interpret them as truths revealed by God.
Many of Eliot’s misgivings about Christianity in general are best seen as a specific response to the ideas of evangelicalism. In an article in the Westminster Review for October 1855, Eliot offered a sustained criticism of a popular London evangelical preacher, John Cumming. She took particular exception to Cumming’s insistence that only actions directed toward the glory of God might be deemed to be good.
Dr. Cumming’s theory . . . is that actions are good or evil according as they are prompted or not prompted by an exclusive reference to the “glory of God.” God, then, in Dr. Cumming’s conception, is a being who has no pleasure in the exercise of love and truthfulness and justice, considered as effecting the well-being of His creatures; he has satisfaction in us only in so far as we exhaust our motives and dispositions of all relation to our fellow-beings, and replace sympathy with men by anxiety for the “glory of God.”
Eliot deems this to be a rather harsh and unattractive God, who “instead of sharing and aiding our human sympathies is directly in collision with them; who instead of strengthening the bond between man and man, by encouraging the sense that they are both alike the objects of His love and care, thrusts himself between them and forbids them to feel for each other except as they have relation to Him.”
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 faith on account of a growing sense of the immorality of such doctrines as original sin, predestination, and substitutionary atonement. Theological terms and slogans that had been the proud watchwords of an earlier generation of Protestant writers now became embarrassments that could no longer be tolerated. Where Puritans had exulted in the thought of a sovereign God who could deal unaccountably with his creatures in any way he liked, many Victorians found this deeply disturbing and in open conflict with their increasingly developed sense of morality and justice.
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 thoughout her novels, from Adam Bede through to Middlemarch. The moral aspects of faith could, she believed, be maintained without the metaphysical basis 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 than Eliot about humanity’s ability to construct morality without God, they were a distinguished minority in this discussion.
Yet when all is said and done, there is a remarkable tameness about Eliot’s critique of Christianity. None of her skeptical arguments against God gets out of hand. They are on a tight leash, like domesticated animals being taken out for a gentle stroll, rather than the more ferocious beasts found elsewhere in Europe at this time. Thus the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) saw Eliot’s position as a typically moribund English compromise. She wanted to have Christian morality but not Christian belief—as if the two could be separated. As he commented in Twilight of the Idols: “They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.” Nietzsche was quite clear: this was a fundamental inconsistency that superior German logic simply would not permit.
When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth—it stands and falls with faith in God.
George Eliot’s novels undermined the plausibility of God in a number of ways. Yet in her later years, she seems to have lost any sense of animus against Christianity, increasingly regarding it as playing an important cultural role. As she wrote in a letter of 1860, “I no longer have any antagonism toward any faith in which human sorrow and human longing for purity have expressed themselves.” In a letter to Madame Bonichon, written two years later, Eliot made clear that she had no interest in undermining belief in God:
Don’t ever ask me to rob a man of his religious belief, as if you thought my mind tended to such robbery. I have too profound a conviction of the efficacy which underlies all sincere faith, and the blight that comes with no-faith, to have any negative propagandism in me. In fact I have very little sympathy with Freethinkers as a class, and have lost all interest in mere antagonisms to religious doctrines. I care to know, if possible, the lasting meaning which lies in all religious doctrines from the beginning until now.
Others, however, were prepared to complete the job that they believed Eliot had abandoned. One of the most imaginative and influential of these more radical writers was Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909).
A. C. SWINBURNE: THE IMAGINATIVE APPEAL OF THE PROFANE
The Victorians, it seems, tended to think of God in imagery borrowed from their cultural context. Whatever the rich reservoir of biblical imagery might offer by way of visual depictions of the deity, many less reflective Victorians tended to think of God as a stern old man—rather like the headmaster of one of England’s famed public schools, such as Eton. Although the New Testament spoke of God’s mercy at least as much as his justice, the harsh discipline of such an authority figure revolted many in an increasingly egalitarian age. Who wanted anything to do with a God who could be compared with a taskmaster who preferred flogging to caring, thrashing to loving?
Swinburne might come to mind here. His celebrated addiction to masochism, especially flagellation, probably began when he was a schoolboy at Eton. In later life he was a regular at 7 Circus Road—“a lovely little villa, presided over by a well-educated lady, well-versed in the birchen mysteries.” He also frequented Verbena Lodge, the flagellant brothel in St. John’s Wood. Swinburne’s extensive body of erotic writings shows a fascination with the infliction of pain. The Whippingham Papers is a case in point.
Oh, hold his shirt up, Algernon,
Hold the boy’s shirt up high;
Let us all have a view of his bottom, Hugh,
Oh, doesn’t the pain make him cry, by Jove!
The Victorian interest in flagellation has been carefully studied by Stephen Marcus in The Other Victorians, and at somewhat greater length by Ian Gibson in The English Vice. Both scholars point out that the appeal of this particular form of erotica was largely confined to the upper classes. Those whose taste for flagellation led them to write or read such works as George Colman’s Rodiad, or to patronize flagellation brothels, are probably best seen as victims of their culture, which offered relatively few outlets for open sexual activity. Paradoxically, the most ardent flagellomaniacs—such as Swinburne himself and Richard Burton—were those who “felt themselves to be in rebellion against the Establishment of the day in matters of sexual morality, and greatly disliked its hypocrisy and puritanism” (Gibson); that rebellion, however, often took the form of an adolescent indulgence in their childhood sexual experiences at public school. Yet Gibson goes further, arguing that Swinburne’s deep loathing of Christianity is grounded in his sadomasochism.
Swinburne is thus to be seen as a rebel, reacting against the prudery of his day at an intellectual as well as sexual level. Swinburne raised attention-seeking to the status of a new art form, deliberately attempting to outrage, shock, and intrigue the prudish culture around him. When rumors of his homosexual antics began to circulate, Swinburne supplemented them with what everyone hoped was invention (but nobody could really be sure)—such as his passionate declaration that he had brought an evening of sexual depravity with a monkey to its climax by eating it. His immense distaste for the Church of England led him to pen undignified Trollopian sketches featuring such characters as the Reverend Simplicius Pricksmall of Little Pissing.
The Victorian upper classes might well visualize God as a birch-wielding tyrant. While many would find this image distasteful, it was not without its attractions to Swinburne. Yet it was tainted by the realization that the Christian God, in creating a desire for pleasure, had caused it to be seen as a thing of shame. God was a sadist, the “lord of love and loathing and of strife,” who “gives a star and takes a sun away”; who
makes desire, and slays desire with shame;
Who shakes the heaven as ashes in his hand;
Who, seeing the light and shadow for the same,
Bids day waste night as fire devours a brand,
Smites without sword, and scourges without rod;
The supreme evil, God.
Religion takes away a sun and offers a mere star in its place. God was the great oppressor of the human soul, creating a sense of overwhelming desire within humanity, yet offering nothing by which that longing might be satisfied—except things that were declared to be immoral. Having created such desires in the first place, God now condemned humanity to a wretched and miserable life of frustration and dissatisfaction. Using arguments that parallel those of the Marquis de Sade, Swinburne argued that only a rejection of God could open the way for human self-fulfillment.
For Swinburne’s imagination had been seized by something beyond the delights of Verbena Lodge: a godless world, in which man was king. The religious stifling of the human imagination would be overwhelmed by the thought of a world from which such nonsense has been banished, and man raised to his rightful place as lord over all. God must die that man may live. In February 1870, he penned a note to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, setting out his fundamental belief in the death of Christianity:
I expect you will see shortly in the papers, “Suicide of an elderly pauper lunatic, formerly an unlicenced pawnbroker and receiver of stolen goods. His linen was marked JAH. A young man of dissipated appearance and a Jewish cast of feature who announced himself as the son of the deceased is more than suspected of being the same person who was sentenced to the gallows some time since for a nameless offence and taken down before the proper time, and restored to life after undergoing the extreme penalty of the law. Since then, he has been known to the police under a variety of aliases, and among his companions of infamous notoriety, by the slang term of “Lamb.”
Swinburne had no regrets about the passing of this divinity. The death of God is simply the precondition for the divinization of man. It was no accident that Swinburne should choose to reconstruct polemically the great Christian hymn “Glory to God in the Highest” in a manner that satisfied his personal taste and the mood of the age: “Glory to man in the highest! / For man is the master of things.” The Christian God is dead, and another has taken his place. As Swinburne put it in his “Hymn to Man,” “O fools, he was God and is dead.”
Swinburne set out his views with particular clarity in a letter written to William Rossetti, stressing the need to break free from that most corrupting and enslaving of all human inventions, the idea of God: “I feel it my mission as an evangelist and apostle (whenever necessary) to atheize the republicans and republicanize the atheists of my acquaintance. I have in my head a sort of hymn for this Congress—as it were a ‘Te Hominem laudamus,’1 to sing the human triumph over ‘things’—the opposing forces of life and nature—and over the God of his own creation, till he attain truth, self-sufficience and freedom.”
To a twenty-first-century reader, much of Swinburne’s critique of Christianity seems to reflect the rather uncritical evolutionary optimism of his age, and to be phrased in excessively alliterative language that is flamboyant and pretentious by today’s standards. Many readers view Swinburne’s preoccupation with the more painful pleasures of the flesh—such as his fantasies concerning “fierce and luxurious Dolores, our Lady of Pain”—as an embarrassment, and prefer to concentrate on his imaginative engagement with issues of religion. Yet Swinburne’s highly rhetorical criticism of religion shaped the manner in which many of his contemporaries viewed the world, and must be regarded as a landmark in the history of atheism.
The key to Swinburne’s vital importance lies in a line from what is widely regarded as one of his greatest poems, the “Hymn to Prosperpine”: “Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath.”2 These words point to Swinburne’s fundamental conviction of the imaginative deficit of the Christianity he knew and so thoroughly detested. What was there in the pallid Christ of popular devotion that could enrich the imagination of his day? The Victorian Christ might make the world meek and mild; he would never capture its allegiance through an appeal to beauty or joy. Christianity triumphed by impoverishing culture and diminishing humanity’s delight in itself. Perhaps most significantly of all, there was no link between Christ and the transcendent—no reason to suppose that, in encountering and wrestling with the person of Jesus Christ, one was stepping over the threshold of a mystery, and passing into the presence of something (or someone) of compelling beauty or delight.
To understand Swinburne further, we must move on to consider the impact of the Life of Jesus movement of the early nineteenth century, which had such a devastating impact on the literary imagination of that era.
THE LIFE OF JESUS MOVEMENT
Even a cursory glance at one of the great icons of Byzantine basilicas reveals the definitive place of Christ in Eastern Orthodoxy. The risen Christ reigns triumphant over the forces that oppress humanity; he may be relied upon to deliver those who put their trust in him. As God incarnate, he offers a window into the transcendent. As John of Damascus, the great Syrian theologian of the sixth century, put it: “Previously there was absolutely no way in which God, who has neither a body nor a face, could be represented by any image. But now that he has made himself visible in the flesh and has lived with people, I can make an image of what I have seen of God . . . and contemplate the glory of the Lord, his face having been unveiled.” Christ is the means by which we may experience “heaven in ordinary” (George Herbert), gaining access to the mysterious world of the heavenly places while we sojourn on earth. The imaginative potential of this conception of Christ can only be overstated with some difficulty. If God was indeed the true goal of humanity, contemplation of Christ was the means by which this goal could be visualized, and hence undertaken more boldly. Generations of theologians, philosophers, poets, and writers found this incarnational framework to be of central importance to their reflections on the hidden transcendent world, and the true destiny of humanity.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, this understanding of the person of Christ had been demolished for many Western writers. Jesus was a distant moral sage, useful for moral guidance—especially as a role model for young children. How many Victorian parents must have nodded appreciatively at the words of Mrs. Cecil F. Alexander from Once in Royal David’s City, penned in 1848: “Christian children all must be, / Mild, obedient, good as he.” But when it came to anything more than that, Christ had nothing more to tell us or show us than any educated person. Traditionally, Christianity anchored its grasp of the transcendent to Christ through the concept of the Incarnation, a notion that rationalism found unconvincing and unpersuasive. For many, the hitherto presumed connection between Christ and the divine had been dismantled and discarded. It is no accident that many turned to the contemplation of nature and the history of human culture in searching for the meaning of life. Christ had been systematically decoupled from the ultimate questions of existence.
The origins of this development can be traced back to a seminal essay by the German rationalist thinker G. E. Lessing (1721–89). Stressing the historical distance of Christ from the present, Lessing argued that this remote and largely unknown figure could not give or guarantee access to an absolute world of truth. “The contingent truths of history can never become the proof of the necessary truths of reason.” Lessing and other Enlightenment thinkers dismantled the supernatural structure that generations of Christian theologians had erected around Christ, arguing that no rational justification could be offered for such developments. They were metaphysically inflationary and rationally impossible. In place of these elevated understandings of Christ, the Englightenment proposed a naturalist reading of his significance, as a religious teacher and moral educator.
Two publications were of special importance in the English-speaking world. David Friedrich Strauss, whose Life of Jesus was translated by George Eliot, argued that the church had transposed Christ into a myth. Much more importantly, Ernest Renan (1823–92) wrote a life of Jesus that was entirely naturalist in its approach, depicting Jesus as a human figure with an exaggerated sense of his own importance. It was hard work being the Son of God, and hence understandable that he suffered intermittent lapses in his responsibilities. So accessible was the English translation of this work that it scandalized much of British society rather than merely its intellectual elite.
By the 1870s the cheerleaders of Victorian culture were coming to the view that Christ had nothing distinctive to say, other than to encourage people to behave themselves properly. If Christ echoed the prevailing assumptions of Western culture, that was well and good. But he could not add to these, nor could he challenge them, by proposing radical alternatives. While many continued to view Jesus in mystical categories, as through a softly focused Romantic haze, others had concluded that he lacked the ability to captivate the imagination of their culture. Jesus was a moral teacher, the Great Prohibitor. And who now wanted to make a glorified Sunday school teacher into a cultural icon?
The Roman Catholic scholar George Tyrrell (1861–1909) was appalled by this evacuation of Christ’s significance. The nineteenth century, he wrote scathingly in Christianity at the Cross-Roads (1909), had accommodated Jesus Christ to its own ideas as to what was proper and decent, finding “a moralist in a visionary; a professor in a prophet; the nineteenth century in the first; the natural in the supernatural. Christ was the ideal man; the Kingdom of Heaven, the ideal humanity. As the rationalistic presupposition had strained out, as spurious, the miraculous elements of the Gospel, so the moralistic presupposition strained out everything but modern morality. That alone was the substance, the essence, of Christianity.” As Tyrrell knew only too well, the Christ that the nineteenth century came to invent and admire was nothing more than a pale reflection of its own ideas, incapable of exciting the human imagination or offering a gateway to the transcendent.
Admittedly, the rationalist “lives of Jesus” were far from what they appeared to be. While offering to liberate their readers from dogmatic views of Christ, they nevertheless assumed, often with equally great dogmatism, that the church could not have got Jesus right. The distinguished German scholar Martin Kähler, writing in the 1890s, argued that the new understandings of Jesus that entranced and scandalized the nineteenth century were just as arbitrary, dogmatic, and problematic as those they displaced.
The historical Jesus of modern writers conceals the living Christ from us. The Jesus of the “life of Jesus” movement is merely a modern example of a brain-child of the human imagination, no better than the notorious dogmatic Christ of Byzantine Christology. They are both equally far removed from the real Christ. In this respect, historicism is just as arbitrary, just as humanly arrogant, just as speculative and “faithlessly Gnostic,” as that dogmatism which was itself considered modern in its own day.
But Kähler’s protests went unnoticed in Victorian culture. They were never translated from their original German in time to be appreciated.
And so the late Victorian period came to see in its Christ nothing more than its own pallid reflection, and chose to look no further. The magnificent Byzantine Christ, pantokrator of the universe, had been torn down, and replaced with a more modest construction, more tempered to the spirit of the age. This metaphysically adjusted Christ posed no real difficulties to the reason, but failed to engage the imagination. The outcome was perhaps inevitable: the Christ who had once been the bright polestar of British culture now found itself in eclipse. His metaphysical brilliance had been diminished on the one hand by the dark glass of rationalism, and on the other by the rise of rival luminaries in the late Victorian firmament.
A CULTURE IN CRISIS: THE LOSS OF FAITH
One of the many merits of God’s Funeral, A. N. Wilson’s study of the rise of atheism in Victorian Britain, is his careful documentation of the ambivalence felt within late-nineteenth-century England over its loss of faith. The secular enterprise, begun with great enthusiasm, had achieved substantial successes by the end of the century. 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 its novelists, poets, and artists. Christianity had been tried and tested at the imaginative and rational levels, and found wanting on both counts. Although it might be thought that this grand retreat from faith would have been greeted with delight and celebration, Wilson brings out the deep sense of emotional loss and confusion that the inexorable elimination of God brought in its wake.
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 Grand Chartreuse, written around this time, Matthew Arnold (1822–88) speaks 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 had seen 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.
Arnold’s sadness was shared by others, who might have been expected to be rather more positive about the nation’s loss of faith. There is something almost tender in Thomas Hardy’s marking the end of the era of faith, as he envisages God’s funeral procession: “I did not forget / That what was mourned for, I, too, long had prized.”
The more radical elements of the French Revolution believed, with a passion and depth that seems slightly misplaced today, that the elimination of God would lead to public rejoicing and the end of craven submission to the crass ideologies of the past. In the event, the fading of God, like a slow but inevitable sunset, was marked by a sense of loss, of bereavement, that earlier generations would have found difficult to comprehend. Suddenly it became meaningful to speak of the death of God in Western culture. God had ceased to be a living presence; what other metaphor could be employed to describe this development? This naturally led to an intriguing inquiry into the cause of death. Did God simply perish, or was he killed off? These are themes that demand more detailed exploration in the chapter that follows.
1 “We praise you, O Man,” a polemical reworking of the traditional Christian hymn “Te Deum laudamus,” “We praise you, O God.”
2 This unusual way of referring to Christ is based on the dying words of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate in 363: “vicisti, Galileae.” Julian attempted to reverse the gains of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire by reintroducing paganism.